 Good afternoon everybody, since I've just met you I'm going to stand up for a moment With me today, this is by nature of a disclaimer is my former colleague my former boss and my current friend Alex Mahon right I I come from the past I'm a Television executive or a former television executive and in some ways Alex represents the intersection between that past and the future Alex has just taken up a job within the last three weeks or four weeks as The chief executive and editor-in-chief of channel for which is a unique public broadcasting institution in the UK It it was established in the 80s as a as a public service Broadcaster with a commercial side to it. It has a stage-given remit that is about That is about being the alternative the noisy alternative It is a broadcaster that has always represented diversity in Britain a kind of political and social edge And has never been afraid of controversy But more interesting in some ways than channel for which faces a lot of the disruption that you are causing in the industry That I come from Alex Alex's journey as a business leader is very specific And I want to explore a particular set of themes with her today And those are her career and how that shaped her which is somewhat surprising when we get into the detail how that shaped her view of the responsibilities of a leader in in Commercial and public life and then at the end we're going to talk a little bit about the challenges facing or more about the challenges facing Channel for and linear television broadcasting houses like that around the world, right? You ready for this? I can't wait, right? Good. So before we before we start talking about your career Alex Can you just tell us a bit more about channel for so that we know where we're heading? Can you can you sketch in the the UK landscape and channel for very briefly? So you and I Gary have worked in international broadcasting for a long time So different broadcasters in 150 plus nations channel for is utterly unique. So there's nothing else like it in the world It is as you said set up by the state So it has a legal remit of set up in 1982, but it doesn't take any money from the state So it's very much in the tradition of British public service broadcasting, but it's not a state broadcaster So we make all our own money about a billion sterling and revenues a year from advertising and our remit Tells us to innovate to challenge to reflect the nation to cause debate to stimulate debate and to appeal to the audiences that others don't reach So if you boil it down the remits about creative innovation doing new stuff, you know the point is to do new stuff and Appealing to diverse and different populations sort of in for the all the good things of social purpose at scale Possibly the best television organization that exists in the world because we also don't seek to make a profit So it's at scale you come into work You're only there to do new exciting cool stuff and broadly to do good with it in a noisy provocative Challenger brand way in with Maverick and risk-taking alongside that right. That's very interesting Let's let's set that so channel four also is the broadcaster that that launched big brother at the At the British public and this was a turning point because it was very very early on in the life of big brother And in some ways big brother as a as a series Defined channels. It's not on channel four anymore and hasn't been for a while But in some ways it defined channel four's brand I think it's fair to say it's an entertainment come house for many years, but let's start with you Alex you You you come from a from a Binational family, right you American father English mother and you grew up in Scotland. Yeah, can you tell us a bit about that? Yeah, I grew up in in Scotland at certain points in the south of England in America kind of all over the place You're making it sound quite luxurious a by national family. I'm gonna. Yes. It's a little more low rent than that and What do you mean by that? I mean by national nowadays in five Constant transatlantic jet-set travel as opposed to that's what you do in my mind It would be more divorced parents who lived in two different countries But yes, we'll take by national And but it did involve actually quite a lot of change so I moved around a lot and I went to different places and I had step Brothers and sisters, so I suppose in upbringing. I was already used to quite a lot of change That's led me into the kind of employment where I enjoy a high degree of transition and change and quite like getting involved in challenging situations where Disruption is required in the company, right? That's interesting and you but but you didn't start out in show business If that's what you're in right you went to university. What did you actually study? This is the big reveal people What did Alex Mahon actually study? I can see the audience is excited. Yeah, right? Studied physics Physics for I did physics is my first degree and then I did physics PhD I did seven years of physics and after I've done seven years of physics in kind of astrophysics and space science and high Energy physics and medical physics. I then realized I didn't want to be a physicist It took me seven years to realize that Yeah, I'm really really fast on the uptake and I realized I didn't want to do it forever because actually Continuing to study in science or engineering as many people here will know it is quite narrowing like it's mentally narrowing You know more about one area than anyone else in the world knows about it But you only know that about one area Until you get much later on and I realized I'd like knowing quite a lot of things about a lot of things But not necessarily everything and that my skill or what I enjoyed was how you apply those things together I also realized that I really like being with people and I enjoyed that sort of emotional Intelligence side of my personality about finding out about other people and science a scientific career can be quite isolating It's not necessarily social based. It's more experimentation in what I was doing So I decided to come out of physics and then went to be a management consultant Before we go there. You were also an astronaut, right? That it wasn't an astronaut I wanted to be an astronaut I wanted to be an astronaut from like when I was very young till I was in my 20s And I led the European young astronauts and I went to astronaut kind of convention space camp training with Chinese and Korean and Russians mainly and Americans and but then I found out that you need to be really really fit to be in like physically fit And I was unlikely ever to happen for me. I had the science bit Didn't really have the physical and how did that how did that experience? Do you think shape you that experience of of being on a space camp and and Working in that kind of field towards that kind of goal Did that did that change you or was it a reflection of your personal? I think you're with people constantly and tech is it's wonderfully like this too You're with people constantly have focused on logic data Analysis and what the correct answer is as shown by those things So you're surrounded by a world of people like that and if you take advanced science, they're not people who care about you know Social media or physicality, you know, it's about intellect and pursuing the right answer and I love that side of it I love the data analysis and the logic and the intelligence of the pursuit of the correct answer okay, so you go from from your career in physics you you go to Business consulting and you find your way into the strategy department I mean I'm eliding a few years right, but you find your way into the strategy department at RTL the largest commercial Broadcasting group across Europe and part of the Bertelsmann media conglomerate and from there because I want to move forward you You move into free mantle media Which is a global production and distribution company and responsible for shows like idle and x-factor and has subsidiary organizations all around the world including here How did you experience that change was it was it did you feel like you you'd arrived at some kind of destination or was it just a job or It was a retreat from the solitariness of the and the introspection or I suppose of the physics, but How did it feel to go from the one field to another? So I always love watching television when I was a kid my mom was always at work In a good way and all I did was come home from school switch on the television and my brother and I just watched television all day long You know, we'd switch it off the moment we heard her come in the front door So to find out you could actually have a job Where watching the television was a legitimate part of it and that knowing about television actually made me look really Like I knew my job once I found out about that I've arrived How could one do anything but pursue a career in that where a love of the medium? Makes you really authentic leader in it I just thought that that Coal essence of what you like doing and doing that work is perfection and many successful people that you know They have found the thing that actually plays to their true hobbies or interests So I I loved that, you know, but then I came in through the business side and the analytical side So I wasn't a producer so sort of how do you then get into production? How do you add value to an area that you don't know and you haven't trained in was more of a complex piece of it Okay, so you you rise through Fremantle You you become chief operating officer of Fremantle's one of Fremantle's two large three largest subsidiaries in in the UK Fremantle and then you form a working relationship a very close and sustaining working relationship and friendship with Elizabeth Murdoch and together you build probably the Noisiest and most nimble of the of the large independent production and distribution groups called shine Right and this this seemed to me I mean as your friend at the time to bring together several strands of your career your love of the business of show business or whatever that was television, but also this this commercial focus and and Tough negotiation and a desire to create value whereas in that industry typically those things are seen as separate Separate occupations or separate weights inside the business. Do you do you how? How did you find your time at shine you were building a business? It was a startup in a sense. Was it your first time in that kind of environment? It was my first time in the high growth of that environment And it was my first time in being a shareholder in the business So the you know as everyone who's here from a startup knows that gives you a different Sense of what your mission and your purpose and your dedication to it is it's very different to a job You can't just leave it and get a better job elsewhere So but it also gives you huge energy because you look to yourself Francis and you look to solve situations Rather than creating a get-out. So I love that. We had a really high growth rate when I joined the business. We were 40 million sterling in revenues and by the time I left in 2013 2014 we were seven hundred million sterling so sort of that massive growth and I think all the things we did that were really difficult time like we bought other companies and we took debt just as Lehman Brothers Kind of crashed and the markets crashed and we opened up internationally and I moved to LA when I had a sort of Five month old baby and went back and forth every two weeks with baby all those things in retrospect look bonkers By the time they felt like a natural evolution of what we were doing because we were full of energy for it And then we have the next idea of things seem to be going our way It's easier in a way when you're the challenger brand when you're the challenger brand and you're growing You've always got someone else really big to catch up to and to challenge and to do different things too and to sort of say Well, they do that we'll do this you sort of have that comparison to go against so that made it easier as well But in retrospect, I think why did we we were lucky? How many children did you have in this period if I may ask I had four children in a period and kept I mean, I still have four children I gave birth to four children I haven't lost a high retention rate. I gave birth to four children during that. Yeah, but to be honest once you've got four children It's easier to be at work pretty aggressive somebody with children And then you leave shine Because the shareholders form a joint venture with another company a merger with Endemol And you move into digital special effects software, right? So you go back to a kind of techie physicist-driven Mathematically based Heartland. Yes. Yes. Why did you do that? I left behind the glamour and heels and the Pink champagne of Cannes and and went to Kodos. Well, I thought really hard about what to do next I've been running this amazing company and it was time to go and we'd been at the pinnacle We'd had all this growth. I thought well, I can't do that again. And if I go to anything else like it I'll be a poor facsimile of it or I'll be constantly trying to reinvent Something and I'll fail And I'll and then I'll forever be looking backwards and I thought really hard about two things one is where's the growth So when I had been an independent production It had been the period of high growth and the growth is all in tech, you know right now in our world The growth in tech so therefore the interesting people end up where the growth is and then I thought about it I made like three circles for myself Vendor I can say Venn diagram in this world. It's not television And I thought okay like power and status money interest and like okay I would love to overlap all those things But which am I prepared to sacrifice and I realized that for me I put interest first so I thought I now Therefore I need to use that to judge myself and like not go for the easy Which would be power and status of money But then I'd be bored and I thought when I'm bored and pretty crap at my job and you get bored very quickly But if I've run out of things to do or new ideas then one does default to what you already know and then it's not that you don't work hard It's just are you any good down anymore always where you'll lose your edge, right? You're just doing the same thing and that's fine at a certain point, but boring So then I realized that was tech and then I looked really hard though So I wanted a tech company that was in the creative industries and I wanted to go into private equity as well So that was interesting so then I found the foundry which is Visual effects not special effects. So it's like all the code and tech that lies behind Kind of image processing computer graphics from the early days when that started in London and so ho in the post-production industry in the 90s And makes all the visual effects that are CG that are in movies like Deadpool or Star Wars or frankly in every key piece of video content we see at the cinema nowadays So they make all the code that lies behind that and they're in Every visual effects Oscar winner for the past ten years has used our software So so that sort of it shows you how pervasive it is in the industry And then I went there to do the next stage of that company Which is how do we go into VR or how do we go into industrial design? But it's completely different business because although the the customer as a digital artist the star for all coders Okay, so now you arrive at Channel 4. We need to keep an eye on the time You arrive at Channel 4. Can you you you have publicly stated at least internally that your your focus points to your your agenda is is Creativity technology Commercial nows and diversity, right? Can you talk to me about your your sense of leadership and the requirements of leadership and then a bit about about how you think? About traditional media in relation to the changing technology that the people in this space are making happen around us Yeah, we try and sum that up So those are my priorities absolutely because unless we put technology and the consumer and Our own culture at the center of the business I feel will achieve nothing and The culture of any creative business and this is true in technology as it is in television For me as a culture that needs to depend upon different people in order to get out of a kind of single tribe mentality You need different people in order to innovate and come up with constantly new ideas So ensuring that we always have a culture that celebrates that difference and therefore is diverse and inclusive is fundamentally important to me Because I as a senior female leader believe that makes us better, right? You know, I believe of all the same and a monoculture. It's rather dull and we don't come up with anything So that's why that's really important to me. I think for me as a leader coming from Creative like science then into creative then into technology and then back into creative, you know The lessons are really different from those places. I'm a blend of that analytical Database driven conclusions and they're you know, right the interest in the emotional intelligence and working with people I'm endlessly curious about people and what makes them tick So I like the blend of that left and right brain and I think different situations of leadership Require different bits of that, you know, if you're doing a meeting with investors It's an entirely bit of that to it is to a meeting with a team of producers You know a team of innovators and ideas and it's different that the data analytics team need from you But what I like about a role like this is all of those facets of one's personality of required and My job is a leader to bring what they need whichever bit of that My staff need to the meeting or my stakeholders need to the meeting rather than and do that in an authentic way I'm still myself mildly sarcastic generally quite chatty Quite honest, you know and also suppress some of those facets in the right way in order to sort of create the strategy That the company needs, you know, I like the combination of that And I think we're in a time where that openness to who you actually are is actually what? Generations demand from leaders like we don't really want the perfectly poised Come to office different person on a Monday to Friday wear a suit every day. We don't want that person anymore So you like this in the office? Maybe next week I might be wearing this boots in London. All right, Alex Just one final question before I wrap the the you talked about the non-commercial remit of Channel 4 But you yourself as I know are extremely commercially adept extremely numerate and a very tough negotiator And you have in your in your kind of manifesto for your period of Channel 4 You have identified commercial smartness as one of the things the organization Needs that that would appear at first glance to be a contradiction. Can you just tell us how you square that circle? Oh, yeah, it's not a contradiction. It's a brilliant thing because the more money you make commercially the more you get to spend it on good stuff I mean, it's just if I make more money I get to spend it on things that deliver the remit right diversity creative innovation public service television back to the British public Reflecting democratic values on screen by fighting fake news independent journalism Noisemaking interesting debate, you know intellectually stimulating programs stuff in the art appealing to youth Thinking about how you reflect Britain in a sort of post-Brexit pre-Brexit world the more money I make the more I get to spend on that I mean, that's heaven right and Where what what do you imagine is the Channel 4 of five years time and then we're off? Channel 4 of five years time has to be a Channel that if your Facebook Apple Netflix Google Amazon you can't do without if you come to Britain You know, that's our mission is to remain at scale relevant to society And you know, that's the special ability that you have as a public service broadcaster when you're about scale You know, you can do that in a way that maybe social media doesn't always reflect You know that that independence and and the clarity of purpose, you know It gives us that special advantage to be relevant, right? Thank you very much. Alex Mahon. Thanks. Thank you very much citizens of slush