Ep:#80 Sarah Gillard and the role of business to shape our future
What is the role of business in society? How can people’s perception with that then impact their experience at work? How does it then impact how a business shows up when it relates to all of its stakeholders and its long-term success? Today we do a deep dive into all of this with Sarah Gillard, using examples from her 27-year career in fast-paced commercial environments at some of the UK’s largest retail companies. In this milestone episode, Sarah Gillard talks about her time as Director of Purpose and Special Projects at the John Lewis Partnership where she was responsible for re-articulating and embedding the purpose of John Lewis so that it continues to be a source of inspiration, innovation, and strategic differentiation. Sarah compares her time working with the Arcadia group, a UK retail network with a very intense focus on short-term shareholder profit, against her time with the John Lewis Partnership, which is the UK’s largest co-owned business. John Lewis has 70,000 people working for the company, and everyone are co-owners. We talk about how these different approaches to doing business then impact the experience inside an organisation and what that does to people, strategy and relationships with supplies and customers. We hear how John Lewis was a massive social experiment to see what happens when a business sees its role in society differently. And we hear about the partnership’s journey over the past 100 years. We then talk about Sarah’s current role as CEO of Blueprint for Better Business, a charity that helps businesses to be inspired and guided by a purpose that benefits society and respects people and planet. How does an organisation move from thinking of itself as a profit maximising machine to thinking of itself as a human system in service of society? And how does that transition happen? Knowing that this is such a decisive decade, and that the role that business needs to play now is more important than ever to shape our future, we hear about how she is working with businesses to be a part of the solution. Sarah leaves us with two beautiful quotes which sum up this episode: Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea”. Arthur Ashe: “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” If you want to better understand the return on being more human, this episode is a must listen. So throw on those running shoes, or grab that favourite beverage, and enjoy this conversation with Sarah. And please don’t forget to let us know what you think of this episode, leave a review and subscribe. If you would like to be reminded of future podcasts and other inspiring stories from TIE, join our newsletter here. If you would like to pre-order my book Return on Humanity: Leadership lessons from all corners of the earth, you can do that here.