Stress in the Spotlight

Managing and Coping with Stress in the Workplace

B. Claridge, C. Cooper

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137292346
• eBook ISBN: 9781137292353
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Based upon interviews with individuals in high pressure positions, from business leaders to abomb disposal expert, this book provides practical insight about how to identify, tackle and overcome any kind of stress.

chapter 1

Kevin Roberts – CEO Worldwide, Saatchi & Saatchi

Kevin Roberts is the New York-based CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the world’s leading creative organizations, with over 6000 people and 130 offices in 70 countries.

Born and educated in Lancaster in the north of England, Kevin started his career in the late 1960s with iconic London fashion house Mary Quant. He became a senior marketing executive for Gillette and Procter & Gamble in Europe and the Middle East. At 32 he became CEO of Pepsi-Cola Middle East, and later Pepsi’s CEO in Canada. In 1989, Kevin moved with his family to Auckland, New Zealand, to become Chief Operating Officer with Lion Nathan. He took up his position as CEO Worldwide with Saatchi & Saatchi in 1997.

Kevin is Honorary Professor of Creative Leadership at Lancaster University and Honorary Professor of Innovation and Creativity at the University of Auckland Business School. He is the author or co-author of Peak Performance and Lovemarks and further books on the power of emotion and the screen age. Lovemarks was named one of the ten Ideas of the Decade by Advertising Age in 2009.

In 2013 Kevin, a New Zealand citizen, was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to business and the community. A former director of the New Zealand Rugby Union, he is the current Chairman of the Board of USA Rugby, a Director of New Zealand Telecom, and business ambassador for the New Zealand United States Council.

About Kevin

“I am the CEO Worldwide for global advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi. I like ideas and inspiration and hate the word ‘but’. I am the originator of Lovemark thinking, the methodology that differentiates Saatchi & Saatchi from all our competitors.

I was born in a council house in Bowerham, Lancaster. My parents were working class, with very little education. My father was a security guard in a mental hospital (not unlike my current job in many ways!), and my mother managed a small shop selling greeting cards. I went to the local primary school. As a young child, I was left with my grandma every day while my parents were at work. My grandma cleaned people’s houses and we developed a terrific relationship which I sustained through my teens until she died.

My father loved sport and encouraged me to play soccer and cricket. He had left school at 14 and was part of a large family of seven brothers and sisters. My mother had one other sister who had successfully passed the 11+ and gone to Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School. My Auntie Enyd was my supporter, mentor, and great believer in the power of education as the foundation for progress.

My parents were rather negative and socialists. As far as they were concerned, my brother, sister, and I were all destined to continue in the working class, to leave school early, to get a job, and to not leave the environment from which we came. We were pretty strapped growing up, with very little money for luxuries. My parents both smoked heavily, which is where a lot of the disposable money went. I have often told people that I have been poor and I have been rich, and being rich is better. I found little nobility in poverty as I felt that influence and impact were limited by those with more money, power, and clout than us.

There is no question that as a 14-year-old my greatest motivator was the Animals song, ‘“We gotta get out of this place – if it’s the last thing we ever do.” I was lucky enough to pass the 11+ and go to Lancaster Royal Grammar School, which motivated me immensely. I was a high achiever in rugby, athletics, and cricket, and was also in the Alpha stream academically. I was surrounded by ambitious, bright, hard-working kids who inspired me to do the same. I was lucky enough to be made captain of many of the teams I played for and this gave me the responsibility on which I’ve thrived.

I had started captaining the football and cricket teams at Bowerham when I was 9 or 10 and have enjoyed leadership roles ever since. The most significant thing that has ever occurred to me was being expelled from LRGS as a Sixth Former, having been asked by the school to captain the First XI the next year and likely captaining the First XV too.

My first girlfriend, Barbara Beckett, became pregnant largely because no one had told me anything about birth control, either at home or at school. It happened the second time we did it! The headmaster of LRGS took a dim view of this and said I could not stay at school and have the baby. I was very much in love with Barbara and with my working class background we did not desert girls in need. So instead of a university career and who knows what ahead of me, overnight I was married with a baby, no money, no savings, no prospects – and no clue as to what I would do. The biggest business in town was Storeys of Lancaster and I rocked up there as a 17-year-old with a good working knowledge of French and Spanish (which was something of a rarity in Lancaster in those days). I was put to work immediately in the export operation, where my linguistic skills compensated for my lack of experience, and my cricket skills were much in demand by the office manager, Tommy Blacow, who was part of the hiring process. He took me down to his cricket team, Heysham, to play. So I landed (accidentally) in Sales and Marketing, which I loved from the start and never left.”

What makes a successful business person?

“To reach the top you must be a radical optimist who is purpose driven. I believe that the role of business is to make the world a better place for everyone, which allows me to be a passionate advocate for business itself. Inspirational leadership is critical. By that I mean that today’s leaders are not the command and control type, nor indeed servant leaders. Instead they focus on inspiring everyone they touch to be the best they can be in pursuit of the company’s dream. Successful leaders today are ideas driven and know how to create a culture where ideas flourish.

At the heart of business success is the ability to eradicate guilt, regret, and fear and replace these powerful emotions with ambition, belief, and passion. Leaders today must embrace Vince Lombardi’s maxim, ‘Winning isn’t everything but wanting to win is,’ because business is, and will ever remain, a blood sport.

Tom Peters got it right: fail fast, learn fast, fix fast. With the emphasis on the latter two, and on the fast. Setbacks are a way of life in business and happen on a daily basis. The New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, fear failure more than they revere success and this fear of failure keeps them focused. I make 30 decisions a day and ten of them are wrong. The trick is to follow the Tom Peters’ maxim, to spend very little time navel gazing and to focus on the killer app, which is execution. Success does not come from getting things done, it comes from making things happen. The best way to bounce back from a problem is to make something happen quickly.

The best business investment I made was in Saatchi & Saatchi stock, which was at £1.13 per share when I joined the company. Two years later, when I sold the company to Publicis, we secured a price of £5 per share. My worst business investment is yet to come.

Decision-making is based on information and knowledge primarily. From there you add insight (or rather revelations) and foresight. A combination of these four reduces risk, but fundamentally the ideas business is a very risky environment because an idea is only an idea once, which means it has never been seen before and it isn’t possible to fully mitigate this kind of risk.

I believe in making the big decisions with the heart, and the little ones with my head. At my age, there is very little that could happen to me that hasn’t already happened in a business sense, so I rely on my experience, judgment, and intuition. Interrogating the data usually results in everyone coming up with the same answers. Winning comes from finding an answer that no one else has thought of.

My biggest company successes include:

Pepsi-Cola going past Coca-Cola in Canada.

Lion Nathan becoming the largest brewer in Australia.

Saatchi & Saatchi becoming Agency of the Year globally a few years back.

I’m not careful and I have no concept of overspending. I avoid care and moderation whenever possible. Nothing succeeds like excess and in many cases I go into projects with a ‘sky’s the limit’ budget and still manage to overspend. People inevitably forget how much it costs or how long it took when they see how beautiful it is and how effective it is. Risk limitation and minimization as a going-in position is a very limiting mindset.

I never patent and protect my business ideas. Lovemarks, which is one of the bigger marketing ideas, was never patented. My board told me to and I disagreed and refused. I told them ideas were open source and it was a question of ‘use them or lose them.’

Partnerships are important but leadership is more important. Leaders are the deciders (George Bush got a lot of things wrong but he was right on this). Shimon Peres told me that leadership is a very lonely place and that leaders must have the courage to be afraid.

So whilst companies operate more effectively with collaboration and partnership, leaders inevitably face many moments of loneliness, which they must welcome. As the Cadillac ad said in the early 1900s, this is the penalty of leadership.

Growth is the name of the game. For inclusive capitalism to work, it must deliver growth. It must deliver jobs, opportunities, and ways for individuals to develop higher self-esteem. Most people do this through achievement and winning. Mankind is fundamentally competitive and wants to improve.

Timing, frankly, is what you make it and is driven by pure, stupid luck, or serendipity. My only thought on this is to suck it and see. Get lots of little ideas out there fast all the time. In today’s world, circumstances and consumers change so quickly that planning and predicting is self-indulgent. Get it out there, test it, and see what happens.”

How do you deal with stress?

“I prioritize everything daily and as part of that prioritization I keep 50% of my time every day free to deal with the unexpected. Inevitably, it is the unexpected that becomes the game-breaker. Filling one’s days with the business of doing business is a futile and unrewarding exercise. In a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world, it’s impossible to predict what’s coming at you. The trick is to ensure you have the mental energy, the heart, and the time to deal with the unexpected. It is the important that matters, not the urgent.

As Woody Allen said, ‘Relationships are like sharks, once they stop moving they die.’ The same thing applies to business. Toyota taught me this. There is always a better way and I’m keen to try it and find it. I spend little time assessing and deciding. I put my focus on executing and refining.

If I can’t resolve a problem, I head for the spaces where I’m most creative, such as my house in Grasmere, and I think about something completely different. My reptilian brain kicks in, my intuition is free to operate, and 12 hours later a new approach always presents itself. I never share the problem with anyone else and I don’t solve problems in groups or by talking about them.

I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with President Shimon Peres in Tel Aviv talking about leadership last year. One of the things he told me was ‘What is controversial today is inevitably popular tomorrow.’ Negative reaction to my ideas, therefore, is like water off a duck’s back.

I was once told that to run Saatchi & Saatchi effectively you need to every morning ‘strap on a waterproof back and a bulletproof vest.’ I do, every day.

I never switch off from work mode, because I don’t have a work mode. I have only one mode, which is to be the best I can be in everything I do. I’m a believer in the Oprah Winfrey quote ‘Live your best life every day.’ So for me work/life balance is a crock. Balance is to be avoided at all costs. I believe in work/life integration. I want to be the best at business, sport, friendship, parenting, family as I can be. And I want to be happy in every moment I have. You are responsible for your own happiness and my happiness comes from doing things I love and inspiring people I touch.

Technology today has liberated us so I can be just as effective away from the office as I can be in the office. And I make maximum use of this.

I subscribe to the view that ‘Living well is the best revenge,’ and having been born poor I really appreciate the finer things of life. I have, however, rarely been in debt. I am determined that no one will ever take me back to where I came and, therefore, didn’t buy my first house until I was 39. I bought it for cash. I now own a bunch of properties that I live in different parts of the world, all of which I paid for in cash. I collect art, again, all of which I pay for in cash. I don’t trade or sell art. I buy it to keep and give away to my family and friends. I never, ever gamble. Life is too tough to throw money away. I’ve always backed myself to earn more than I spend. And so far I’m just about ahead (if only fractionally!).

Stress is something you have to actively recognize and work on. I’ve always been behind the ‘8’ ball, having no tertiary education and no network to rely on so, frankly, working harder has always been my killer app. I’ve been determined to enjoy a life well lived, which also brings its own share of stress. In my experience, you have to recognize this and first know thyself. Figure out what stresses you out and either eliminate it from your life, or reduce it massively, and replace it with things you enjoy, which minimize the stress. This needs to be very specific. Stress, worry, regret, pain, and guilt are all emotions that must be managed, reduced, or eliminated and replaced with positive behavior.

Focus, commitment and discipline are at the hear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Kevin Roberts – CEO Worldwide, Saatchi & Saatchi
• 2 Dame Mary Perkins DBE – Co-Founder and Senior Executive, Specsavers
• 3 Major Chris Hunter QGM – Former Bomb Disposal Expert, Author, and Broadcaster
• 4 Nikki King OBE – CEO, Isuzu Truck (UK) Ltd
• 5 Frederick Forsyth CBE – International Bestselling Author, Journalist, and Political Commentator
• 6 Dr. David Dunaway – Surgeon, Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, London
• 7 Gian Fulgoni – Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, comScore, Inc.
• 8 Debra A. Pruent – Chief Operating Officer, GfK Consumer Experiences
• 9 Gale D. Metzger – Former Co-Founder and President, Statistical Research Inc. (SRI)
• 10 Jack Kraft – Former Vice-Chairman and COO, Leo Burnett Advertising Agency
• 11 Joan Chow – Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, ConAgra Foods
• 12 Mark Conroy – Former President, Regent Seven Seas Cruises
• 13 Ann Widdecombe DSG – Former British Conservative Party Politician and Author
• 14 Robert Barocci – President and CEO, Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), New York
• 15 Ken Hom OBE – International Celebrity Chef, TV Presenter, and Author
• 16 Sir Chris Bonington CVO, CBE, DL – World-Famous Mountaineer, Explorer, and Writer
• 17 Angela Knight CBE – Chief Executive, Energy UK
• 18 Shelley Zalis – CEO, Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange
• 19 Jeff Banks CBE – International Fashion Designer
• 20 Nigel Sillitoe – CEO, Insight Discovery, Dubai
• 21 Sally Gunnell OBE – Former British Olympic Champion
• 22 Ann Pickering – Human Resources Director, Telefónica UK
• 23 Lord Karan Bilimoria CBE, DL – Co-Founder and Chairman, Cobra Beer
• Conclusion
• Index