An episode of The Impact Multiplier CEO Podcast

S2E7: Leadership Lessons For Challenging Times: Alun Baker, CEO, Clario Tech

S2E7: A conversation with top CEO Alun Baker

In this episode of Leadership Lessons for Challenging Times, Alun Baker, Chief Executive of Clario Tech, a consumer-focused cybersecurity company, talks with Xquadrant's Founder Richard Medcalf.

Alun is a visionary and growth-driving CEO and Chairman. He's passionate about rapidly growing or restructuring B2C and B2B technology-based companies and preparing them for M&A, fund raising and exit. He also has extensive Non-Exec Director experience, with four companies he's chaired making the Sunday Times Fast-track growth list.

Learn these leadership lessons for challenging times...

In this discussion we cover a wide range of topics and benefit from Alun's diverse and longstanding experience as chief executive.

Listen in and you'll learn:

  • How remote working affected productivity in a very surprising way (6'50")
  • What recruiting during challenging times - such as the COVID lockdown - looks like (12'18")
  • How to bring the best out of people and why it is always personal (24'32") 

TRANSCRIPT (Click to open)

Note: this transcript is automatically generated and only lightly neatened up. So this should be used  only to get the gist of the conversation and any transcription oddities should be ignored!

In this conversation I speak with Alun baker. Alun is CEO of Clario Tech, a business to consumer cybersecurity company. In this video, Alun talks about how he could find business opportunities in such a saturated market filled with so many incumbents, as a relatively small 800 or 900 person company and really carve out something unique. We then also get into COVID and the whole pivot and navigation that Alun had to take the company through as part of that: how he was able to bring the best out of people, how problems in the business always end up being people problems, how value in the business is created by people, and really what the fundamental principles are that Alun sees that never really go away and that he comes back to in all the different CEO roles that he’s had.

I enjoyed this conversation, I hope you will too. Enjoy Leadership Lessons in Challenging Times with Alun Baker of Clario Tech.

Richard Medcalf
Hi, Alun.

Alun Baker
Hi, Richard.

Richard Medcalf
Great to have you here. Thanks for joining me.

Alun Baker
It's a pleasure. Actually, it's been a long time coming so I'm looking forward to this.

Richard Medcalf
Yes, indeed, well, hey, before we jump in, why don't you give us some context? Just take a minute or two to explain, you know, who you are, and what Clario Tech is and does.

Alun Baker
Yes, so somebody once described me very recently actually, in media as a veteran of the technology industry. I'm not sure I like the veteran bit, what the connotations are. So yes, I've been in IT sector for nearly 30 years, and spent most of the last 20 years either transforming businesses or growing them. And I've been in everything from director in Oracle acquired By Accenture, I've also been chairman of four companies, three of which went through successful exits. So almost everything I've done has been leading major type of high growth scenarios or going through some kind of significant transformations.

For the last two just in the last two years, I've spent a lot of time in Ukraine, believe it or not, looking at a business which was called Kromtech owned a protocol Map Keeper and which we subsequently acquired. I set a new company up in London called Clario Tech and acquired the IP and the resources of Kromtech and we are about to launch a brand new product into the market in a couple of weeks time. All around cybersecurity. So Clario Tech is Richard the only way I can describe this is what appealed to me as I looked at them that was at least 10 years old. When all of the players in the market were doing the same thing and saying the same thing. And almost all of it was around antivirus. And my kind of philosophy in business has always been, once you get beyond the tech, tell me what the tech is doing to make a difference in business, what problem is it solving because unless you understand that, you don't understand the value of what you're delivering and how to deliver it. So what I saw was an industry a sizable industry, that that was ripe for disruption because unfortunately, cybercrime has grown at 40% a year. And, you know, latest estimates are it will hit $6 trillion by the end of 2021. And business to consumer which is what we're about the consumer is hugely misunderstood, and Clario is all about making it easy. Using a completely different tone of voice, having a unique user interface, it's like nothing in the market. It's, we personalise it so it's all about you. We talk to you as an individual. So it's Hey, Richard, that's how we engage with you. And we've also then integrated what we're calling human intelligence, which is a kind of a redirection from artificial intelligence. Because when you look at the market today, the headlines that about Facebook, getting a $4 billion of total fines over the last few years, losing people's data, or British Airways, losing people's data and getting a 185 million pound fine. They don't talk about the fact that hundreds of thousands of people's lives were affected by those data breaches. So even when it's about a consumer company losing data, they never talk about the true victim of a crime, which is a consumer. So Clario was all about taking a completely different approach. We don't talk technology, we talk about your money, your data, your browsing, your network. We don't talk about anything that confuses people. And for the first time ever, we're engaging you in cyber crime.


Richard Medcalf
Got it. Okay. So it's cybersecurity for consumers in a quite different, different way. A different approach. Fantastic. And as you say, it's a business which has got you in London, but there's been a large number of employees I know in Ukraine. So that adds another level of complexity I guess to you as an executive. So tell us a bit more and obviously we living pretty crazy times. 2020 is been an amazing year. Not always for the good reasons. But you know what happened for you in the last couple of months, how has COVID forced you to adapt as a business, I mean, what's been the biggest challenges that you've had to wrestle with as it as the senior leader?

Alun Baker
Yes, it's it's really interesting because somebody once told me that cloud computing accelerated enormously in 2009, following the banking crash, because companies weren't prepared to make large capital investments. So cloud based, you know, AI as you eat or drink was suddenly appealing, and people got over some of the hurdles. And I think the big technological advance we're now going to see is remote working. You know, most companies have avoided it, they've avoided it with assumptions of productivity would fall. You'd have security issues, you'd have infrastructure issues, but fortunately think, you know, there was a lot of tech arrived at the right time. Remote video conferencing grew up over the last few years. Now what we see particularly for us, we actually didn't have a policy for remote working. And within one week, we moved 830 people to remote and surprisingly without any hiccups, so not only did it happen smoothly, Richard, it also did something quite contrary to what most people would have predicted. Our productivity has actually gone up, which was probably lacking any kind of predicted trends you'd see with this. When you dig into it, you understand why right, people are very focused, they're stuck at a desk. They are also with isolation, haven't had any distractions. So I think the challenge of COVID is for us, we we've got productivity up and people are working well, and the morale is high in the business, but it's still quite novel. The next phase is what does the blend of office plus remote working look like because you can't go back to just pure office working going forward. It also has some really interesting conversations.

Richard Medcalf
Let me just jump in because i think there's a lot right there is in cover there's been a big energy boost of the initial crisis response, all hands on deck, you know, we need to write the ship make sure okay. And as you said, it's also novel, it was novel perhaps for certain companies or certain teams. Not for everybody, but suddenly the entire for remote working it was novel. And what I'm seeing now is that there's definitely energy dip that happens, right? Because suddenly people go okay, it's not new anymore. We're in this for the long whole, the world not getting back to normal straight away. There's gonna be no it's it's still very complicated and there is a there's a bit of an energy dip bit of a morale dip, actually a creativity dip potentially, right? Because it's okay when you're in crisis mode, where everyone's laser focused on what they need to deliver. But then suddenly, when everyone takes a bit of a breather, it's that cross functional collaboration, that creativity, you know, not just bring in your own team, your own team calls. And you know, but actually thinking more expansively about the business. I think those are the kind of challenges that are now coming down the line for other companies.

Alun Baker
Yes, I definitely can see that. Because, you know, even if you look at your social network now, people joke and say, I can't do another quiz. Right? So a lot of the work we do is we have drinks evenings, we've had fancy dress evenings, we've had quiz evenings just to keep morale together. I jump in on team meetings. So just to hear what people have got to say how they're feeling. But all of that doesn't have a long term fix, I think. Now the next bit is to contemplate what do you do next to support a remote work stream longer? There's positive to it right, Richard? You know, I think the IT sector has been notorious like a lot of sectors in the way you support women in the workplace, particularly people with young families. So there's this now remote working model as destroyed the myth that says you can't be productive at home. I think also we recognise one big thing here we talk about work life balance. Well, life is just encroached. Work has just encroached on life. Now, it's about a life work balance, not a work life balance. So, you know, when I'm talking to my teams, I say, look, if your kids run into the middle of a conference meeting, don't get embarrassed. That's just what we've enforced here. We brought it to them, not the other way around so nobody gets stressed. So think we'll all think thinking differently. But now it gives us a chance to say, how do you support families in the workplace better by allowing remote working? How do we change our models to support this? Because we don't have an excuse anymore. We've seen it can work. So those barriers have just been torn down. We now have to think differently. We have to architect a different working environment for people going forward.

Richard Medcalf
Yes, absolutely. And what about the decisions that you've been making in this time? Obviously, you had to move, move on to remote work, have been decisions, which have been tough to make or challenging in some way in this time.

Alun Baker
Look, I chair a company that called Arkk Solutions who are a big tech company, and because it's b2b, are can continue to grow, but they've been through that fillo programme. So on one side as a chairman, I'm seeing what's happening in a business I'm involved in and then on the other side, as a CEO, Clario tech is a b2c company. And when you're at home, you're now dependent on digital more than anything you've ever depended on before your life. Therefore, we are actually seeing significant growth. So for us, you know, COVID has has had a business accelerated impact on us. So, it hasn't impacted us in that way. However, you know, lots of other things. We've recruited 30 odd people in the last few months. So onboarding people remotely so not seeing your really cool offices. They haven't met people in the same way. So trying to align people culturally, when you're doing remote interviewing, it's a lot tougher, but we're learning how do you do that, skills and new approaches.

Richard Medcalf
How do you do that and how you can onboard people when they're when there's nobody to know where to go, right.

Alun Baker
Yes, look, I think it's a combination of things. We show people our offices because there are offices in here, for example, have won awards. It's it's a super cool kind of industrial operation where we have, you know, a restaurant that serves several courses for breakfast, lunch, dinner as music room. It has English teachers it has a gym. And it's a super, super cool environment, but we show pictures to people, we get them to talk to a broad range of people in the teams. And we also can you can interview which is really good as well, you can interview with five, six people on a core quite comfortably. So they get that feeling of what type of organisation you are just by in many respects, it was a bit odd before right Richard you're only meeting this person on a video call now it's cool that you're meeting a broader group of people on a video call and don't see it as strange. So I think as human beings we quickly adapt.

Richard Medcalf
It's funny really because I mean yes, you know I work with Cisco for over 10 years and starting in 2006. And to be honest, that was you know, they were bringing in telepresence and video WebEx at that time, and they really made a big pivot pretty much, you know, pretty much back then. And so I remember, you know, stopping flying to the US to do project but doing purely via video and get this benefit from just having to walk down the corridor to do my meeting, rather than to, you know, spend a day on a plane. You know, it's really interesting, most of that comment that the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Because suddenly, it's like, people are like, what's happened is everything has kind of caught up with that kind of way of working, which kind of multinationals that already kind of adopt, you know, certain multinationals have already kind of adopted but suddenly it's like every, you know, every Scout troop and you know, kind of almost any, any, any organisation at any level, whether it's super low Cool, whatever has had to experiment and survive and thrive on on this technology. So it's super interesting.

Alun Baker
You raise a good point because if you worked remotely, and I'm sure you've done this before, where, you know, you might be in a remote office where the majority of people might be in America or something, you always felt like an outlier. Yes, now because we've been through a prolonged period where we're all outliers. So we're all part of a bigger hive network now. I don't think anyone's ever gonna feel like an outlier in the same way as before. So I think it's it's had a seismic impact in the way we will regard ourselves going forward. You can be a one man office now and not feel isolated. So yes, I think it's will trigger a totally different mindset for people.

Richard Medcalf
I'm one of the one of the elements in the Xquadrant, you know, approach is talking about success systems. And we always realise looking back, that success has been built on getting certain things, right, and being able to kind of replicate that almost as an instinct. But I think looking forward, there is going to be that, like, how do we create a success system around working remotely? Yes, for example, I think it works a lot better when everybody's remote. Or everybody's in the room, because actually, you have a richer interaction when everybody's remote than when you have half and half. But culturally, companies are gonna need to think about that. Are we gonna have are we gonna have days where we all come in the office, we all you know, go out for lunch, we all do whatever. And then certain days when we will remote or is it gonna be kind of pick and choose? I've seen the pick and choose and actually, it creates some interesting dynamics like, you never see the whole team because somebody is always, you know, half the team's already. Always outside. of the office. And so I think there's some care will be needed to actually figure out what a hybrid culture looks like, you know, and what constraints we put on that culture.

Alun Baker
Yes. I did executive networking remote meeting last week and with a group called 360 leaders, so they had an incredible group of people together, Richard, and one of the people on there had founded a business with two other people he'd never met face to face. I think that's an that's switch in thinking right. So but it tells you what this has done. And it also I think, what's important for people to remember here. Nature's just shaking the world and it shows us to be super vulnerable, right? So when you look out into the future, we no longer can say there's no chance of another pandemic. And we can no longer say that even the major changes in global warming are not going to have potentially huge impact on our future in some way. So I think the way people think about risk is changed. Therefore, no matter what happens, back to normal, we get in the next scene, from the next eight months out to the next two or three years, people are always going to have to remember this and go I need alternative plans. So that multi dimensional working model is going to be important. We all adopted because something could change a game and you've got to be ready, it can't catch you out again. So as you've just said, then having a model where you should have this multi dimension is going to be important to you because it's actually mitigating risk. So I mean, I think it should come into our culture.

Richard Medcalf
Yes, I think one of the things I talk about these days is, you know, is antifragility really, you know, this concept? The idea is that, you know, fragile is minute breaks when you when you when it comes under stress, robust, it doesn't change, but anti fragile, it gets stronger, like the human body, you know, when we, when we stay in a hospital bed or whatever we wither away, we need some stresses in the system to become healthy and to get stronger. You go to the gym, you build your muscles by subjecting them to stress and actually, we need to build organisations, which are a bit less lean, and a bit less minimalist, and where we have some redundancies and so we don't have single points of failure. Because the minimalists you know, it's great when it's all working in a very stable environment. But you know, if minimum it if it's suddenly a shock to the system, and you know, they've got a toilet paper or whatever it is in his home, you know, or any food in the fridge. Then he's going to be outperformed by the guy who's got a basement full of you know, a bunker in his basement with stocks, and the flip side is the upside the downside you need to create opportunities to exploit that.

Alun Baker
It's strange, I think the analogy I see is I used to chair a company called company I, which we sold to Symantec. And that was all about fault tolerant systems and storage systems. And in the beginning, if you remember, full tolerance was a backup, right? Then it become when your machine went down, you had another machine you switched on, and then it switched to hot hot, it had to literally in sub second response times, replace the failed system. And I think what we'll see is the same you have to apply that philosophy to the New World within now. What is my hot hot look like? We were forced into this made mistakes. We can't afford to make the same mistakes. Again, we need to be more prepared. And as you've just said, you build some redundancies into that you have to.

Yes and then I think on the upside, as they'll say, The upside is actually how as a company do we get better at being open to chance and to serendipity, and new opportunities, and then when we, when we find a good one, to really be able to jump on it and exploit it, you know, to really open ourselves up to the upside of all this volatility. Because again, we lock in too much to plans and, and everything else and systematise everything, we can almost reduce our ability to, to grab the opportunity that arises to the left or to the right of our main main pathway.

Yes, so so we talked about remote working, but also there's a huge acceleration in digital economy here right for everyone. So anybody that's traditional bricks and mortar that has either a plan to or partial plan to digitise some aspects of the business will be thinking how do I accelerate Now it's a in business you want to be in control, right Richard now there's so much of what's just happened that's outside of our control. Different countries responses in COVID means that access to those countries physically will now be determined by whatever their contamination rates are, whatever the challenges they have, and whatever the rules are, though. It's outside of my control. So suddenly, there are aspects of the business that in the past you felt like you were in control of, suddenly you have no control over so how do you break that risk down and say, I now need an alternative model. That doesn't mean I have to fly to that country to have meetings or it doesn't mean I need my workforce to physically move across boundaries or borders to be able to conduct business. Because what if, for example, America has a longer problem with code And Europe and Europe opens up America doesn't, or countries ban Britain because we've got some of the worst death rates in Europe at the moment for a longer period than other countries in Europe. All of those things are outside of our control. And therefore you have to mitigate and digitalization is the logical mitigation for this.

Richard Medcalf
Absolutely. So hey, let's let's get personal a second, how's this period forced you to grow as a leader? Or perhaps asking it another way? You know, what leadership lessons would you give to yourself? You know, 10 years ago, you know, the younger you 10 years ago, you know, what, what have you learned over this period? And perhaps, you know, before as you've taken on this very different, you know, Ukrainian based company, you know, what's, what's been your growth path recently?

Alun Baker
You know Richard, I was talking to somebody in my team, who is an outstanding contributor in our team. And I was talking to her about her personal development recently. Something that you grow into over time as a leader is that your confidence grows because you go through periods where you doubt yourself. And what I've learned is that if I had had less doubt about myself and trusted myself earlier, what I'd learned were good lessons. And they were fundamentals about business. And those same fundamentals apply to every business, different shades in there, but they apply good is good, right standards are standards. And never doubt those, so you keep the faith in some of those things. It's super important. As a leader, I think my real strength has been to treat people as individuals, right? Nobody is managing. I have 835 people in our organisation. I don't manage 835 people, I manage eight or nine people, and each one of them, manages a group of people. So what you have to do is make sure that you instil in those, the things that you think works, and make sure that pushes down to the organisation because you can't do it top to bottom himself. So, the key thing for me is, everything is personal. It's never not personal. So understand that an individual has different motivations. They have different stressors in their life. You can have broad principles, but to get the best out of people, you need to engage, you need to understand them, you need to understand what motivates them, and what challenges they have to overcome because everyone is different. And if you're prepared to put the timing, you get a lot more out of the people that work for you and a lot more support for you in the journey you're on as a leader as well. And you get a lot more out of the company that you're leading, and it's more fun because it is personnal. I don't care what anybody says in my mind it's personal, so a true leader understands that.

Richard Medcalf
When you work with any issue of business has it comes down to people when you go back down the chain, you know? And I mean, to be honest, I'm actually asking you to do my marketing, I think because you know, you just described the the thing so perfectly right that you've got this big organisation, you can't change the mindset and the culture of all those people. But you can work on these eight or nine people that you have. And that's the journey of you know, transformation, right, creating that into a team and going deep into them. And understanding not just your own skills, but how it's, you know, how what you say what you do, but how you adjust that to who they are, right? Often as leaders, we just got to push things out at people. And we don't adapt what we do to them, and it doesn't matter as well. And then the second level is multiplication.

Alun Baker
You have to put the time in.

Richard Medcalf
Yes, exactly. You've got to you've got to learn and create a language to. It's really the key part is multiplication. So you know you, you can do it. But that only gets to eight or nine. The key the magic happens is to when those eight to nine are able to replicate what they have learned and experienced with you with their teams.

Alun Baker
Yes, so Richard, one of the things we did, we did a complete cultural transformation in the business. So we took the management team because we were becoming consumer champion business. And that means putting a customer first that's a cultural change. We have a culture of continuous improvement. We have a culture of trust and collaboration, now they're words until you enact them. So we did a roadshow. around every office. We ran multiple events with everyone in the management team on the part of this. They own part of our our cultural DNA. So we call them DNA workshops. What does this mean? And we showed the tone of voice for our company, we explained to people what this actually means everyday to you as individuals. And we did it office by office, groups of 12, 14 people at a time. And they it was a huge commitment from the management team. But without it, it's just a PowerPoint that you presented a quarterly update, and it just doesn't carry weight through a large organisation. So you know what people said to me, I give a lot of time up to that process, but it was probably the most valuable thing I did for for several months really was to make that commitment.

Richard Medcalf
It's what I call the high value activity, you know, you need to put your effort, especially as the CEO, on the biggest leavers, right, and transforming the culture has such a massive impact. It's a high value activity, right? You know, it's up there. It's one of the top. So let's sum this up. To wrap up very quickly, I know we've been speaking for a while and it's been fascinating, but I want to respect your time I'm just gonna ask you three or four quick, quick fire questions, just to just to find it a bit about what some of the inputs have been into your life and leadership. So what's your favourite book? What book's made an impact?

Alun Baker
Oh, Crikey. Probably To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my favourite ever books. It's not a big book. But it opened up something which is very topical now about equality and championing of equality and but it was a fascinating book in a moment in American literature, which I loved as well. So, that's certainly the book I always think about. If somebody says, tell me what your favourite one is.

Richard Medcalf
Great. What about your productivity tip? Well, you know what, what have you found works really well? Well, just to help you to get stuff out the door.

Alun Baker
So, Richard, it's a really interesting question because I was talking to my CMO recently. And Dom was head of digital at BBC and mobile operators, Sony, and Sony Ericsson. And there's so much work to get done when you're going through such a huge transformation in a business. And it's just don't sweat the small stuff right. There are things that make fundamental differences in your business. There's stuff that you cannot change, just leave it for now. And focus on more, you can have a material impact where you've got a KPI attached to it. We're about to implement OKRs, as the first time we hadn't done it before, because we weren't ready to truly understand what was important right. Everything was important. Now we've got to break it down. forward into, what are we going to focus on for the next, you know, 12/24 months? And OKRs? Give us that that model around that. But up until that point, we'd probably got those in wrong because we're still in this discovery. And one of my biggest learnings, and I think is, and I've talked to people about this quite a lot. The smartest people don't have all the answers, they have the smartest questions. So keep asking, keep digging, keep discovering. Because if you don't first seek to understand you will make the wrong decisions. But equally, you have to make quick decisions once you do actually get that point of discovery. So yes, do the things that you know, you can affect that have a material gain or impact on the business. The small stuff can wait. It can be fixed along the way, because you've got to keep moving. And sometimes you can stand still too long while you're thinking you're overwhelmed by too many things.

Richard Medcalf
Yes, absolutely. Thank you. Last question, what's your favourite kind of leadership quote or motto?

Alun Baker
Wow, okay. You know, there was one. And I can't actually remember the quote. Crikey, it was a Winston Churchill one I don't want to misquote him. And I actually read it yesterday. And it was just a reminder of something super important that my favourite quote that I almost put in every presentation that I start with them. And the reason I wasn't talking about such a leadership quote, because it's anonymous, and that is that the definition of madness is to keep doing what you're doing and expect a different result. It's the kernel of change, right? You have to do things differently if you want a different result. And people struggle at times to understand That simple philosophy.

Richard Medcalf
Yes, absolutely. Yes, I love that quote too. And one of the things I really focus in on in my own business is helping people actually, I call it habit mastery. Because, you know, you can read all the books and all the great ideas and all the things you can do in your business. But unless you as a leader, can actually implement new habits sustainably into your own life and help your team create new team habits. And then everything falls away, you know, you kind of have a berth and it falls away and you forget it. And then you can actually like learning the kind of components to implementing in front of increasing transformation, one habit at a time. I think it's really important because of what you said, it comes down to behaviours. And it comes down to specific behaviours and processes and habits. In very specific moments, often, I mean, my top leaders often it's like, it's not just a general thing, you know, like You know, take it back into the personal realm, you know, losing weight, it's pretty hard to do, but not eating chocolate at 4pm when I'm feeling snack ish becomes something which is quite manageable. If you focus in on it, you know, you can define behaviours and adopt them or raise them if you're very specific.

Alun Baker
Yes, and that's interesting too. So, one of my other key philosophies is always aim for the stars because if you land on the moon, you have a long way up, right? So you have to get people to break through glass ceilings, and sometimes Richard, you can give people this big vision and they love it, they get behind you. But you've then got to break it down into each incremental change you make rolls up into something huge. But if you only talk about, you know, next year, we will grow our business, hopefully, you know, 40% and we expect to but if you said that to something we get to grow by 40% next year, let's do it people look at you and go, Ah, but then when you break it down into what are those improvements look like? And how do each one of those roll up into 40% then everybody knows they roll in that piece of improvement that they own. So it is breaking it down into manageable pieces that make that effective large change.

Richard Medcalf
Yes, I mean, it's called I call it building the bridge, you know, you have people who are mentally live in the future and conceal that and you've been to people mentally live in the present. And it's quite hard for the two to meet up and you have to do that process instead of actually breaking down the vision into what are the steps we're going to take so that we can actually you know, and actually, normally the visionaries don't see all the issues and the people with all you can actually see all the practical things to resolve that necessarily. And naturally see where it could all lead them. So that's why teamwork is so valuable.

Alun Baker
Great comment. Now Richard, just spot on with that. And and by the way, it's also a recognition that people don't need to be the jack of all trades, you want specialists, you want the people with a great vision and you want the people with the pragmatic, operational delivery. And together they make great teams. Sometimes I think we beat ourselves up as both leaders and and sometimes we, we can hold people to many objectives underneath where look at what their skill set is, and make them focus on that you can improve their weaknesses, but don't expect them to become a master of something they're not. Be the master of what they really are good at and get them to improve that and then have other people with those skills to balance the like teams. I think that's so critical and people forget that.

Richard Medcalf
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. It's a multiplying factor of teamwork. Yes, absolutely. Not a you're not always easy. But again, you got to have this framework to understand how you're going to do it. If you're just kind of winging it, it becomes hard. So getting that language and that model in your head. How are we going to get these people to work well together is super important. Why, and thanks so much for taking the time. It's been really enjoyable as ever and fascinating. And thanks for peeling back the covers a little bit into Clario Tech and running this international business. And just some of your lessons from the last from, I guess, several decades of leadership expertise. Thank you.

Alun Baker
Richard, it's been a pleasure. And sometimes you don't get a chance to think about these things. So you really provoked some additional thinking in me. I appreciate it. Thank you. Perfect.

Richard Medcalf
Thanks.

Richard Medcalf

I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Now let's turn to you. If you're a top performer, who's already accomplished great things, and yet knows that there's a whole new level of impact and potential open to you, why don't we get on the phone and strategise on how to get you there. Head over to xquadrant.com/speak to find out more. Until next time, be bold and be purposeful.


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S13E37: “Impact investing is broken”, with Brett Simmons (CEO, Scale Link)

S13E36: Is your work interesting, or impactful? with Chintan Panchal (Founding Partner, RPCK Rastegar Panchal)

S13E36: Is your work interesting, or impactful? with Chintan Panchal (Founding Partner, RPCK Rastegar Panchal)
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