Chief Executive Officer, Nord Anglia Education Limited
What makes us successful: Andrew Fitzmaurice at TEDxCollegeBeauSoleil
Prior to Nord Anglia Education Andrew was at EasyCar.com where he spent three years as Chief Executive. Before that Andrew ...
About Andrew Fitzmaurice
Andrew Fitzmaurice, CEO of Nord Anglia Education, has described the organization as operating in 28 countries with over 60,000 students and more than 12,500 staff. In welcome addresses to staff for the 2019–2020 academic year, he highlighted the company's "be ambitious" philosophy and its collaborations with Juilliard, MIT, and UNICEF, and stated that one in three Nord Anglia students go on to attend the world's top 100 universities. He said the organization claims to be "the world's leading premium schools organization" and emphasized the importance of both teaching and support staff in delivering an outstanding education. In a 2018 TEDx talk, Fitzmaurice discussed his own experience as a "third culture kid" who attended seven schools by age 13, and argued that frequent moves taught him not to fear new situations. He cited a World Economic Forum statistic that two-thirds of jobs future graduates will hold do not yet exist, and called on students to collaborate across cultures to address global problems. In a 2017 student interview, he said that a CEO's role involves resource allocation and that schools should be "owned by the community that it serves," rather than standardized like a chain. In a 2013 TEDx talk, he described "high performance learning" as not accepting limits placed on individuals, and used his own poor French exam result as an example of how low expectations can hinder achievement.
Transcript (1 segments)
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Andrew Fitzmaurice0:00
Thank you very much. Unfortunately, I'm in danger of losing my voice again, but I want everyone to know that I don't make a habit of it. Now, in the organization that I work with and that I'm responsible for, there are 10,000 students, and there's another very important group within that organization, and that is 1,500 teachers. So can anyone imagine being in charge of an organization that had 1,500 teachers in it? Would anyone like a day of running that organization? Anyone like to do a job swap with me for a day? Yes, there's a few hands in the audience. I'd much rather have a day at Bosay, I can promise you. Anyways, the funny thing about all of these teachers in the audience and also in the organization is that they're quite interesting to work with. And I was speaking to Mr. Liam about it, and I said to Mr. Liam, 'Mr. Liam, how do you think about it when you think about being in charge of an organization with lots of teachers underneath you?' And he said, 'Well, Andrew,' he said, 'it's a bit like being in charge of a cemetery. He said that you know that you're above a lot of people, but none of them are listening to you.' I'm sure that's not the case really, Mr. Liam. Anyways, what I want to talk about today is high performance learning. So high performance learning is about not accepting the limits that are placed on you as an individual about how much people think you can learn or how good you will be at a particular subject. Now, how many people in the room think that they are not good at maths? That they're not particularly good? Few arms went up. Few honest arms went up there and said, 'Yeah, you're not good at maths.' So here we are. So a few more people admitting as we go on that they feel they're not particularly good at maths. Well, high performance learning is saying that that's wrong. That that is something that has been put upon you at some stage rather than based on your own ability. So what I want to talk about today is some examples of changing your mindset so that you are no longer someone who says, 'You know what, I am no good at maths.' So we think about it as a fixed mindset, and so I've got some positive examples of fixed mindset and I've got some negative examples. And I want to start with a negative example. And the negative example of a fixed mindset was me when I was 12 years old at my school. Now, I'm not saying my school is a rubbish school. In fact, it's a very good school. There's one very famous alumni from my school who had a 50th anniversary concert recently for his band in London. Can anyone guess what that band was? The Rolling Stones. So Mick Jagger went to my school, so it can't all be bad. Okay, even what I'm going to tell you, not everything about the school was bad. It produced Mick Jagger. But one thing that it did to me was when I was 12 years old, I joined the school after two terms and I started to learn French at the school. And I had no idea, so I sat at the back of the class. I thought, I don't know what they're talking about. I needed someone like Amara to tell me, 'Come on, you can do this,' but I didn't have that. So didn't listen, got a terrible result in my French exam in the first year, 10% out of 100. Not good. Mr. Liam would not be happy. So what happened to me? Now back in those days, education wasn't always enlightened, and rather than encouraging me maybe to say, 'Andrew, you can do this, you can be good at French,' no, what they did was they said, 'You're obviously no good at languages.' So whilst everyone else is going to be able to do Latin and German, we're going to put you in remedial English. Not remedial French—I'd have taken remedial French. I'd have been happy to be put in remedial French. But they put me in remedial English. So that just gave me a mindset that I was no good at French. And to this day, as Mr. Deer will tell you, when I try and speak to him in French, and I do try, I still feel it's something I can't really grasp. And when I came to the age of 16 and I sat my exam, my IGCSE as it was then called, an O Level, you could get one of five grades in that O Level: A, B, C, D, or E. And do you know what grade I got? None of those. I wasn't even good enough to get an E. They had something called unclassified. The lady who did my French oral broke down into English during the oral examination. I got unclassified. It was no good. But what it told me was that people are very good at setting their expectation of what you can achieve. But that's something you shouldn't accept, because there's no way that I couldn't have got a French O Level exam at least an E. And I want to tell you now about a couple of ways that you can not accept things and a couple of great examples. The first one is success through practice. So you can train your mind to be successful. Okay, we've had a fantastic pianist on the stage here today. Another famous pianist, famous concert pianist Daniel Barenboim, he famously practiced for 10,000 hours to master the art of playing the piano. Now if you think about that, that is practicing for 3 hours a day for 10 years. That's a big commitment. But it shows that if you really apply yourself to something, then after practice and practice and mastery and mastery, you can become very good. Maybe not as good as Daniel, but you can become very good if you're prepared to put the commitment in. The second example I want to use is from London's 2012 Olympics. Now, Great Britain did fantastically well in the 2012 Olympics, did better than ever before. We had a medal haul like never before as a country, and I think one of the reasons for that was people thought it's our home Olympics. We can dedicate ourselves for four years at our home Olympics to really achieving something special. And here's someone who did that. How many people have heard of the athlete Mo Farah in the room? Okay, he won two Olympic golds. Nearly all of you have heard of him. Two Olympic golds. Arrived in England at the age of 11 from Somalia, and by the age of his early 20s, he had got to a position of 10th in the world. Now, if like me you think 10th in the world is pretty good, you'd have been satisfied. But Mo Farah was not satisfied with tenth. He wasn't going to have that expectation pushed on him that he was only 10th best in the world. So even though he was fantastic at his sport, he changed everything. He changed his coach, he changed his diet, he changed his training regime. Everything got changed, and at the end of four years, instead of being 10th in the world, Mo Farah ended up being first in the world, not in one event but in two Olympic events. So a fantastic success story. Now, I maybe haven't convinced you today that you can be the next Daniel Barenboim or you can be the next Mo Farah, but I hope I've convinced you not to be told that you're no good at maths, not to tell yourself that you're no good at maths, and maybe to avoid an unclassified in your French IGCSE. Thank you very much.