BUSINESS LESSONS

What have you learned about being a chief executive? First of all, the value of resilience and the second thing is to try and work with really good people — in particular try and hire people who are better at what they do than you are. When you do that, you learn faster. As you get older in your career, you learn a lot from people who are younger.

What advice would you have for people starting off in their career? Do the difficult jobs, because you learn a lot more from difficult and challenging jobs than you do from easy ones.

What is the biggest difference between running a business owned by a group and a stand-alone company? One of the big changes we’ve seen here is when you are no longer part of a big international group, the number of decisions you have to make goes through the roof. You then realise when you are part of a group, how many decisions are made for you.