Suzanne Heywood - Exor COO on her 10-year family trip: from childhood heaven to unescapable hell

Very good. Well, the video, when we kind of come to it, will show you a little bit of original footage from the boat, so you'll get a little bit of a sense of what it was like. Um, but essentially I had a very odd childhood. Um, when I was 7 years old, my father decided that he wanted to sail around the world. He wanted to follow Captain Cook around the world, actually, to be precise. I should say my maiden name is Cook and my father comes from Yorkshire, so there were kind of tangential connections. But he decided he wanted to sail around the world following Captain Cook. This was going to be a three-year voyage. So we were going to set sail when I was seven and we were going to be back when I was 10, and then I was going to go back to school and everything was going to be normal again. And it was going to be a huge adventure, it's going to be very exciting, etc., etc. So we set sail when I was seven, um, and you'll see the boat hopefully in a moment when we get the video going. And the voyage started off kind of okay. You'll see in the book there's some hints quite early on that this is not going to be quite the kind of pleasure cruise that you might have thought it might have been. In particular, my mother gets terribly seasick. I mean, on board we have me and my younger brother who's only six, we have my mother who gets terribly seasick and hates sailing, we have my father who of course is driving this kind of huge adventure, and we have three crew members. And in fact, over time we keep on changing crew members. No crew members stay too long on board because my parents keep on falling out with them. But you know, we set off with three crew members as well. So we sail all the way down to South America, cutting a long story short, and then across to South Africa. Now for those of you who are not sailors in the room—do we have any sailors in the room? A couple of sailors, okay. Well, normally if you're going to sail around the world, what you would normally do is you would sail from east to west. And the reason why you sail from east to west is because then you can sail near the equator and normally the winds are behind you. But we were following Captain Cook on his third voyage, and for all sorts of complicated reasons, Captain Cook decided to sail the other way, which was to sail from west to east. And in order to sail from west to east, you have to go really far south because that's where the winds go the other way, but only if you go really, really far south. So we went all the way down to South America and then across the southern Atlantic Ocean, which is a very rough ocean. The oceans get really rough when you get to the very far north or very far south for a few different reasons, but in particular there's no big land masses there to break up the waves, so they just get bigger and bigger and bigger. And also you get quite high winds, so that was a very bad trip. And then we set off across the southern Indian Ocean, which is the ocean between South Africa and Australia, and that's probably the most dangerous ocean in the world. By this point, it's still me age seven, my little brother age six, my mother who hates sailing, my father. By this point we have two novice crew on board, my father having fallen out with the previous set. Halfway across the Indian Ocean, we get very badly shipwrecked. We get hit by an enormous wave, we end up on a tiny atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I end up with quite a bad injury. I'm thrown against the wall of the hole when this wave hits us and against the ceiling, so I end up having multiple head operations on this island without any anesthetic. Because if you're on an atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, you can't... I remember that part actually with the French doctor, right? And it was all, it felt very rough. And yeah, so I won't, you know, we will come into more of this, but basically this voyage then goes on for—it takes a decade before I finally managed to get off this boat. A decade in which there's very limited schooling, very limited access to other kids, and my relationship in particular with my mother kind of nose dives from the point at which I become a teenager. So it becomes a really, really difficult, toxic kind of environment. And that's what the book is about. Because about halfway through this, I decide I'm going to try and escape from this, what is literally a kind of never-ending voyage, and eventually I do. So I come back to the UK and I get myself into University. So to give you the kind of punchline at the end, it's a very crazy childhood with all sorts of things missing, and we'll come on to you know pros and cons of that sort of strange childhood.

So the biggest issue that I faced on this boat, I realized by the time I got to like 12 or 13, I haven't by that point really been to school properly since I was seven. Um, and I, you know, obviously reading books that we had on the boat, but I mean we're basically on a boat sailing around, so you're not able to go to school or anything like that. I decided, I don't know where I got the idea from, but I decided that my only way of getting off this boat was to somehow find a way to educate myself. But it's quite hard to do. You've got to remember, we're kind of pre-internet, pre-mobile phones. You know, you basically got post. I mean, that's it. And talking to somebody in person. I realize for some people in the room that may be kind of a crazy idea, but that's literally all. And on a boat, of course, we had very primitive equipment. We didn't have... we obviously had a phone most of the time? We didn't have a fridge right at the end? We didn't have any satellite navigation. I mean, it was very, very basic on board. So we finally got to Australia, by which point... I mean, we were in Hawaii when I was 12. That was supposed to be the end of the trip, because that's where, for those of you who know your Captain Cook stories, Captain Cook was killed in Hawaii on his third voyage. So that was supposed to be the end point of our voyage. We were a year late, so we were four years in. But my father decided to keep sailing. In fact, we had a family vote and my brother and I voted to come home and my father and my mother voted to keep sailing. My father announced that it wasn't actually a democracy after all and we were going to keep sailing. So we kept sailing. We finally got to Australia and I managed to go to school for about 10 months or so. And then my father announced we were going to keep sailing, because he just loved sailing and this was a lifestyle that he just really enjoyed. At that point, I managed to convince them to let me enroll in a correspondence school. There's a correspondence school in Australia, but the problem with that if you're living on a boat—I mean, it was my only option—but the problem is on a boat you don't have an address. And that's the one thing you need if you're going to study by correspondence: you need somewhere where that school is going to send you stuff and you can send it back. So instead, what I would do is I would post off all my lessons every time we got to a port, and then I try to get my dad to tell me where we were going to go next. And sometimes we did go to that place next, but quite often we didn't, or we hit a storm and we went somewhere else, or something else happened. But one way or another, I tried to educate myself that way. And meanwhile, by this point we'd run completely out of money. I should say we were never a very wealthy family at all, but by this point we're completely broke. And so we're taking crew on board the boat and getting them to pay to come on the boat to have little mini holidays. And that was how my parents were funding this trip. But that meant that they really wanted me to work on board, cooking and cleaning for these crew. And my brother—I'm afraid it was a very gendered world—so my brother was able to help when he felt like it on deck, but I was expected to cook and clean down below. That was very gendered. So I would go and hide when I could, when I wasn't being dragged into doing chores up in the forepeak at the front of the boat, and try to study and then send these things off. And then eventually, when I was 16, my parents basically left me and my younger brother, who was 15, in New Zealand and they kept sailing. They just left us behind. And that was the most—I describe it in the book—that was the most difficult year for me because I didn't know anybody. I only knew one adult in New Zealand who lived in Auckland, and we were dumped in Rotorua. So I didn't know anybody, I wasn't going to school, and I was still trying to teach myself because I'm still determined my way out of this thing is to get myself to University. And then I wrote to every University I've ever heard of in the world. And it's quite funny because the universities I'd heard of, of course even if you live on a boat you've kind of heard of Harvard and you've heard of Oxford. So I wrote to those, and they ended up being all the elite universities, not because I thought I was elite, but those are the ones I'd heard of. So I wrote to Auckland University, Auckland New Zealand, and kind of Sydney because of course that's local. And they gradually started writing back and they were all saying no. So New Zealand said no because I have a British passport, so I couldn't go to New Zealand. Australia for the same reason. Harvard never wrote back, and I now realize that 'Harvard University, Harvard, America' is not the right address, which by the way is a real flaw for Harvard, for anyone sitting in a hut in New Zealand trying to make up what the address is. It doesn't work. They definitely lost you to somewhere else. Yeah, they lost me. I think that's probably more my loss than theirs. But anyway, and then amazingly Oxford wrote back and said, 'Okay, write us a couple of essays and we'll think about it.' So I wrote them a couple of really quite crazy essays because I was really worried about the fact that here I am sitting in a hut in New Zealand on my own, I haven't seen a teacher for—I mean, actually I've never met any of my teachers in person. And so I'm trying to do six subjects because I was doing the Australian curriculum and I was conscious that in the UK you only did three at that point in time. So I couldn't do a standard essay, so I wrote a couple—I wanted to study science, I wanted to study biology—so I wrote one essay on how to do science at sea, which was quite entertaining: if you want to do a dissection and you're living on a boat, you first have to catch a frog. So I described how I caught my frog and chopped it up on my mother's chopping board and all the rest of it. And another slightly odd essay about whether or not humans are a domesticated animal, which I just thought was so obscure a topic that nobody else would have written it. Anyway, amazingly they wrote back and said if you can get yourself to England, we'll interview you. So I went and picked kiwi fruit—which by the way I do not recommend, that is a horrible thing to do; they're really heavy and they have little hairs that come off and they're really horrible—but I earned enough money for a one-way ticket back to the UK. I came back, did the interview, and amazingly they let me in. And the incredible thing about education is if that happens, it transforms your life. Because the really odd thing is, I then get to Oxford—there's a whole other issue about how I was going to get any money to fund myself, which I describe in the book—but anyway, I get to Oxford and nobody ever seems to ask you really about what happened beforehand. They all just assume that you've come from some privileged background and gone to a school and all of this stuff. So you kind of then continue on in life, which I've done and done in many ways quite conventional things. And we'll come on to that. But I think some of that experience, that crazy childhood experience, has helped me. Some of it has not helped me; there have been big disadvantages, but there's definitely been advantages and disadvantages.

Yes, you're right on both parts. I should say I haven't done the research, but I've kind of looked at what the research is because I'm quite intrigued. Because people say to me, 'Well, hang on a moment, Suzanne, you seem quite normal,' which I suppose is quite reassuring. Suppose none of us really feel that normal. But you know, clearly I can. When you go and look at the research, there are two interesting things that come out. First of all, there's quite a lot of evidence that a fair amount of people who are very successful have had difficulty in their background. So there was a book that came out which I've been reading about British prime ministers, for example. Like them or loathe them, it's amazing how many of them had a very difficult childhood. They lost a parent, or they were ill, or something else quite traumatic happened, many more than you would expect if you just took a random section. So that's the first thing, which is quite interesting. And interesting for you guys if you're hiring people: if somebody has got themselves out of that sort of background, often they end up quite able to overcome future obstacles as well. And then the second thing is there are some really interesting longitudinal studies looking at kids who've had really difficult childhoods. One I was sent actually followed for 40 years a set of kids in Hawaii who came from really difficult backgrounds—kids who grew up in families where there was alcoholism or drug abuse or just great poverty or whatever. All of them were really bad. And two things are really interesting from that. One is that three quarters of them were obviously really badly affected for lots of their life. They measured being impacted by both—they weren't holding normal relationships, and also their careers were not what you would expect given everything else. Who knows what was going on in their heads; they weren't looking at that. The good news is of those three quarters, about half of them got back on track by the end of the 40 years. But still. But the really interesting thing is a quarter you couldn't tell when you looked at what they did in terms of career success and relationships and other things. And of course we don't know why that is. And as an ex-scientist, I'm very conscious that when you start to look at the characteristics of that quarter, you get into correlation rather than causation. But it does seem that if you're able to make other relationships outside of your family group in a very traumatic childhood, you can actually come out a little bit protected. And funny enough, on the boat, these crew members who kept on appearing and disappearing in my life, some of them I actually did form some quite strong bonds with, particularly one who I still know very well. I always call him Mr. Ray. My parents used to insist when I was a kid that adults were called 'Mister,' so to this day Mr. Ray is Mr. Ray; I still address him as Mr. Ray. So yes, so two things: one is there are a large proportion of successful people who have come from remarkably difficult backgrounds. And secondly, unfortunately, most people who come from difficult backgrounds are badly impacted by it. So you wouldn't inflict it on somebody. But if people get out of it, they can be very successful.

Yeah, I certainly think one of the things that I learned as a kid—I mean, I was a very curious kid, I was always asking questions in a slightly annoying way, I suspect. But I did learn that you can teach yourself things. If you remain really curious, it's amazing what you can learn. I mean, I self-taught myself, and I don't think I've ever really lost that. If you can retain curiosity and just keep learning stuff, it's really interesting. I did a cyber security course recently because it was just—I got quite fascinated by it. I love learning things to this day. And that definitely has stood me in good stead. That's one of the reasons why I've been willing to do different things in my career as well, because when you move you get an opportunity to learn something really quite different. And at Exor we have a number of companies in very different industries, and I love that because I get the opportunity to learn and become quite deep in what I know but in a range of different industries, which is great. So I think that learning mindset—I had to teach myself otherwise I was never going to escape. And you also learn to bounce back from things because you have to. There was nobody watching out for me, and therefore you had to learn to pick yourself up.

Yeah, I mean it's one of the interesting things hopefully people will find in the story. It's not really a sailing story; it's on a boat but it's not really a sailing story. It's really a story about what happens if you take a family and stick them in a very small environment for a decade. And it's a very different thing getting on a boat when you're seven years old and getting off a boat when you're 16. As I say, the family relationship started to deteriorate. And one of the interesting things as I've talked to people about the book is how many people have family relationships which are really quite difficult. We often don't talk about them. So it is, and especially on different skills. I mean, I'm sure if you're an entrepreneur, the first time you tell your parents, 'Oh, I'm going to leave my safe job and just do something,' normally it's not exactly easily accepted, especially in certain backgrounds. No, it's not easy at all. So that's kind of interesting, and coming to terms with that. And then I think the other thing is, you know, I grew up in a very strange world where my father was the only point of authority in my world, and he was very authoritarian. Because there's something about being the captain of the boat: you have complete control over everyone's lives on this boat. And my father, like many captains, I think quite enjoyed that control. He often wouldn't tell us where we were going next. I remember once when we set sail from Fiji, we were either going to go to Tonga or Samoa, and I wanted to know which one because my school work was going to go to one or the other, and he just wouldn't decide, or he just wouldn't tell us. And it was only when we were about halfway there that he suddenly said, 'By the way, we're going to Tonga.' So he had ultimate control over the family. But when I got to an age where I was willing to take my father on—and I didn't do it directly, I did it obliquely because I couldn't really do it directly—what I realized is that authority is kind of important, but you don't have to live your life constrained by it. And I think for me that's been really helpful in my career, because I am willing to challenge the status quo. Many times people have said to me, 'We shouldn't really do that next, Suzanne,' or 'I'm not sure that's the right thing,' and I will quite often go against what people tell me I should or shouldn't be doing, partly because I grew up slightly outside of society, so I'm willing to challenge what's seen as the conventional thing to do.

Yeah, well I should say there's huge disadvantages of coming from this sort of background, particularly educationally—there are loads of gaps that I had to fill in—and socially as well when I first came to University, especially I guess at Oxford. The book doesn't get that far, but the acceptance? I mean, yeah, no, well we can talk about that. It was really tricky when I first came back, socially in particular. But having put all those things to one side and having worked my way through those, there are definitely advantages. One is this learning mindset. Another is a willingness to challenge the status quo because I just didn't grow up in a very formalized way. The word resilience is overused, but for me I think I am very resilient. And I think the reason is that when I face a challenge, it sounds ridiculous in a way but it is actually true: when I face a challenge, I do actually think back to being seven years old on a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean being hit by a wave, and think, 'Okay, whatever it is I'm facing day to day, whatever challenge with the companies that we work with or whatever, it's not as bad as that.' And that enables me to put things into proportion. And I think if you can learn to put things into proportion, then you can actually get through a lot of things. My theory is that one of the reasons why people who manage to escape from quite difficult backgrounds can become successful is because they have that ability to put things into proportion. If you've grown up in a family with alcoholic parents and you've had to escape from that, when you face a challenge you're going to understand whether something really is big or whether it's small. So there's been a whole bunch of things from my childhood that have been helpful. As I said, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone because most people don't escape from those situations. But there's definitely upside. So I would encourage you, if you're thinking about people on your teams, it's worth considering people from slightly unusual backgrounds.

There when they need you to be there, putting their interest not necessarily first but at least on the map. And funny enough, that was quite helpful because I realized that's all compatible with being a working parent or working mother. So I've always tried to make sure I'm home at weekends and often there in the evenings, but less so now because my kids are 22, 20, and 20, so frankly they don't really want me around too much. But great.

Yes, I should say EXO is really very small. We're an investment company and we tend to be the anchor shareholder in different companies, but at the EXO level we're relatively small, so we don't make a lot of hiring decisions because there aren't very many of us. Obviously the companies do lots of hiring, but I don't get involved except for senior level hires sometimes. For me, the biggest thing from all of that is this resilience thing. I had to step in to be the CEO of one of our big industrial companies during COVID, and the fact that I had that very difficult childhood was incredibly helpful because it enabled me to stay very calm when we were going through a pretty difficult period. We had to close plants all over the world and then figure out how to open them all up. Everyone here lived through that as well, but for me it was pretty stressful because if you're CEO, you feel like a lot of people are depending on you making sensible decisions. So that ability to stay calm when things are difficult has been really helpful. I do think it's because I've come out of a difficult background that has given me that. When things get really tough, I get quieter and calmer and just listen more to people around me.

In general, kind of everything. I still subscribe to New Scientist, not Nature, I find that a bit heavy going, but I still love science. I'm pretty obsessed with politics. My late husband was Cabinet Secretary here in the UK, so I had a lot of indoctrination into UK politics. I'm very interested in politics not just in the UK but more geopolitical stuff as well. I find that really interesting, and of course we live in a moment where that is so important to try and understand as best you can because it has an impact on everybody now, even small companies. The things that are happening geopolitically have a big impact. So I tend to read a lot, and I still read a lot of books. Lots of different things really. I'm lucky enough to be on the board of The Economist, so I feel that part of my job is to read The Economist. It's a good way to figure out things happening in places you wouldn't otherwise read about. If I read the UK press, it tends to be very UK-centric, but The Economist will give you what's happened in the Nigerian election or what's happening in Pakistan, and that's really interesting.