Great to see you. Thanks very much. Have a seat on our Nordic wood. Super. So, some of our audience will have seen you on the main stage. We've also got viewers in 34 different countries watching on the live stream and not all of them will have caught your great conversation over there. But let's just sort of pick up on some of those key things. We want to talk about leadership tenure and I'm curious: did you know that you always wanted to be a CEO, or at what point in your career did you think this is for me?
Yeah. No, I would say I never considered being a CEO. All I ever wanted to do is make an impact, create great companies, and lead people to do extraordinary things. So until I got the call to move to London for Burberry, it was never even on my radar. I had turned it down a couple of times. Finally, one of the women came back and said, 'Do you realize there's only 1% of women who get to be?' But it still wasn't the deciding factor. The deciding factor was: could I help make this a great legacy brand? Titles don't entitle you to anything, right? So no, it was never part of my thinking.
And when you were doing the role, was it how you imagined it would be? Having turned down the chance to be a CEO and then you're there, what was different to what you might have expected?
Yeah. I think the difference is you're 100% accountable. The buck stops with you, and I'm absolutely fine with that. I would prefer to be accountable rather than blame someone else or point fingers. So again, you can either decide this is for me and I'm going to be accountable and push us as far as I can, or you can just rely on the title and float through, but it's never been my style. So I think that going in with a greater responsibility, you have a certain period of time and things are moving so quickly. Your employees expect more, your customers expect more, and you have to look at every facet of the business and pull in brilliant talent. I've always said that I'm just a connector, I'm the enabler. It is not my job to micromanage every facet. My job is to put the right people in the right place at the right time and coordinate one powerful strategy that everyone believes in, and then get out of the way and empower them to execute.
Well, you've answered my next question about what the key leadership qualities were that you needed to be a CEO. You talked on the main stage about the transition to going to work for Apple, and then you weren't the CEO. The buck didn't stop with you. There was someone else's company and vision. So what was that transition like?
Yeah, I get asked that question almost more than others. But it's funny: I took the job to make an impact, not because of the title. And with a company that size, 70,000 employees, over $40 billion in revenue, and so many customers coming in, Eddie Q once said, 'Forget the title, you are the CEO of that business.' Nobody has time. These businesses are so big. Even though retail was only 17-18% of Apple's business, it was still bigger than most businesses in the world. So if you think it's different and you wait for someone to make a decision, you're not doing your job.
We had to lean in. I had to run it as if I was the CEO of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't have gotten anything done. Do you think you would have taken another CEO role if you hadn't moved to Apple? Or were you ready to?
No, I would have stayed at Burberry another chunk of my career.
Another chunk of your career. Okay, Angela, we have quite a lot of questions that have come through both on the main stage and while we've been talking, so I'm going to jump into a couple of those now. This one you mentioned the high pace of the fashion industry when you were on the main stage. This pace also leads to a lot of waste. What is your take on that and sustainability in the industry?
Yeah, I mean, that's a whole other topic, but at Burberry we fully believed that less was more and that the biggest problem in fashion is overproduction. So how do you make fewer better things that last the test of time? Even in our supply chain, we got rid of all PVC, went to natural fibers, which was better for water, climate, everything. So to me, when you're a luxury brand, the most sustainable things are the ones that will last for 50, 70, 100 years and not get thrown back into the environment. So I urge every fashion company I work with to produce much less, in a more responsible way, and produce it better so that it outlives you. The trends are all going that way. There will be more business done secondhand in the next three years than firsthand. So the trends are leaning that way, and it's a great opportunity for companies.
Super. We have a lot more questions coming in about leadership as well. This one says 'congruent leadership and caring leadership. How can we ensure that we see more leadership to inspire future young leaders?' So I think what they're essentially saying is you've talked about a caring, open, and authentic leadership, but are there enough people around, and what can we do to ensure there are more?
Yeah, it's a tough question. It's a big world, right? 8 billion people. So it's a really tough question. I believe they are there. If you listen to the Italian gentleman right before me, he talked about how it is in our human nature to want to be loved and to belong. So I think it is educators and leaders' responsibility, especially in an AI age, to help unlock that at a much greater scale. We haven't been taught; there are no high school or university classes on instincts, none on deep compassion and leadership. So with AI, we have an opportunity to lean back the other way and bring that. It exists. Everyone is born with it, but it hasn't been the focus. This has been the focus, and we're going to lose that one.
