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zach was 11 he's our youngest he he asked me for you know if i was going to die finish me off as facebook's vice president for europe the middle east and africa nikki is one of the most powerful women working in tech facebook is this huge company the prospect of leading so many regions is there any element of what the [ __ ] am i doing here you don't climb everest you get to base camp one and that's your thing certainly in chaotic moments it's like what are the things you can control in order to either get out of the chaos or to hit the north star so this meta shift people are understandably scared do you have any concerns that we're taking away what it is to be a human i think it's an important question i think three years into your career at facebook and then you get some awful news i got the diagnosis that i had follicular lymphoma which is an incurable blood cancer so we gathered the kids on the sunday morning i couldn't i just couldn't get the words out [Music] and i told my story on world cancer day so many people sharing having a similar disease but we're scared to show that because it was a sign of weakness i mean it sounds ridiculous but there are still companies where that sort of behavior is happening we often don't put the discipline into our personal lives that we do in our work lives and often our work lives are dictated by others these things aren't mutually exclusive so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this yourself [Music] nicola you've had an extremely extraordinary career i've followed you for many many years for many many years i think about six or seven years throughout my career and i've watched and i've also gone back and looked at the previous 21 odd years you spent in advertising in agencies because my background is in advertising and agencies my first question is when you think about
why you why you were able to lead that career what are the circumstances of your early years that went into shaping who you became and the success you then saw for the next 30 40 years of your career well first can i just say i'm so excited to be here in your dining room and having um having this conversation with you and fear of this turning into a great big loving i've been following you too so um yeah i couldn't be more thrilled to have this conversation that's a great big question to um to start with i think from a very early age i was always very curious i was always that kid that was putting their hand up and just going well hang on what about can i ask a question and to be honest it didn't play so well in school um the school that i was at at the time really just wanted like a cookie cutter that you came in you learnt by ro you passed your exams and i i wanted always to just push the question a little bit understand a little bit more and i think that kind of desire for knowledge that curiosity wanting to know what might happen has probably been a part of shaping who i am do you know where that came from that curiosity did it come from somewhere did you have brothers and sisters yeah i um so i grew up in manchester i have um a fantastic family a family of two brothers parents all connected grandparents in and out of the house every single day and my mom worked my grandma worked and so my north star at the time was just kind of a very busy household people coming and going but people always there for one another people supporting and a belief i think that anything was possible my parents were caterers and they used to do functions for um extraordinary people celebrities prime ministers and so i grew up just seeing that even extraordinary people are just people i was a grafter i was working as a waitress for them and so i saw that and i saw
people and i think if you take the fear away out of people however successful they are i think it allows you to think yourself about what you can learn from from them and then what you might be able to apply to yourself were you a confident child yes i was yes what evidence do you have of that if you look back on my school reports talks too much i think if you're not confident you probably don't talk too much asks too many questions um i wasn't i wasn't fearful i wasn't afraid it's funny because as you say when you're younger those things are often looked down upon even the phrasing of that too many questions yeah and especially for a woman or a girl at the time i remember um yeah there was a really particular incident when i was 15 it was the parents evening where you just before as it was o levels that was the last year of o levels gcses and you go in the um dining room and with both my parents from teacher to teacher and this was a really important moment for me as a child where the latin teacher literally started to shout at my parents and told them that if i didn't change my personality that i was never going to get on in life can you imagine being told that at 15 and it hadn't been such a good parents even i'll be honest but i saw something in my dad that day that really has always stuck with me because he turned around and he turned to her and he said i want to be really clear he said i think it'll be my daughter's personality that gets her on in life not what she does with latin and with that he was like we're off and so i went with my parents and we left but i just remember thinking he's got my back he sees something in me that she doesn't and it was a real seminal moment for me as a as a child growing up what was that latin teacher referring to when she said when she was talking negatively about your personality what was it in your personality she didn't like she didn't like the questioning she didn't like me and really trying to get to grips not just
learning the the language by rote but actually understanding much more about what the romans were doing and what you know what we learnt as a result but that wasn't her job her job was to teach her the language not to teach us more on the history and that side of it and i was really interested in that and yeah she didn't like that at that age what if i'd asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up what would you have said to me that time i would have probably said an actress so yeah i was i was always in the plays i was doing performances and i was told at school that i wasn't very good i wasn't clever i wasn't going to pass my exams with hindsight i think there was probably some anti-semitism that i experienced at school and a few particular incidents that stick out but and so i thought my life was going to be on the stage a few particular incidents that stick out yeah i had um i'm religious and i observed the sabbath and that meant in the winter months that i would go home early from school and we had a couple of teachers that would always insist on starting the new topics on a friday afternoon and when my parents and they could have started the topics and you know who starts new topics on a friday afternoon that's not a good thing for anybody you know it's the end of the week people are tired my parents went in um and to ask about it and they were told very clearly that if my parents insisted on taking me out what you know that was our problem not theirs and um yeah i i that was one thing that i had that stuck in my mind and another thing i had i had an english teacher who um used to mark me down and my marks were really low i was like two out and three out of ten and i was in a good school and these were not my marks and my parents again my parents there's a kind of a thing here that they
they were backing me they actually took my english book to um one of my brother's teachers and said what do you think of this work and they said we don't understand the marks these are the marks of a of a child that you know this is an a student but my confidence was so smashed by these teachers telling me i wasn't good i wasn't smart that i you know didn't think that i would maybe even do a levels never mind going to university at that time which was kind of the normal for that school and as it turned out i i left school at that school at 16 and went on to college and i got an a in my o level in english and actually decided to read english for a did a levels got an a and actually went to university and read english and you know did an english degree i actually went back to my school and i think about this now and i can't believe i did it when i got my a and my place at university i went back um to the school to that english teacher and so i rocked up and i said to her i've come to see you and she was like as you can imagine quite shocked and she goes why are you here i said i've come to tell you that you could have destroyed my life and the power that you wielded on others really could destroy and i said you know you really came close with that with me and taking away a dream of mine that might never have been realized because i always loved reading and passionate about books and i just needed to tell her that and i felt better for telling her that never saw her again what did she say she just looked at me shocked and you know i think back now with the uh the benefit of age it was quite a shocking thing to go and tell somebody that you know their own biases and prejudices and the power that they wield could destroy a life um you know in comparison with the best of teachers that it can inspire and lift up and and to make you something make you believe in yourself more that wasn't some of the experiences i had from some of my teachers
more broadly what does that say about the education system because i i mean i feel a similar way i was always did bad in school there was two lessons that i would never miss which was business and psychology but other than that i would not attend so and it wasn't i wasn't a rude kid you know i went back and i've spoken at the school multiple times now and when i go there they say you were a really nice guy but a useless student and because of that the sort of implicit message of of being a useless student um and the idea that the a grade people are going to be rich and successful and happy and then everyone else you're gonna have to settle for something else you're not gonna go for a kid that's such an easy narrative to believe it's almost amazing when you hear that someone went through that and they didn't believe that story at such an impressionable age is there something that we can do to remove i don't know grades altogether or to stop people like you who went on to have these phenomenal careers potentially falling through the net because of one bad teacher or one bad grade or believing a narrative about themselves based on any of the above so i think it that's a big question and i think there is there's a lot in there to unpack but i think having people believe in you at a young age is really important and not everyone is as fortunate to have a family that is as loving and as supportive as mine is and so people look to people like teachers kids look to teachers to be those people for them and on the whole i think teachers do a phenomenal job i mean a really truly extraordinary job but some kids slip through and i think it's on all of us to think about what more we can do to be able to help kids to really realize and their full potential because you're right how many more are out there that could be doing the most extraordinary things if someone just says to them i believe in you i got you i think you could do this at what point then did you choose advertising this one's really simple so i
went through university doing um i actually did english and theater study so i was acting and actually had a place at drama school um at central school of speech and drama it's a great school but i you know i shared that i'm religious and i observed the sabbath and i quickly realized that you know a life on the stage is not it's not very you know compatible with you know wanting to observe the sabbath so i also saw that friends of mine who were um acting were pretty miserable because there's so much luck involved you know they were trying to get the equity cards they were working in remote parts of the uk trying to you know get a break and i just didn't want to roll the dice and have so much of my life dependent on luck and they were great actors and great actresses and at the time i had a friend who was a year older than me guy called neil marcus who had got a job in advertising in london and i was wow i've never heard of such a job i didn't know anybody growing up in manchester that worked in the creative industries it wasn't a known thing that and it wasn't a thing in my school from my careers advice that they gave you that there were such jobs and yeah i'd always love the creative industries i love theater i love you know drama i love fashion i love film i loved all these things so when i heard what he did and that you know you could get paid to do such a thing i was like that's the thing i want to do so that's how i got embarked on it and then i did my research which back in the um the early 90s comprised of going to a library and getting hold of you know the the magazines the trade magazines and working my way through them to understand the great agencies and so i applied uh as a graduate trainee to get on a scheme and i got into uh bottle bogle hegerty which was the one i wanted to go to acting drama theater all these things in hindsight has the skills that taught you played a role in your career yeah definitely i think all everything that you do makes you who you are
um and so i actually think the skills of acting is something that all kids benefit from because it gives you confidence it gives you confidence to make a presentation it gives you confidence to make a pitch these are some really vital things when it comes to you know working in business acting also gives you the skills of working in a team you're relying on each other who's going to finish the the lines the you know the the makeup artist the you know the directors the producers you're all working as one um to be able to come together and realize the potential so yeah definitely all those things definitely helped you spent that the next sort of 20 years from that first sort of grad was it a grad internship yeah no yeah spent the next 20 years working in advertising um interesting industry to work and you stayed in there probably a lot longer than i think i could have because you know there's lots especially when you're working agency side there's a lot to deal with you rose within that industry very quickly as well but when you think about that period of your career what did that really teach you in terms of yourself leadership skills and everything in between what was the so many things so definitely taught me leadership skills and you know you start early on working for others but then you as you rise through the ranks then people work for you and i was always very keen to learn from others that were doing it and i you know i spent the first 12 years in advertising working for bottle bogle and hegerty so i learnt from some of the very best crafts people in the industry both from the business side and actually the creative side as well i remember when i when i left there and i was taking on my first really senior position at gray that i actually went to see someone called stevie spring who was a woman i hugely admired now as a dear friend to ask her what i should do what advice did she have and she said to me um nikoi you really need to think about every aspect of when you're talking to people not just what you're saying but
how you're saying it and how you're using your body language and other things as well because people are going to judge you they're going to pick up on everything that you say and i thought that that was good advice that nobody um had ever shared before it was also the first sort of time that i started to get 360 feedback on and so that i could learn about how others perceive me because how you think of yourself in your head is very different to how other people can perhaps think about you so it was actually making sure that i was developing the muscle of leadership as well as i was going through uh the different roles that i have so yeah it took taught me a huge amount what were some of your weaknesses in that early phase of your career that you that you really had to work hard to overcome you talked a bit about body language and i'm not sure if that was a weakness and then um was there anything that you you initially struggled with being in that agency um sphere working for someone else yeah i think um not trusting my instincts trying sometimes to be something i wasn't you know bbh in the 90s was super cool you know everybody was wearing 501 jeans and white t-shirts and honestly that wasn't a really good look on me and so trying to emulate what others were doing rather than just trusting me and actually having the confidence now this has sounded a weird one because i already told you that i thought i was a confident person but having and and i've really realized that this is something that women do more which is having an exhaustive conversation in your head before you get your point out and then the conversation's moved on and you've missed it or someone else has made the point and not realizing that i had a seat at the table because people were interested in what i had to say and not to be so fearful not to get those points out so that is definitely a skill i owned as we as i kind of went through my career why do you think that that issue is more um more prevalent in women i think it's a fear of getting it wrong being seen as being stupid um
yeah i think that i think those are things that you know we're challenged on um from a young age and it's something that you know if i could go back i would definitely speak up more i would share my voice more i would you know bring my opinions to the table i think those i think women do struggle with that and certainly talking with women about this issue i you know especially if i'm talking to younger women they're nodding away and it's like just put that imposter syndrome away it's really not a good thing it doesn't help any of us you in that period if i'm correct you you kind of went through three different agencies yeah started at that first one that i cannot pronounce you went to gray which i can pronounce and then kamarama yeah kamarama yeah um was the third one why did you move every time what was the reason for you to move on the first time i moved was because i'd been there 12 years i looked up above me and all the people that had been my bosses 12 years earlier were still all my bosses and were always going to be my bosses so i kind of reached a point where i really didn't think i was learning as much as as i could and should and actually started to think about maybe there's a life outside advertising and then actually it was somebody else that came to me a guy called gary lace came and said look you're at the coolest agency on the planet i'm just coming to gray as a change management kind of mission i want you to be on that mission with me and he goes i know people will sort of laugh because you're at the coolest and this one isn't but wouldn't it be amazing if we could do that and i love that vision because i thought yeah why would i swap one great agency for another great agency where's the learning um that curiosity thing again right and and so i went and did that and honestly that was one of my steepest learning curves as from a leadership perspective um and from a business perspective how we changed that agency around in the
five years um that i was there and then it was another kind of moment of serendipity where um had been at gray for five years it had been independent and then it sold to wpp so the change was kind of coming and i got a call from a guy called ben bilbaul who was one of the founders of karmarama and said would you could i have a cup of coffee and i said yeah definitely and i always whenever people ask me that i would always say yes i was like you never know interesting things always happen when you when you meet interesting people ben's interesting so i go and meet ben and i was totally hoodwinked because the other founders of the agency were there sid and dave i was like okay what's this and they said oh we're here to see if you want to be our fourth partner i was like oh i didn't see that one coming at all and that had very much been a boutique business a lifestyle business they wanted to significantly grow it and so i i joined the agency and the day i joined there were 12 people sat round the table and the day i left there were 250 in five years didn't it sell to accenture yeah i did um a couple of years ago it did so that first that first was it eight and a half years at that agency that i can't pronounce tell me the name you can just say bbh 12 years 12 years later which is a long time in ad in adland which is a long time in anything yeah i guess a lot of people especially i don't know if it's i don't have the data but these days i think amongst our generation the thought of doing 12 years at one place is quite inconceivable why did you do 12 years there and would it not have made more sense to because there's often this narrative that if you swing more from job to job you can get higher faster would it have not made more sense to just you know do a couple of years then move on so there was a lot going on in my life in that 12 years so i got married i had three of our four children while i was there and also i absolutely loved the agency and the job that i did so i started off as an account as an account man but actually i moved into new business a new business it just gives me
a thrill it always has because you're meeting new businesses you're learning about those businesses you're meeting new people there's the pitch i love the thrill of the pitch the chase and all of that and so it constantly felt like it was a new job and especially because i had three maternity leaves during that period as well i grew as a person each time i had my babies people often don't think that but you learn new things about yourself and so i came back each time refreshed and excited but as i said by the end after the uh after the 12th year it was like no this was time time to do something new and kamarama the agency where you were the fourth partner and the owner um at some point in that journey you get a call from you get head hunted by meta well facebook because yeah at the time facebook so it's 2013 and you know the agency is going brilliantly and i am also the president of the institute of practitioners in advertising it's the trade body for the ad industry and i'm the first woman in its almost hundred year history to take on that role and my whole mission was about making the uk the most digital minded digital first country because i could see that the opportunities there for the industry were going to be huge if we could capitalize on what was happening in silicon valley and so yes i did get a call carolyn everson came it was another cup of coffee which she actually said would you like breakfast so i go for breakfast and we'd met through an awards thing a year or so earlier and it's very american i'll never forget we're in the ivy i'm surrounded by literally everybody i know and she literally comes straight out i've got my water i'm drinking my water and she goes nicola i'm here to see if you're interested in heading up a mia for facebook and i literally splurted water out and i said oh no no i i don't think so why what are you talking about and she
goes oh i and she said oh um well people have suggested your name and i've been looking for a while and i said well i've got kamarama and it's going great and i said i'll tell you what let me think about it so i went home that night and i spoke to my husband john he goes are you nuts he said and it put it in context it was just after facebook had floated hadn't been going so well i was a huge fan of facebook though but i felt a deep connection to all the people that we'd hired at kamarama you know 250 people that relied on us for their mortgages and were part of the vision and the dream there but i gave it the overnight and i woke up in the morning and i thought actually this one's now got my you know i'm excited about this i i can start to imagine what that could do because i'd always loved tech i'd always been interested in it and this would give me a ringside view so i said all right i'm interested and then fast forward we had a whole recruitment process and ultimately got the job i've got to be honest that doesn't sound that um breakfast at the ivy doesn't sound like the most well thought through pitch [Laughter] yeah that's that's how it was she should maybe smooth schmooze you a little bit first and yeah it was direct it was directed yeah i quite like that as well i have to say and and that that prospect of becoming the head of e-m-e-a is that's terrifying that that would be terrifying for anyone the prospect facebook is this huge company it's hugely socially significant it's now public company the prospective of leading so many regions terrifying you know most people would would be overcome with imposter syndrome probably i it's not how i saw it i just saw it as a huge opportunity i loved the products i mean so it started with something that i absolutely passionately believed in i was a huge fan of mark zuckerberg and sheryl sandberg
um before i had the job and so to have the privilege of to work for two of the finest leaders that have ever worked in business ever um and to work so closely was was just an extraordinary opportunity and you know it was so early on i mean i remember you know we we hadn't opened a lot of the offices back then london only had a couple of hundred people working there and so it was really early it was really scrappy i'm good in that i'm i'm good in kind of bringing people together setting out what the objectives are working towards what the vision should be and i knew the industry okay this was my industry these were all the things that i loved working with some of the best and the most smartest of people but when you start that job it's a public company it's as i said hugely socially significant is there any element of what the [ __ ] am i doing here oh yeah of course completely and you know joining you know i thought i knew digital before i i started and then i really got to understand and those first few months and i think this is true for anybody that that comes and joins meta you literally feel like you're drinking from the fire hose you've got information coming at you left right and center you've got to make decisions quick quick quick on the decisions and i find that quite exhilarating and i'm a great writer i write things down i'm learning i'm processing in terms of that's how i retain knowledge and it just felt energizing i hadn't felt like that since some of the very early days in my career and i still feel like that today i have to be honest when you think about taking on a new role um in your career is there some kind of framework or principles or characteristics you're looking for when you're making that decision we i get asked this a lot when i meet people that listen to this podcast or when they dm about they're at that kind of crossroads where they're trying to weigh up one of two options what advice would you give so i definitely always
research the business which is obviously what you would do but then i'm very into also understanding it better by having lots of cups of coffee with people that are in and around the business and it's it's a two-way thing especially at a senior level where they're interviewing me but i'm also interviewing them and i've got my list of questions and you know really wanting to understand what what's motivating what they're looking for is it what i'm looking for as well and squaring that and then writing lists you know the pros and the cons of why this may or may not be a good thing and picking up also the challenges that people have as well so that you're very clear going in what are the things that need to be fixed what are the things that shouldn't be fixed that are working really well and where some of the other opportunities are and then i often go back after a few months into them and just reflect on what i've written uh and see what i've done as a result and how much does the family play a role in that decision you spoke about going and speaking to john about it huge i was huge i mean up until this point i'd largely been uk based i did europe as well but i'd largely been uk based i didn't travel a lot john traveled more um you know we've got four kids and so it was very clear to me that if i was gonna take on this role that it was gonna mean a lot of travel and how did i feel i'd also been working four days a week up until this point and because that was something i had done when gabby my our eldest was one i just didn't feel that i was getting um being good at anything and so that was something that i'd taken on so it was going to be a really big change and john and i really sat and talked about it and he went just go for it he said this off but he said i'll i'll root myself more at home so that you can go and do those things and we made a kind of thing between ourselves that i'd always make sure wherever i was in the world i'd come home for the weekend and we'd always have the sabbath together we'd always be there as a family together but in the week i would travel so yeah it was um it wasn't just my
decision it was it was a joint decision i i couldn't have done it unless i'd had his his full support on that point of working four days a week when gabby was was born um what was behind that decision give me some color there i felt that i wasn't being a good wife i didn't feel i was being a good mum a good kind of family member good friend just work was all consuming and i needed just a bit more time to be able to do the things that i also that were also important in my life you get one go at this thing and so i worked out that actually i probably just needed the friday if i had a friday that i could do the things that i wanted to do and remember this is pre-tech all this stuff we didn't have tech at all our fingertips and everything and so i i went to talk to my bosses and they're actually incredibly open about it they cut my salary by 20 of course but they got me for i did the same job in essence but did it in four days through the discipline that i applied um and so that's that's where it came from and honestly it was one of the very best things that i ever did it did mean that i took some changes in my career though i think back now and i didn't push myself to do a ceo job when i was in was was in agency life because i felt that i probably needed to be there five days in order to do that but i have no regrets about that because the experiences that i did as a result of having that time i think you know fulfilled me and also make made me who i am there's a huge importance for and you know when i when you said that i was just thinking about how how self-aware it is to really tune in to what matters for you because it's so easy and tempting sometimes to just um try and take on more and try and get the highest sounding status job you possibly can to be a ceo even if it's and i i think about this a lot of my career that sometimes i just maybe need to pause and think about what how i feel and what really really matters to me as opposed to just being dragged by what i think i'm supposed to do right yeah i think that's i think that's true for a lot of people
i and i think it's we often don't put the discipline into our personal lives that we do in our work lives and often our work lives are dictated by others here's the path that you'll climb up off you go and actually just stopping and going what matters to me in my whole life and i was always really clear my nostalgia was always my family i would john and i always wanted to have a big family four kids that was really important to to be around for them as well i love the fact that like oh you know our kids are older now and they choose to hang with us is a real source of pride and joy for us both so being as intentional on the personal side as as on the work side these things aren't mutually exclusive you might have to trade things at different times but if ultimately the person feels more fulfilled and happy then surely that's a good thing right it's very rare for people to turn down a promotion which is an interesting concept i actually remember the day where i offered our marketing director the chance of our head of marketing the chance to be the marketing director of the whole company and i remember them saying no no thanks you know as a ceo you take that one of two ways you think you know is this is and this is just being completely honest is this not an ambitious person do they not like it here you know but when i when i spoke to this individual to find out the reasoning behind their decision i just had the most amount of respect for them i respected them so much more because of that self-awareness to know that they in that personal life they wanted something a little bit different and also they they the person communicated to me that he didn't feel like he was quite there yet and it was just i will never forget that day because it only ever happened once and we employed you know more than a thousand people over the last 10 years so um it's just and i don't think it's a conversation people have enough which is like
you don't have to accept the next rung on the ladder just because it's the next wrong on the ladder and yeah i agree with that and actually it's something we've already gone deep in that meta because what that often means is you take somebody from doing a job they're brilliant at and they love and you put them into a role often as a people manager because people manager means success right where they they're not as good and so it doesn't work for anybody then and so we actually have something which is an individual contributor where you can rise up as an individual contributor be very very senior but not have to manage loads of people because that's a totally different and i'd never heard of that before i thought i i think it's really a fantastic concept for keeping and motivating great talent it is because much of the reason why people love their work is because of the relationship they have with their peers and when you move them to management roles those relationships are somewhat changed yeah often broken so makes a lot of sense um you get three years into your career at facebook and then um you get some awful news yeah um so i am 45 then in november 2016 and living this amazing life right i'm flying around the kids are thriving family's great and i'm busy and feeling great and i i had um had this little lump in my in my groin tiny like the size of a pee and honestly wouldn't have thought anything of it but i have a a really good girlfriend who is um who's a doctor and i just mentioned it to her literally in passing like i wouldn't have gone and seen a doctor for it and she has probably nothing if it's still there let me know in a few weeks and it it was so i went to see her and she she put her hands on me and i saw in her eyes um that she that she wasn't happy about it and i said what is it she goes i don't know
but you need to see someone i don't know what it is and she sent me um sent me to a doctor who was turned out to be the wrong doctor but it was he was a gynecologist and he said um he said you're fine you examine me he goes but i literally had my coat on he goes but you know what while you're here he said we should just do a ct scan i thought okay i was by myself because i really didn't think it was anything so i went and had a ct scan which is quite an intrusive thing if you're not kind of expecting it invasive and and then i went home didn't think anything of it it was a friday and got home and put my phone away because i was busy doing other things and then i remember i picked up my phone and there were so many missed calls from my friend the doctor and also from this 0207 number um which i didn't recognize and i can still remember the feeling of just being physically sick and i went up to see john and i said to john i think this is going to be very bad news i'm going to phone lisa while she's my gp friend while you're with me and she just said have you spoken to the doctor i said no she said i'm coming over honestly she lives around the corner it was the longest five minutes of anyone getting to me and she told me um that the scan had shown that i had tumors everywhere all over my chest all underarms everywhere and they didn't know what it was and that um that began the process over the worst weekend of our lives um googling everything trying to work it out because you can't see comfort see doctors at the weekend nobody's around had to wait till monday morning had a whole fiasco of going to meet a surgeon trying to take her one of the tumors out but they wouldn't take it out because they didn't know which was the one to take out and
it was just very frustrating and being a person that's very used to like you you're like knowing what you want to do getting in control making things happen like you just couldn't do anything you had to wait till monday morning to go for a pet scan to understand it and then over it was just all just so much information and also we didn't want the children to know because we didn't know what it was and so it was just john and i sort of isolated working through all of this but within a few days it was i got the diagnosis that i had something called follicular lymphoma which is an incurable blood cancer most people that have this it can take two to three years to get diagnosed i got diagnosed in five days and it was it was a shock it was i'm thinking about it now and i still can't believe what i'm telling you that this is something that happened to me um and is happening to me yeah how does how does how does the world you look out upon look differently through that period of your life that weekend because you've gone from flying around the world you know thinking about a particular professional challenge and life is normal and then boom i did a lot of crying i cried so much i mean it was a physical thing i just remember it being very physical the feeling i couldn't sleep i actually lost half a stone in one weekend um and then i just remember thinking on that monday morning that that's not me i mean i catastrophized everything because of course when you heard the word cancer and tumors cancer we knew it was bad before we knew what it actually was i went to all the worst places in my mind as to what was going to happen fast forward i was going to have chemo then it wasn't going to work then i was going to die then you know the children would be left alone it was just horrific absolutely horrific the games your mind
can play on you or that you allow to play on yourself and i remember thinking on that monday morning i actually did my hair did my makeup and said i'm going to face this in the way that i face everything i'm going to take it one day at a time and you know whatever the cards i'm dealt with i'm going to make sure i live the most with what i have and i'm never ever going to allow myself to go back to that weekend that i just had which was just horrific and i didn't and so i took it on you know understood what i had and then had to start to process that and then start to tell people because you're right on that monday i was supposed to be flying to china and so i couldn't do that and so i had to tell my bosses that i wasn't going to be able to tell them you know the reason why or what i knew at that point and you know i will always be unbelievably grateful to sheryl sandberg for literally just saying we're here for you whatever you need um we've got your back and that was you know for your boss to tell you that is you know the most important thing in the world i'll never forget that that conversation with your kids worst conversation of our lives um we gathered that it was about it was a week later and it was deliberately a week later because danny our on number two was just 18 that weekend and he'd had a big party on the saturday night so we didn't want it to spoil it for him and so we gathered the kids on the sunday morning um all sat round the table to try and tell them and i actually i couldn't i just couldn't get the words out it was horrific you know in in a moment you change your kids you you know they've got this life and in that moment you bring a different dimension into their lives
john had to um he had to tell them i couldn't get the words out zach was 11 at the time he's our youngest and you know he just he he asked me for you know if i was gonna die finish me off finish me off how does how does someone respond to that it took me back to a conversation i had with my mum when my mum found a lump in her breast when i was younger and and it was the first thing i thought i must have been about eleven must have been about eleven when i got that phone call how does how do how does a parent deal with that conversation with an eleven year old when they ask that question there's no right or wrong is there on these things what i what i said to him was i hope not gonna try my best and what i promised them that day was that they could always ask me anything there was never a question that they couldn't ask and that we would fight it as a family together and we would learn about it together and it wasn't a secret and there was no shame sometimes there's a shame with these things especially it was particularly difficult because nobody had ever heard of this cancer and and the fact that it was incurable so all that language with cancer that we knew of we're going to beat it and cut it out and do those things couldn't say those things it was this was going to be a journey and this was now going to be a part of our lives and yeah i think probably probably changes it all a little bit that day the word incurable is a is a hard word to accept especially when you're you have the type of personality that i can tell you have it almost seems like control is when i
hear that word it's like the control is taken from me because if you know my natural um when i was reading about your initial response to receiving that diagnosis that cut out attack it was gonna that would be my response yeah it was i mean that was part of that weekend where i was just trying to find a surgeon i kind of felt if i found that surgeon and they cut it out then that would be on the path to curing it because in that moment they didn't know if it was a they thought it might have been a breast cancer that had spread so they were going at it that way but actually it turned out it was a lymphoma that happened to be around the lymph nodes in in the underarms so um it was a whole new language and vocab is to try and understand what it means to have an incurable cancer and then to start to understand that this one didn't have much research and so all the questions you want to ask it's okay so if i have treatment how long is that going to last for and how long will i be clear for and you go into a remission and then it comes back and that there's just no knowledge and no information in the way that you want to have that knowledge and so i think i think one of the challenges of that word incurable is that it's always with you and there's not a day that i goes by where i don't think about the fact that i do have a blood cancer um and that the risks especially through the last two years that we've had with covid have been very challenging for me in the family up until the point where better treatments were available for people like me in these moments both professionally and personally there's uh um there's sometimes a desire to be strong on the outside brave face yes and no i was very lucky i didn't i never made this a secret and
and in many ways i couldn't have suddenly disappeared from work because people knew i was having tests and so i i told i told my team straight away and and people are wonderful you know people like we're here for you what can we do what do you need i was like i don't know at the moment and this cancer as i said is quite different in as much as i didn't even have treatment for 18 months because what what is understood is the fact that because there's we can't cure it and because there could be new treatments then the doctors do this thing called watch and wait where literally they watch and they wait and they they see what's happening or as patients call it watch and worry and you have scans and you have blood tests and then there'll come a point maybe that you'll need treatment and my point came 18 months after that first diagnosis where i was just unlucky that it grew around my kidney area some people can go several years without needing treatment but they said i could have it would it would give me kidney failure and so they deemed that i should i should get the treatment there that was a blow and the only reason that was a blow that moment was because i thought i was going to get two years that's a kind of the average after if you get an early diagnosis and i got 18 months so that was a blow um and then i had six months of chemotherapy and 18 months of immunotherapy treatment as well and it was you know i i did well not everyone does as well as me it it put the cancer into a form of remission they call it no evidence of disease but you know no chemo is fun that's for sure what kind did you get any psychological support throughout this process because we talk a lot about the physical symptoms but the the mental um the mental difficulties i mean are just quite honestly like unimaginable i just all of the words you've used and the context of the
family and all of these things your team members was there some kind of psychological support that you sought out in therapy or other actually there wasn't but i also think it was because i was so open you know you talked about did i put on a brave face i think the hardest thing i did was when i told my story more publicly and i did it in two parts the first part was when i stood up we used to do an end-of-year conference in emea where everybody flew in and i stood and told my story to everybody and that was one of the hardest things i've done with the story of the diagnosis and i i wept on the stage i mean i literally had tears coming um down my eyes as i did it in front of everybody that worked with me and people just inundated with me with hugs and you know that thing of don't hug me when i'm crying it's gonna make me cry more that that happened but people were so so supportive and then again when i when i told my story on world cancer day um in the february i was just inundated with support and love from people people i didn't even know and so many people sharing the story of having a similar disease or incurable disease that they've not gone public on for a variety of reasons whether it was fear of it was largely to do with work actually largely to do with they won't get that promotion if people think they're weak physically and so they live with this extra burden of having an inc a disease and putting on a brave face hiding doctor's appointments i never had to do any of that and so i felt strong mentally the whole way through this i got my head around the cards that have been dealt with to me and as i said i was never going to go back to that weekend and so i made sure that i protected myself through the things that i did through the things that i could take control on um in in order to get that but i know
that's not true for everyone and i certainly know that through one of the things that we did was to grow this group on facebook called living with follicular lymphoma it's almost 10 000 people now which i kind of pinch myself because it's it's the largest gathering of people that have ever existed with follicular lymphoma and could only have happened because of facebook but the mental challenge and the anguish that people in the group talk about every single day that haunts me and and that sort of drives me to do the work that i do in terms of trying to find a cure it haunts you yeah because people i know how blessed i am i'm blessed with my with the job that i have with my family with my faith with my community all those pillars that support me and and make me who i am and i know how lucky i am to have that and [Music] i read every day that so many are not the group acts as a support for them because you don't want to talk to somebody else that's got a different cancer it's not helpful you know i had that in the early days a lot of people with breast cancer wanted to tell me their story and it's actually thank you but it's not that helpful i need to know people that are two years ahead of me on this journey who've got follicular lymphoma that i had the treatments i had will have that that's the best help and support possible was there ever a decision you made about whether to continue with work because this is i know this is a question you've kind of been asked before about whether you you know some would assume that if if they were to get that diagnosis they might retract from work and and just stay home what was your thinking around that it honestly never occurred to me and i think i'd been very intentional in my life about the things that mattered to me in the things that i wanted i love what i do i absolutely love my job it is a lot of who i am it is something that gives me huge
energy good and you know helps me on my own journey in learning so it never occurred to me that if i was well enough um that i that i would carry on working and work out you know i was asked you know take the time off whatever you need to do i was like oh no no i don't want any time off i want to do i want to keep things as normal as possible because i i feel pretty blessed with the with the life that i have and if i'm well i'll i want to do the job and i thank god i have been well and even through the chemotherapy i was able to work which is can often be a surprise because there's different types of chemotherapy and thankfully the one i had is not didn't react as severely to me as some people have with theirs i didn't lose my hair for example which i know is a hugely traumatic thing especially for women and so i was able to work but to do it in different ways on that day when you get that message from the doctors that um there's no evidence of disease and that you're follicular lymphoma is in remission yeah how is that day how do you do you remember the day i do and honestly it was a bit of an anti-climax because it only meant for now and so i sort of i'd gone into that meeting going either way manage your own expectations so you're not disappointed and so if i didn't build myself up to go it's going to be good it's going to be good news i was like it's this is just going to be what it will be and you'll deal with it and i think that really helped in terms of the management of the expectation and so when he told me that i was like that's good and he goes well aren't you more happy i was like no that that is good news but there's still a journey ahead and you know i want to find i want to be part of the team that finds a cure for this thing so that other people don't have to go through these meetings like you and i are going to have to have must be a nice conversation to have you with your kids though it was good news um you'd sort of get halfway through they've done a scan to say it was going
well and so they sort of drip fed that information and but i didn't allow myself that euphoria of yay i didn't do that moment i i and that is quite a weird thing if i think back on it now because of the nature of the person that i am i am quite celebratory i am kind of that person but i that one was a more muted certainly was more muted to me it doesn't entirely surprise me that was your reaction because you talked about um it being a process of like expectation management and one would assume that if you can control your response to good news it also helps you control your response to bad news in the same way it seems to me i've done that in the past as almost a defense mechanism yeah it is it's a protection it definitely is a protection thing because if i was going in there going i hope it's good news i hope it's good news and it's not i'm just going to be flawed right and so i already knew what the worst thing could be i i've got an incurable blood cancer that's not going away but it would just be you know let's see where this next part of this journey takes me how did that news impact the way that you saw your life and uh because for me the pandemic and watching what happened happened to the world and seeing how that there was this tectonic plate underneath all of us that i'd never realized called our health that i as a young person had never even realized could was there or could move and that if it did move in fact my whole life sat upon it my career my relationships my family everything my goals my ambitions my future was all sat on this thing called health and one day it shakes and you didn't know it was there how does that change your view of your life and the decisions you make yeah and in many ways our family had a trial run on the pandemic because going through chemo you have to be super careful i mean we had the masks and the sanitizer at the door back in 2018 for anyone that came into the house i didn't go to the theater i didn't go out didn't go on planes etc
so i had to be super super careful because my immune system was shot to pieces but actually i didn't make a lot of major changes you know a lot of people that get a diagnosis like this do look their life in in that moment and go well getting divorced spending all that off to vegas i i didn't do any of those things because i think i'd been very intentional about the about the life that i have and been very purposeful about some of the choices that you know we've made together as a family and so no i there was none of those kind of crazy things did it change how you allocate your time at all did it yes i did um so i took control of some of the things i could control and so there was enough evidence knocking around about lifestyles and diets and things like that especially with the disease which is about the immune system about reducing inflammation within the body and so i had a shocking diet i was really not very good at exercise i.e i did none whatsoever and so i did build that into my life so yeah they were i guess some pretty big changes then that i did make you talk about being intentional about your life what does that mean to you and why is that important yeah i i actually practice something called vision writing which is um you write as though it's a year from now and you set out looking back on the year you've just had what you're going to achieve and all the research says if you write stuff down then you and you share it with people you're more likely to do it and i do it around my personal life i do it around work and then i do it around community and i take people on the journey with me you know to help to work out what it's gonna write it down and then i then i share it and that's really helped me to be really thoughtful about what i want to do in the next year and certainly with the family it's involved a huge amount of travel we absolutely love traveling and seeing different places and exploring and it's we sit together and we kind of
go what do you want to do this year what are the things and when the kids were smaller you know that some of the things that they wanted to do were kind of little things i remember there was one where um i think sam just wanted to go and have a chinese meal i'm like yep we'll have a chinese meal and his brothers and sisters laughing at him for going you know you underplayed that one yeah you couldn't ask anything from what you are doing you know different personalities of the children coming through but i think i think that that has made a difference i read about some advice that sheryl sandberg had given you around that time um about not uh engaging in secondary worrying yeah what is that well that the secondary worrying is what i was talking about which is well i'm going to have chemo it's not going to work i'm going to die john's going to marry a wicked woman children are going to be miserable boom i'm exhausted and it's miserable and depressing and that that's just giving the power away and and she was right i mean it was such good advice just to kind of to say that don't don't allow yourself to do that and i think you know i think that is something that people do with bad news you know you take yourself into a into a different place of all the things that that could go wrong but i think people do that in in all aspects of life if you go for a job interview and you know you start to worry about not getting it well that's not going to be very helpful is it in terms of how you're going to present yourself so yeah because you're right impacts performance but also that mental torture yeah which you're choosing you know to inflict upon yourself just makes the whole process miserable doesn't it yeah and we will do that oh yeah it's easier said than done but there's i often you know people ask me about um advice for like moments of
chaos the only advice i've ever been able to conjure really is um trying to plant yourself as much as you possibly can in the present moment and and that which you can control yeah totally i'm absolutely i i heard a great um speech years ago from a guy who'd climbed everest who basically said you don't climb everest you get to base camp one and that's your thing and then you work out how you get to two and you never climb everest you go from point to point and certainly in chaotic moments it's like what are the things you can control and what are your small milestones that you need to get to in order to either get out of the chaos or to hit the the north star do you see that in great leaders within within facebook slash mata oh yeah definitely i mean you know having you know mark zuckerberg pivoting the whole company as he as he did last year um changing the name of the company and going this is what we've done for the last 17 years here's where the new thing is going to be this is where we're going to go that's bold that's extraordinary so few leaders do something like that i mean it's one of the reasons that i love what i do is get to learn and be inspired by him what's he like he's incredible absolutely incredible leader he sees things that others don't necessarily see and he's always right in those things in terms of what he plants in terms of where the north stars are no question and then he's really clear he gives very clear direction as to what's important what what matters where the trade-offs are going to be and what he expects of people and i think having that clarity of you know the things that we're going to measure the company against or the individual against those are really important things and you know growing up in agencies as we both did those were things that didn't really exist it was all done on touchy-feely how's that person doing and if you weren't you know if you weren't kind of in that crowd then it was hard for people
whereas working matter you've got really clear objectives as to what you need and should do and the fact that everybody has them means that we can point towards the north star and in this case the building our part in the building of the metaverse when you talk about he you know he has this very high conviction and he can see things that a lot of people can't see um and then it's proven right what are the key moments of sort of self-disruption where you think he was really right right he was exceptionally high conviction to the point that it probably didn't make sense to a lot of people but it but it was uh proven to be correct it was mobile the first yeah it was i think mobile is the first time that we that strength of leadership and that pivot really came through and in the actions that he had because lots of leaders talk stuff but then don't follow through with the action and the fact that you know back in 2012 2013 mark turned around and said you know facebook was was built late so it was built on on desktop it wasn't mobile first we need to shift the company to mobile and so the product guys were still coming in with desktop innovations and he stopped them and you know for two weeks he didn't have any meetings because nobody had any mobile applications to share with him of how this was going to work and so by being really clear as to what the expectations were people were able to move very quickly in terms of what the deliverables and we've seen it time and time again since then so you know the the shift of video the shift to stories and now the shift to reels that we're going through the short form video now is another one of these pivotal moments that we that we've seen in big companies it's hard to get i mean you know it's hard to get that agility and innovation often to keep up with a changing world for many reasons i mean people have come to work they're qualified in one thing they've done it their whole life so it's it's understandable why there might be friction and reluctancy to go from being like a you know a developer
on uh desktop to mobile like that's not what i do i don't know it so there's so much friction and resistance how does how does mark in facebook and how does the company overcome that you talked about being very very clear what does that mean in practical terms does that mean like you will be fired if you don't or does it mean no i think it's more about the culture that's created that allows people to fail um and dem and talks about that with openness and vulnerability if we try this and it didn't work but if if we're not setting ambitious goals then we then we we wouldn't not be failing we have to fail as a tech company to get to those bigger north stars but the key thing is is to make sure that we're taking the learnings from those failures and then applying it and telling the stories of those things as well so you create a safe environment for people to go well i'm going to do this thing and i'm going to go all in because this is my hypothesis of why it will work and then if it doesn't to have the self-reflection to go why didn't what can we learn what's the debriefing that needs to happen and we take learnings from so many different places you know um the military is a great one that you know when operations don't all operations good and bad they debrief directly after that's kind of a muscle that we also have as well and that just keeps making us better on that on that switch from web to mobile let's say um i'd read that market basically said i'm not taking and you kind of alluded to it a little bit there but i'm not taking any meetings until people start bringing me mobile products to look at is that is that true yeah because that for me is one of those that's a very practical thing where a leader goes i'm so high conviction that i'm no longer going to take meetings about the old thing absolutely and that's that for me is an example of of what i was talking about like in a very practical sense that's that's a very high conviction thing to do absolutely and a different example of it is um on the shift to live video
when that was first becoming a thing mark called what we call a lockdown and moved resources on the engineering side from whatever they had been working on and it's not like those things weren't important that they were working on to be able to then work on this product so convinced was he of it and when we go into lockdown it's kind of it's like hackathons it's day and night people are kind of going for it and it's you know you set a clear time period with the deliverables and uh and the expectation when the deliverables happen and when mark might present his vision for these sort of tectonic shifts that are going on in the macro tech environment that he believes are important to facebook how does he communicate that to everybody to bring them along yeah because often leaders when they when they have a vision in their mind they'll just go we're going to do this but i think bringing people along is is a process of explaining and inspiring yeah it is and you know he does a weekly q a for the whole company where the company can ask anything and it's interesting because you know we're learning as a company as well we're 17 years old some of the questions get repeated week in week out because you've got new people coming and so now we answer some of those by um by writing about it but he's very open about it and he talks about what we're learning he brings in other leaders to share how they're doing on some of the the challenges we have you know after every earnings is you know a company uh meeting where we're setting out the vision as to where we see the next year so everyone's really clear about what the north star are what the priority areas for the company are and what everybody can do to contribute their part to each one of those company priorities so this meta shift i think it was very surprising to a lot of people because it's one thing to you know add a add a new i don't know product to a company but to change the name is a very high conviction statement about the future i mean it doesn't get more high conviction than that
can you tell me about when you first heard that facebook was changing into meta your initial thoughts about that and how it was delivered to the company yeah so i found out earlier i was one of the team that obviously found out a bit earlier and i just remember just going oh my god i absolutely love this and it basically picks up on a lot of what we've just talked about i love the boldness i love the name absolutely love the name i saw that it addressed pretty quickly you know some of the challenges that we saw about the fact that as i said the company's 17 years old and started just as facebook and we had facebook as the company and we had facebook as the biggest app but by now we were all these other apps as well instagram whatsapp you know portal oculus quest etc messenger and there was a lot of confusion around it so i thought not only did it solve that but then to show us a kind of a new north star for the company we'd always been a social technology company and this is kind of a new way of how people are going to communicate live experience in a whole new way going forwards and we're right at the beginning of it right at the beginning when you first hear that though is it not slightly terrifying no it's so totally exciting and because we're now in a really interesting period which is we're old enough to have seen what you know the first iterations the first couple of iterations of what the internet were and we're now at the beginning of this third phase the metaverse web 3 all of this coming together that wouldn't have been possible before because the technology wasn't there and a lot of the technology still isn't there we're talking about something that's still going to be probably five to ten years off before that really immersive experience for many uh is realized and so to be right in at the early doors i just think is super super exciting and to be one of the companies that will hopefully help to shape that
what is the metaverse it's funny it's funny because it always almost reminds me of like early you know early web one and web two people ask the same questions over and over again and i've watched the like news anchors saying what is internet anyway and then stumbling to answer the question and i see this a lot we're all struggling in some respects to find a nice definition but in facebook's definition what is what is the meta bus yeah so it's the next iteration of the internet one that is much more immersive one that can allow you to do things that you couldn't do um perhaps in real life um or enhance that and it's going to be a continuum of things it's not going to just be one thing people often think it takes you straight to this vr immersion but actually it's a continuum of everything from how you use your phone you know it uses ar vr uses ai um and it's gonna in the same way that you know that web two has impacted so many different aspects of our lives so this will too um as well i know you must be so i'm gonna i'm gonna make a presumption i know you must be sick of of the questions around the negative consequences like with web 2 we i think we conducted an experiment about social media and social networking because the technology enabled us to so we had these you know initially we had desktop computers then we had mobile devices the internet got really good these social networks emerged from friendster to bebo to myspace to facebook and all of that and in hindsight we've now learned about the role that these tools play for better and for worse in our lives because of this new web 3 metaverse technology being perceived as being some kind of like headset you'll don and you'll go into this other planet where you'll be doing much of your social interactions that you do in real life now in this virtual world people are understandably scared they're scared because they're already seeing their kids glued to social media apps and tick tock and instagram and
messenger and snapchat or whatever and they're thinking well they're going to be wearing a headset and you know some virtual on some virtual planet you're a parent is there not and i know that you you care a lot about your own kids screen times because you've said that before it's one of the things that you're very particular on especially with the youngest of your children um do you have any concerns that we're going more and more into a digital world that's taking away the what it is to be a human so we're already in a digital world and so that that's a fact and that's a reality and how we live within that i think is the important question and our vision of the metaverse isn't one where we're gonna increase it just it's more about that the time that you spend online can be so much more enhanced but to be clear there is nothing better than sitting with you in your dining room right now that's fabulous right the fact we can have a hug and all the rest of it those things are great i never want to replicate that but if you have got the ability to be able to to step into another world to see things that perhaps most people would never be fortunate enough to see you know the barrier reef match your picture wherever those things are that's pretty extraordinary how we educate in the future you can't change what's going to happen when it comes to technology and progress but i think there is another aspect that i think that we've learned from what's happened in the last 20 years which is that technology can be used for good and bad and so let's get ahead now early doors before this thing is fully realized let's create guard rails which is something that we as a company are doing we're putting money out there working with academia working with governments etc to start to work out what the guard rails should be so it doesn't come as a surprise um that is actually something that we can build for intentionally from the get-go it's a huge opportunity as well isn't it for for society it's a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs
for for um the builders of the future it's a huge opportunity for brands yeah this is just so exciting because it is going to impact everything i think about the fact that you know my grandchildren will will finally learn in a different way than i learnt at school and the fact that they will be able to have an immersive history lesson or immersive geography lesson where they can actually go for a you know a scuba dive swim and and see what the coral reefs are like or walk down the streets of ancient jerusalem as it was then and have that brought to life i mean that looking up and looking around and and seeing what that i mean totally going to disrupt education in a positive exciting way but already seeing how it's you know impacting for good things like the the the health industry and medicine where we're seeing surgeons now already training um and doing operations in in vr and practicing which and the stats are saying that they're coming out as better surgeons than people that are just getting the odd body that they can kind of experiment and that kind of makes sense as well and then from the business side when you asked about brands the opportunity it's going to create for creators and whole new jobs that we can't even imagine yet that don't that don't exist i think the crater economy is going to be something that we're going to see a really significant uptick in more people being able to make money through creativity i think that's really exciting i get all the excitement we what we learned from the last 20 years of the internet is that there's always a cost there's always a cost when you're thinking about what those what the the downsides are what are what what are the things you're guarding against like what are the things you're thinking okay we need to make sure that we build with this in mind because i don't think we did that over the last 20 years with the internet um i don't think we built very intentionally over the last 20 years so yeah i think i think it's an important question i think about the fact that we're being very intentional with
building diversity and equity into all of our products and everything that we do so i am unbelievably proud of the fact that you go in today and you want to create your avatar and there's over a quintillion different versions of avatars that you can create i don't know if we would have had that 10 years ago the fact that you can have that can see to be very intentional about some of these things that people can represent themselves as they want to be represented i think is really important you know normally you would you know years ago you would start with you know it's a white man and then you would go from there well that's not very inviting the emojis are the same you know yeah so it's a journey right so those i think those are some of the things another one that we've been very intentional about um is about protecting physical space because you have the ability um in the metaverse to feel the social presence i mean that's one of the amazing things about it that you genuinely feel like you are in the presence of someone and hanging out with them and so being very clear and one of the things we've we've built is a personal boundary space so that people can't come into it it makes you feel like you've got about four foot around you and if they come too close to you it kind of pushes them out that's that's a pretty cool thing then of course you get the the feedback that people go well what if i want to hug someone and i'm like oh we've just built that product so you don't have to so then you have to build different things in as well because you take the feedback but it's building those things early i think makes a difference and we know now we've got enough information and data from the last 20 years to be to understand a lot of these things um mark zuckerberg has been a character that has been um the public perception of him has been written by the media often i'd say almost always unfairly in my opinion as someone that knows him what how does that make you feel because i'll be i'm just going to be completely honest look
i know a lot of people won't have sympathy for someone that's a billionaire in that whatever but i don't know how a human being deals with that amount of constant constant attack i don't know how they do it i mean keep priscilla right there and my kids right there and not turn anything on he is um [Music] he passionate believes in the vision the mission the ability for people around the world to be able to connect together for businesses small businesses the smallest of businesses to be able to have the same abilities to reach customers as the largest businesses in the world always could do and that sort of evening out of things all over the world he passionately believes in that he's driven by that and then you know i think about marcus as you said the husband the dad the son extraordinary human being and the fact that you know his pleasure to give virtually all of his money away to charity to cure diseases i mean i think it's pretty extraordinary to have made some of those decisions in the way that he has um i personally find him inspiring i find him courageous i find him kind and caring but most of all i find him inspirational do you think he's misunderstood i know him to be the man that i just described him to be and so i'll leave others to judge that interesting because i don't know i think he's misunderstood so and i think that's largely because and i know this is super unpopular but i just don't really care um i think i think it's largely because having spent 10 years working in social media in the internet building companies in the space living and working in san francisco in the valley um
when i s what i see in reality in the day-to-day work of my life then what i see in the headlines there's a huge disparity between the two you know i've been critical of all social media platforms for various reasons i've got big concerns and one of the ones more you know over the last couple of years that i've been more engaged in is just the psychological impact of comparison and what that says about ourselves and you know seeing this person on instagram and making me feel inferior about myself and my self-esteem and what we do about that um what how do you think about that as a parent and a mother when you that particular issue of like the social experiment of our context now being a billion people as opposed to just our little tribe which it might have been one day when we were most human on in africa i think um look i think for for one of the things that we've done and this is an area of course we take unbelievably seriously we start with the fact we don't want children on the platform unless they're over 13. i think that's really important and we do a lot to take kids off that are that are younger than that and we can pick that up through things like ai etc but it's also working through some of the tools that we have for kids as well i mean we have parent hubs and i think it's important that people know that these are places that parents can go to get the resources to understand how to have the conversations with their children as well we have things we work very closely with charities all over the world especially when it comes to young people we've created products that say things like take a break and that you can set time limits for yourself and give yourself a nudge we've got things like if it looks like someone's going to write something mean it gives you a nudge and go you sure you want to write that and so we're working with those charities as i say and we're doing constant research with with young people
as well to make sure that we're understanding where people are today and of course we're very clear on the fact that we we want them to come on the platform to connect with their friends to connect with you know the music and the sports and the things that that they care about but also the fact that we can provide the resources for parents as well i think that's also important do you think do you see a lot of these challenges as trade-offs as in in order to have in order for me to be able to connect with my sister who lives on the other side of the world when she's in japan living there um there are trade-offs of that because i have to on many of the social platforms i have to expand my context to a point where i am going to potentially start involving in sort of negative comparisons about myself but do you see what i mean in order to have some of the wonderful things i mean i guess this is this is life in order to have some of the wonderful things we seek as humans there's always some kind of trade-off we have to make but i think it goes back to you're in control of the things that you follow you're in control of the the people that you want to engage with on there and you can be very choiceful about that and so you know i i look at my you know if i think about my instagram or my facebook it fills me with joy because they are my friends and my family and some are all over the world now and living in different places given that i'm living in a different place and just to be able to have that community and that sense of togetherness is something i could never have had and especially through this last couple of years where we physically couldn't see people for so much of it i mean thank goodness for portal quite frankly because that became a regular thing in my family in terms of how the grandparents could connect with the kids couldn't you know connect with the different children where they were at different times that was something that was really important same with my parents my parents have a portal and um buying them an iphone and then being able to use whatsapp
uh was completely changed our family you've got a family group yes we have all right so for one christmas what's it called bartlett's right one christmas i bought my dad an iphone and up until that point he he didn't have facebook or anything so him getting facebook was the first time he started to connect with the kids after they'd all gone to university and then when i bought him an iphone then i bought my mum and iphone the following christmas um that's when they really stayed in touch and then they got a portal and then that's when things really changed and it it has had a huge impact on us because my parents live you know several hours away their kids live all around in every corner of the world so that has brought our family a lot closer um and also there's been a big conversation recently which is i've been heavily inspired by to be involved in which is about personalized advertising being someone who now is on the receiving end of a lot of business pitches over the last two years i've had i think the biggest single issue that small businesses have said to me that is affecting their business i'll say befall of the supply chain inflation stuff has been the change to um the personalized advertising problem products on facebook i my personalized advertising um now works is less effective and harder to track the attribution and the return i'm getting on on my spend and a lot of this is because of changes that have happened to ios what's your what are you seeing what are you hearing what is your take on that yeah so you're absolutely right the changes that apple made in terms of what they allowed to happen really impacted small businesses and that was something we were very vocal about and something that we talked about and it was almost as though there was this thing that you couldn't have personalized advertising and privacy you absolutely can and it was almost as though personalized advertising isn't a
good thing it's a fantastic thing you know i think about you know my own personal feeds the fact that i get to discover brands and businesses that i would never have known about um that's a really good thing because it's good for the business because you're finding the new customers it's good for the customer because you're finding new things as well and it's good for the other people that never see those ads because they never should see them because they're not relevant to them um i saw recently a uh i don't know you are a dog lover aren't you i've got it of course i am i knew you were so there's a dog hotel that you can go to and dorset now that's a great ad if you want to send your dog to gonna have a kind of a staycation and go and get made up and it's run by a wonderful woman who has foster children as well and they are all working together running this business that advertises on solely on facebook i believe and the business has grown extraordinarily that they now employ seven more people as a result of it now there is no point advertising that to a cat lover or to somebody that doesn't have a pet that's pointless but it's that personalization that that works and that's one of the things that i think has been so fantastic um about the meta platforms is that it has allowed small businesses as well as large but really significantly small businesses to be able to reach customers that perhaps might not have known about those products not necessarily just in the cities that they live in but actually in other countries around the world as well where people want those products and we're constantly refining you know and and improving the attribution and the measurement that you that you just talked about and we're seeing some really good results accordingly hill our sponsor here on the table is a prime example of that tell us about that steve i don't know what any opportunity to but i have to say their sponsors i'll get destroyed by the asa but um they they're a prime example of that their business heavily um grew off of personalized advertising finding people that i really really care about being
you know having a nutritionally complete diet and that we're looking for let me just read off the back we're looking for this kind of product that is plant-based that is um gives you your protein and all of those things and they went from being a uk startup to the fastest growing e-commerce company internationally according to the sunday times um very much aided by personalized advertising on social media and facebook in particular um and even they have seen the uh the negative consequence of the changes that have happened it's really really startling because it's a one-sided narrative i think in the in the the press largely but when you when you are someone like me who spent who is pitched thousands of times a month by small businesses and you ask them the question what is the thing you're struggling with now and it's the same answer every time over the last two years that's when i realized that that there was a problem here and that there was a second narrative and a conversation we needed to be having i want to get some advice from you about work i know most people listening to this will really be um in all of you the career you've had and and trying to take some actionable um more actionable advice from this conversation as to as to how they can have a similar career they how they can be successful in whatever endeavor they're pursuing when i was thinking about some of the advice you've given previously one of the points you'd said is about really understanding your core strength and your core skills why does that matter and how does one do that and what does it mean to understand your core skills and strengths i think it's about understanding what what you enjoy i think it starts there and then whether you're playing what you're intrinsically good at in with those areas as well because actually sometimes people are good at things but don't enjoy it and so ultimately that will not make you as fulfilled or as happy as you as you can be
often you're not the best judge of yourself and so finding people around you either family and friends but actually also work colleagues that can start to say what is it about me that's good what is it about me that maybe isn't so good help me help me understand those things better and then you start to create a stronger version of yourself or vision of yourself that you can then you can work through i've always through my career had um my own sort of board of advisors it's an informal thing um when i'm doing different things where i need a different point of view or perspective i'll put people around me and ask them for advice mentors sponsors you know fashionable words that get used but it's really people that perhaps are a couple of years ahead of you or older that kind of done these things before to to learn from and to be inspired by and to change them around as well i think those things those things help what are your core skills and strengths um others will say um but i think it's around that i start that i lead with empathy and that i'm it really matters to me to understand who the people are that are that i'm working with and what motivates them and and what doesn't and to have a different style that can work with the with each of them to motivate them to be the very best that they can be i'm always looking to understand that i think i set pretty clear deliverables and expectations and i really spend the time with with my core team i absolutely believe in the frequency of a regular one-to-one meeting where we can learn you know to get those constant updates where i can give advice but i've always got the clear north star i've always got written what i think the deliverables will be i'm not afraid to pivot and to change my mind if that i see evidence and data there's a poster at wall data wins arguments i like that because i think it's it's true that you can really look at
something and know and then if something isn't going well to stop it and to have the humility to say we tried something it didn't work and then to be able to to move forwards and to role model that as well and not to be afraid to say i did that it didn't go so well let's now go and do let's go and do something else there's a few of the things others will add other things i'm sure also you know to have some fun along the way i think that's really important i think when i first started work there was this thing about works really serious and it is serious and it matters but you spend your most amount of time with the people that you work with and one of my other favorite posters is that meetings are made for laughter and so sometimes if you can just take the tension out and just break the break it a little bit i think that's something that that's important as well i've heard you um give the advice that it's important to bring your whole self to work as well um i think that is some type that is also kind of counter narrative in the sense that people think they should just bring their professional self to work or their boss self to work why is it important to bring your whole self to work because if you're trying to be you know other things you'll just not do a very good job and if people don't know what else is going on in your life i mean look at all the things that we've talked about today people didn't know i had you know i was dealing with health issues at different times and maybe my performance wasn't so good at that time then i'm going to be judged unfairly for where i am in that time as opposed to let's just have an honest conversation i'm old enough now i'm 50 but i remember some of the days of the women that came before that would leave a handbag and a coat on the back of a chair to pretend they were still in the office when actually they popped out to go and pick up the children or do something but was scared to show that because it was a sign of weakness if you were actually being a mom i mean it sounds ridiculous but there are still companies where that sort of behavior is happening and so the fact that we can be in 2022 and it's still taboo to talk about a a disease that you have or it still can be in certain countries taboo
to talk about the fact that maybe your parent isn't well or your child isn't i mean that's crazy so allowing the space and the culture within companies to to be who you are and to know the things that matter to you ultimately allows people to be higher performers which ultimately means that they'll do better in their jobs and they'll be happier in their lives and do you think that's a there's a real responsibility for the leaders at the top of the organization to lead by example yeah i i absolutely do and again here's where the data wins arguments because if you have more diverse boards at the tops of companies you have more successful companies and i do think there's an element where you bring where you don't have groupthink and you have different people around the table it brings in some of these these types of ways of being and ways that form a culture culture is formed top down and bottom up but so much of it is from the cues of the leaders at the top as well so showing that vulnerability being so open um bringing your whole self allows other people to do so as well and your career is um real a real testament to this next piece of advice which is about asking for what you want people don't do that either because people think they should take what they're given but having the i don't want to use the word courage but because it doesn't seem like quite the right word but asking for what you want is scary for a lot of people and there's a lot of threat and risk associated with that how has that been important in your career yeah i think it is but i think it's also about doing your homework knowing what knowing what matters to you knowing what's important questioning if these are the things that matter to you and these are the opportunities you want this is this pay rise that you think you should have i mean my first couple of pay rises i just said thanks that's great i mean that's terrible right i had absolutely no idea of of what my own
worth was and so i just said thank you um i never went in in those early pay rise conversations once a year reviews to think about was i happy on the accounts that i was on i just said thanks i would not give that advice to anybody i just wouldn't i think that's a terrible thing to do i think you should know those things and then the onus is on you to make sure you do their homework on your career because nobody else is going to do that and also to not assume that people know what you want either because sometimes you do know what you want and you're sat there going i hope they're going to suggest it and not to say it people don't do that because they are scared and again i go what's the worst that can happen you can ask for it and they'll say no and then you've got a judgment call do i want to stay in a place that said no or are they giving me a trajectory for what i need to do in order to get there or actually is this a wake-up call to say actually maybe i should look at something different what do you wish you'd said in those price conversations not just thank you but um i've been out and i've looked at the market and i understand now that my value is this and these are all the things that i've done that i'm really proud of and that i've been successful and these were the kpis that i think that you set me and thus this is what the equation should be and then probably there'd be a bit of a negotiation but at least i'd be in with the start right whereas i had and i was just like thanks what if your boss turns around and goes you're out of your mind get out of here nicola then i think you have to go why do you think that because if you have the data to say well other places don't feel that and here's all the reasons why i feel passionate and proud of what i'm doing show me the path that gets me there and so if it's a yearly pay conversation maybe look to see if you could do something in six months or set out other criteria in terms of what matters and what's important a quote from you the times i've grown the most have been the times where i felt most nervous the
times that i thought i was i wasn't going to be able to do it those growth moments throughout your career where you felt most nervous yeah i think well we've talked about them the first each of the firsts of the jobs i think were definitely um another one was when i took on my first position if you like in the industry which was when i was asked to be the president of wackol in the uk which is the women in advertising communications of london club it's a 100 year old networking club for women in the in the industry that's gone through its own metamorphosis and so suddenly i'd gone from being nicola in um you know just in an agency to having this position across the industry to inspire women to bring women together and to chart what it means to be part of a a women's club in this era and what needs there might be and so yeah i practiced i prepped i really thought long and hard a lot of the things that we talked about i went and met all the past presidents i got the advice from them as to what they wanted i talked to existing members what they wanted so i really did my homework so that when i came to that moment of setting out my vision for for the year um as to what i was going to do i felt prepped i was still nervous it's good to have those nerves right but yeah do the prep and i think it helps those nerves a lot of people they tell themselves a story about those navs the story being i'm an imposter and i imposter syndrome seems to be such a frequently asked question of me and from this audience is like how do you deal with that people think i think they think that impos that feeling of nerves which is that i think that they're reading into feeling like an imposter is signed to retreat and to get back into comfort get back into certainty no for me it's it's a rush of adrenaline it's the it's the moment before you do something to go all right you've done the prep you've got this it's good just to kind of
get ready it's like a getting ready moment and then you go and then it kind of helps it helps you go there because i think if perhaps it doesn't happen then maybe you're not going to be on your a-game and maybe that's not a good thing do you sleep with the phone by the bed um in and out is the honest answer in and out so i was really good when the kids were younger about putting it um into into the hallway and as i've started to travel more it is a bit too near if i'm honest um because i'm doing that excuse of it serves as my alarm clock because i heard you say that you keep you advised people to keep a physical alarm clock yeah even though they made them which we have yes no we've got them in certainly at home we've got them but if i'm on the road yeah it's definitely next to me i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast the tectonic plates in which we build our business can shift overnight and with the world we live in getting increasingly more digital it's never been more important to be connected and that's why i've partnered with vodafone business they offer reliable and critical connectivity to run your business their network is even used by core services such as the police and the nhs and the ambulance service because it's unbelievable their broadband comes with a minimum guaranteed speed as well which is something i think i wish i'd had throughout my career so you're never lagging behind and on top of this they give you all of that sort of extensive business expertise you need when you need it to learn more about how to find the right type of connectivity tailored for your small business along with free resources insights and one-on-one advice from digital advisors search v-hub by vodafone and you know this um this book i have here make it work lessons from life in business she means business now she means business is a joint initiative between facebook and the federation of small businesses and the british chamber of commerce to encourage uh female entrepreneurship why is that so important to you so she means business is something that we set up in 2016 in the uk but it's
actually now something that runs all around the world and it's a a matter-enabled program which is to basically encourage more women to set up businesses because women actually set up businesses at half the rate that men do and so in the last five six years we've now trained over a million and a half women equipping them with digital skills giving them new networks to be able to get out there and to feel confident in setting up their businesses the reason this matters is i mean there's so many reasons it's important to me because you know being a mum of a girl as well as three boys i want gabby to have exactly the same opportunities as you know my boys do and so much of society has said that can't be so whether it comes to the allocation of funding for businesses getting set up whereas you look for role models out there and so this book we created was deliberately designed for people younger in career to be able to look up because the importance of relatable role models is so so important if you can see someone just above you that's done it then it will give you the inspiration to think well maybe i could do something like that too and so this book brings together very successful business leaders but also women that are just starting out with with new businesses as well the likes that have come from instagram the creators like you know grace beverly who i you know i know you know and have and have interviewed so that they can see that it could be possible for them to do so and they share their advice they share their top tips they share the things they wish they'd have known in order to inspire the the next generation and this is just not a nice thing to do this is something alison rose who is the ceo of nat west bank she did something called the rose review and she said that if women were to set up businesses at the rate that men are setting them up it would add 250 billion pounds to the economy so we need these women we need these women to go out and set up businesses and honestly it's one of the the best things that i get to do in my
job is to go meet these women that have set up businesses and have been empowered because of because of our platforms what are the the um barriers in their way um for to to close the gap on that disparity and i'm thinking of this also from the context as a male employer what what what how can i be more of an ally and supportive to my colleagues who are women who might be a victim at certain times to like unconscious biases like what can i do you can call it out i mean one of the things that we see more than anything around around a table is look for the woman who's not speaking i mean sometimes they even physically do it they don't take the seat at the table sheryl sandberg talks about this you know on the lean in it's like first of all make sure you're actually sat round the table don't take one of the seats that are at the back of the room then if you're not hearing from different people this was really noticeable through the pandemic on zoom the people that just sat there and were quiet i think that the onus actually should be on the leader to say i'd love to hear your point of view on that what do you think and invite them into the conversation i think having more senior women in a company tell their story and make an intentional space for the younger women in in korea to be able to hear those are the things that i think are also important and then for you to say well you didn't get it right where you might have had moments where you had your own learning moment that you're not afraid to to share and give resources give resources i mean whackle does an amazing amazing training day every year where you come and you just listen and you laugh and you cry and you're inspired by the women that are basically sharing their stories in the research um i read that you'd found that women's confidence falls between their late 20s and their 30s pretty significantly why is that
yeah there's there's a lot of things that are going on um at that time and it goes back to it's a time where a lot of women drop out it happens to do with um having babies maternity etc and again as an employer having strong policies in this area you create the most loyal of you know of talent that wants to come back if they feel that they've been part of it i've promoted women than when they've been on maternity leave on a regular basis because they think if you've got top talent just because they're out for a few months doesn't mean that they shouldn't be rewarded for what's gone on before so having those behaviors that people see but it's actually not just about the women as well it's about the men if you've got paternity policies i remember a conversation i had with with one of my senior leaders where he hadn't taken his paternity leave and i said to him if you don't take your leave none of the men that work for you will be able to do that he really didn't want to do it i sort of had to force him and he took his time i took a couple of months and he came back after he said thank you he said if you hadn't said that to me i wouldn't have done it and honestly it was the very best thing i could have done for me and my family and he said i'm going to talk about that as a learning moment for himself but also to give you know the guys a moment ago you're not going to get fired if you go on paternity leave that's going to be okay on that point of parenting one of the things that i i'm definitely um guilty of on this podcast is is asking that question about balance about work-life balance and i've heard you talk about this there's when i ask that question there's definitely a presumption that things must be out of balance and i've heard you say that that's not a great question to ask so i thought okay i'll stop asking that question but you've asked it now because you've raised it i watched the video upstairs of you saying that i thought [ __ ] i've i've um i've been asking everybody that question about balance why is that such a bad question to be asking
it's a bad question to ask because it's normally only asked to women yeah my husband who also has four children and a big job has never been asked that question ever and he does conferences and podcasts and all the rest of it so it's a woman's question and the assumption behind and the bias is that if i have a job then i must be a bad mom that's really and so even the simplest of things like that is a bias that we have to call out because it just puts another level of guilt onto the woman that she doesn't need to have now if you say how you know you can ask the question in a different way top tips for these things etc um and in many ways that's been the nature of the whole of this conversation but it's that one just it just hurts me i i i raise it because i have to and i remember one of my guests made a very similar point and they said no one's ever asked joe rick joe wicks who's got i think he's got three kids now he's good friend of mine three kids i think he's got four on the way um how he does it how'd you do it all joe how'd you do it all right no one's ever asked him that and it's completely true it was a real moment for me like [ __ ] that's so true there's a real uh i don't know there's a real prejudice i guess there there's a real assumption there which is really really unhelpful and it's a sign of a broader kind of bias that exists in our society well you know when you look you look forward at the next chapter of your own life there's so much change going on you're such an innately curious person what do you foresee what what are you i know i hate to assume that people can configure it all out in um in advance but what kind what do you see in the next chapter of your own life so well i'll start with the deeply personal um which is that i hope that i will be blessed to be lucky enough to to be a grandma at some point and i'm saying now kids if you're listening no pressure get there in your own time but family is really important to me and i think there is no one richer than someone that has a multi-generational
family so i hope that i will be blessed i hope that through the work of the foundation that we've created to find a cure for follicular lymphoma that we will find cure cures in my lifetime um that matters hugely um to me and then i i look forward to you too you and i doing another one of these in the future where we're doing it in the metaverse from different parts of the world and we're doing things together that we never dreamed that we might be able to with all the foresight that we have with the knowledge and intelligence and the awareness of what we see that actually will be even more extraordinary when this fully realized version is built and i know you're going to be in there and i know you're going to have a world that's going to be all singing and all dancing you'll have your dining room in there yeah i'm looking forward to visiting if you'll have me of course i'll have you thank you we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks the next next guest i know i'm nervous about this sometimes we have some some very easy questions so um is there something you associate with a key moment of hardship in your life a certain song playlist smell food that takes you back to that moment it's a strange one actually it's a pair of soft tracksuit bottoms of all things because to have a pet scan you need comfy clothing and you need things without um metal in it and i didn't have a pair of sweatpants that had that and so i had to actually go and buy some on the day before on that sunday before the monday and so whenever i see them and they're in the bottom of the wardrobe it does just take me back to that moment and so yeah who'd have thought pair of
sweatpants do you keep them in the wardrobe yeah they are there i didn't throw them away it's quite weird that i haven't thrown them away right you've ever considered throwing them away no hasn't occurred to me maybe i'm gonna go home now and actually chuck them in the bin i'll leave that choice to you nicola thank you so much for your time i know how important that is um to everybody but especially someone who's who's so incredibly successful in is is is has this huge company to to to drive forward thank you so much for your honesty your wisdom your vulnerability all of it is so incredibly important and the the work that it does for the listener um the the value that it brings to the listener the value that it brings to to me as someone that gets to interviewing you and pick your brain is is hard to quantify you are you are i mean you are just a a one-of-a-kind inspiration to so many i know you're a huge inspiration to gabby who is upstairs because i've heard i've had that talked about as well and to so many others i actually messaged my team beforehand and said and i've never done this before i said nikola's coming you all need to make sure you hear this so i'm sure they're riddled up and down this building on all the screens we have up and down this building watching and i've never done that before i said this i think the quote was um you'll never be able to get um this kind of um business advice leadership experience regardless of what you paid for it so make sure you're all tuned into this one and i really really mean that you're you're a tremendous inspiration for so many reasons and you buck so many important narratives that have to be booked you buck so many narratives that have to be booked and one of them is just your style you know this this idea that you've you've led with empathy and empathy can take us to the top is i think an important message to hear because sometimes we we think that we've gotta be a little bit more nefarious in order to climb in our careers and you're a shining example that that is not true so thank you for the inspiration thank you for your time thank you for your openness and thank you for being here
today thank you for having me um it's been it's been emotional i have to say thank you thank you as you might know crafted one of the sponsors of this podcast and crafted are a jewelry brand and they make really meaningful pieces of jewelry and this piece by crafted when i put it on for me it represents courage it represents ambition it represents being calm and loving and respectful and nurturing while also being the antithesis of that seemingly the antithesis of that which is um sometimes a little bit aggressive with my goals and determined and courageous and brave the really wonderful thing about crafty jewellery is it's super affordable it looks amazing the pieces hold tremendous meaning and they are really well made [Music] [Music] you