CONFERENCE SPEAKERS
£5K TO £10K
AFTER DINNER SPEAKERS
£5K TO £10K
"Very relevant, provocative and entertaining"
Morgan Stanley
YOUR FEEDBACK
"The key messages about working together and teamwork really came through."
VT Group
TOPICS
Change Management, Corporate Turnaround, HR & Training, Branding & Reputation
SPEECH TITLES
Culture Change
Spreading the Passion
BIOGRAPHY
Ellis Watson is Managing Director of Newspapers at the Scottish media group, DC Thomson. He was previously CEO of Syco Entertainment, the joint venture between Simon Cowell and Sony, responsible for global development, formats and commercial strategy.
The Syco appointment followed spells on the board of Menzies and FirstGroup - the world's biggest privately owned public transport operator, with brands from First Great Western to America's Greyhound Bus network. Before that he was in charge of five national and 240 regional titles as MD of Mirror Group Newspapers.
Ellis' first break came as a very young Marketing Director at the Sun and News of the World, reporting directly to Rupert Murdoch. He helped them reverse the decline in sales and launched numerous cutting edge initiatives, including Books for Schools. He also conceived CurrantBun, before moving into TV as head of Celador International - where he licensed Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to 100 countries and oversaw no less than 130 separate consumer products.
In presentations Ellis argues that a significant external shock like recession can be a springboard for positive internal change. He shows how to inspire passion even when under pressure, and how to progress from mission statements to true company culture - where quality, integrity and diversity are all properly harnessed.
Ellis is known as one of the most inspiring, instinctive and intelligent speakers in Britain. He's also enormously entertaining. He might well reveal what it was like to work for the idiosyncratic Murdoch - or how the Colombian Minister of Information insisted on hosting 'Millionaire' himself, giving glamorous female contestants a helping hand.
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Q&A
JLA: Are there any positives to be taken from the recession?
EW: Many companies are responding to recession like Chicken Licken, and totally missing the opportunity to radically overhaul the focus of their team. Any significant external shock can be used as a springboard for internal change that's staggeringly positive. Give me a room full of despondent executives in a downturn for an hour and I'll turn them into a bunch of change-hungry, tenacious go-getters because of the opportunities of the economic change.
JLA: What lessons can a large organisation learn from entrepreneurs and small businesses?
EW: Getting big companies to be bigger is hard, as the people running them often have forgotten - or weren't part of - the entrepreneurial aggression that made them big in the first place. Getting large organisations to be as hungry and aggressive as a small one is a cultural challenge - it must force executives to think outside their big resources, comfy positions and self-important success. If left unchecked, big organisations become lazy and complacent - get it right, and they can make a powerful cocktail from brilliant scale & assets that smaller competitors can't harness and a real drive to make them work damn hard.
JLA: How do you inspire trust, build trust and foster ambition?
EW: Talent can't sit behind boardroom doors and deep carpets - it has to rush through its organisation infecting their passion and drive across the whole company.