The interview is drawing to a close. Throughout it, Ronan Dunne has been both engaged and engaging, thoughtfully discussing everything from the brewing racial tensions in the US to his view that Covid-19 will fundamentally disrupt the hierarchical model.

He has carefully identified lessons from his career, delved into his management philosophy and talked about the need to reset the relationship between business and society. He has long described his role as the “chief cheerleader” and “chief storyteller”, and over the course of our lengthy interview, he is loquacious and charismatic.

And, despite his career trajectory, he is surprisingly down-to-earth and disarming. He agreed to the interview instantly, and, despite running the largest division of the world’s largest telecoms firm, cut out all press handlers.  

As the interview is ending, the CEO of Verizon Consumer Group, a division with annual revenues of $90 billion and 55,000 employees, carefully pulls together the threads of the previous 90 minutes, and outlines his hopes for the business and society in a post Covid-19 world. 

I have been in journalism a long time, and interviewed thousands of business figures. This was the first instance where I was left speechless.

“I genuinely think the rate of change, the rate of transformation and people’s willingness to consider change is probably greater than it has been for a generation. Because Covid has hit us so hard, everything we assumed now has to be retested,” he said. 

“I think it’s a great time for, for want of a better expression, thought leadership or at least stimulation of a different type of debate about why and how will the response be different this time and be more relevant. Because, if economically, it is just seen as more of the same, that is not good enough. 

“If the fear of society and community is that it is another cycle of boom and bust, another cycle of haves and have nots, then people’s willingness to stand up and be counted, participate, contribute to the solution might be lost. Whereas if we open the conversation out at this stage and say look, everything we assumed as being the sort of pillars on which we had built all our assumptions have moved. Now is a time to say we’re more open to a broader conversation and bring people back into the conversation. 

“It’s why I admire the Greens going into Government rather than saying I’m going to stand on the side lines and call the score. I also thought this of the Liberal Democrats despite the fact that they got crushed in the following election. 

“So, I think now the question is how do we facilitate a conversation in which we give each other permission to think again about the assumptions that always constrained our conversation and be willing to say that if we’re willing to contribute differently, think differently, maybe we can have a more sustainable, different outcome that does include all of the elements of the stakeholder groups throughout community. But one that also respects the fact that thriving business is a part of how you make that happen. Or even if it’s only how you pay for it. I don’t mind which way people look at it. But this idea that capitalism has to change, I 100 per cent agree. This idea that somehow or another we can solve the problems of the world by excluding capital from it, respectfully just makes no, not just economic sense but makes no social sense to me either. 

“Because a lot of people find their equivalent of self-actualisation through economic activity. They’re proud of what they do whether it’s making cars in a plant for 30 years or whether it’s you know, working in a sewerage plant keeping freshwater clean for households in Dublin. Lots of people presume piously that no, no, no, no. But most people find some positives from going to work, being economically active, having some element of choice in their lives. 

“But let’s think about how we match talent to opportunity and make sure that it’s more evenly distributed. If we do, we’ll be positively surprised by the outcome. I’m a glass half-full guy, always have been.”

*****

Sitting in his office in Slough, 20 miles west of central London, Ronan Dunne was having what he would later describe as a spiritual moment. It is March 2008, and the Dublin-born accountant is three months into his new job as chief executive of O2 in the UK. He had previously been CFO and had long been groomed for the step up. However, three months in and Dunne is finding the transition difficult. He cannot find a rhythm and is struggling to get traction for the job. 

However, sitting in his office, suddenly everything starts to make sense. He had spent the previous 25 years learning, developing experience and gaining insights. However, when he took over the job, he kept second-guessing himself, benchmarking his decisions against what other CEOs would have done. That day, however, he realised that he needed to be himself – that the deep and rich lessons of the past 25 years had prepared him to be the chief executive.

He realised that if he was going to do the job, he could only do it on his own terms.  “And from that day on actually, I would say very rapidly I got comfortable in the job and started to make a difference because I realised that this life was the preparation for the CEO,” he says. 

“The nature of the CEO role is nobody ever asks you a question that they already know the answer to. So, when you realise that, it’s quite liberating to know that you don’t have to know the answer because the other person doesn’t either, that’s why they’re asking. And the truth is the job of the CEO is to manage uncertainty, that’s the nature of it.”

*****

In 2016, Ronan Dunne relocated to Basking Ridge, New Jersey to start a new chapter in his life. His departure from O2 was amicable and tied into the proposed takeover of O2 by Three, its smaller rival. Ultimately, the deal was blocked by regulators, but Dunne had made his decision to move. Indeed, while still in O2, he made the decision to invite executives from Verizon to come to Slough to see him in action. 

In his role as executive vice president and group CEO of Verizon Consumer Group, the largest division of Verizon Communications, the leading US telecoms provider, he leads the teams responsible for delivering wireline, TV and wireless connected experiences to more than 100 million consumers every day, while his unit is also responsible for helping to build the first 5G technology network that will re-define how customers live, work and play.

I begin by asking him about the cultural differences between the US and European business. 

Ian Kehoe (IK): I just want to talk about your own journey. How has that transition from Britain to New Jersey been? In addition to changing jobs and roles, it’s a massive cultural shift. 

Ronan Dunne (RD): It is. There’s a lot of people in Ireland who’ve had experience of working in the UK and a reasonable number have had experience of working in the US. What I think is interesting in my experience is going to the UK is one transition, and you go to an environment where essentially everybody in Britain knows somebody from Ireland, that’s the reality.

You go to the US – and it varies from coast to coast, but I’ll make some generalisations – the focus in the US is almost entirely domestic. People don’t look outside their borders. Occasionally when there’s an incident of some kind around the world, but generally, they don’t look outside their borders. So, it’s domestic. Now, you can explain that given the physical size and given the population, 350 million people. So, I’m not making it as a kind of a negative statement, it’s just an observation. In that regard, fitting in or assimilating is quite different because some of the aspects I would have assumed to have brought were around a significant kind of global perspective, a broader view. Respectfully, most people weren’t interested. I don’t mean that in the narrow sense of whether the board of Verizon in considering to recruit somebody like me, of course they’re interested in the fact that I had experience across Europe and elsewhere. But in the day-to-day, it’s not a reference point that is of interest to people.

So, what I found was that the earliest assimilation was harder. Socially and business-wise it is very conservative on the east coast. I went to New Jersey in September of 2016, the expectation then inside our organisation was that senior leaders wore a suit and tie every single day. I hadn’t worn a tie in 15 years, not being flippant but the only two places I used to wear it when I worked in the UK was if I went to Number 10, went to Buckingham Palace when there was an official event on. So, it was different. 

And the other thing was that the organisation and again, I can’t reference every US corporate, but it was quite hierarchical and my leadership style has never been that way. I’m a front of house person. So, the first 18 months were much harder than perhaps even I expected. The good news was that we were going through a change and my recruitment was an ingredient of a decision and a very explicit intent by the board and the executive leadership to drive change within the business. 

And now I would say that in the last two years I’m in a position where I’m much more akin to the style and leadership approach that people would have been familiar with from me for the previous ten years for example, when I was running O2 in the UK. 

IK: I think it’s interesting when you say the east coast is conservative. I would have thought Ireland or Europe would have been more formal, more hierarchial?

RD: Now the culture in the west coast is slightly different. Silicon Valley, because the level of opportunity within the US is so large for investing and everything else, doesn’t tend to look outside. It’s a bit like the consumption of wine – if you’re a winemaker on the west coast, your market domestically is so big that you never consider having to market your wines in Europe, which is why we see a relatively small amount of US wine in Europe. It’s not a quality thing, it’s just a market size thing. And I think what you had in the US was, particularly along the east coast, a lot of traditional businesses that had been big for a long time that had a strong sense of values. They do things the way they do them because they have always done it that way. 

IK: And had you seen any of the tensions around race that have emerged in the last number of months.  

RD: Look, I think the US is not unique in this. Whether it’s diversity, inclusion, whether it’s racism, whether it’s the haves and the have nots and the increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor, whether it’s access to good quality education – structurally, these things exist frankly in all our countries and they tend to be exacerbated in times of economic downturn and disruption. So, in Ireland we saw it a lot in the downturn past the crash. The regrettable impact of that is those who are less financially flexible tend to be impacted the most. 

What I think has happened in the US more recently is that as the economy has been relatively strong, employment has dropped etc., and it’s become more and more obvious that the rising tide hasn’t floated all the boats. And the discussion, I think, has been crystallised in the context of the run-up to the November election, and it’s not simply about blue versus red, democrat versus republican. But that created an accelerated forum for a conversation around big debates, around big government, small government, tax reform, health policy which anyone who listened in to any of the democrat candidate debates would know, they were tearing themselves apart in relation to those things. So, what I think has happened is that relatively benign economic environment, a perception that everything is going well, matched to the realisation that has been amplified by the domestic political agenda, which has really highlighted the gap. 

And then you know, sadly it’s been the case in the US, whether it’s been Ferguson a few years ago or others, that every so often there’s something gets lit in the tinder box. Look, I’m very clear for our businesses and for our community that more has to be done. I’m proud of the fact that my business unit has one of the most diverse employment bases of any major company in the US. My board is very diverse but that doesn’t mean that we’ve solved it. What I would say is that I hope it means that we’re well informed and we’re thoughtful about the agenda that we all have to contribute to accelerating some of the change. As Verizon, we did a thing on the digital divide a couple of years ago in conjunction with an award-winning producer from National Geographic highlighting that there were two digital divides in the US; a rural/urban digital divide and a socioeconomic digital divide. 

If you were in a school in New York in a poor suburb, you were as likely to be excluded from digital teaching as you were because you were living in a remote area on the plains somewhere in the United States. So, it’s something that we’ve been very conscious of and the company itself is very active with United Nations Foundation and the Global Citizen Programme and particularly focussed on a number of the SDGs around education, about living with dignity and around the environment. 

I genuinely love what I do and I believe that a business like ours and a brand like ours can make a difference every single day. 

IK: That’s really interesting. I don’t want to get into the whole career journey. It’s been told elsewhere and I don’t want to rehash old ground.  But I do want to delve into the decision to go to the US. You could have done anything at that point – you could have gone the board route, the VC route, the mentor route. What was the attraction of the US and Verizon? 

RD: I describe myself as a 15-year old curious kid and it’s not just a glib clever thing to say. I remain, sincerely at 56 years of age, as fascinated by everything as I was when I was a kid. So I’m a kind of a joiner upper, I’m a curious, I’m a high-energy individual. And the other thing is – and again forgive me but I’ll say it plainly – I’m a very strongly values- and purpose-driven individual. 

When I was at Telefonica, we had a Telefonica University in Barcelona and a fabulous guy called Brian Bacon who runs Oxford Learning, does corporate development. He ran a programme about purpose and while I’d always understood it, I’d never necessarily defined it as elegantly or as sharply. Essentially, what drives me is a genuine interest in making a difference. And making a difference can be anything from a more profitable business, a more successful business. But I’ve had a strong sense for quite a while of making a difference in the sense of the broader socioeconomic model. If we can help people to do well and participate effectively in society and in the economy, that’s part of the solution to all boats rising. 

So, when I was in the UK for example, I committed 20 per cent of my time to youth employment and youth engagement off the back of the downturn. I took over as CEO in 2008 and by 2010/11, 50 per cent of young people were unemployed in Spain, 19 per cent in the UK, 57 per cent in Greece. 

So, if there was something that had to be done it was to ensure that a whole generation of young people weren’t economically excluded because if they were, it was a cost that society was going to have to pay for 30/50 years. So, it was hugely important. So, put that in context, I found myself having been almost ten years the CEO of O2, a decision is made that we were going to sell that business. The background is, in the end, it didn’t go through. 

And then a few weeks ago the courts in Europe decided that the European Union was wrong and actually struck down the fact that the merger was blocked. But that’s all water under the bridge. 

I had to make a decision, exactly as you described, and I really had three routes. I was at the age where I could hang up my football boots and say, I’ll be a part-time player/coach and I’ll go and do a non-exec or do a chairman role. The second thing was I had, from a practical point of view, a non-compete clause in my contract and so, if I was to stay basically in Europe, I had to move industry. If I wanted to stay in telecoms, I had to move geography. So, I really broke it into three things; look for non-telco in Europe interesting opportunities, look outside Europe to see if there’s something interesting in telco and see what the opportunities were maybe of non-exec chair investing type, the third leg as it were. 

And honestly, actually Comcast in the US approached me first because they have a wholesale MVNO agreement with Verizon, as it happens, and they were about to launch their mobile business – this was in December of 2015. That kind of got me thinking about, well, maybe the US is an opportunity. By coincidence and unrelated, I chose to say no on that because the timing was such that I’d made commitments to the chairman of Telefonica that I would see this through to completion, one way or the other. And two months later Verizon approached me. 

If you see that context of okay, I need to look at geography I’m going to stay in the sector, but then you go back to purpose. Verizon is the largest telecommunications company in the world. The consumer business is the largest consumer telecoms business in the world. That’s nothing to do with me, that’s just a data point when they come and talk to me. 

And you kind of have to ask yourself if you’re actually remotely genuine about the fact that what gets me up in the morning is I’m curious and that I believe that making a difference is important. Somebody turns around to you and says, would you like to run the biggest mobile phone company in the world?

You kind of have to think, if you have a chance of doing it, that it’s something that you have to do. The conversation with family and with others was, of course, I don’t have to do this but you know me well enough to know that if I’m offered it, I have to do it. And so, the people around me were – I think the honest expression would be, thought I was brave to do it at that stage in my career. 

I’d nothing to gain as far as a lot of people saw it and a load to lose from a reputation or whatever point of view. I just saw it as an adventure and you know what, that’s exactly what it’s been and I don’t regret it for a day. The first 18 months were hard work but we’re all used to hard work. I love what I do. I genuinely love what I do and I believe that a business like ours and a brand like ours can make a difference every single day. In the US, where they talk about maybe introducing a minimum wage where the States that have it, it’s about $7.80. 98 per cent of all my employees earn $15 an hour and when I take in commission and variable pay, 94 per cent of them earn $20 an hour. That’s making a difference as far as I’m concerned. Now of course, it’s the right thing to do. I’m not claiming credit, but most companies in the US don’t have a situation where ninety X per cent of their employees meet a $15 or $20 criteria which is a real living wage, as opposed to a minimum wage.

“I think everybody gets enamoured by a generation of technology and we fall into the trap of admiring it rather than harnessing it and determining what it is we want to do with it.”

IK: But even telecoms has the capacity to change society – and create opportunities for many people. 

RD: It is the ultimate accelerant of a more accessible open and democratic, in the small sense, society and environment and I’m a huge believer in that. And I think, without being too dramatic about it, the fourth industrial revolution is predicated on the ability to drive in a 5G world, this truly ubiquitous access to connectivity that is pervasive in its coverage and capability. I would describe it as an informed opportunity, which is really bringing AI intelligence at scale, in an environment where data is respected and protected. 

But it means you make better choices, data-informed choices, and that means less waste and more efficiency in our economy and a smaller impact on the environment. But it also should mean, in a positive sense, greater lifelong learning and a multistage career where people continue to have opportunities. Because a lot of what we described as progress and broadening the employment base has been low-grade repetitive work that’s not significantly value-adding for the people in those roles. 

If we take some of that out, rather than presume that just reduces the amount of employment available, what it does is it creates more space for creativity and value-add that sits on top of those things rather than labour being yoked to the process to be that low-grade component. But to do that we have to invest in education, we have to invest in fixing social balances and that means it has to be a partnership, public/private partnership to be effective. But I’m hugely positive about the role that telecoms and technology can play but also – and this is really important – we as society need to decide the role we want it to play. We can’t allow the technology to determine the role that the humans play and that’s where the world of AI and others is complex. But to me it is clear – we set the rules and then we harness the technology to deliver the things that society considers are important. 

IK: Do you think it’s been the other way around slightly in recent years?

RD: Oh, I think everybody gets enamoured by a generation of technology and we fall into the trap of admiring it rather than harnessing it and determining what it is we want to do with it. And I’ll go all the way back and again, at the risk of making a huge point. But look at Quaker families like the Cadbury’s and others who, in an environment of mechanisation of factories and others, set up whole villages and towns, public health systems, educational systems and whatever else. They had this completely coherent ecosystem view and they created wellbeing, not just wealth but wellbeing by looking at it in a holistic way. 

So, I think there are models out there that we’ve seen in the past. If you’ve ever been in the UK and go to a place like Bourneville. It’s not just a chocolate bar, it’s a town that was organised, where the workers were looked after and had accommodation when they retired, their kids were put through school, they had free medical. So, I think it’s exactly that sort of environment where not just to say it’s centrally controlled, don’t misunderstand that, but it’s where it’s orchestrated in a holistic, coherent way where we look at all of the things that society considers important. It’s about inclusion, it’s about a living wage, it’s about access to education, it’s about choice. It’s about housing.

I think economic activity is an essential ingredient of identifying the resources that need to be available to deploy for the common good. So, I’m a strong believer that a robust economic environment is the backbone of an inclusive society.

*****

Ronan Dunne’s career story has been well documented – how he went straight from school to train as a chartered accountant Deloitte (then called Touche Ross), and how he then moved to England and quickly rose the corporate ladder. 

So, instead of revisiting old ground, I asked Dunne in advance of the interview to identify a number of trigger points in his journey – that had shaped him both professionally and personally. One was his spiritual moment when he became CEO. The other two, however, come from the period before he was a CEO. 

“Early in 1987 I went to the UK and I worked in banking. I was 24, enthusiastic, and I worked hard. I think a very positive thing that a lot of Irish people who’ve worked abroad would recognise is when you turn up outside the country, not because you’re just wearing a shamrock on your sleeve, but you’re adamant that you’re going to show up and make an impact because you want to demonstrate that you’re as good as the local community and that you have what it take,” he says. 

“And so, I always think that people work a bit harder just to make sure that they’re seen to be as good. I think it’s a very positive thing and that Irish communities overseas have thrived as a result of that hardworking endeavour. So, I worked my butt off and the good news was people saw it, realised I was pretty good, and so three months in I got promoted to supervisor of the team in the finance department. And to keep things going I’d go in late at night, I’d go in at the weekends because my now wife Elaine, then my girlfriend, was still back in Dublin. And the big lesson was your output is finite, it’s your impact and influence that can be infinite. It’s not what you do, it’s what you make happen. 

“And the big reveal was, unless I could create an eighth day or a longer than 24-hour day, this model wasn’t scalable. A massive learning I still hold it to this day is that it’s not about what I do, it’s about what I make happen and what I orchestrate and facilitate around me.

“Anything from strategic direction to personal development, coaching, learning, building of teams, whatever those examples might be. Creating the context in which people can be the success they deserve to be. I think it’s the genuine role of management. So, that was massive for me because it was the dawn of, you know, being bright doesn’t solve anything in isolation. 

Dunne says the second turning point occurred way before he was appointed CEO of O2 in the UK. “I was the CFO and about nine months or so earlier my boss came to me and he’d like me to take on legal and regulation. And I thought yeah great, I’ll do that. And then he came on and he said take on procurement and supply chain. Okay, that’s fine. And then he came to me and said, ‘The HR person is moving, do you want to take on HR?’, and my initial reaction was, can we grab 15 minutes, we need to sit down and have a chat. And again, being completely transparent, my perspective going in was, boss I’m now doing three jobs, I’m only being paid for one. Am I missing something? 

“And the answer was that I was. I came in thinking that he should give me another 10,000 a year at least to recognise that I’m working longer. And his attitude was, you’ve missed the point, I’ve been stretching you for the last 12 months because I think you have what it takes to be the next CEO. I hadn’t really seen that. I thought being a public company CFO was what good finance guys do. And while it’s easy to say on reflection – many of the characteristics of people who know me is that I’m a natural people leader – front-of-house and therefore general management might be logical. That wasn’t the way I had perceived the way careers went for finance people. And the real kind of crystallisation of that was that I was appointed CEO and took over on January 1, 2008.”

At Verizon, Dunne is responsible for the firm’s nationwide network of shops – they contribute between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of the division’s annual revenues of $90 billion. On March 15, as the Covid-19 crisis hit hard, he was forced to close 82 per cent of all his US retail stores. 

Slowly, a number have started to reopen as the lockdown eases, although Dunne says the market has only come back by between 12 per cent and 15 per cent. To help customers, Dunne and his team made the decision to give customers 15GB of extra data. All staff have also been retained, while the company has provided financial support for suppliers and business partners. Forbes recently said that Verizon had implemented the best corporate response to the crisis. 

Overall, Dunne says the crisis will impact his unit in the billions of dollars, rather than tens of billions. 

IK: What do you think the long-term impact of the crisis will be? 

RD: Think about customers. I think the deeper thing that’s likely to be an impact and which would take time to evolve is an evolution in the customers’ attitude to self-expression. I actually think that customers will want more control and I mean that as individuals as opposed to customers of specific brands. 

Their whole worlds were thrown upside down 13, 14 weeks ago and all of a sudden control was completely taken back to the centre and I think what that will crystallise for individuals is they want to have more of a say, they want to have more of a sense of them having some control on the levers that impact them. And whether that’ll be choices about how they work, whether the choice is about whether they go to very large venues, travel internationally, do other things. But I just think generally that will result in this sense of, a keener sense of self-expression is something that I need to have more control around. Therefore, I think for brands and for businesses, this idea of helping individuals to put themselves back in control, to give them more ability to curate and define the terms in which they participate would be significant. 

In practice, that’ll mean things like virtual season tickets for sporting events or live entertainment. Because different people will say, I still want to participate, I still want the benefits of membership but it’s got to be on my terms because I’m not going to Croke Park with 85,000 on Sunday afternoon. But I’m still a fully paid-up member of the GAA, my local club, I used to play for Kilmacud Crokes in Dublin. So, that sort of thing will start to evolve as a trend in consumer behaviour that will be significant. 

I think from an employee point of view the single biggest thing is how does one develop and plan your career in a world where the traditional models that you were used to were being seen, being able to engage with key sponsors, senior leaders, other things. If we’re all working remotely there’s a lot of people already starting to think about what does work, not just in the practical sense of home or office but how do I develop my career, how do I get in front of the people that are important, how do I get seen. 

IK: Do you think it will leave the younger generation worst impacted? 

RD: I think there’ll be two impacts, and I think some will potentially be negative, but I think some will be significantly more positive. I think there will be a fundamental disruption to their hierarchical model. 

It just won’t exist. So, the old constraint of ‘yeah I’m seeing people, no I’m good’, but you know what, I kind of have to wait until somebody moves on to get ahead. It’s a bit like getting into a golf club in Ireland, how bad a winter was it; how many places are there in the spring sort of thing. 

So, I think the hierarchical mould will get shattered and I think that’s entirely right. One of the things I’ve talked about for years is this idea of social capital versus human capital in the sense that you organise around the need or the opportunity. You don’t organise the opportunity around the hierarchy and structure within a traditional business. So, I think that’s a real positive. Traditional senior leaders are also struggling to understand what’s the new norm for influencing impact otherwise, and I think therefore smart, digitally literate younger members of staff have a bigger opportunity in this phase to help to reshape the reality of work and the workplace than they ever had before. 

The message I’m sending to my own teams is that if you talk about a window of opportunity it’s the reality that every business, frankly every government, every civil project, every charity, everything is considering in this current environment more radical change than they’ve ever contemplated in their lives, because they know for certain that they have to. So, in that environment, I actually think the influence of our younger, more agile members of our community, whether that be work or socially, are more likely to be impactful and therefore I actually see it as a net positive. 

“We are, as an open economy, maybe more exposed to the rebalancing of the globalisation and some of the geopolitical moves.”

IK: What is your view on the Irish response to the crisis?

RD: My personal view is – and I watch very, very closely – I  would have thought that Ireland is in the top maybe three or four or five western countries in the coherency of the response between those aspects which are specifically associated with the medical response, but also the balance of ensuring that the economy was protected.

What I think has been important – and all businesses have tried to do this – is, there are essentially three phases. The first phase is a need to address health and wellbeing, whether that’s customer or employee or citizen as the case may be. The second thing is I need to address how can work get done in this disruptive environment. And the third thing is, how do I build a new normal. And I think what we’ve seen is that the response in Ireland to the first two has been pretty good and better than most. I think the challenge – and I’m positive about it – with the formation now of the new government is, the big question now is getting good marks in the first two is great but the fundamental impact on people is your response in phase three. How do you establish the new normal which gets the economy back on its feet again, which ensures liquidity and consumer confidence as well?

Because certainly, the stats for the US is that about 80 per cent of GDP in the US is driven by consumers and about 50 per cent of all consumer expenditure is discretionary. So, if consumers sit on their hands over the next 18 months because of a lack of confidence, that has a massive contracting effect on our economy. 

IK: And the new government must also deal with corporate tax reform and the possibility of a no-deal Brexit.

RD: One of the things we are looking at is what is the globalisation impact of Covid-19, what’s the geopolitical impact. And let’s be honest, people are considering both. Whether it’s the world’s relationship with China, whether it’s a long supply chain and the disruption associated with that, I think there will be an impact on the way, particularly, manufacturing processes happen, where people source from, and so on. And I think Ireland has to recognise that as a country without its own natural resources we are, as an open economy, maybe more exposed to the rebalancing of the globalisation and some of the geopolitical moves. On top of that, clearly, reforms to corporation tax are a specific. But my instinct is the other two themes are probably bigger influences on US corporates in what they plan to do over the next while.

*****

The future

IK: What does the future look like for you personally? How long do you plan on staying executive or what would you like, have you any other ambitions when you’re done with this?

RD: I do and it’s not something that we touched on it detail but we kind of skated close to it. I’m a huge believer in this idea, as I said earlier, of purpose and making a difference. My strong belief in that area is that if we can harness the talents of the current young generation and allow it to accelerate its impact, that that will have a hugely positive outcome on society. 

And the channel for me on that is work that I do within my own Verizon environment, but the biggest manifestation was I worked very closely on a number of youth charities in the UK including working directly with Prince Charles and Step Up to Serve, which was one of the legacy charities after the Olympics. And worked very closely through the Think Big Programme with 65 youth charities in the UK. My main focus now is a charity called One Young World, which actually had its global summit in Ireland about five years ago now. 

One Young World was founded by David Jones and Kate Robertson, who were then the co-chairs of Havas Media. It is the largest global gathering and network of young leaders out there. It has more representation of countries than the United Nations does. And on an annual basis it gets together and has a forum, a summit somewhere around the world. This year, sadly, it has to be postponed and it will go virtual. It was to be in Munich in October. 

To the context of what I might do next, I want to put something back – and I know lots of people say that – but in a very tangible way. My kind of overarching philosophy on society, on work, on everything is that the exam question that we all have to solve is how do you match talent to opportunity, because the truth is talent is broadly and equally distributed around the world. It doesn’t have unconscious bias, it’s completely inclusive. And so, opportunity is the thing that has the constraints, the conscious and unconscious bias’, the limitations. 

If we take the view that the future can be positively impacted by matching talent to opportunity, that is a philosophy, it’s what I focus on in areas like my charitable work and other things and that includes things like education, it looks at things like life skills, work skills, other things. And so, I’m increasingly trying to spend my time where I can take that sound philosophy and it’s maybe spending some time helping young founders – or not so young founders sometimes. 

This is almost certainly my last executive role. I love it but at some point or other, you do hang up your boots and go to being assistant manager or whatever it might be. You’re allowed to come out for the kick around but you just put your boots back before the game starts. So, some element of non-exec work is entirely possible, but it’s likely to be kind of a third, a third, a third. It’s likely to be some structured-type corporate involvement, a third which will be investing, angel support, providing advice to businesses and start-ups even if it’s not related to investing. 

And the other third is putting something back, which will probably include directly charity work in the youth sector. But also it could be public office in that regard, not necessarily in the elected public office sense, but public office in the sense of committing to working with Government. I’ve kept close to the Global Irish Economic Forum over the years. I keep in touch with people like Ciaran Cannon, with IDA, with Enterprise Ireland, with people like that. So that if there are things that people need or I can help, I try to do that. 

And although I haven’t done anything about it yet, one of the things I think may well be on the list is the idea of a visiting lecturer or professor in a business school.  As somebody who doesn’t want to teach you how to do the formula for the slope of a line which relates to demand or whatever else in an economic model, but wants to tell you how the world really works after 35 years of working in business at a reasonably senior level. And say yes, the math is important, but here’s the link to reality. Nobody’s ever actually asked me to calculate something in a capital asset pricing model since the day I did it studying for chartered accountancy. 

But my background in accountancy and my numeracy have been hugely foundational to how I understand structures and models when I’m trying to do problem-solving and thinking. It’s the ability to take some of the theory and make it an actionable tool in the hands of this next generation of leaders that I think could be massively powerful.