All Points West

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 Welcome to the All Points West podcast. Today, we are taking a look at the role of the consultant with Jennifer Sundberg, who is one of the founders and co chief executive of Board Intelligence, the boardroom consultancy and technology firm that Jen and her co CEO Pippa Begg founded in 2009 to help transform boards and leadership teams into a more powerful driver of performance.

Board Intelligence supports more than 3, 000 organizations and 40, 000 directors globally, from Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 corporates to government departments and charities. Last year, Jen and Pippa co authored a book, Collective Intelligence, How to Build a Business That's Smarter Than You, which is, I believe, is a book of the month.

Thanks for joining me, Jen.

No problem. I read that the light bulb moment for you came back in 2008, sitting in the back of a room as a consultant, uh, watching a two, a successful FTSE 250 conduct its board meeting. Tell me about that moment. Why was it so influential?

Yeah, that's right. So, so the origins of board intelligence, we did not begin life as a tech company. We began life as a small team who were deeply interested in a problem and became experts in how to solve that problem. And we discovered tech along the way as a way of, uh, Doing more and better and more scalable to solve that problem.

And, uh, and that problem indeed came from an experience in the boardroom many, many moons ago. So around 2007, 2008, I was a consultant. I was sat in the back of the room at the boardroom of one of my clients board meetings. given the opportunity to sit and observe big FTSE 250 200 year old company, a real solid stalwart of the footsie and a high flyer at the time.

In fact, they were going great guns. They're going great guns, but they had some huge risks and some huge challenges coming over the brow of the hill and everyone could see it. And, uh, you can see that everyone knew that they'd been riding, as it happens, on the coattails of Nokia, who had grown great guns.

And these guys supplied bits and bobs to Nokia and, um, and had done very well through that. And, uh, and as anyone under the age of 30 may be asking, who are Nokia? That's kind of the point. So, you know, Nokia, the crest of the wave, it crashed and, uh, this firm's prospects with it. And, uh, and they could see it coming.

They could see this coming. This company had these big strategic challenges. They also had an outstanding board. This was a board of relevant and carefully selected individuals. There were no trophies on this board. Incredible brains, entrepreneurial spirit. The skill and the wheels do a really good job of tackling these big, hairy, strategic problems.

The makings of the ultimate board meeting, right? The board meeting, you want to be on the fly, fly on the wall at, and there I was in my, in my, uh, mid twenties. Uh. I'm really quite spoiled to be there, or so I thought. And um, and I had these high expectations and then, I suppose the big insight from this experience was how ineffective it was.

That over the course of three hours, they never got around to having any of the important conversations.

the reason was very clear. In front of each board director sat a big pile of paper called, as I was told, the board pack. And as the board meeting unfolded over 3 4 hours, they worked their way very studiously through this enormous deck of every imaginable cut of backward looking financial and operational data.

And the information drove the conversation, the problems that were coming at this company. They hadn't yet taken hold in the data. They hadn't yet come to pass and by allowing the conversation to be driven by this backward looking information, they never got around to talking about the big stuff that was coming.

That was forward looking. And it gave me the insight that it doesn't matter how good the people are on the board. They are necessary, but insufficient conditions for success, just as in sport, you need to have the best possible world class sportsman, the best possible world class Formula One racing driver, but you've also got to give them the best possible car for the job with all of the latest telemetry and, you know, information streams.

You've got to give your, your best champion jockey, the best horse for the job. You can't take high quality individuals and give them the Low quality tools and expect them to deliver world class results. And that's what was happening in this boardroom They were not given the the tools of the job They were not being given the quality of the information and the relevant information aligned to the conversations They needed to have that gave me the insight that there was something amiss.

Obviously, it was one anecdote. It was a single data point. I started having more conversations with With other clients and discover this was not an anomaly at all. This is quite common, but the information that flows into the boardroom is a function of habit and convention and the habit and convention as you package up all of the available backward looking information that you can find a hand, put a bow on it, caught the board deck off you go.

So I suppose that was the, like, well, thinking, hang on, there's something to be done here. Obviously, I didn't know exactly what or how, but I was motivated to find out. And that's when I met Pippa, and she had had her own experience of the boardroom at also a, probably an unusually young age, her experience being in the fund world.

She'd also experienced the sharp end of some pretty ropey governance and was, was motivated to see what could be done. So we teamed up. And that's we began. Yeah. So was

So what was Pippa doing?

So Pippa's career began in the treasury, but she then went to work for an asset management house and then, latterly, a hedge fund.

She just quit her job because she had seen, uh, the, the darker side of, I suppose, from the finance community and she didn't like what she saw and she voted with her feet. And, uh, she was looking to do something that would feel purposeful and something that would have an impact and something that would ideally tackle.

What she had seen, which is the, the, the risk of ineffective governance, the lack of checks and balances and the bad stuff that can flow from there. So it was a very timely meeting that, uh, that we both met having had very fresh experiences of something kind of similar.

So, um, you'd had that experience at the FTSE 250, what did you do then from that moment how did it change the way you operate?

So to begin with, we approached solving it like a consultant would. So, uh, we, uh, we put together a proposition to, to identify, you know, uh, for any organization, what their current state of their board reporting was, what the conversations they were trying to have were, how to then, you know, I suppose, get from A to B to align the information flows with the conversations they're trying to have rather than the information they currently have, and to put together ways and means of, of fixing that.

We actually, uh, so we approached it as consultants. We sold these consulting projects in to, uh, FTSE boards, got a lucky break in the very early days with EasyJet. We did what, uh, what, it must be at least a reasonably good job with them because their board then took us into the other boards of the companies they were also on the board of.

I suppose one of the, one of the nice features of this business model, any business that serves boards, is the multi boarded nature of an independent, non executive director. Means that if you can impress them, if you can do a good job for them, you have free marketeers helping to, uh, I suppose pollinate your work across all of the other boards that they, um, work with.

So we had a nice snowball effect in the early days, but we didn't really have two sticks to rub together and spend on marketing. Our clients did the marketing for us, and we, and we, approached a lot of our work by actually asking our clients, what are the questions that on your mind. So we'd ask the independent directors and the exec.

When you sit down to read a chief exec's report, when you approach this board meeting, when you sit down to read a proposal that's being put to the board, we'd ask them, well, what are the critical questions firing off in your mind? And over a number of years, we built up this bank of questions. And one of the things that surprised us.

Was how common the questions were on the minds of the directors of companies that would seem to have nothing in common from the outside. So we would be working with the board of a 1500 mining company and with the board of a regional hospital trust. And yet, when you ask the board director, what are the questions firing off in your mind, when you read your chief exec report, they'll say the same thing.

They'll say, I want to know what's keeping them up at night. I want to know what's the level of confidence in achieving our plans. What do we need to stop things, start doing, do differently, all of those questions. It transcends sector size and structure and so that's how we started to build up essentially a playbook and a set of know how that just got stronger and stronger with each consulting project that we did to the point where we were able to then eventually productize that, that know and eventually wrap it into some tech.

How long did it take before you started to, um, realize that that backward looking thing started to go away and that the boards that you were engaged with were beginning to be a bit more strategic and forward looking? Because I guess that was a process?

Well, actually I'd say it's kind of instantaneous. Once you shift the information. The conversation immediately changes, you feed your board with detail on the last quarter's financial operating performance and only that they will talk about that if you feed them with a really stimulating paper about the strategic choices and what's happening in the wider operating environment and the potential impact of those developments, they will latch on to and talk about that.

And I suppose the reason we don't market is because this is what they want. So this was not us. We were not preaching, you know, that this was that we were not preaching to boards that, uh, that they should be doing something other than what they wanted to be doing, which was to have more forward looking strategic conversations.

They just didn't have, it wasn't clear whose job it was, I suppose, in some ways to fix - fix this.

Yeah.

And of course you could say it was the chairman's job, but the chairman is to actually make the kind of change that we introduced. Somebody at the exec level has to affect that change. And chief exec's kind of busy.

It's one of those roles without a clear mandate or one of those tasks without anyone who owns that clear mandate, which is why often falls between the cracks and things don't change.

Yeah. Well, you obviously did something right because here you are now with a blue chip roster of clients, including about 25 percent of the FTSE 100 and with 150 members of staff, I believe. What is it that your clients keep? What is it that, um, keeps your clients coming back and not just coming back, but lots of stayed with you since day one?

So we're constantly evolving. I suppose now that we are more of a tech company, uh, with a lot of services wrapped around that, tech is constantly evolving. So, uh, our ability to have more and better impact is constantly evolving too. And, uh, that keeps it exciting for us. And it means we're constantly bringing out new things for our clients to add value.

So we provide them with services to support the, the pain free administration of their board paper gathering and distribution process. And, uh, on that side, there's a huge amount of investment in information security to make sure that that critical information for their organization stays secure and the work that we do to help management teams write shorter, better, more strategic, more forward looking We're deploying a lot more AI these days, as you might imagine, um, but not to automate away the work of the exec, not to, not to delegate the drafting of papers to an AI powered bot, but rather to provide management with an AI powered critique as they craft their board reports.

Pointing out the gaps and, uh, and the, the sort of, you know, where they may be missing critical, uh, considerations that they need to think more deeply about. I'm

That leads me on nicely. You mentioned that you're more of a tech firm now. So you've developed your own management reporting platform called, uh, Lucia. Tell me about that. What is it? How does it work?

Delighted to, yes, we have two products. We have a board portal product and we have a product called Lucia. So Lucia is your thinking and writing guide. So, uh, when you come to craft a Board or management paper, our clients log in to Lucia and it takes them through the thinking process as well as the drafting process to help every member of the management team write short, sharp, strategic briefings.

To power those conversations that you want off the back of it. So Lucia, think of it like a, uh, sort of the love child of the, uh, that squiggly red line that you get in Microsoft if you spelt something right. So the mashup of, of that combined with. Grammarly and Socrates all wrote up into one.

That gives you Lucia. Um, so Lucia is a software platform that implements a methodology that we've developed called the Question Driven Insight Principle, the QDI principle, which a lot of the book we've just written was all about. So, uh, so Lucia is a way of implementing at scale a thinking and writing methodology.

What's the reaction being like to that from the boards that you work with?

The boards love it. The boards love it because, um, it is a universal challenge to find signal through the noise these days, right? So, um, I mentioned that one board who had the mismatch of, you know, their information flow didn't match the conversation they needed to have. But as we started to get closer to that problem and understand more about the challenges in boardrooms, there were many other challenges besides simply the volume of information.

So for a lot of boards they are drowning in information and not the information that matters and, uh, so the very fact that, uh, clients use our services that at the large corporate end, they will. see their board papers shrink from maybe four, five, six hundred pages. I could do not, you know, more than half.

Just simply reducing the volume, it means they can make a fair stab at actually digesting it. And then the fact that the relevance is much higher and the clarity of each paper is much higher. I mean, I, I have read cover to cover FTSE board papers and, uh, having put the hours in to get through the six hundred pages, be none the wiser at the end of it as to whether this is booming or busting.

So, you know, the volume is a challenge, but the quality and the clarity of what's been written is awesome. So all of these problems that we solve are a gift to the board director and the exec director as well, because it's not, you know, these chief execs and CFOs and chief operating officers, they are also drowning under the weight of all of this information.

And themselves trying to digest not just the board deck, but the exec deck and all of the many committees there on the working groups there on and for them, the board deck is actually just the tip of the iceberg. And so, increasingly, we're supporting the exec with the greater challenge they have across that organization of, uh, getting better quality, more concise information flows.

Yeah, great stuff. As I mentioned in the introduction last year, you and Pippa wrote a book, Collective Intelligence, how to build a business that's smarter than you. How did that come about and why Collective Intelligence? Why not just replicate your company name and call it Board Intelligence?

Intelligence

A great question. We had the realization that even with the boards, with whom we had the most impact, even the clients of ours whose boards were operating at full pelt, having focused, productive conversations about the things that matter, and taking good decisions off the back of that, It isn't enough, right?

In this day and age, you know, it's in the era of the, it's not the big, they eat the small anymore. It's the fast, they eat the slow. If your organization requires all of the really important decisions to flow up to the boardroom, It's just not going to be able to move fast enough. And what we recognized was that many of our clients, even the ones with really effective boards, they were bottlenecked, tremendously bottlenecked.

They would have just too much on their board agenda. One of our clients once said to us, you know, I need a, I need a horizontal board agenda for all of my many number one board priorities, right? It's a, it's a pretty superhuman task being on the board of a large multinational and the solution at some point you realize it's not just to make that board work better, it's actually to get, it's actually to, to lessen the burden on the board in the first place and to push more of the decision making down through the organization.

The board can only do that when they have confidence in the capabilities of the organization to discharge those decisions well. I suppose it also was brought into shock because by a meeting we had with Sir John Timpson many years ago, he came into our office to pitch and John Timpson of the shoe and key repair fame.

And, um, we started our pitch and it'd been working pretty well for us. This pitch had gotten us into the boardrooms of the likes of City Bank, National Grid, EasyJet. So we're feeling pretty good about it. He let us get into about slide five before he held his hand up like he was trying to stop the oncoming traffic.

And he said to us, um, I don't need a better board. The important decisions in my business are not taken in our boardroom. They're taken as close to the shop floor as possible. And he introduced us to the principles of upside down governance, upside down management. Where every layer of management exists to support, empower, enable the level up.

And, uh, I suppose that he introduced us to that quite a few years ago, and it wasn't really until we had our own experiences, I suppose, of seeing from first hand, just how challenging it is to try to try to drive the business from the boardroom. Just how flawed and model that is. Uh, the stars line, actually, this is where we want to take what we've learned from working in the furnace of some of the world's largest, most successful businesses, but take that know how and share it and cascade it down so that at every level of the organization, you have the skills, the processes and the confidence to use your brains, use them well.

And build the confidence of the board to then delegate more authority down. And that is why it's very long winded answer. That is why it's called collective intelligence and not board intelligence.

Yeah. Yeah. Timpsons are an interesting business and sometimes the best ideas are just the most obvious ones, aren't they?

Yeah. And they don't always come from the board of people at the top, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So you've had lots of experience of working with good boards and probably some bad boards as well. What, what is it that makes a good board? Are there any secrets? Yeah.

Oh, lots. So, um, well, so very simply, we always boil it down to, you do of course need the right people on the board. You need people with the right skills, the right experience, the right diversity of thought, all that good stuff. You need the right information flows. Because, you know, a great board director without great information is blindfolded, right?

And they're not there because they're clairvoyants. They're there because when you supply them with the right information, they can apply good judgment to it, but they need the information. And the third thing, uh, is governance infrastructure. So the individual's information in the infrastructure, and the infrastructure for us is around everything from the cadence with which they meet, the quality of the agenda and the relevance of the agenda, uh, the, uh, environment that they meet in and the quality of the chair.

So all of the surrounding environmental factors as well. Now our expertise is, is somewhat limited to that piece in the middle, the information piece, but you need to get all three humming for an

Thanks for that, Jen, as well as running board intelligence from 2011 until quite recently, you were a member of the advisory board at Thinker International, a nonprofit that aims to alleviate poverty worldwide. And you've been a committee member of the German Street Association since 2006.

You're also a former monthly columnist at Management Today. You've got a master's degree in Classics and Management Studies from University. Now, I want to understand where the sort of drive and motivation comes from. So, um, if you don't mind, I'm just going to delve into your background a little bit.

Where did you grow up and what was that like?

Also, I feel horribly embarrassed that my LinkedIn is a bit out of date and I, I still support Finca, but I'm not on their advisory board. And although you did mention that and the German street associations similarly, I haven't been on their board for a while. I do need to update LinkedIn. Um, but, uh, me and my, my background.

I've had an incredibly privileged background in pretty much every respect. So hugely supportive family, my mother was always, uh, fiercely determined that I would have the career that she did not have. Um, it wasn't, uh, it wasn't expected of her that that would be an option.

It wasn't a path that was ever, you know, Proposed. And so she felt, yeah, it mattered to her enormously that I would have that option to

take.

what did mum and dad do?

so my father was in management in the pharmaceutical sector. My mother worked as a volunteer for lots of charities, um, but didn't have her own income. And, uh, and I think she felt the, the lack of agency in that, um, situation.

My father being a chartered accountant, when I decided to set up a business, I remember calling my dad and saying, what do I do? And he said, well, there's this thing called companies house. And he explained that returns and I've always thought how lucky I was, because I didn't even know the questions I needed to ask, and I've often reflected on people who have gone on to set up their own businesses, who, who didn't have a father who was a chartered accountant, you know, just, or someone in the vicinity who could, tell them what they need to, you know, what questions need to be asked or where to go to find the answers to them.

So, um, every step, I think I've been pretty, pretty spoiled there. My parents were completely broke my whole childhood because they spent every penny they had and more on sending my brother and me to private school. It was a big struggle for them, uh, but, uh, they were determined to do that.

And, um, I benefited hugely from that. I went to a, a, uh, girl's school that drummed into me, uh, or inducted, uh, brainwashed me nicely into this idea that, you know, anything men can do, we can do better. A strong sense of, um, fight to go suck it to the world and show them. Um, which I think was also very cool.

Something of a gift to have that um,

that

sense

was this? What, what, where was this? What school, what school was it?

So I went to a school in Brighton called Rodean,

All girls boarding school. I was pretty happy there. It was probably one of the few schools where I'm not very sporty, and it was so cold outside, right on a cliff edge that you had to be pretty mad to want to do team sports, and so I probably benefited from not being the odd one out, wanting to stay indoors, um, and, uh, yeah, sparing myself the embarrassment of being pretty rubbish on the hockey pitch.

I was very lucky. I had a good group of friends, still in close contact today. But, um, I'd say it was a school that was very, um, ambitious for us all. Very strong focus on STEM subjects and, you know, the traditionally, traditional preserve of, of, you know, sort of men and boys.

Think that it gave me a lot of fire in my belly to go and, uh, and take on the world. I think, um, I was very lucky also that I graduated just at the time that the starting gun had been fired to really accelerate the prospects of women in business.

Yeah.

So you, uh, just to stick with Rhodene for a bit, did you, um, so did you grow up in Brighton?

No, I grew up about an hour, hour and a half away. Um, so yeah, so I boarded there. I went to boarding prep school as well. I didn't, didn't enjoy my prep school, but I didn't enjoy my secondary school as well. Yeah,

you were pretty academic then at school. What subjects did you gravitate towards?

so I was a workaholic. Um, I didn't have any of the characteristics that I grew up associating with entrepreneurs. And I've never really used that term for myself either because it's never felt natural, but it gets used, it gets applied to me from time to time. Um, but I was never into, uh, I was a pretty obedient pupil.

I would spend my weekends working hard on my homework and studying really hard, uh, probably a little bit over anxious, um, about exams. I studied, Maths and French and Latin and Greek, um, at A level. I was fascinated by ancient civilizations, and I'm always looking for every opportunity to find relevance from that to, um, the work that I do today. Um, and that's not hard. You can generally do that without - without breaking much of a sweat.

Right.

And then university where, what did that lead you on to then? I know you've got your master's from Cambridge, but did you do your undergrad at Cambridge as well?

I did. So I read classics initially, and then I transitioned across to management studies at the end. And, uh, both of them, yeah, both of them were good fun. Um, like,

sort of, polar ends

spectrum.

Um, so, yeah, uh, what was it like? Uh, it took me probably a couple of years to, Relax and stop feeling anxious.

I wasn't going to cut it. And then, um, in my final year, just had a blast actually. So management studies was, um, a new faculty at the time in business school and the business school was still quite new back then. I think the business school had a lot to prove. So whereas the classics faculty had existed donkey years, it probably since the pretty much the origins of Cambridge.

The judge management business school, um, was new and, uh, new things in Cambridge, as you can imagine, people are a bit sniffy about, and especially a subject with the word studies on the end, you know, so, um, but consequently, they tried so much harder. And, uh, I guess it gave me the experience that, um, a you know, that old Avis ad, you know, we, we're the number two, so we try harder.

It was a, you know, felt like I was living that the business school, uh, you know, they would, they would prep a curriculum. They would prep PowerPoint slides. There was a plan for what you're going to learn that year. Classics faculty didn't need to prove itself and so I think consequently I had a better experience in the end of the judge. I was grateful for that.

What did you do after university? Did you decide to go and travel or did you go straight to work?

So I went straight to work, except that I graduated in 2001, fortunately with a grad job with a strategy consulting firm. But, just before the job was due to begin, October 2001, obviously September happened, and, September 11th And I had a phone call about a week before my job was due to begin telling me, not to come and to wait until January of that year because the work had dried up and they didn't want a big influx of all these grads looking for things to do when there wasn't anything to do.

So I found myself with three months and a loose end and rent to pay. I just secured myself a flat and I, I couldn't bear the thought of having to call my parents and ask for help on, you know, month one. So I was determined find some work, but in the weeks after September 11th, there wasn't any work. I printed out my CV, uh, looking for some temping work, handed out around all the, Companies around where my flat was and I got this insanely lucky break.

So, the chief exec of a print media company must have just been out for lunch and just come back to the office and the receptionist that I had just given my cv to and where i'd scrawled on the top willing to do anything underlined, and I was looking for receptionist or a secretarial gig She, um, sorry, she handed it to the chief exec as he walked back in from lunch.

He looked at it, and he saw that I'd just graduated from the Cambridge University Business School. And, uh, that piqued his interest, and he called me. He invited me in to discuss a problem he had with one of his business units, that he wanted somebody to help him external world to take a look at, and, uh, I was kind of astonished because, well, first of all, I had no such qualification for doing this.

And, um, uh, that wasn't what I was looking for. It wasn't the kind of work I was expecting. It was a ton more interesting than I was expecting. I explained that I was, I just had this gap before starting my proper grad job in Jan and he gave me this amazing project to do for three months. I suppose changed the course of my life because it was through that experience of working for that company, a company I think still exists, it's called Tapestry, print media company. That I suppose, got a taste of what it was like to run your own show and I really enjoyed it. Perhaps it ruined me, because when I then went and joined my grad job, it didn't live up to those expectations that

I'd, that I'd had.

what was the grad job?

The grad job was working for a, um, firm called Roland Berger, German strategy consulting firm, and, um, largely spent printing and binding and putting data into Excel spreadsheets, which I wouldn't have minded, but it wasn't much of a fun atmosphere. And I think in the aftermath of September 11th, there was a lot of anxiety around, uh, people losing everything.

In fact, it wasn't just September 11th. It was the dot com bubble bursting and September 11th. So I think a lot of people feared for jobs that created a fairly somber working atmosphere and, um, and, and the work was yeah, quite boring as it often is at the bottom. But as I say, I, can live with boring if the environment is fun, but it wasn't.

I guess on top of that, you'd already had this three month experience of sort of being a, you know, a taster of what it might be like to be a business consultant.

exactly. And it also meant I had an off ramp because I was able to call up that chief exec and said to him, if I quit my job, any chance of another project? And he said, yeah, I've got three more divisions needing the same analysis doing come along. So I, I gave me the ability to hand my notice in, and go off and set up my own show, and I couldn't have done it otherwise.

So,

uh, it shows you can't really handle these things, you know.

Yeah. Well, sometimes everyone just needs a bit of luck. Don't they? Absolutely.

yeah, I mean, life is full of these sliding door moments, isn't it? Where you think, gosh what if,

Jen, we were chatting before the interview and you your husband, as well as having demanding careers, have two young daughters. How do you manage to juggle the demands of being a busy working parent?

Sure. So, um, I love being a mother. Um, and, uh, I love being a mother. spending time with my children. So there are, yeah, lots of, lots of challenges, logistical challenges. Um, so one of the reasons I am co chief exec with Pippa Begg, we share the role. It's been a real gift with maternity leave. Each time one of us gets pregnant, we hand the baton to the other and vice versa.

She has three children under the age of eight. Um, I have two. Uh, so yeah, running the business together has, has been big part of that. I'm also very fortunate in having a Swedish husband and they are particularly enlightened. So, I like to think that Sweden is just us in 20 years time and that we'll catch up hopefully.

But uh, in Sweden the, the, the, the It is a parenting challenge not a, not a mother challenge, or mothering challenge. So, um, and he, he guards that fiercely. So he, he loves his time with the children and, um, you know, wouldn't, wouldn't want me to elbow him out of that. And that's meant that between the two of us, we've been able to make it work.

He's, uh, got a s Octane career. So he started his career at Goldman Sachs where he was a commodities trader, then moved into hedge funds and other finance roles, all sorts. He continues to do some of that. He also works a little bit in port intelligence these days as well. Software engineer. So he, he's extremely flexible and really values that, um, flexibility for being able to pursue stimulating career. But also spend time with the children. So, sorry, it's a funny answer. So I suppose my, my answer is how do I do it? I think I married extremely well, an incredibly supportive husband. I have a business partner who I guess is in, we're in lockstep with each other in terms of the flexibility that we each require and we work every hour that God sends and we don't do anything else really.

Yeah. Thanks for that. I'm sure a lot of that will resonate with plenty of other people who, uh, who listened to the podcast. One final question. When you're not advising captains of industry and finance, how to sort out their latest issues? How do you like to relax? Do you have any hobbies?

Well, that is such a good question because my answer is a bit Painfully dull one. I have no hobbies and I was chatting to one of our former clients. He's a He was chairman of TPI cap and chairman of son guy called that Rupert Robson who's written a fabulous book called the sentient robot and he is a great thinker on AI and has been before it was fashionable. He's been studying AI and its potential for the last decade and he said to me, he's just retired, and he said, uh, you know, he said, I feel like I'm living out my own experiment for what happens if slash when we end up with, you know, AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and the work for us mere mortals diminishes.

What are we going to do with ourselves? We all know that the Devil makes work for idle hands, right? We've not evolved over millennia to do nothing. So, what's the world going to look like? And are we just going to descend into bitter war and troublemaking? And he said, you know, being a newly retired, um, former captain of industry, he said he was having to develop hobbies.

And he said, he thinks hobbies will be the savior of mankind and we need to develop hobbies if we're going to find ways to occupy ourselves in this, perhaps very different future that we may occupy in a few decades time. So I need to get some hobbies. I currently have, I suppose my hobbies are hanging out with my kids, um, and I love that.

But, um, but in the truest sense of the word, I, uh, I, yeah, I am in need of hobbies. I'm in the market for some. Uh, maybe in years time, the window might open up.

What about travel? Given your passion for language that you studied at a level, um, does that Not occupy some of your time.

So right now, travel is, um, Highly problematic. So, uh, given that I, the business itself uses obviously pretty much every waking minute and every waking minute. It doesn't consume. I try to spend with the children. So travel, would make that a lot harder. I try not to travel too much with work.

It happens me, Pippa and I are in the US a fair bit these days. We certainly don't. Yeah and actually internationalization of the business is a, is going to be a key part of the next stage of our journey.

Right.

Quite how we want it is still to be figured out. But no, I travel very little.

Okay. Well, Jennifer Sundberg of Board Intelligence, thanks for joining me on the All Points West podcast and good luck with it all.

Thank you for having me.