Mark Aitchison I Pioneering at Frontier Agriculture

…who runs Frontier Agriculture, a business he founded in 2005, whose customers are predominantly farmers. Originally an agronomist, advising farmers how to grow, learning how they think, he then joined Cargill. They’re a trading not a customer business, but a few years in, Mark saw an opportunity to make their Agri Division number 1 by focusing on customers and service, and by being bold, going out on his own with their backing. After a good first few years, it became the platform to buy ABF’s grain business – great on the ground, not well managed – merging Allied Grain with Cargill Grain and creating Frontier. Over time, new services have been developed, especially in digital and analytics, but what matters most is being seen as expert, professional and customer focussed – you want farmers to say you’re not the cheapest but you are the best at what you do for them. It’s now a service business whose customers are 10,000 farmers and 300 grain buyers, and the culture is crucial. The best service comes from good people given great training and systems, who care about the company they work for and the service they provide. Lorries are symbolic – they are clean and the drivers are helpful and proud, acting as diplomats, driving carefully, efficiently and safely. When farmers talk about what they appreciate, it goes well beyond financials. Innovation has been continual, with forward pricing provided to farmers every day and with support to help them steer decisions well through ups and downs. It can be tough – there are times when the data has bad news on crop quality for example, but it’s managed with good, prompt communication and constantly improving data as a basis to work from, always aiming to help farmers succeed, on their side. The latest initiative is a new challenger bank for UK agriculture, Oxbury, set up in 2020 building on authentic relationships with farmers and becoming the fastest new business to reach breakeven in ABF’s history.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-aitchison-57100030/

Sigrid Van Den Houte I Pioneered at leading Belgian broadband provider Telenet

…who in 2010 played a leading role in launching a whole new pioneering approach to the mobile market. Seeing customers being confused by and lacking trust in the current leaders, Telenet introduced an entirely contract-free and so tie-in-free offer for all, based on just two price points rather than the more usual 25 or so. They were called King and Kong. Share went from the 2.5% achieved 2 years after original market entry to 18% in just 6 months, when the established competitors all decided they had to copy. Telenet got to 23% share by 2013 and applied the approach back to broadband, taking away contracts and naming the two plans Whop and Whoppa in a similarly pioneering spirit. Sigrid was most recently Chief Customer Officer at Virgin Media O2.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sigrid-van-den-houte-6401a9a/

Judith Hackitt | Pioneered through the Grenfell Building Safety Review

…who pioneered through leading the review into building safety that followed the Grenfell Tower fire disaster. The approach she took was big picture, looking outside-in, not in this case requiring insight to understand the problem to solve for the people the industry is there to serve. That part is obvious – people expect to be safe in their homes. But being highly insightful in seeing that a new and better response was required from the collection of organisations and bodies and individuals involved, and that this would be achieved by seeing them together, as a system. What is boldly pioneering compared with what we commonly do, is avoiding the simple fix. There was huge political pressure on Judith to ban building cladding. But she knew that would not solve the problem. It would be a temporary measure, a short term, inside-out response satisfying the organisations involved but not solving the problem for the people buildings are for. The inconvenient truth was that the culture of building needed to change, and the system of working followed by all involved needed to change. It had to become motivated by fitness for purpose, including safety, and not the lowest short-term cost. This is a familiar battleground for customer-led thinking, and with the pain of the fire creating the will for serious change, she eventually won out. Her recommendations have been described as radical and demanding, and they have been implemented, and continue to be overseen, across the construction industry, clients, investors and government. For Judith, this systems approach was not new – she was originally a Chemical Engineer and this is how they see their world, and then she Chaired the Health and Safety Executive for a number of years, with a systems approach being crucial whenever there are issues with making work safer.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/judith-hackitt-17850432/

Chris Moss | Pioneered at Virgin Atlantic, Orange, and 118 188

Chris Moss

…who has pioneered repeatedly and in high profile ways. The first big one was as Marketing Director at Virgin Atlantic from their very earliest days in 1985 through to 1993, building an iconic, much loved challenger airline brand from the unlikely origins of a record company, gathering scale, upsetting BA, finding ways to make the experience of flying exceptional while still being practical enough to get ideas off the ground. There was substance at the heart of it – creating ice cream moments mid-film, being first to instal seat-back TV and inventing Premium Economy. He did plenty else at Virgin with Richard Branson, working on their various stunts and record-breaking escapades. Next came Orange from the end of 1993 and this included coming up with the brand name, VERY different to the techy incumbents at Vodafone and Cellnet, and only allowed because, while being named after a colour was against the rules, being named after a fruit was not. Again, there was customer pioneering substance behind the attention-grabbing exterior – customer service used caller ID and answered the calls ‘welcome Mr Moss…’, shocking for many people. At the time (the mid 90’s) Vodafone and Cellnet (as was) charged £25.00 per month for line rental and all calls were extra. Orange charged the same £25.00 but included 60 mins talk time, encouraging people to talk more. When calling, Vodafone and Cellnet rounded up calls to the nearest minute. So if you just said ‘I’m at the train station...’ they charged you for 1 min, because of legacy billing issues in their original business. Orange charged by the second so you paid for what you said. As Chris says, you wouldn’t let the petrol station charge you to the nearest gallon… Most companies charged extra for voicemail. Orange realised voicemail generated more returned calls and greater trust, so included it for free. Al this meant Orange had more loyal customers, spending more on the service, churning churned less. Hence their sale (via Mannesmann and Vodafone) to France Telecom for more than double T-Mobile’s price at $47bn. The third big maverick move was after the auction to outsource directory enquiries, with Chris CEO for one of the bidders, a business called INFONXX. The number they were allocated was not to his liking, so he immediately bid a few million to get 118 118 which he knew was the one to have. It was willingly sold, and the moustachioed runners appeared as a memorable chapter of the noughties while the business took more than 50% of BT’s share. Again it was based on pioneering in the sector. They knew before the old 192 service closed down what the most popular numbers requested were and they realised if we they could more fully solve callers’ problems, saving them time and effort while making the calls longer, they would get happier and more valuable customers. National Rail enquiries was the number most requested, so by offering train times they rapidly became a one-stop shop. People called to find phone numbers, often so they could then make another call to get addresses and post codes. So 118 118 offered post codes and addresses and again it was a hit. Then there was the offer to directly connect you on that call, from an insight that most people were calling from a mobile, maybe driving, so this was a simple hands free option while generating higher revenue too,

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismoss007/

Vernon Everitt | Pioneered at Transport for London

…one of the leaders of Transport for London over the last 14 years as they went on a classic customer pioneering journey against a competitor in the shape of the car. They have made the whole of London’s public transport and active travel network more attractive to Londoners by making it feel safe and attractive, easier to use and to navigate, responsive to issues and easy to pay for in ways that are trusted. He also pioneered in the sharing of open data with developers, leading to a host of successful apps such as Citymapper that make the transport system yet more user-friendly. Building on TfL's success, Vernon is now working with Andy Burnham to integrate transport in Greater Manchester too.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vernon-everitt-16aa2811b/

Justine Roberts | Pioneering at Mumsnet

…who set up Mumsnet in 2000 in response to an extremely frustrating holiday as a parent and seeing an unmet need for better sharing of honest advice. She created the community literally from nothing and then grew it after the internet bubble burst with almost no resources. But as a result she learned a great deal about how to make the idea for real – for example making it work genuinely well for all involved even when emotions run high. It took off to the extent it started influencing general elections, but perhaps the biggest challenge and achievement has been making it sustainable commercially without compromising on the customer-led ethos that keeps people happily using and trusting the brand, an outcome requiring yet more innovation.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/justine-roberts-cbe-0211a914/

Ashley Schofield | Pioneering at giffgaff

…CMO then CEO at giffgaff, a business conceived 12 years ago with the aim of seeing whether a mobile network inspired by social media and digital collaboration could create value in new and better ways for a segment of the market. The approach has been very human, with a different set of beliefs about customers creating a sense of ownership born out of mutuality – members helping other members and so saving on the costs of service, their commitment to the company leading to members finding new ones by word of mouth, saving yet more. The mutual principles are central to the way the business is run with member consultation on even the trickiest issues such as price rises. They underpin what is still a successful growth story and at the end of 2021 giffgaff had 3.7m customers and revenue of over £500m.

Read his Pioneer interview here

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ash-schofield-5b104b64/

Paul Stephenson | Pioneered with Mars

…who has pioneered not only with human customers but also with animals as consumers. He worked at Mars for 20 years, leading innovation in pet care internationally and on chocolate globally. Examples include the creation of a whole new category of product that helps dogs have better smelling breath and healthier mouths. This is Dentastix, and it was deep care of the pets wellbeing that led to the identification of the problem, then exploration of the cause with dogs, and the creation of a solution that would delight both the pet and their owner.  Details matter – for Dentastix to perform its health enhancement role a new daily routine needs to be established.  Using packaging cues (they were always sold in sevens) and making the chew ultra-tasty for the dog resulted in a new daily connection moment between pets and their owners. Serious success followed, for Mars with a business worth several hundred million dollars within 10 years, and more broadly with the creation of a new category, the sign of a genuine piece of pioneering that others copy.

In Chocolate one of the challenges tackled was to take the category into India and Africa, which, despite producing 70% of the world’s cocoa, consumes only a tiny proportion of the end product. Part of the challenge is not with consumers but with the retail chain to reach them, with high temperatures and scarce refrigeration making it impossible to get good quality chocolate to the people who might enjoy it. The team developed a chocolate with a higher melting point plus a very low-cost refrigerator that would maintain chocolate at around 20°C, and thought they’d cracked it. But as it started to be rolled out, there were unexpected quality issues of melted product. It took some outside-in exploration to serendipitously uncover what had gone wrong. By happening to be at a small shop when the owner closed it for the day, a Mars team member saw them switch all the power off as they left, to save on their bills. In so doing, they switched off the Mars fridge and the temperature soared overnight. It was enough to guide the adjustment of the design so it could maintain a low enough temperature for long enough when not connected to power. Mars today has a thriving portfolio of chocolate brands in India, and is expanding its footprint in Africa.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-h-stephenson/

Ashok Gupta | Pioneered with the UK Pension System

…who has led policy reviews using systems thinking to get whole systems to operate in ways that are customer-led, producing good results for the people they serve. One example was a review on behalf of government into the defined benefit pension system, showing for example how they could often have a negative effect on people in other parts of the wider pension and economic system. As Chair of Financial Systems Thinking Innovation Centre (Finstic), he encourages this approach to thinking. He is also a non-exec, working only with customer orientated organisations, for example being Chair at eValue, a fast-growing digital financial advice and planning company.

Read his Pioneer interview here

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashok-gupta-2142a8/

Joe Ferry | Pioneered with Virgin Atlantic

...who was in charge of design at Virgin Atlantic as the pioneering brand first became established as an iconoclastic antidote to BA and to the conventional flag carrier airlines assumptions of what a flight entailed. Creating joy through unique inflight entertainment and quirky onboard products including adding a rubber duck to the washbag. More substantially they innovated, reinventing business class as Upper Class, challenging every preconception of the flying customer journey to create seamless airport experiences in their ‘Clubhouses’ and onboard interiors complete with a bar, also creating a seat that converted into a truly flat bed, all with direct aisle access which was assumed to be an impossible challenge.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeferrydesign/

Clare Richmond | Pioneered with The Crouch End Project

Who took on the challenge to reinvigorate a declining local high street, without any budget, resource,  experience or even permission.

She initially thought the challenge was for better marketing, but it became clear it was more about mindset. She started creating a team from the local community’s independent businesses, encouraging them to work on what they could achieve together despite sophisticated competition and limited resources.  It turned out those limitations were an inspiration.  They re-thought the idea of high street value revealing a new opportunity - to meet the needs of the community rather than simply the customer.  They got into action, and an open evening welcoming locals into shops for a drink and a chat worked brilliantly, building confidence and capacity within the whole community to do more, and in the end to better meet their own needs.  The results transformed Clare’s view on leadership, seeing the advantages of having less but with a strongly felt reason to do something leading to collaboration and innovation.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarerichmond/

Peter Duffy | Pioneered at easyjet, Just Eat and the Moneysupermarket Group

…Chief Commercial Officer and a crucial member of the easyJet leadership team from 2010 to 2017, pioneering for customers in the discount airline sector by dealing with huge pain points like unallocated seating and adding appeal through live flight trackers and premium food and beverage, all breaking industry norms. He moved to Just Eat as CMO then CEO, learning more about the role of data-led customer centricity. He is now Moneysupermarket Group CEO, on a similar journey to put digital and data more effectively at the heart of a modernised customer-led business..

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-duffy-36a36a22/

Steven Roberts | Pioneered at Barclays, with Digital Eagles and their Eagle Labs

…who created Digital Eagles by accident, having bought 10,000 i-Pads that it turned out few colleagues wanted to use. He found a way through, with a handful of young colleagues helping people across branches learn to enjoy and find benefits in digital tech. They then did something similar for customers, who they realised often had the same issues and opportunities. Next, he saw potential in un-needed branch space and created Eagle Labs, equipped with digital tech, made welcoming for small businesses and for the community including kids. The spirit is generous and open, with Barclays relationships emerging naturally. These are now being seen as an opportunity to reinvent the place of the bank in the community, back to the original centuries-old coffee shop heritage where bankers were facilitators for the trade being agreed in a communal setting.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-roberts-3b98ab45/

David Wales | Pioneered at the Fire and Rescue Service

… who pioneered in the Fire and Rescue Service, latterly as its first ever Customer Experience Manager. The journey started with a research project looking at ‘why the public don’t do as they’re told’ in a fire-related emergency. The results showed how disconnected the Fire Service was from the experience of the people it served. Far from needing to educate the public to change, its main finding was that the Service needed to reflect on its own purpose beyond compliance and statutory requirements. It thought in a scientific and technical way, but people respond to an emergency in strongly emotional ways which reflect the huge personal impact of their experience. David learned from CX professionals and developed a more human and consequence-focused approach. Traditionally, UK firefighters have focussed on rescuing people and saving property with limited attention given to the longer term impact of their interventions. This is further compounded by the fragmented and complex nature of the various services involved in the end to end journey.

Using human centred design principles, David could see new opportunities to improve. For example, treating burns injuries effectively was not originally part of what firefighters prioritised – they were there to rescue people and save property. But burns need particular treatment, and applying cool water, fast, is the first step. However, in practice it rarely happened as each agency sought to quickly convey the survivor through the chain of care. Despite this, survivors typically arrive at a specialist burns facility long after the window of opportunity for the benefits of early cooling has passed. David also recognised the mental effects of trauma and the need to help people deal constructively with what happened to them. This whole joined-up, human approach was new, but results are encouraging. There is much more to do, and David continues to pioneer in the international emergency and disaster sector.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidatsharedaim/

Gillian Drakeford | Pioneered at Ikea

…who has pioneered across a career at IKEA. She joined in the UK in the earliest days of the business, establishing the strange new model of well designed, well priced, flat-pack furniture with a British audience. Her first big piece of pioneering leadership came when she led the business into China. She had to learn how to work outside-in, really understanding how Chinese people lived and ways that IKEA’s offer and strengths could be made relevant to them. This involved surmounting big challenges including scale, with more than 25,000 people coming to a single store on a Saturday, with pricing, having to reduce costs and adjust the model to allow a sofa to be sold for one tenth the price it was originally, and adjusting the range so customers could buy chop sticks and rice bowls. It worked extremely well and she was asked to come back to the UK which in 2013 had run into trouble. The business had failed to respond to a multichannel retail world, and share was falling while customer complaints rose fast. The business had lost belief that IKEA could succeed in the UK, become too focused on costs, was divided by unhelpful silos, with no connection to a true customer view. Her pioneering started with restating why the business existed, leading to the line ‘The Wonderful Everyday’, and then committed customer listening, visiting people’s homes, understanding their needs, their hopes and their frustrations. The team made big organisational shifts in response, from store sales targets and online being in competition to defining online and store business by market areas, adding the two together, incentivising cross-channel exploration, buying and dealing with returns. The huge 60% of online orders that failed were diagnosed as the efficiency-led KPIs in the supply chain, rewarding full batches in containers when they were ready rather than responding to customer need at higher cost – but lower overall cost when seeing the refunds and rework needed, and higher return from happier buyers. Innovation included buying Task Rabbit and offering it as a service to customers preferring to spend on avoiding building things themselves, and new small store formats in city centres to make a real world experience more accessible. It all led to profitability growth shifting from 0.2% to 10% for 5 consecutive years and a growth in share from 6% to 8.3%.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillian-drakeford-b0511844/

Tracy Abraham | Pioneered at Channel 4 and Monzo

…who has pioneered in two spells at Channel 4, where the nature of her version was to have a very clear understanding of their customer and then challenge, provoke, make trouble and inspire change in ways that resonate. Her second stint involved overseeing the launch of Channel 4’s video-on-demand offer, 4OD, ahead of BBC and the iPlayer. It wasn’t as clear as it looks now – they had seen what Napster had done to music and wanted to find a positive way to pre-empt the issue. But would that be by putting content on other platforms or by creating their own? Customers can’t help you because they don’t know yet. So Channel 4 went with the fuller experience, one where they could grow value for their customers over time in clearer ways, and it worked very well indeed. She has also pioneered from the earliest days at Monzo, again building an offer and experience that would come to define a new market segment, helping the engineers turn their innate customer obsession into something with features and benefits customers would understand and enjoy.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracyabraham/

Ed Fidoe | Pioneered with the London Interdisciplinary School

…who has led the creation of two pioneering educational organisations, first with a school, School 21 which opened in 2012, based on an insight that it’s important to help young people find their voice, able to converse well verbally in any setting. This is a critical factor in evening up people’s life chances across socio-economic backgrounds. It led to the creation of a bigger enterprise, the aptly named Big Education Trust, looking to grow a wider range of similarly human practices in schools at greater scale. 

Along the way, he had been thinking about universities and how frustrating the experience can be as well as how far away it often is from being useful to all who they are supposed to serve. In 2016 the law changed to allow unis to award degrees soon after being set up, not having to wait 7 years, and in 2017 he started to raise money for what become the London Interdisciplinary School. LIS is built from a core belief that the 21st-century leaders require a broad set of interdisciplinary approaches and methods to tackle the world’s most complex problems. The university takes a problems-first, interdisciplinary approach, grounded in rigorous methods, with real-world applications. It’s been a tough journey, one Ed has been leading since 2018 when the first faculty came together, opening to students in 2021 while steering through the latter stages of Covid. It’s now financially secure having avoided taking government money to keep the necessary degree of independence, and it’s already competing effectively against Russell Group universities. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-fidoe/

Neil Patel | Pioneering at the Neonatal Unit of Glasgow Royal Hospital for Children

…who has, over many years of exploration and study, found new and better ways to take care of premature and sick babies. A field that is naturally focused first on keeping fragile newborns alive has always been technology-led, at least in the west. Learning from countries where the tech is not available suggested benefits in parents being much more centrally involved, an idea that superficially looks like introducing untrained carers into the middle of a high-risk situation. But Neil found that being led by parents, the customers they could speak to, also led to much better outcomes for immediate health and growth, and in creating better long term conditions for the family by reducing trauma and tension in their baby’s earliest days. Remarkably, even in this medical field, the customer-led principles originating in businesses translate well. The team has gone on to take the principles further, introducing regular listening sessions for (originally nervous) staff teams with parents, and innovating in line with ideas parents suggested such as overnight video updates from nurses to parents on their baby’s wellbeing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-patel-840941281/

Richard Sells | Pioneered at Electrolux

…who when Chief Innovation Officer at Electrolux led a move from a disparate portfolio of 55 brands to a few brands focused on what customers really valued – not just the engineering, but the way different people used the technology to make their lives easier. His customer innovation team brought structure and better connection to customers. They got people across the business going to customers’ homes across the world, getting involved in everyday activities from washing up to cooking dinner. They saw first-hand what they did and why, growing belief in what really mattered. They created relatable personas and clear roles for the few crucial brands, then shared widely and immersively to great ultimate effect for the business. The results were strong, adding to healthy growth achieved more cost-effectively than the previous engineering-led approach.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-sells-b39168/

Sarah Gillard | Pioneered at John Lewis

…in Feb 2020 led the innovation team as Covid hit. Business 99% focused on shops, products and operations. Started thinking about what the country needed not what the business did, developed an activity platform and got online in three days exploring how to take skills and expertise from across the Partnership and share widely – from making a monkey out of an old jumper to gardening tips.  Nursery advice service moved onto the platform because customers could no longer get help in stores and were desperate for it.  In 5 months had grown a digital community of sharing, ran events (money going to good causes) and created sales although not the objective. Since then, led the work to redefine the purpose of the John Lewis Partnership.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-gillard-b74b5564/