Here is a question for you: have you ever faced an obstacle that felt impossible? Wondered how some people turn extreme adversity into unstoppable success? Suzanne Heywood, shipwrecked at age seven, isolated for a decade at sea, yet she became a top executive and investor, leading multibillion-dollar companies. In the next 20 minutes, Suzanne shares how resilience, clear decision-making, and relentless innovation can turn setbacks into breakthroughs, especially for leaders, investors, and policymakers. If this short version sparks your interest, I encourage you to explore the full episode. Please remember to like, follow, and share this podcast; it truly helps us reach more listeners like you. Now let's dive straight in, starting with Suzanne's extraordinary childhood journey that set everything in motion. Happy listening.
But you then have this contrast between these incredible locations and then what's happening on the boat. As you say, some extraordinary adventures, some of them life-threatening, and then increasingly as you go through the story, because I go on the boat when I'm seven years old and I'm trapped on the boat for 10 years basically, increasingly it becomes a story about how am I going to try and escape from this boat, how am I going to educate myself, how am I going to have friends, go to school, have a life given that I'm stuck on this boat, and the relationships inside the family start to deteriorate, so it becomes a real family drama. My visa keeps on running out, they've left us in a very isolated place, very beautiful again, really beautiful place, but really isolated, and I describe in the book actually how I become incredibly depressed. I end up ringing up Youthline, which is like a kind of phone line that you ring when you're in desperate trouble. But one way or another, I get myself through that year, and that's the year when I write to every university I've ever heard of in the world asking them if they will consider letting me come and study.
Oh, how did you survive there? I mean, no money, no your brother, into yourself?
Well, my father left a very small amount of money in a bank account, not his main money. He put a small amount of money in another account which I could access by forging his signature because I was too young to have a bank account. But we didn't have very much money at all. We had a very old car which kept on breaking down. Looking back, the biggest risk was that I became incredibly depressed and I had nobody. I didn't know anybody, no adults at all. And it's an extraordinary position to leave a young girl and a young boy in, and then just to abandon them and sail away, because of course I couldn't ring my parents when there were problems. But one way or another, I did get through it. I describe it in the book, and it gets very dark, and then we get to the kind of the darkest bit, and then eventually it starts to turn around, and I come back out of it. And that's the start of me actually escaping, because when I write these letters off to every university in the world, most of them write back and say that they won't consider me, but one, Oxford, amazingly writes back and says that they will if I can get myself to Oxford, they'll give me an interview. And so I went and picked kiwi fruit, which is the national product of New Zealand, earned enough money for a one-way ticket back to the UK, and did the interview, and incredibly they let me in, and that changed my life.
Well, why do I feel like that? Is it that I'm not enjoying this immediate thing that I'm doing, but actually the idea of being an academic and everything that comes with it is fine, or is this a much more fundamental thing which is this lifestyle is just not the lifestyle that I want? And you've got to think about, because sometimes short-term obstacles are worth overcoming if long-term that's what you want to do. But there's no point in overcoming short-term obstacles if you're continuing down a route which really isn't working. And for me in that case, I realized that I wanted a lifestyle or a way of working which was much more working with other people. For me, the academic lifestyle was just too narrow and too isolated. I wanted to go and work in teams with other people and get energy from that and give energy from that. So I realized it wasn't the right fit for me, and therefore I switched and I went into government. So I think you need to ask yourself when you hit an obstacle: is this an obstacle that it's worth overcoming, or is this an obstacle that I'm just overcoming because it happens to be there? Lots of people, when you ask them why they climb a mountain, they say because it's there. Fine, but mountains at work, you shouldn't just climb because they're there. You've got to climb them because you think it's a mountain worth climbing. So it's always worth pausing when you get into an obstacle to work out whether you're just climbing that obstacle because it happens to be the thing that's in front of you, or whether you're climbing it because it is worth getting over and there is no better way to do it. And of course, we see this all the time at work. You'll get partway into an IT project and discover that it's much more complicated for whatever reason than you thought it might be. It's always worth having that pause. There's a little example that people use: come up off the dance floor and go up onto the balcony and just stop and think about it for a moment. Am I pursuing this because it really is worth it but it's tough, or am I pursuing it because it was the thing that I thought that I should be doing or I was told that I should be doing, and actually there might be a much better way of achieving it, or I might actually decide that the goal that I'm going for is not the right one?
The first one which I referred to before is this point around resilience, which I know is a word that some people struggle with, and I should explain what I mean by it. What I mean is, what I don't mean is that by being resilient, you're somehow impervious, you're not affected by things that happen to you that are bad. I mean, we're all affected by things that happen to us which are bad. But what I have found, coming from that background, is that when something happens which is bad, I can put it in proportion because I know what really bad looks like. Really bad is being a little girl seven years old on a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean when we were shipwrecked. So when I face a problem, and it sounds a little bit silly, but my brain works like this: when I face a problem, for example, one of our companies is struggling and I need to go and help them and people are getting very upset, I can put it in proportion because nobody's life is in danger. We will get this sorted out. There will be not necessarily a good course, but there will be a least bad course that we can take, which is going to be the best one under the circumstances. And that ability to put things in proportion enables me to stay very calm when things are difficult. And I think if as a leader you can stay very calm when things are difficult, you're much more able to be rational, you're much more able to listen to what people say, because normally there'll be somebody around who has a very good idea even if you don't have one yourself. So that is a huge strength, that calmness, that ability to put things into proportion, which is what I call resilience.
I mean, biases can be problematic in lots of different ways. First of all, as I say, there's people biases. So most companies will have, even today, many companies will have a certain sort of person who works in a particular sort of company, whether that's people from the industry, or more men or more women, or people from a particular nationality, or people from a particular type of educational background. I've come across companies where virtually everybody has worked at a particular university, maybe they've come out of MIT or maybe they've come out of some other kind of university. And there is a bias because you've got a group of people who are similar to each other. They quite naturally begin to assume that people who don't come from that background, who by the way may therefore be less good at some of the things that they're good at, that those people are worse, they're going to be ineffective. And that I think is a very dangerous way to think, because there's lots of evidence actually that when you have a group of people who come from very different backgrounds, they're more willing to challenge each other, you're less likely to have groupthink. If you've got a bunch of people and they've all been educated in engineering at MIT, they're all going to think in a certain sort of way. And then if you put somebody else into that group who comes from a very different kind of background, they're going to have different things that they're worrying about. Maybe they're less worried about detailing the process and getting that very clear, which by the way is a very good thing to do, but they may actually come at it in a very different way and be much more worried about what the culture of an organization is or whatever. I'm making wild assumptions here, but the point is that as you mix up these groups, generally you tend to get better outcomes.
What makes the difference in leadership? Why do some companies successfully implement the culture of innovation and can innovate and innovate and keep innovating and keep growing like Apple or Amazon, and why do other companies fail? What's the huge difference? Can you boil it down to a few simple rules?
I don't know about simple rules. I mean, I sometimes call them kind of Phoenix companies, you know, they kind of reemerge after the fire, they reinvent themselves. At Exor, when we're looking for companies, we look at companies not just that perform well financially, but we also look for companies that are sustainable because that's important, but also companies that are innovative, and that they have created a moat, they're distinctive. So they're distinctive and they're innovative. And I think if a company is going to be around for a long time, as a culture, the management needs to put as much emphasis and reward and attention on innovation and distinctiveness as they do on the kind of short-term results. And the danger, of course, particularly if you're a public company where you're being driven by quarterly earnings, is what you're really worried about is what's the next lot of numbers that I'm going to present. By the way, that's not a bad discipline, that's a good discipline. But where it can become dangerous is if that means that you're not putting emphasis on innovation and distinctiveness and sustainability as well. And so one of the jobs I think for a CEO and a leadership team for a board is to try to make sure that the company is doing as much on those longer-term issues as the shorter-term issues. And it's the companies that lose sight of that, I think, that end up in trouble. I never worked inside Apple, but I imagine I would hope, I'd be surprised actually if it wasn't the case that the conversations even at very senior level are as much about what they're developing for three years' time as they are about what the sales are today and next month and at the end of the quarter.
