Chairman's Network Lunch - 15 April 2010

Date: 15 April 2010

Time: 12.00 - 15.00 pm

Venue: St. James & Kensington Rooms, 6th Floor, Claridge's

Speaker: Mike Harris, Executive Chairman of Garlik and former CEO/Founder of Egg plc and First Direct

Mike Harris Shares with You His Experiences in Building the Kinds of Teams that Create the New, the Different, and the Revolutionary.

Mike, as you may know, built and directed as CEO three billion dollar companies including the telephone bank First Direct, the internet bank Egg, and was CEO of Mercury Communications, then the main competitor to BT.   He was also chairman of mobile phone company Mercury One-2-One which was bought by T-mobile for $10 billion in 1999.  Mike has been credited with transforming the financial service landscape worldwide and has a passion to bring to fruition revolutionary ideas in business.

Management guru Warren Bennis once stated that nothing worthwhile had ever been created by an individual; that everything worthwhile required a great team and building such a team was the leaders’ real job. Mike concurs and finds that there is a popular myth about the ‘great leader’ in business.  It is great teams, said Bennis, not great leaders who set out to create a dent in the universe – to change the course of events and make something new and different happen, something which simply wouldn’t have happened without them.

Mike will share his experiences of attempting to make small dents in the Universe at First Direct, Mercury and Egg: what he was attempting to do, what worked and what didn’t and how he is using those experiences in his work presently.

Mike is currently chairman and co-founder of digital identity experts Garlik – a company which was created in 2005 in order to give individuals and their families more power over the way their information is used in the digital world.  Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web is on its advisory board.  Mike has also worked with Bill Gates and many other globally-recognized business people. He was also (part-time) chairman of innovation at the Royal Bank of Scotland from 2005-2009.  His latest endeavour is a company called The Difference Engine that provides Workshops, Master Classes, Seminars , Coaching, Mentoring and implementation support to companies (from start-ups to large corporations) which want to be a remarkable example of what’s possible in business.
 

More about Mike Harris

Mike Harris' bio