Craig Fenton, CEO @ New Zealand Rugby

If you could just start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and what it is you do.

Thanks, Peter. Uh, nice to be here. So I am the Head of Strategy and Operations for Google in the UK and Ireland. So that's what most traditional companies would call a combination of the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Strategy Officer. So we kind of plan the business and then hopefully operate business to that The title's pretty descriptive. Outside of that, I'm a dad. I've got two sons, one's 20, the other one's 17, and a number of side interests that I'm sure we'll get into.

Yeah, when you were offered the opportunity to join Google as Strategy and Operations Lead, what was it about the company and your role within it that made it so compelling for you to join?

I've always been a bit of a technology geek. I enjoy gadgets. I'm not a computer, computer scientist or an engineer, but technology has always fascinated, fascinated me. Probably a product of growing up in a pretty isolated place. You can probably tell from my accent I'm a New Zealander and largely pre-internet. So everything that we kind of take for granted today, for me, is still like magic. And I find it exciting, interesting, and I'm very passionate about it. So I, I think thing number one is that Google for me was and remains at the forefront of a rapidly evolving industry that's technology-centric. Two, I really like the people that I met there. And three, I had spent some time doing quite a different job and felt like a bit of a change. I'd become a little, a little comfortable, and I like to be uncomfortable because it's a good sign that you're sort of learning and stretching yourself. So the role that presented itself was quite different in many ways, though still in the sort of technology sphere, and it sounded like a great, a great fun role to do.

Yeah, and you said you like the people at Google. What kind of people are these? What are the kind of people that Google are looking to hire, and what would make a candidate stand out who's looking to apply for a job there, maybe?

They're quite varied. So I think, you know, I've worked in a few places and certainly, you know, come across many businesses, certainly during my time in consulting. And I would say that Google is one of the more diverse places that I've worked. In terms of the variety of backgrounds and experiences and sort of world lenses that people bring. And there's typically, you know, when you talk to a Googler, you only need to ask 2 or 3 questions to find something remarkable about what they've done or who they are. And generally, that's not where they went to school or where they studied and what they studied or what they did before, but something much more personal about what it is that really sort of defines who they are as a character. You know, whether it's a sporting thing or maybe they've got a, you know, an adventurous proclivity and they've climbed mountains or something in the charity sector. There's always something. You know, I'll give you an example. I was talking to somebody the other day who was interviewing for a role, and I, you know, I asked her, you know, what her background was. There was an interesting thing at the bottom of her CV— that's generally where the interesting stuff is— about sports. And she said, well, yeah, I was, you know, I was a professional athlete for a while. I said, oh, what sport? She said pole vaulting. And turned out she had represented Germany in pole vaulting. You know, so that's just an example. And probably connected to that, certainly what I look for and what, what most of my colleagues look for, it's not so much what you've done or where you've studied, it's who you are. And who you are is more commonly defined, at least in my experience, by the things that you pursue outside the sort of thing that we call our professional lives.

Yeah, one of your main one of my roles is to manage these people, manage them as a team. And as a young student currently creating my own startup and hoping to build a team in the future, I'd love to know how you describe your management style and why effective team management is so important for the performance and wellbeing of a team.

Well, good luck with your startup, Peter Wood. Well, I think every business at its heart is a people business, and the And the great sort of epiphany for me is though Google on the outside looks like a technology business, its real asset is the people. So surrounding yourself with great people who know more than you or have skills that you don't have, and then getting out of their way and letting them do their job is one of the most important things you can do as you think about building a business. Business. In terms of my own leadership style, probably I'm the wrong person to answer that question. You should really be asking it of my team. What they tell me is 3 things: I'm empowering, so I leave them alone and, you know, give them the guidance when they need it, but largely, you know, trust them to do their job. You know, we hired them for a reason. You can't get in the way. You need to let them let them breathe and fly, so to speak. Second, I, you know, what you see is what you get, so I'm pretty authentic and not afraid to be vulnerable as a leader and say I don't know. You know, that happens quite frequently, and I think that's, you know, that's a quality that makes leaders relatable because none of us know all the answers and there's, you know, we are creatures of imperfection. So I think just sort of wearing the heart on the sleeve, so to speak, and just being authentically who you are and not wearing, you know, some sort of facade or mask, figuratively or literally. And third, I'd say I'm pretty playful, which probably sounds a bit weird, but I think one of the most important things in nurturing an environment of innovation is to create the psychological safety in its team to play. And play in a professional context means take risks, experiment, you know, walk forward into the unknown, pilot things, and kind of sense and figure things out. And a hallmark of doing that well and frequently is pretty frequent failure. And they may be big failures or they may be small failures, but You know, in my view at least, that's an important sign that you're doing things right, which probably again sounds a bit weird, but that's what innovation is all about. It's not sort of doing the stuff that you already know, it's exploring new ground.

So I guess maybe on your leadership style, and it's obviously evolved from somewhere, you've had a really illustrious career even before Google, where have these three tenets sort of evolved from and Where do they come from?

Probably just making catastrophic errors on a very frequent basis over time. It's sort of like parenthood, you know, leadership, you're not trained for it and can't be, you kind of just need to figure it out. So, you know, I think you sort of refine your approach, your character, and get more comfortable with the passage of time. And usually through doing things in a way that is not effective. And certainly that's been my path. You know, these are the attributes, I guess, of the product of having refined the rough edges over time. And of course, all of us sort of come with the values and and characteristics that are instilled in us as young people as well from our parents and our families. So I suppose it's a bit of that as well.

Yeah, you seem to have a really interesting relationship with failure and errors compared to many of us as young people here. I mean, what would you say on that? And maybe a few examples of some of your biggest blunders over your career and life, maybe, if you're willing to elaborate.

Yeah, I mean, I guess that's right. I've had to sort of reconcile and make friends with failure because I'm just not that good at the things that I try, at least to begin with. Some big blunders. Boy, I mean, this podcast is less than 4 hours, so I'm not sure I'll be able to get through all of them, but they're many and varied. In fact, I start every meeting with my team each week talking about my glorious failure. Of the week. And, you know, an example which is, I think, probably on the sort of minor end of the scale, just as a weekly thing, is, you know, we had a discussion at our management group about a metric. There was a whole lot of noise and resistance to this metric, and I just didn't close that noise down fast enough. It sort of bled on a little bit and became a distraction. And, you know, that's a a failure in acting rapidly and allowing something to become, you know, distracting as a group. And, you know, focus is important and distraction is the opposite of that. So that's a sort of a minor example, you know, recently. Any number of examples that my children could give as parents over time and sort of refining the way that, you know, that you deal with things as a parent. And, you know, I think if there's any lesson there, it's to trust and talk to your children, certainly as they become teenagers, as adults, and not, you know, not fool yourself into thinking you can control them as much as you would like to, and as much as that becomes a sort of frustration over time. And then probably the biggest one that felt like a failure, certainly at the time, is when I took the decision to go back to university after 6 years as a lawyer. That was my first job. I was a court lawyer. And I wanted to sort of retrain, if you like, and into the world of business. And literally sold the farm, figuratively anyway, sold our house that we just bought, quit my job, didn't have anything to go to, and then moved to the other hemisphere. On the sort of wild bet that I'd be able to repurpose and retool and come out of that, you know, a new person from a professional point of view. And that came to an abrupt halt about halfway through when we started applying for, you know, summer internships, which typically divide the 2 years. It's a 2-year MBA. I did an MBA and I think I got up to 32 rejections. I'd done 55 interviews and I was just getting no's everywhere I turned. I thought at the time, I thought, geez, you know, what have I done?

Well, when I look at your career, I certainly don't see failure and I'm sure anyone else looking in doesn't. But what I do see is a lot of purpose and you talk about on your social media this idea of living deliberately. So what do you think is the role of purpose in pursuing a career, and what do you believe is the purpose of your own career?

Well, it's rather an existential sort of and philosophical question. I think from an inward perspective, you know, our careers, which we spend a large part of our lives pursuing, need to be fun in some way. They need to be enjoyable. You need to be exercising a passion addressing the interests that you have in your life in a meaningful way. That's the sort of me, me, sort of self-centric way of answering the question. Beyond that, and rather more meaningfully, I think we need to have an impact or feel that we have an impact, and that could be on a very grand scale, but it can be on a smaller scale. If we can affect just one other life in a positive way, then we've kind of fulfilled a purpose, haven't we? We've become part of a society and contributed to humanity in some way. So whether it's big or small, I think having an impact in a way that's quite outside yourself, you know, so positively influencing the lives and enjoyment of others, for me, is probably the best answer to that question, which is a bit esoteric, I know.

No, I think it's a very important thing to say and a great answer. And I was wondering, with your time at Accenture, you were constantly progressing your role and moving on to the next thing within the company. And I was wondering, when did you know it was time to make that leap and what was the driving factors behind that?

I like to be comfortably uncomfortable, comfortably uncomfortable. So discomfort, I think, is a signal, as I said earlier, that you're building in some way, you're learning in some way, you're stretching yourself. So the answer is I tended to change roles where I'd become— when at the point point that I'd become comfortable. It's sort of become a routine. I could do the job with my eyes closed. And I think that's a good sort of signal that your learning curve has somehow flattened. And we all like to be challenged, at least most of us do. And that, that's been the rule. And within Accenture, that cycle tended to be about 2 to 3 years. So although I was with that, that company 16 years in the end, I had 8 roles during that time that were quite distinct, most of them in different countries, certainly with different clients and different teams. So the, the role continued to evolve or change in quite radical ways over that time, and that was a good cycle. At the end, you know, at a sort of rather more macro level, I felt my time at Accenture had flattened. Or my learning curve had flattened, I felt like something completely different. And that's the point I jumped out and came to Google.

Yeah, and within Accenture and now obviously with Google, you said there's a massive blend of nationalities that you're working with, going from different country to different country. How was that experience of managing an eclectic team and also just bigger teams in general?

Exhilarating. And, you know, I regard myself— I'm an immigrant, I've lived in the UK for 25 years, I am a British citizen, uh, now also a New Zealand citizen, but I regard myself as European first and foremost. And I think one of the most magical things about living in this part of the world is the tremendous cultural diversity right on our doorstep. So I led teams in, in, in Paris and in Amsterdam. You know, I did business for a couple of years in Germany. I worked in Italy for 2 and a half years. I've worked in Russia, in Turkey, in Poland. I did some time in Finland and Sweden. I had a long stint in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Worked in Spain. And all of these places have rich and diverse cultures and quite distinct ways of working. And I just find that absolutely fascinating and interesting. And of course we need to adapt to that, right? We're the sort of foreign organism, so to speak, in these places. The way that you convene, run, and drive change in Italy looks incredibly different, um, to the way that you would do that in Germany or in Saudi Arabia. Uh, and aren't we lucky to have such diversity on our doorstep?

Yeah, and on that, I want to talk about maybe the first time you left New Zealand and, uh, that experience and when that was and how you felt and how you adapted Because obviously you're very young, you're armed with experience at the moment of such moves, but how was it at the time? What advice could you give?

I was 28 when I left New Zealand. I'd had 6 years, as I said, as a lawyer. I'd taken a bet, managed to implicate and drag along my girlfriend and now wife, my girlfriend at the time, and I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders, you know, so it felt risky. So it wasn't an easy thing to do, but somehow exciting at the same time. And I remember sitting on the aircraft in Wellington, New Zealand, which is the capital, about to fly at that time to Geneva in Switzerland. And that's where my journey began. I had to learn a second language, so Actually, before starting my MBA, I went to Switzerland, enrolled myself in the University of Geneva and studied French and Swiss history in French. Because, you know, I needed to figure out— I was a mono, monolingual guy from New Zealand, and I need to learn how to speak a second language. And it was at the same time exhilarating and intimidating. And a little bit overwhelming, but I had the sense of the excitement, I guess, of a journey, a new journey about to begin. And it's been a hell of a ride and it remains so. You know, I hope I have many, many other inflection points like that.

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Well, I suppose the, the essence of impact for me is manifest in change of some sort, whether that's changing the way that, uh, or the usefulness of our products in the marketplace, uh, the relevance and, um, and you know, return on investment, I suppose, for companies being able to reach their customers, you know, which is obviously the advertising industry. That's a big part of Google's business. Or impacting the way things are done in a rather more sort of rudimentary operational way. You know, Charles Darwin is often misquoted as saying that the it's the strongest that survive. That's not accurate. What he actually said is that it's not the strongest that survive, but those who are most adaptable, or something like— I'm paraphrasing, but it's about adaptability. And I think in a world of constant change, really, that's the only constant— the fact that there's change happening, and that change is happening more radically in terms of the the magnitude, as well as more frequently. By definition, there's no such thing as enduring mastery. You know, when you get good at something, it changes under your feet. So this idea of agility, adapting to new stuff, figuring it out, experimenting, and kind of finding a path is a constant, and I would like to think that that's a contribution I make in some small way to our plight, both with our teams and people that we work with and the, the products and, and, and customers that we serve.

The audience of this podcast is mainly students, and if we could just go back to your time in education and take some wisdom from that. You initially graduated in Law, Finance, and Economics. I'd like to know why you decided to study such a range of subjects and why those ones, how you thought that would help or hinder your career. And then also just going forward towards your MBA, how did you find the difference in going back to study then? And, you know, you graduated top of your school in that MBA at London Business School. What fueled your drive to still succeed in your studies, and how do you reflect on that whole experience?

Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think you're probably looking for some sort of, um, oracle-like, uh, um, you know, guidance here. The reality is I studied finance and economics because I couldn't be bothered reading the, um, massive at the time paper-based course guide at university. But my friend Mike had looked at it and he figured out that commerce and law looked good. So I just did that degree because my mate Mike was doing it, and if it was good enough for Mike, it was good enough for me. There wasn't really any— anything more deep about it. And on that particular degree, we either turned left and became an accountant, or we turned right and became a lawyer. And I went the legal route, and, you know, that was interesting, fulfilling. And as it turned out, rather by accident than design, you know, having those skills has been important. It's been an important sort of building block, and it's probably not a day that goes by that I don't use my legal training in some way, my legal experience. And then the MBA was really a vehicle, you know, rather than a destination. It was a vehicle to achieve what I wanted to create as an inflection point to pass from the profession of law into somehow business, whatever that meant. And I didn't really know what it meant at the time, but I knew I was interested in, you know, this was the dawn of the internet, this was '98, right? Google was born in a garage in '98. But I could see the, you know, I could see that something important was happening, and I was very drawn to the sort of creative discipline of kind of figuring that out and becoming part of a cycle of innovation in business. So in both cases, I'm afraid the thinking behind the study wasn't either deep or meaningful. It was more a sort of means to an end. And in the case of the undergraduate degree, falling forward because my friend Mike had decided that was a good thing to do, and I was happy to follow his, his judgment. So it's been, um, a bit of a stochastic walk. And you, you asked me, you talked about, um, graduating top of the school at London Business School. I kind of, um, I figured out, as I referenced earlier, when I started getting dings left, right, and center, that I had nothing, uh, to distinguish me. You know, I was from this bizarre, isolated place at the bottom of the world. I'd worked for a company that no one had ever heard of. I was in a profession that was sort of rather orthogonal or, you know, not obvious as something that would be useful in business. And I'd been to schools and universities that no one had heard of. So the only thing within my control at that time was to put my head down and think, well, I'm in control of how hard I work. I better get my head down and get some good marks because if you can get yourself onto the Dean's List, which is the top 10 in the school, then you start getting interviews and start distinguishing yourself just on that alone. So that was within my control and I sort of decided I'd better get busy and, you know, obviously I sort of you know, worked a bit harder than some of my colleagues who were having a good social time, uh, at the time. So that was the, that was the background to that.

Yeah, for me, this is exactly why I do this podcast, you know, is you see these people, you know, who just seem like they have the most amazing career and have always had it figured out. And, and it's very— I find it very humanizing and, you know, inspiring to show that, you know, it's— they've had the exact same thoughts as you And, you know, it's not always easy, and I really appreciate you sort of opening up about that. I want to ask maybe about some of the mentors that have helped you, guide you through this whole experience, and, you know, who they are, why they were so important to you. And also, you do a lot of mentoring yourself now. Why do you feel so inclined to give back to young people?

So in terms of the mentors that have influenced me, I think, you know, we're all students of life and in life, and the best way to learn is to look at what others are doing and sort of seek wisdom from them. And I suppose the first mentor I had was my grandfather. He was a doctor, but kind of a bit of a mad scientist. He liked nothing more than going down into his shed that was essentially full of junk and making stuff. Whether it was mechanical, like trolleys and things like that, or electronic circuits and stuff like that. And I found that to be an interesting pastime and spent hours and hours with my grandfather in the shed and sort of got that sense of excitement in kind of figuring something out and building something. I then worked with a guy in the law who was just very empowering. He trusted me deeply. He gave me more rope than I felt I could handle, certainly enough to hang myself. And I found that in the same breath scary and empowering and interesting and motivating. So, you know, that I suppose is something I've learned to do with the people that I work with as well. And another actually subsequently at Accenture sort of gave me the same oxygen to breathe, and at a stage that was on its face sort of too early in many ways. So these sort of slightly risky and uncomfortable situations are things that mentors can provide, both in a professional context and also in a personal context. And I do a lot of mentoring today, but it's never one way. I regard mentorship as a two-way street, and I learn at least as much from people that I mentor as I hope they do from me. There's always a sort of two-way dialogue there, and I try to meet two or three new people every week, and in some cases, you know, end up in in, uh, rather sort of, uh, continuous, uh, contact with them.

Yeah, and if mentoring is one thing that sort of keeps you working as hard as you do and, and, you know, guides you for your career, I think another thing you sort of attribute to your success and being able to continuously work hard is what you do outside of it. So you call it active relaxing, and I kind of want to know what you mean about that, and then also maybe dive into some of the hobbies you have outside of work. I see you do a lot on YouTube, you're a pilot, you have a record label, and how do you maintain all these passions outside of work with such a busy work schedule?

I schedule it, and I've got a very tolerant wife and children, is the short answer. I think there's no job that fully satisfies all of our interests. So for me, this is a way of exploring interests fully, those that are not satisfied, you know, in the workplace, in my day job, so to speak. So in the case of the YouTube channel, for example, it's called Coffee, Eggs and Inspiration. I'll pause for a moment while your listeners look it up. Please subscribe and smash that like button so that you're, uh, you, you, or that notification button so you're notified. Um, I'm the world's smallest YouTuber, um, but I, I just love it because it's a sort of creative outlet. It's, you know, I can't sing, I can't dance, at least my wife tells me I can't. Um, I can't play a musical instrument well, I can't paint, But I just love the creative process and filming content and particularly editing content is something I found to be really fulfilling. You know, it's an expression of creativity that in the narrow window where I'm able to, I can kind of do. And it's also a great way of learning our products, you know, Google's products. YouTube in this case, as a creator would and making all the mistakes. And I do a lot of, you know, representing the company in the public domain. And I think, you know, there's a certain credibility of standing in front of an audience and saying, you know, if you've got a smartphone and an idea, you can create a channel and reach a global audience. I know because I've done it, right? You're talking from really from the from the heart. So this is sort of a dual thing. Flying, I've always been fascinated by planes. It took me until my late 40s to get round to it. And I got my pilot's license about 7 years ago. And I just love flying because when you're flying, you know, I've got a tiny, tiny plane, think white van of the sky, 40-something years old and very mechanical. And you hand fly it, right? There's no autopilot, there's no computers or anything like that. And when you're flying, you know, you really need to be in the moment, right? You need to be careful that you're not bumping into a mountain or into another aircraft. Your mind is totally there. You have to be in that zone, and that's a great way of relaxing, ironically, because you can't think about anything else, you know, the pressures of work or everything that's happening outside of that. And it's a cool way of, you know, seeing the country from a slightly different angle. And likewise for my business interests, you know, I've got 4 companies of my own. I'm an angel investor. And the golden thread there is just the excitement of meeting people and working with them in some way, whether as an investor or more directly as a company owner and founder, on ideas that potentially, you know, move us forward in some way, in an innovative way, disruptive way. I just find that really interesting and fascinating. So these are all sort of interests that I love to explore. And you need to be disciplined and schedule time and make time for it. And you certainly need a patient family, which I'm lucky to have.

A lot to unpack there in terms of your hobbies. And yeah, the YouTube channel is fantastic, by the way. Everyone check that out. On the investing side, however, many of our audience will be interested in how you got into that and sort of the things, the lessons you've learned from that and how to you've applied that to your work at Google too. I mean, could you elaborate a bit on that experience, which is obviously ongoing, and how it's helping you and benefiting you?

Yeah, sure. So most investors, angel investors, just an individual who invest their own money, you know, you've got VCs, venture capital companies, that take funds from a pool of people, put them together and invest. You've got private equity, they tend to buy sort of more mature companies. The common thread is that you're investing as much, if not more, in the team as you are in the idea. The idea needs to be a good idea, right? But that's sort of table stakes. And the only thing certain about that idea is that it's wrong in some dimensions and will need to evolve and change. It's like, who was it, was it Muhammad Ali or Mike Tyson who said, "Everyone's got a plan until they're punched in the face." And being a founder is a little bit like that, right? You've got this beautifully crafted investor deck and business plan, and then look at all this, this target addressable market and how massively I can scale. And almost as soon as you've put the final full stop in that investor deck, you figure out it's wrong. So the team is the most important ingredient of any startup. They need to have conviction and perseverance with their idea, but not to the point of dogmatism where they don't detect adjustments that need to be made. And every startup will go through many pivots in their journey. So they need to have conviction and confidence and perseverance and not sort of just get put off at the first stuck in the past, but also not have the— have the humility to change direction and adjust their course where they need to. They need to be adaptable. Remember that Darwin quote? They need to be adaptable because markets shift. Even if the idea is good on day one, it won't be good in 2 years. You know, the market will change, the consumer behavior will change, the technology is probably going to change, etc. So that adaptability is very important. And they kind of need to have the courage and bravery to take risks, right? That is the, you know, entrepreneurship is a French word, it's about risk-taking. And, you know, great entrepreneurs see something and get drawn to it, but then most importantly, what distinguishes them is that they take the next step and they do it knowing that they probably don't have everything right, but excited by the prospect of finding out.

On your website, it mentions that your best education, your best experience was actually in a bar job when you were younger. A lot of us have jobs as such and maybe we seek no value. We just sort of see the clock ticking, um, and wait for the end of our shift. How can people take value from that and get through that process as you have? And maybe if you want to elaborate maybe on what you said on your website about how it being such a valuable experience.

Yeah, sure. So the dirty secret is that education does not happen in a classroom. It happens outside of that. And now maybe there's some sort of basic tools and skills that you develop in the classroom, but the real learning happens outside. And working in a bar is, When I was at university doing my undergraduate degree, it's a 5-year degree, I worked 35 hours a week in a job at night and I studied during the day. I didn't have support, you know, from financial support. My family didn't pay for me to go to university, so I needed to find a way of doing that myself. And I'm glad to have had that experience because working in a bar teaches you a number of things. It teaches you, first and foremost, people skills. You're dealing with a lot of different people. In different states of sobriety and in different, you know, different personalities. So I think people skills is one thing. It teaches you process, right? If you work in a restaurant or a bar, you will quickly come to understand how to design a supply chain in a sort of miniature way. You know, how to make, you know, how do you do 300 cappuccinos an hour, you know, and double your output, well, you need to have a system, right, in place, and you end up designing that system. So it's a great sort of teacher in that respect, and you learn the humility of being in service of others as well, which is a great attribute for any profession. So I'm a great believer in the learning that happens outside the classroom. These schools and universities we have are great, and I would never diminish their importance, but don't be fooled into thinking that you're really, you know, you're getting your mainstream education there. You're not.

Yeah, and I guess your philosophy on education inspired you to write a book, Playful Curiosity. What was the motivation behind such an endeavor? And maybe if you can summarize the premise behind it and then this philosophy.

Sure, so I felt, well, as the sort of introduction to the book says, I think education is broken. Now let me be clear about what I mean there. It's a comment on the system, not on the people in that system. I think teaching is the most noble profession. They are our heroes. I worship somebody who's a good teacher because I don't think there's any higher calling, actually. And we've got some brilliant and beautiful people in that profession who do amazing things, but they do it inside a system which I think is broken. It's certainly outdated, right? Our education system as it currently as it currently stands, and I think this is true in most parts of the world with a few exceptions, was designed during the Industrial Revolution where what was important is to have production lines where everyone had a sort of minimum level of numeracy and literacy. You know, that made factories work really well. It enabled offices to function in the time. That was a long, long time ago, right? And if you think about the premise of education, we push information largely, which is to say things that other people have found out. We ask students to commit those things to memory and then we put them through an instrument of torture called an examination, which is really a test of two things. Recall and exam technique. It doesn't really test anything else at a, at a very deep level. Yet we live in this environment of constant change where by definition you start with what you don't know. You know, that's what real life is, is all about. You start with what you don't know and you figure it out through experimentation. It's, it's actually the opposite of examination, right? Where you start with something that you know and you're tested on your recall of it. Um, so I don't think it's a very good simulation of the skill sets, uh, that are actually needed in the real world. And I see this in, in, you know, I do a lot of recruitment in my job at Google, and, and the people, you know, some of the most remarkable people, um, that we hire bring with them skills from what I call the University of Life. You they've had an incredibly hard upbringing in a tough and poor neighbourhood and have had to sort of find their way through that grind, or they've had a tragic event in their life that they've had to recover from, or they've pursued things largely outside work. They've taught themselves how to code, they've built their own app. You know, we've got 100 apprentices who've come straight from high school in Google in London right now. And they're the most remarkable group of people who have a lot of these attributes. So my observation is that what is important and valuable in the workplace, it's typically not what you leave or what is imparted through either the school system or the university system. And the premise of the book is to provoke a conversation about this in order to somehow sort of contribute to change, to changing it. And I think there's, you know, there's a few things— playful curiosity is a sort of descriptive title— there's a few things that I feel are needed. First of all, you need to start with somebody's passion, their curiosity. You know, the Montessori or Steiner systems of education are good at this. They're play-based education systems where you're starting with somebody's curiosity and allowing them to sort of experiment and find out. That I think is a better simulation of what happens in the real world. It's playful in the sense that failure is a necessary part of the process. It's celebrated and rewarded, not penalised through the punitive mechanism of grading in examination, right? That's the the opposite of what we need. And I think the final part is experimentation, you know, real-life experience, hands-on, outside the classroom. Don't teach somebody about calculus using a whiteboard. Take them to a racetrack and ask them to figure out the acceleration or slowing down gradient of a race car. You know, that's a, that's a real-world application of this fascinating mathematical concept. So my small contribution, I guess— now you don't need to read the book, by the way. The book is only a 15-minute read for those of you who are interested. But that's my point of view, and it's a point of view that's sort of built as a person who recruits people, who sees what's valuable in the workplace, and as a parent who's had to kids go through the system.

Yeah, I completely agree with everything you've just said, and I've often felt unenthused and sort of confused within the education system and, and just sort of making that, that leap from university to a career in the office space. I feel slightly unprepared. And also, what, what do you think for students and young people now, like, you know, if this is the education system, what kind of things can they be doing to prepare themselves for the workforce better, you know, things to get them inspired and passionate about what they might be able to do in the future? And finally, what industries do you think, as somebody who's in a tech company right now, and you know, you do a lot of sustainability and everything like that, what is the up-and-coming industries that people should be looking out for?

So two parts to that question. So first of all, what my advice is to play, figure out what you're interested in and go play with it, kind of figure it out, right? If it's content creation, start a podcast as you guys have, or a YouTube channel, or a TikTok channel, or whatever you're drawn to, or start filming your gaming and put it on Twitch. That's a creative discipline. If you're interested in a business, start one. Don't talk about it, just start one. right? It's super easy to do. It's 30 quid to register a company. You know, you can create a website in about 45 minutes using Squarespace or Wix, and just play with it and make the mistakes and sort of celebrate those mistakes when you make them. And many other examples. So the message there is to play. Think about what draws you, what excites you, and play with it. You know, it's surprising where that will that will take you, and at the very minimum, it will give you something to talk about that's really a source of passion, a source of passion for you. In terms of the emerging industries or sort of areas, I did a post on this recently on LinkedIn. You know, I think there's— I'm a technology geek, so I come with that bias. So this won't interest the violinists and and the painters amongst your audience, but I'm fascinated by a few emerging trends. You mentioned sustainability, so let me start there. I mean, it's an existential challenge that we have as humanity, and, you know, there's an emerging sector which is sort of around climate tech. It's carbon sequestration, carbon storage, It's around alternative energy sources and energy security that's sort of come to the fore in rather tragic circumstances recently, whether that be battery or hydrogen or other forms of alternative greener energy. And many other sort of elements, there's hardware components, so how do you equip our power grids to cope with sustainable energy and and much more unpredictable patterns of usage. So green tech, I think, is a really interesting thing. Quantum computing is definitely the next generation of the physical or physics side of computing. We're still, even with the most powerful computers in the world, operating essentially with ones and zeros. So these little transistors that work in a binary way. The idea of quantum computing is to detach from that sort of binary 1 or 0 and take advantage of the quantum physical principle of superposition, where you can be a 1, a 0, or any kind of combination of those. That, it turns out, vastly increases the processing power of computers. We had an event that we declared in, I think it was October 2019, with quantum computer called Sycamore with just, I think it was 56 qubits. These are the superposition sort of units that make them up. That solved a mathematical equation in 200 seconds that would have taken the most powerful supercomputer available today 10,000 years. So that gives you a sort of sense of the step change. It'll take some time to, for for quantum computers to be stable and reliable enough to use in a practical way, but it's definitely a sort of a quantum leap, forgive the pun. Artificial intelligence, you know, obviously that's in the public eye at the moment in a big way. The computer science has been around for a long time, and it's in the public consciousness only recently because because, you know, we've got these little sort of beta tools that are being released, but they, you know, that style of computing has been around for some time. And I think computers just have this ability to spot patterns in data that the human eye can't and won't. And the most exciting applications, in my opinion, are in the medical field where AI can be used, for example, to spot early signs of malignant tissue in female breasts, or to spot early signs of macular degeneration or diabetic retinopathy and stop people from going blind. You know, these are very meaningful. And more recently, protein folding, these 200 million basic building blocks of life, whose shape is as important as their chemistry and amino acids to defining hitherto unsolved incurable diseases, right? So I think there's some really exciting applications there. I could go on, but I'll leave it at that.

Yeah, and I really appreciate all the time you've given and how much detail you've gone into everything. And, you know, I know you're a busy man and you've got a lot to get back to, so I just want to ask one final question, and we like to ask all of our guests, and it's about your idea of success and how that may have changed from the beginning of your career when you're in New Zealand, you're doing law, you've just graduated, you know, to now as a managing director at Google. What is your idea of success and how has it changed?

I think the enthusiasm of youth tends to fuel this unbridled ambition, and you tend to reference that against others. If only I could be like, you know, fill in the gap, or reach these heights, or do what they've done. And I think probably to some extent that's natural. It's certainly natural in the day of social media, right? It's where we live in this sort of rather skewed artificial sense of sort of comparison. The reality is that you're only ever going to compare yourself against yourself, right? The definition of progress is that you're more skillful and better and wiser next week than you are this week. So I think that's probably one thing that's changed. You know, I don't have the sort of FOMO sense. I'm happy in my own skin. You know, happy to be progressing in some way and always learning in some way, a perpetual student, if you like. I think the idea of making impact probably grows over time. I'm not saying it sort of doesn't exist when you're younger. I think, you know, I admire deeply the Gen Z and Millennial generations because they sort of have their ducks in a row in a way that my generation probably didn't so much. It's a less superficial generation and more deeply thoughtful generation in so many ways. But making an impact, I think, is incredibly important. And I think the final thing I'd say is that work's just work. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day. It's just something that you do. To amuse yourself. And it should amuse you. It should be playful and fun. But there are many, many important facets of life and achieving balance where you're able to express and address your interests across that full spectrum is what life's all about. So keep it in perspective. And this thing that we call work that feels really, really important at the time, time isn't really.

Well, thank you very much, Craig, for the last, um, hour or so. It's been really insightful. I think our audience will take so much. Um, and yeah, Pete, you got anything to say?

Thanks so much, Craig. Appreciate it.

My pleasure. Thanks for the time, guys.