Becoming the Chair (III): getting the role, developing through self-assessment and operating in complex stakeholder environments, with Andrew Tyler (Portfolio Board Chair)

🎙️ You can listen to the full podcast interview with Andrew on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Andrew is Chair of a series of investor-backed businesses, including Ainscough Crane Hire, Winoa Group, Joloda, Detertech, ETL Systems, Hydraroll and Senior Advisor at Blackstone Credit. Tune in to his discussion with Nurole CEO Oliver Cummings to hear his answers to: 

• What inspired you to move from CEO to Chair, and how did you prepare for it? (1:43) How have you identified and got the most from mentors? (4:23)
• What prompted you to do a self-assessment as a Chair? (11:31)
• What lessons have you applied from the self-assessment? (16:52)
• How do you navigate complex stakeholder dynamics as a Chair? (18:58)
• What have you learned about managing private equity investors? (26:13)  And
• ⚡The Lightning Round ⚡(31:38)

*This is an AI-generated transcript and will contain inaccuracies*

[00:00:00] Oliver Cummings: Hello and welcome to another episode of enter the boardroom with new role, the business podcast that brings the boardroom to you. I'm your host, Oliver Cummings, CEO of new role, the board search specialist and market leader, bringing science to the art of board hiring.

I wanted to take a moment before we start to say thank you. For all the support and positive feedback on the podcast, one recent comment from at yo via Gill stood out, which highlighted finding a mentor in Enter the Boardroom.

If anyone listening is interested in finding a traditional in-person, mentor, do consider joining the neural board community, which you can find@community.new.com.

For just 29 a month, we have created a space where you can get matched with a mentor, as well as learn, grow your board network, and tap into the hive mind of over 60, 000 board members in real time.

Today's guest. Andrew Tyler is chair of Ainscoe crane hire the UK's largest mobile crane service [00:01:00] provider. We know a group, a metal abrasive specialist. Detertech, provider of intelligence led security solutions, ETL systems, manufacturer of satellite RS systems, Geloda, Hydroroll, intralogistic loading systems manufacturer, senior advisor at Blackstone Credit, and founding partner at Ancient Horse Limited, a board consultancy and advisory services business.

He was formerly chair of Kite Power Solutions and Sealand Support Services. Ned at Datasight and president of the Institute of Marine Engineering Science and Technology. He has taken on all these positions within the last six years, having left his last CEO in 2019, Andrew, a huge welcome and thanks so much for joining us today. 

Andrew Tyler: it's an absolute pleasure, Ollie 

Oliver Cummings: Andrew, you've clearly had an amazing journey and successfully managed to transition. From CEO to chair, which is a path that I think will be of interest to many of our listeners. Can you just tell me a little bit about that [00:02:00] transition? What inspired you and how you went about preparing for it? 

Andrew Tyler: I think the inspiration probably came from my long time career mentor Paul Lester, who's been in, who's been a chairman for, must be the thick end of 15 years now. He has the misfortune of having had me twice as his CEO. And Paul always said to me that the best job in business was the non executive chairman.

And he was an outstanding, is an outstanding chairman. So I was always very inspired and used to joke to him that my ambition was to be a mini Paul Lester when I grew up. So it was always there in my head that that's how I wanted the final chapter of my career.

But then A bit of luck and timing. I finished my last executive role in December 2019. And I think actually another one of your podcast interviewees had also found herself finishing her exec career at the end of 2019. So maybe it was a vintage moment, but we all then catapulted into COVID.

And I was [00:03:00] relatively young early fifties and thought one big. CEO role to go a good five years of chunky CEO role suited very nicely and then I'll set up for my non exec career as it were. But obviously during COVID the whole recruitment market went very flat for a few months, understandably.

And just before we all got locked down, I got an approach from Colleague of a colleague to come and just do a bit of advisory work on, on Amesco Crane Hire, which was having a tough time of it. 

It had just been taken over by its bank, which was Blackstone Credit. And they just wanted to get an idea from somebody who sort of understood the construction infrastructure and rental sector as to why things might've gone wrong.

So I went in as an advisor in the first instance. But quite quickly I got asked by Blackstone Credit whether I would consider them more substantial. role with them because they had some other in this case, distressed assets that they were very interested in having somebody like me come in [00:04:00] and then potentially share.

And I resisted it for a while. And then, as these funny things happen, I was on a dog walk one day with my, my wife who kept on, she was curious about this one. She kept coming back to it saying, why is this one so interesting? You know, it's really interesting. You should look at this one.

And eventually I thought, well, actually, you know, if this is where I want to end up. Then why wait five years? Why not grasp it now. 

Oliver Cummings: That's certainly a pattern I've seen repeating where people who do do that advisory work and often it'll be unpaid. They're just doing it to help out of interest. And then often that turns into something more. 

The other pattern that I've spotted that you've referenced there is the role of the mental and the people who are most successful with building their portfolio careers often seem to have a mental.

We've recently launched as part of our community. I find a mentor service that we're experimenting with because we can see the power of it. But I'm really interested to hear how your [00:05:00] understanding of that relationship.

Andrew Tyler: I am a huge fan, mentorship if that's the right term. Again, I got very lucky at the beginning with an individual called Sir John Parker who at the time was both the chairman of national grid and the chairman of Anglo American, so two FTSE 100 companies. And he had a very strong maritime background.

And at the time I was operating a lot in the maritime world. And fate threw us together. And I don't even know to this day quite why, but he clearly took a shine to me. And he adopted me without me asking. But if I'd had my time again, I definitely would have asked.

And it was a very light touch mentorship. I would basically pop in to see him probably every six months, try not to bother him too much because he was the chairman of two FTSE 100 companies. They didn't need me turning up in his office too often. And he was always incredibly thoughtful and he, in a half hour meeting, I would come out absolutely buzzing with some of the advice and guidance that he'd given me and if I then [00:06:00] had a particular career situation, I would text him or email him saying, Hey John, is there any chance you could just have 10 minutes?

Because you know, such and such has come up and I really would just love to get your view on it. So he was amazing. Now, so John is more or less retired now, but some years ago he informally gave the baton to Paul Lester, who was my career mentor, then followed. By taking me on again as a CEO for one of the companies he chaired, and then subsequently has continued as a very, very close friend and mentor.

And in my very early days in the chair role he would be the person I would ring up with queries. That were everything from how should I handle this situation to how does this aspect of remuneration work. For example, in the private markets the way that the compensation operates with a fee based aspect to them, this sort of all important management, incentive plan.

And Paul would give me advice on, well this is how this is supposed to work and these sort of expectations you should [00:07:00] have and so on. So he was just. Extraordinarily useful.

Oliver Cummings: You like a lot of people who've been very successful attribute a large part of it to luck, but I'm always skeptical when I hear that. You were taking the proactive steps in calling. Those mentors every six months yourself. I could imagine some people listening to this thinking I would never dare call someone like that. They just haven't got time for me. But was it you that took that proactive step and where there are other things that you can think of on reflection that actually you do that catalyze that relationship.

Andrew Tyler: I suppose there's a little bit of my character there, but I will say great leaders, they recognize helping others in their careers to walk in their footsteps is something that's, first of all, extremely important. But secondly, their way of very genuinely giving back to a great business career that they themselves have had.

And. I would be very surprised if you find many great leaders in [00:08:00] business who will not point to a small handful of individuals who sometimes for no obvious reason have been there for them. So yes, you've got to be respectful and you don't want to go around to sort of making a nuisance of yourself.

But I think that most of us can probably think of people who we've got huge respect for who are more senior and experienced to us and who we would love to have a little bit of personal help and support from. And as I said, I think in a lot of cases, a quiet word, respectfully put, and you'd be very surprised, how many people would say, Yes, do you know what? I will absolutely be prepared to help you

To your opening point, I think it was Gary Player who said the more I practice, the luckier I get. I think networking, is one of the really, really crucial things when you are looking in particular to build a portfolio career, a non executive career.

And I've always loved networking. I love people. I love being with [00:09:00] people. I like meeting new people. So I guess I naturally gravitate towards networking. I was also very wisely told by Leo Quinn, the current CEO of Balfour Beatty, who again was somebody else, I should say, who helped me a lot of key points in my career.

Including helped me rewrite my CV once. And Leo. One said to me, he said, look, you have to kiss a lot of frogs. And what he meant by that is when you're looking for new roles, looking to develop your career, you'll meet 20 people, and one of them will turn out to be extraordinarily useful to you probably about three years later, but you have absolutely no idea which of those 20 it might be.

And this is the advice I always give to people when they are looking to particularly. They've reached a point of inflection in their career and they're looking to go into an unknown space for them is just go and meet an awful lot of people, drink an awful lot of coffee.

10 minutes with somebody. most people. I will be good enough to give you 10 minutes and actually [00:10:00] 10 minutes is often what it takes. So just go and spend time. And I have been almost military about the way I've gone about planning this in the past. 

I would book three days in London in my diary. And I would spend the preceding three weeks booking appointments and literally stacking my day with meetings and calls and I would hit it very, very hard.

And I might come back after three days having seen 30 people can probably generated another 30 leads at the same time. And now I look back on it. I think, well, that that has now paid off in so many different ways. And sometimes it's building those close relationships with organizations like new role 

where let's face it you want to be front of mind. When the opportunity that suits you comes along. But we're all very, very busy. We all meet dozens and dozens and dozens of people. So how can you be the person who comes front of mind, whether it's in an executive search firm or whether it's a private equity company, or whether it's just an [00:11:00] individual who happens to also be very well connected and has got their ear to the ground, bearing in mind that Firms like yours will sometimes come to me and say, this role's come up.

Have you got any ideas of somebody who might be suitable? And I want to have people in the front of my mind that I can recommend and say, well, you should have a conversation with them.

And you know, all you need sometimes is a three minute conversation for that individual to say, do you know what? I think you'd have a really interesting conversation with so and so. And I'll make the connection for you. It's all it takes sometimes.

Oliver Cummings: That's very powerful. The idea that you're structuring it to that degree and being that considered about building that network, I think is a really key insight. And it's one of the things, actually, again, that we've. been testing in the communities, how to make that networking less painful for people.

We've been trying these speed dating options for people where they just get through some structured conversation, 10 minutes with six different board members. And it's been quite interesting to see how that's played out and leads to these completely serendipitous [00:12:00] further connections.

 What we're hoping is if those meetings you're talking about, you have a hit rate of one in 20, if we can move that to two and 20 or three and 20, then that would have been a massive value add for four people. 

When you got Recommended as a guest for the podcast, one of the things that really stood out about you was that you have undertaken at your own instigation, a self review as a chair, I'm really interested to understand what prompted you to do that. 

Andrew Tyler: I'm sure like just about anybody in a C suite today, you have been a participant in some form of individual and or team reflection. 360 degree. Reviews have been a feature of business life for a very long time. 

I have always been a big enthusiast of the team review where you look at individuals profiles, where you look at them together as a team and you use that as a way of [00:13:00] understanding each other better so that you can work better together as a team.

And I feel that when I became a chairperson, first of all, being the CEO is a lonely job, then try the non exec chair because that's even less supportive because you are not there in and around your C suite colleagues, supporting each other, sharing each other's problems day in, day out.

So there was an element of this, which was, how am I doing? I mean I don't really know. I'm doing my best, but I don't really know I think the other thing is that I have also seen situations. Luckily, I have not ever had a chairman like this myself, but I've seen situations where a chairperson clearly believes they've now arrived at the perfect, fully formed article.

This is the pinnacle of business, as it were, I've been the chair of the board and therefore thou can do no wrong. And that intuitively has to be rubbish. Any bit of even basic self reflection will tell you that you, you kind of never ever stop learning. And I think when you move into a very different role. How [00:14:00] can you be instantly brilliant at that on day one? You've never done it before. 

And then I thought, well, okay, so how do you go about finding out? Well, you can go out for a nice dinner with your shareholder or go and have another CEO, but I feel that that's never a great way to get objective feedback.

And that's why people use 360s and those kind of psychometric assessments and so on in order to get a more objective idea on how they're performing. So I've been working with a fantastic lady called Sarah Kilgore, who was working on some other sort of communications related work in one of my businesses.

And I just really liked the way she thought about leadership. And so we just chatted around this idea. I said, look, so I'm kind of feeling that I need to find some way of getting objective feedback on how I'm doing. Cause I'm only three and a half years into this. I want this to be my career for the next 10 years and I want to be the best that I can possibly be.

And therefore, I'd like to understand three and a half years in, it seems like an appropriate length. The [00:15:00] time that we doing the job, I've also obviously got a huge benefit or privilege of doing it for more than one company. So I've got different stakeholders from different companies both executive and shareholders.

And so Sarah said I'd love to do this. And so we looked around to see if we could find a kind of off the shelf framework for this. And basically we didn't find one and there may be, there is one out there and we didn't. it. So Sarah went back to first principles of this and she said, well, look, let's start with, what does a great chairperson in private market look like from the perspective of the people who care about it?

And so she did around the interview, she did a load of research. She spoke to a number of search firms and so on and said what are the stakeholders looking for in a great chair. And she condensed that into a set of attributes. And then from that, she then derived a survey.

And so I then provided her with 20 odd stakeholders, shareholders executive, my CEO, CFOs, et [00:16:00] cetera, from my community across my different companies. They then all did the survey and then that was followed up with a structured interview to get under the skin and get some verbatim comments and anecdotes and so on.

And then she put that all together into a very well structured report, we sat down and throw it all areas which didn't necessarily instantly connect with me. We talked through, why individuals might have had a certain view on things. And then at the end of it, I mean, there was a quantitative element to it because there were questions that were structured and therefore she was able to do some level of quantitative analysis.

And then the rest of it was through the conversations that she'd had with these, with these various stakeholders. And of course. The most critical thing was then identifying areas for improvement, things that I could focus on to get better. So that was the basic process. It took about three months from, from end to end.

Oliver Cummings: What insights have you had from your self review that have influenced the way you chair? 

Andrew Tyler: That [00:17:00] balance between If you imagine around the board table expressing your opinion as the chairperson, as opposed to facilitating the expression of others opinions. I am opinionated. I do have an opinion. And at times, I could play my opinion in later in the discussion. 

And maybe more softly in the discussion. I guess as the chairperson, you're the head of the board, so you're naturally where there's going to be a level of deferment to you. And I think making sure that your opinion doesn't get overweighted in the discussion. 

And in fact, I think it's probably fair to say, I have not got this, I'm not doing this as well as I could and should do, which is the reason I'm raising it. I think sometimes Your opinion as a chairperson matters in the context of reaching consensus and resolution more than it does as a singular expression of view, if that makes sense.

So your job as a chairperson should be to gather the [00:18:00] opinions from around the table, see how from those opinions you can work towards consensus, but perhaps at times, you know, some of your opinions are important in forming that final outcome and resolution from the discussion. I suppose the only other time when a chair person's opinion perhaps can be a slightly louder voice is where maybe there's an area of particular specialization.

Where you as the chair just might, by coincidence, happen to really be the most experienced and specialist voice around the table on a particular issue. And then probably your opinion would carry more weight and could be more overt. So I think that's something when you come out of an exec role into a non exec role, I would say as a general point of view that you are likely to have to dial back the deployment of your opinions than maybe when you were in an executive role.

Oliver Cummings: Now there are two other topics that I really want to get into before [00:19:00] we go on to our lightning round. The first that really jumped out at me was the complexity of some of the shareholder environments that you've worked in. 

And if I think back to my time as a private equity investor, there were a couple of horror shows I had where we were invested alongside some strategics as well as other Investors and it was, it was complex, but when I compare it to some of the stakeholder environments you've navigated with not just investors and strategics, but also government or quasi government entities, I'm fascinated to hear how you think about navigating and balancing the interest of those sorts of complex shareholder dynamics as a chair.

Andrew Tyler: I have been super lucky. I mean, at the time it didn't feel like it, but I've been super lucky, as you've said, to be in some really fantastically complex shareholder situations. And funnily enough, it's not necessarily related to the size or type of the organization. 

[00:20:00] My first CEO role with. Dare I say it, Paul Lester is my chairman was actually for a sort of fairly small, late stage tech company that had had as sort of Tech companies in their early stages often do had an awful lot of different investors come in at different times in different rounds with really very different motivations for being involved and you couldn't have dreamt up a more a set of shareholders with more. Diverse reasons for having been involved in the company or for that matter financial outlooks.

So that was a bit of a baptism of fire, but I was sort of green, too green at the time to realize how complex that was that I was getting into here. And I suppose, I operated largely by instinct. And my instinct was get to know everybody as well as you possibly can at both a personal level, but also the context within which they've got involved in this particular business.

So forget the [00:21:00] specifics of the circumstances, just immerse yourself in who is this individual. What are they all about? What are they like as a person? Why are they in this? What is an outcome that's going to Not that you can guarantee the latter. But then when the fireworks start and it all gets really tricky, you've got quite a deep sense of, right, that's really going to annoy Jim, and that's going to have Margaret doing backflips, and that's really going to have, Mike and Joe at each other's throats.

Oliver Cummings: Is there an example you can bring it to life with? 

Andrew Tyler: it's always tricky in these situations, isn't it? Because you need to be rather careful of the libel laws when you start getting too specific. But the one I was alluding to was one where we had two very well known individuals who were individual shareholders in the business both of whom were forces of nature.

Who'd actually been very canny about when they'd come in to the business, we had [00:22:00] got a trail of ex founders and CEOs and other individuals who had been involved during the 10 years or so that this business has been around. And then we got some more structured investors, green funds type investors who had come in and gone through the normal route of putting it through an IC.

And then we had got three very large household name industrials involved. I mean I can give you a couple of the names. If you've got Shell on the one hand and the now late Max Mosley on the other hand as material shareholders in your business, the chances of you being 100 percent aligned on outcomes is approximately zero and the chances of you being aligned in your approach to things is also approximately zero.

But I just spent the time trying to understand everyone's positions and why it matters to them. And from that, you can start to think about, [00:23:00] okay, at the end of the day, everyone's going to have to compromise here. That goes without saying. So where am I going to start finding some middle ground here, where, as is often famously put, everyone goes away equally annoyed with the outcome.

And that would certainly have been the case in this particular instance. And I think that that as a template, that was a super. complex situation, even though the company, the business itself is quite small. 

But I think that fundamental approach is how I take the approach to everything I'm doing now. I mean, most of my companies that I'm involved in have got multiple stakeholders who have who desire different outcome. And they include, by the way, the executive who in the private markets are obviously also shareholders in the business.

I take that same approach always you should just spend as much time as you can with people, including really crucially the ones who aren't necessarily the noisy ones, because those quite often individuals who just happen to be more forthright, but they aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest stake.[00:24:00] 

So ensuring the ones who are being quiet, who might very well have a bigger stake are, you are proactively going to speak to them, understanding what they're trying to get out of this situation. I think that's really, really critical. And also I think. Making everybody collectively part of what you're trying to do so that you don't have people standing outside the ring throwing things.

That everybody has a sense that their participation is required to get the outcome that you're trying to get. So they can't just be, as I said, standing passively on the sidelines. Even if they're not a board member, it doesn't stop them being bought into what you're trying to do and the outcomes that Collectively trying to get out of this and at the very worst, they'll end up with more understanding so that if they do have to compromise, at least they're compromising from a position of kind of understanding the dynamics understanding the issues that you're dealing with and, and maybe, bluntly put, having a little bit more sympathy with you than they might otherwise because they'll appreciate that you're actually trying to thread [00:25:00] a really difficult needle here.

Oliver Cummings: Practically speaking. What do you do as a chair to achieve that outcome? The sort of thing I might do would be to go and talk to each individual shareholder and say, Look, this is the dilemma I'm facing. I'm trying to balance X, Y, and Z. Have you got any thoughts on how to do that? So you're sort of inviting them to see the problem from your perspective and solve it with you.

Andrew Tyler: Spot on, spot on. That's exactly what I do. I just feel like you can't talk too much really, can you? My article or faith here is that if you are being open and honest and upfront with people, they will 999 times out of 1000 respond positively to that.

And do it early, do it before it needs to happen, not when you're having to react to a situation. Certainly the getting to know people Do that bit and why are they in this and what do they want out of it? Do that long before that's become a rarefied issue. 

For example, don't wait until you're in the planning stages of an exit process. Do that at the beginning when you're [00:26:00] first involved. I feel like almost your best time to do it is when you don't really know each other and you can come in and ask all the stupid questions and be really almost disarmingly, Open in your questioning with individuals. 

Oliver Cummings: What have you learned about managing private equity investors as a stakeholder and as a as a chair that are smart Chair or C level who hasn't worked with private equity wouldn't necessarily find obvious? 

Andrew Tyler: At the soft factors level, I'll say there's no difference. Cause one level of it's getting back to the things I just said about they are stakeholders in the business. What are their interests? What are the outcomes they're trying to get out of this? 

I think, where, if you were new into PE, what is critical is that you understand how PE works in the same way that if I was to go into a PLC, I need to understand how the public markets work because that's the back cloth. That's the backdrop to the way individuals behave. 

So through a lot of conversations over the years, but also a lot of [00:27:00] reading. a lot of research. I've spent a lot of time trying to understand how the history of private equity, how private equity works. Very particular things like the way that their fund dynamic operates.

How do these funds get initiated? How do they get invested in? How are the assets originated? What are the pressures that they get from their limited partners? Because at the end of the day, they've got their own external stakeholders, their limited partners.

And how does that influence their behaviours? How does the dynamics of the way that one fund might be maturing versus a fund that's being That's a new fund that they're trying to get invested in. Because I very often found that the way, that their particular perspective on an asset may have a lot to do with, well, this is the state of the funds.

This is either the financial performance of the fund or we're trying to attract our new fund, so we kind of [00:28:00] need some gold scored in the existing fund. Or, you know, the way the other assets in the fund are performing versus this asset. We're really looking maybe to hold this asset a year or so longer or a year or so less.

I mean, really, really understanding and also, you know, bluntly put, think about the incentives that are at a personal level of the individuals that you're dealing with within, within PE, because their compensation structure is not the same as a compensation structure that you'd find in the public market.

It's not the same as the compensation structure you'd find in executive. So given that an element of us being in business is to make money out of this. And there's no shame in that. Understanding how PE makes its money is really important as well, because that will condition their view on the assets and what the asset, what the outcomes are that they need to get from the assets.

And it really is very different from public markets or something that's owned by a bank. Pension scheme or a family office or whatever. The private equity business operates on this deal cycle [00:29:00] model. That's what private equity do. They buy assets, they create value, they sell the assets and the difference is how they make their money. 

I should also add, and I will just put in a little plug for this as well. At the same time as you're understanding how private equity works, understand how private debt works because private debt is becoming a very big asset class now.

I've had the huge fortune, as I said at the very beginning of our conversation, of sort of coming in as a senior advisor to Blackstone Credit. Now, okay, I'm working on distressed assets that effectively have undergone a debt to equity swap. So you can argue that they're They are private equity now, but they're sitting in credit funds.

And so I've spent an equal amount of time learning how the credit side of the business operates. And they have a completely different perspective on things because they are basically lending money at a fixed return. And they're trying to manage the downside risk rather than. Taking risk to achieve outsized growth to get a greater return.

So I think just the more you can do to [00:30:00] educate yourself, the more you're going to find it easier to understand the motivations of the dynamics that are going on around the table. 

Oliver Cummings: I can think of a few different situations where either the way the carry was structured or the way the return hurdles were structured or the way where someone was in their promotion life cycle, whether it was to becoming partner or a managing partner was suddenly driving these extraordinary decisions.

So you could see everyone else couldn't figure out what was going on because they hadn't understood that why they weren't prepared to sign off on what. On the outside seem like a perfectly reasonable ask but they hadn't understood those underlying dynamics. 

Andrew Tyler: Very, very relatable. And I think one of the things that I often will spend a lot of time talking to my execs about my CEO about my CFO is I'll say let's just look at it through the eyes of our private equity sponsor. This is what's going on over there. So this is the pressure they're coming under, maybe from their managing partner or from their LPs.

They own us, they [00:31:00] own this business, so it's incumbent on us to understand the pressures that they're operating as well. And then if we're not doing X or Y, this is the consequence to them. It's not just the folks sitting around your board admiring the the wreckage of your budget. This has got consequences for them as well.

Oliver Cummings: Andrew the time has flown by which means it's time to go into the lightning round where i'm going to say A short statement and ask you for a quick response if you're ready 

Andrew Tyler: can manage that 

Oliver Cummings: So first up the boardroom behavior that irritates you most 

Andrew Tyler: when board members and it can be any board members and including the executive descend into executive tactical detail. That really is the business of their executive ops board and not the company board 

Oliver Cummings: the best book every board member should read and why. 

Andrew Tyler: This sounds very Desert Island Discs when they ask for 17 luxuries instead of one, but it's not actually a book as such, so I hope that's okay, but I do think every board member should read and possibly have posted on their their office wall Percy Shelley's [00:32:00] sonnet Ozymandias I think in, in business, As in life, arrogance and hubris always ends up in ruin

Oliver Cummings: Your favourite quote and why? 

Andrew Tyler: I'm choosing this one because probably over the long term, this is the one that I've come back to heaven knows how often is why not Niebuhr's God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can, cannot change, the courage to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference, particularly the third piece. 

Oliver Cummings: Your most significant professional insight. 

Andrew Tyler: I think it's the, Humans naturally prefer myth and legend to facts and data

Oliver Cummings: Your worst professional advice that you've ever received. 

Andrew Tyler: I've received this on more than one occasion, which is a view that chairpersons need sector specific experience. And as time has gone on, I feel very strongly it's the opposite that's required.

Oliver Cummings: What have you changed your mind on about boards over time? 

Andrew Tyler: That's a very good question. I think [00:33:00] probably That great boards are actually in and of themselves great teams.

Oliver Cummings: What's something people commonly misunderstand about you? 

Andrew Tyler: I would say that my cuddly sheep's clothing is commonly misunderstood for my inner wolf.

Oliver Cummings: And last but not least, three things that those listening should take away from this if they take nothing else. 

Andrew Tyler: I would say first is that you shouldn't consider taking on non executive roles unless you love supporting others and achieving their success. It's definitely not all about you. Second I think it's being very focused on the specific contribution you make to value creation for the business that you're involved in at a personal level.

And the third is that you are definitely never too old or too experienced to learn

Oliver Cummings: wow, Andrew. Thank you so much [00:34:00] for taking the time to share a little bit of insight into the amazing way that you approach your boards with a phenomenal growth mindset. I've taken lots and lots from this. I really thank you so much for taking the time to share it with us. 

Andrew Tyler: Well, thanks very much, Ollie. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Oliver Cummings: And thanks to all of you listening. We've been blown away by the incredible feedback about how this podcast has been helping you get board roles and become better board members. This podcast is for you, so if you'd like to suggest guests, topics, difficult challenges, or you'd like to share stories about how the podcast has impacted you, or have suggestions on how we can improve, please email Podcast at new role. com that's podcast at new role. com and let me know. I'd love to hear from you otherwise. Thanks again for listening and look forward to having you back here for the next discussion.

🎙️ You can listen to the full podcast interview with Andrew on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.