Andy Coulson: Hello and welcome to another Business edition of Crisis What Crisis, the podcast that provides valuable lessons to help you live a more resilient life. If this is your first time with us, please do hit subscribe wherever you're watching or listening, and please do leave us a review. It really helps make sure that these I hope useful conversations are shared as widely as possible.

Today, we’re joined by one of the UK’s most resilient businessmen. Rupert Soames, now Chairman of the Confederation of British Industry, has built a 40-year career running toward the gunfire rather than away from it—perhaps no surprise, given that he’s the grandson of Winston Churchill.

Rupert’s career started unconventionally—with a stint as a DJ at Charles and Diana’s wedding—before working his way up from the shop floor at General Electric to senior management over 16 years. He later took the helm at Aggreko after the sudden death of its CEO, leading the company through crisis. At Serco, he pulled off one of the most remarkable corporate turnarounds in recent history. And last year, he stepped in to steady the ship at the CBI after a turbulent period and its recovery is already well underway.

But behind his decades of success, there have been moments of personal resilience as well as professional.

Rupert Soames OBE, welcome to Crisis What Crisis.

Rupert Soames: Good morning.

Andy Coulson: How are you?

Rupert Soames: Doing well, doing well.

Andy Coulson: Good. Well look, thank you so much for joining us. Rupert, we’re going to talk about those business crises that you've lived through, navigated, managed so brilliantly during the course of your career. But let's set the scene a little.

I touched on your family in the intro. Your father Christopher Soames was a highly accomplished, very effective man who held a number of political roles, including in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet and as European Commissioner. And your mother Mary, Baroness Soames, an incredible woman, a life of public service. Both, I imagine, had a big impact on your world view, if I can put it that way.

Rupert Soames: Yes, they certainly did. And they were wonderful parents, but very busy parents. I also had four siblings who were quite a lot older than me, so I was a sort of mistake that came along at the end. But as my mother said, a very much loved mistake.

So they were brought up slightly as a pack, and I was sort of trailing along behind saying, “Me, me, what about me?”

Andy Coulson: So the gap between your-

Rupert Soames: Five years, between my adored elder sister and me, is five years. And there's ten years between me and my adored elder brother.

Andy Coulson: You say it with a smile on your face, the mistake piece, but-

Rupert Soames: Because it's funny, because I just imagine- I mean, to have four children and think that that's, you're done. And then suddenly another one comes along. Anyway, I never felt unloved in any way, but it was a stick with which I could occasionally beat my mother.

Andy Coulson: Yes. So parents, busy, busy people would be would be an understatement.

Rupert Soames: Yes. But I mean, I had a very privileged upbringing. I had a generally fabulous education. I was sent to boarding school at seven, and it coincided with my parents going to Paris, my father to be Ambassador there. And so I thought that- lots of people of my generation and my upbringing did that. But it was a boarding school, and it had some of the sins of boarding schools, including some masters who had an entirely unhealthy appetite for young boys. So it wasn't completely plain sailing from that point of view.

And the only reason why I mentioned it, because I was subject to some very poor behaviour by people who shouldn’t have-

Andy Coulson: You were you were abused?

Rupert Soames: Yes. Yes, I was. But-

Andy Coulson: Goodness. I'm so sorry that that happened to you.

Rupert Soames: Well, there's nothing to be sorry about it. It happened. But the only reason I bring it up is a, because I'm completely unembarrassed about it.

Andy Coulson: As you should be.

Rupert Soames: Many, many worse things have happened to many people. But I think that it was maybe part of helping me learn behaviours and coping mechanisms which proved to be useful in later life. The idea that hiding things and not talking about them is a really bad idea, letting things become a sort of sepsis in your brain.

And when I watch some of these inquiries into historical allegations of sex abuse at schools or whatever, my heart goes out to the people who in their 40s and 50s are still harbouring truths that go back late into their lives and have probably never talked about it. And I can only imagine the pain that you get from that if you've never talked about it; if it has been allowed to grow as an incubus inside your brain, and then suddenly age 40 or 50 it comes out. I mean, it must be horrific.

Whereas me being a happy-go-lucky sort of chappie was making jokes about it at dinner parties when I was 16.

Andy Coulson: Really? You never really sought to conceal it?

Rupert Soames: No, I didn't. No, absolutely never.

Andy Coulson: Your parents were aware?

Rupert Soames: My parents absolutely were aware. And I think that it must be a difficult thing for parents to know that they've sent their child to a school where bad things have happened. But I never felt remotely abandoned or unloved or anything like that. And it truthfully wasn't a big issue for me. It's only funnily enough when I've grown older and perhaps more reflective about- when people like you come and ask me questions about sort of, what is this about resilience? How do you imagine-? And how can you know anything about resilience when you had such an incredibly privileged childhood? Which I did.

And I just think that being able to speak about it, and be unembarrassed about it, also has been helpful, and helpful in terms of leading to resilience. Because we all are children of our childhood. So we all have things that happen when you're in your- the Jesuits used to say, “Give me a child until they're 7, and then you can have them.”

And so I don't want to make a big thing about it. It's not been a huge thing in my daily life. But if I meet somebody like you, who has had huge difficulties in their life-

Andy Coulson: It's nothing in comparison.

Rupert Soames: It is. I don't want to overstate it. I mean, we can be over sympathetic to this, but it's sort of the comparing the notes of where that resilience may come from.

For me, it comes from the idea that always look on the bright side, be cheerful about life and crack on.

Andy Coulson: So when we look at the period of your early childhood through school, were people aware whilst you're at school, or is it all- you say 16 you were-

Rupert Soames: My parents were- one of the school masters went to prison.

Andy Coulson: Right. So it was confronted it was-

Rupert Soames: Well yes, it was confronted in a sort of 1960s sort of way. But it was confronted. And you'll know that since then, I mean now, in the last 10, 15 years there's a lot more come out about what was going on.

Andy Coulson: Yes. You were at Eton?

Rupert Soames: Yes, nothing bad ever happened at Eton, this was actually at prep school between the ages of 7 and 12.

Andy Coulson: Right.

Rupert Soames: And I was at Eton. I was generally an unpopular boy but I would say that I was - I enjoyed it, I was able to do what I really wanted to do. And it was a place that opened up tremendous possibilities for me.

Andy Coulson: So the fact that it was known, confronted by presumably your parents, there was a process, this master ended up being prosecuted, imprisoned. That also allowed you within the family, and for your family as well who must have been- your parents must have been devastated to discover this was happening.

Rupert Soames: Yes, I don’t - if they were I think it was just sort of “Rupert's fine.” And Rupert was fine. Rupert was absolutely fine, and we all made a bit of a joke about it and marched on. But you know, the only reason at all for talking about it is that- the sense that there are still people out there who haven't had as easy a time as I have.

Andy Coulson: Yes. Well, just thank you for sharing that, Rupert. This is a conversation about resilience in the business context, and what seems clear from what you've said is that that’s an important element of the story, because it's fuelled your resilience to a degree.

Rupert Soames: I think what it's what it also fuelled was- whether it was that or whatever, or just being the youngest, was to take a different path. Because when I went to Oxford it was the time of the Big Bang, and nearly all my contemporaries and my friends from university went to work for banks, and I didn't want to go on that path. Partly because I recognised they were cleverer than me.

Andy Coulson: Was that really it?

Rupert Soames: Yes. There were some amazingly intelligent clever people there, but I just wanted to do something different. I’d always taken a path slightly differently trod, and so at university, at Oxford I was a DJ and I was doing the President of the Oxford Union for three nights a week and I was doing the music at a nightclub called Annabelle's two nights a week. It was quite hard work, did not leave a lot of time for social life.

So this idea of working hard and playing hard, I came out of Oxford longing to leave and get into the world, but knowing that I would not make a good banker.

Andy Coulson: Right.

Rupert Soames: I was pretty sure by that stage that I was-

Andy Coulson: But clear that business is where you wanted to be.

Rupert Soames: I loved it. Clear that manufacturing and technology is where I wanted to be.

Andy Coulson: where did that passion come from?

Rupert Soames: I don't know, I don't know. But I got offered a job and I got-

I don't know whether you've ever seen those children's books, the sort of cutaway books, called The Way Things Work? You get a cruise liner cut away in half and you can see, there are the engines and there are the things- I am insatiably curious about the way things work.

And one of the joys of my working life is I’ve worked in so many different businesses. I’ve worked in software companies, I've worked in manufacturing, weighing scales, I’ve worked in rental businesses, i worked in government services businesses. And the joy of constantly discovering the way things work is one of the things that's been so much fun in my life.

Andy Coulson: And that was just in you?

Rupert Soames: I think a sense of natural curiosity The other thing is, which I feel really strongly about, is I was incredibly lucky to be brought up in the countryside. And one of the things about the countryside is everybody treats each other the same. I mean, you know, you have to get on with everybody.

I spent a large proportion of my time in the holidays when I was a school child, going around helping to do artificial insemination of cattle. Because the guy who lived at the bottom near our house, I used to go around in his car at the age of 9 and 10, helping do AI on cows.

Now, when you are covered in a large dose of cow manure from an angry Jersey cow, it doesn't half knock out your airs and graces.

And one of the things that I just get so much pleasure from is the idea that people are okay to talk to me from whatever background, and whatever. And that's one of the things that has been wonderful about my children, who were all brought up- we kept home in one place, which was sort of between Aylesbury and Oxford and Bicester, whilst I worked and travelled around.

But living in the countryside and being brought up with country people and farmers is a privilege, and a background that suited me well.

And then going actually into factories and making things and seeing the- and the pride of saying, “This box-” I mean, I was working there during the Falklands conflict, and you used to have to go and take- you’d get a piece of equipment that was for a Harrier Jump Jet at an air display, and you had to walk it down the production line as it was made because we had to get it off the Falklands. I mean, how proud can you get? I mean, how sexy can a job be than doing that?

Andy Coulson: But you're in an environment obviously, your family is a political family. That road for you must also have been much discussed and been there as an option for you.

Rupert Soames: I loved politics. I was obviously very heavily engaged in politics at Oxford because I was President of the Union. You don't get to do that without being. But I lost that. And I also had the privilege- my brother was very good at politics and probably two Soameses were enough in politics.

Andy Coulson: Did you make that calculation?

Rupert Soames: Yes, he never for a moment would have dissuaded me from doing it. The other thing is I'm afflicted by- I'm really bad at remembering names and faces. Really bad at it. I mean-

Andy Coulson: That doesn't work well in politics.

Rupert Soames: Which does not work well in politics. But I love politics. That's one of the lovey things about the CBI is you're on the edge of politics and seeing how- you see all the fun bits and how fascinating it is. So I've always tried to keep a foot there, but I'm not a professional politician because I'm not good enough at it.

Andy Coulson: You're incredibly self-effacing about all these things, Rupert.

Rupert Soames: No, no, but I think if you’ve lived with politicians, if you've been brought up with politicians and seen how really skilful, how skilled they have to be, you know this from your work. People always think that politicians are sort of amateurs, that they sort of go round and they lie and cheat and steal. They don't, actually. They are highly committed.

But it's very, very different in working with a volunteer army. You know, where actually everybody can take- any of your colleagues can decide to flounce off out of Cabinet any day of the week and then cause you endless trouble.

And I just think when I see politicians who are doing their job well, I hugely respect that. I sometimes wish they gave those of us who had taken a different path and are sort of actually running businesses, it’s pretty difficult and complex and multifaceted, and they're just different disciplines. And it's quite hard to be good at both. There are very few examples of people who've been good at both of those things.

Andy Coulson: I'm interested to ask that question specifically. Just before I do, though, was the voice of your- or the shadow of your grandfather part of the deliberation on politics as well? Our greatest politician?

Rupert Soames: No, it wasn't. Because the other thing is, I don't have his name. So he was my grandfather, but I'm called Soames, so people didn't-

But I think one of the things that is certainly true, that for at least half my career, people thought that the reason for my success was who I knew, not what I knew. But equally I then had huge benefits, which was I had something to be proud of, a love of history, a love of the English language, wanting to write. I sort of have a- I love writing. I occasionally go and write op-eds and stuff. I get great pleasure in doing that, that communicating.

And it wasn't really until I got to sort of halfway through the 40 years of my industrial career that people stopped saying, “Well, he can't be completely incompetent.”

Andy Coulson: Again, the self-effacement. But the skills-

Rupert Soames: With good reason.

Andy Coulson: But if you were to look back at yourself at the start of your career, the drive we've talked a little bit about. But your key skill, or key skills, I think it's already coming across in the short term that we've been talking. Communication is a- you're really good at it. Has that always been the case? Have you always had, you know, from that ability to be able to talk to anyone, deal with anyone, you just described it eloquently in terms of the upbringing that you had, the farm, dealing with anyone and everyone. Is that something that you took into the workplace when you joined GEC? And was that, would you say, one of the skills that helped you progress?

Rupert Soames: I think genuine curiosity to know what people are doing in their jobs. Genuine respect; you can't fake respect. But when I go and see somebody doing their job well, and you think how bloody good they are at it, I am a) curious and fascinated, but also very respectful. Because they are doing things I couldn't do, and I could learn from them. I think there is always the sense that you can learn from people.

I am a huge believer, when people talk about culture, culture is about behaviour, and it's about learned behaviour. And one of the things that I say to people, particularly if you are a business leader, is that people watch your behaviour with intense interest. It doesn't matter if you go around and say, “Oh, we want all these highfalutins, we want people to behave really well, we want people to be nice to each other, we want people to do this and that and the other,” if when they see you, your own behaviour, and they see something different.

If you say, “We want people to be committed to the enterprise,” and if they see you, not working very hard, then you get a dissonance. And the quickest way to lose an organisation as a leader is if your personal behaviour is not aligned to what you're asking them to do. And when people sometimes say, “Soames runs towards gunfire,” it just happens to be that people have asked me to go and do jobs. It's not that I run towards it. I've been, “Would you like to go and do this?” And having arrived there, I think I have a- of not asking people to do things that I wouldn't do myself.

And I've been at it long enough for people to know that almost everything I ask people, I already have done. So whether it's going and debt collecting in the Yemen, or sleeping in a container in Angola, or going and walking around prison corridors trying to make sure that prisons are decent places, I have done those things and I can look with- and what it brings me is not a holier and though, it's respect for the people who do it. Understanding just how incredibly good people are at their jobs and how hard they work.

And one of the things that I’m occasionally asked, “Oh Rupert, what’s the secret of your success?” And the one thing I never say is working hard. Because there are millions and millions and millions and millions of people who are holding down three jobs, raising a family and probably got a mum at home who's got dementia or something like that. They work hard. Hard, hard work is not- it may be a pre- a condition for success, but it's not a guarantor of success.

One of my favourite expressions is Henry Ford's thing about, what's the secret of success? “Rise early, work hard, strike oil.” And it's this thing that you need to strike oil, and not being disrespectful to people in whose lives they have not struck oil in terms of had luck, that luck has not gone their way. The great big Pantechnicons have come crashing down the road and smashed their lives to bits, sort of thing.

And it was one of the reasons why I felt- so I feel quite strongly about asylum seekers, because I had the privilege when I was at Serco of helping organise the accommodation of 40,000 asylum seekers in the UK, and seeing the complexities of that situation. And also going and talking to people who had picked themselves up and had walked from Afghanistan or from the Sudan, had crossed the Mediterranean or Turkey, walked here to get here in search of a better life. Which you know, in decades, generations gone past, people used to do that going from Ireland to the United States and everything.

It's not the political point, but it's this point of treating people with a modicum of respect.

Andy Coulson: Rupert, you very generously offered to sort of look at three case studies if you like from your career, and analyse them from a from a crisis point of view.

Let's start with Aggreko. You moved across as chief exec in 2003 and arrived into a company that was in trauma really, following the unexpected, very tragic death of its chief exec. Just tell us what you sort of found on arrival.

Rupert Soames: A traumatised organisation, bereft. It was an organisation that had been so much grown in the mould and with the culture of Phil Harrower, who was a tremendous- he left school at 16, he was the absolute reverse of me. He'd left school at 16, he'd gone in as an apprentice into engineering and then got into power generation. He then moved to the States and built up this amazing company. And he was revered and rightly so.

And then little La-di-da Somes turns up. You know, Eton, Oxford and an accent that sort of expressed that. I’ve never been able to get rid of that, despite my attempts. And to win over the confidence and trust, and particularly since these were people who really knew about their business. And so, “What do you know about generators? What do you know about rental? You've never been in a rental business. How do you know about this?”

I think word got around quite quickly around the organisation, that I was the third choice because the other two candidates had withdrawn and they were desperate for a candidate, so I was there. I was there having been unemployed for a year, having had my second firing. So I've been fired twice in my life, and that one before Aggreko was particularly difficult because it took me a year to go and find another job.

Andy Coulson: There was a job between GEC and-

Rupert Soames: Yes, I worked for a wonderful company called Misys, which was software. So I got fired from GEC and I got fired again from Misys.

Andy Coulson: Can we talk about that just quickly? I mean, either one or other, or both perhaps, your reaction to it, the impact of it?

Rupert Soames: Well, I got fired from GEC for trying to buy the company that I was running. I wanted to buy Avery Burkel. And also after sixteen years there, when my hero and mentor Arnold Weinstock retired, it was time for me to go as well. And then I left Misys because- whether they found me annoying or whatever, but it was genuinely about maybe a different view of where the company would go. But I remain to this day completely respectful and devoted to Kevin Lomax and John Sussens, who were my bosses there. I didn't blame them at all for firing me, because I was quite annoying.

Andy Coulson: How did it impact you?

Rupert Soames: Well, it impacted me that I had three-

Andy Coulson: The second firing sounds more difficult than the first.

Rupert Soames: Well, it was more difficult to go and find another job so I was unemployed for a year. And that needed a certain amount of resilience, going around whistling cheerfully as I tramped from job interview to job interview. And luckily- I mean, I would have taken anything by the end, but luckily for me I got offered the job at Aggreko following the tragedy of Phil Harrower.

If you say what was it like when you get there with a traumatised organisation, an organisation that's looking at why have they chosen this guy, I was incredibly lucky in many respects. One was, a guy called Angus Cockburn was a finance director there, and that was the start of twenty years of working together with Angus. He was just brilliant. Not only is he a great finance director, he's a prince amongst people.

Andy Coulson: And he was in place when you arrived?

Rupert Soames: He was in place, yes.

Andy Coulson: Was he one of those who was unconvinced?

Rupert Soames: No, I don’t know, I never challenged him at that. And there was also Sheila McNeil who became my PA there. These people who had the choice just said, “We'll give them a go,” and they gave me some support. And actually over a period of time I was able, I think, to convince people, mainly by going out on job sites and standing at the top of the Tour Montparnasse in France in the freezing cold and looking at an air conditioning unit that was- I mean, it was a wonderful business, Aggreko, still is a fantastic business. But it wasn't only the Phil Harrower, I think, it was also the direction, it had lost its way.

Andy Coulson: I just want to give people a sense of scale, if they haven't heard of a Aggreko. You arrive, I think, market cap circa 450 million. When you left, it was five billion. Just so we understand the scale of the success.

Rupert Soames: Well, that was the striking oil bit.

Andy Coulson: Yes.

Rupert Soames: That was the luck. But it was also- there’s another good saying, that in a hurricane even turkeys can fly.

But we did wobble ourselves over to the part of the beach where we got into the fact that emerging countries, developed- fast-growing economies were short of power, and colleagues built up this terrific business providing power all the way around the world to emerging companies. And the company grew really, really fast, but it never lost its culture. And the culture was not something that I brought, it was something that was there already.

My big contribution I think to Aggreko was not to cock it up, because it had this phenomenal culture of customer service. It was populated by people who saw themselves as the fifth emergency service. When hurricanes hit in Louisiana, when- I remember getting a call, because we did the power for the London Olympics and there was a serious threat to, a credible threat to cut off power. Somebody said they’d got into the power stations, could cut off power to the whole south of England just before the opening ceremony. And we got a call from the authorities saying, “Can we send the Queen? Can you guarantee me that there will be power in the stadium?” And being able to say, “I can guarantee you there will be power in the stadium, come what may.” And she went.

It was being involved in great events and doing really good engineering as well, and it was great fun.

Andy Coulson: You are, I suspect, somewhat understating your role. You're the chief executive of this business, it is a business in trauma. Yes, it has this incredible culture that you've just described in place. But that culture does need nurturing, that culture does need developing. No culture stands still for long and however imbued that was on arrival, it needed to be developed, it needed to be nurtured and led through an incredible period, periods of change. How did you approach that, just in practical terms?

Rupert Soames: I actually think in terms of cultural change there was more of a job to do at Serco, which we'll come onto. At Aggreko I just dived into that culture like a warm bath. People said they had orange blood, they were unbelievably committed to the thing. And I truly- my greatest contribution to the culture at Aggreko was not to mess it up. And to dive into it, and to embrace it, and to say this is good. “This is good. What you care about, caring about- knocking over walls to go and get power to people.” It was a lot of heroism in that organisation and a lot of also really good logistics and manufacturing and design, but it needed a bit of self-confidence and it needed to get the strategy right.

One of the things I've learned about all the companies that I have been to, well the two really big ones, Aggreko and Serco, is that you have about six months when you arrive somewhere like that to get the broad direction and the strategy right. If you get that bit wrong, you can be off by a bit, but if you get that bit wrong and say, “We are headed off southwards,” and in fact that's not a place to go, you're done. It's one of the things that I say about a chief executive. Chief executives ask for advice and I say, “The first time you hit that ball of saying where we're headed, you've got to be right.”

Andy Coulson: How do you do that? How do you give yourself the best chance of being right?

Rupert Soames: The first is to go and listen to people in the company who know what they're doing, and go and listen to customers, and then you just have to use your nouse, you've got to have good radar. You've got to be good at being prepared to listen to people for advice. But fundamentally-

I remember vividly in Serco when we were to advising the strategy for Serco which really was strategically in a hell of a hole, and we were working on it, and the third light bulb came on. Pizzas came in at nine-thirty one night when we were there, and suddenly I got it. “I know what this is I've got a narrative.” Coming back to the communication bit, because a strategy that you can't explain in words, you've got to have a narrative. And it's when the narrative hits the spreadsheet draw- not the spreadsheet, the PowerPoint drawing, the boxes, we go and do this then that and the other, and then you can bring a narrative together, and the words fit.

You can say, “I can say…” And if the words fit. I do a lot of my thinking by repeating words. Not so much writing them down but going over them, and if the words fit, if it makes sense then probably it's decent. But I've seen a few times when people, new CEOs have come in and said, “We're going to do zhup,” and off they go, and it takes you eighteen months to find out that you've been going the wrong direction for eighteen months, and then that really is not a good place to be.

Andy Coulson: Let’s move on to Serco, then. 2014, you're persuaded to leave

Rupert Soames: No, I volunteered.

Andy Coulson: You volunteered?

Rupert Soames: Yes, I put my hand up.

Andy Coulson: Wow. I was going to ask you-

Rupert Soames: I was in a good job running Aggreko.

Andy Coulson: This was the question I was going to ask. You’re obviously doing good job, you're absolutely knocking it out the park at a Aggreko, and you decide, “Actually I fancy that.”

And we should explain that Serco is a company that at that point that was in pretty serious trouble. So what was the thinking?

Rupert Soames: I think chief executives are like plutonium; they have a half-life. And for the first half of their life they're fizzing with energy and good things and warmth, and for the second half of their life they're a nightmare to dispose of. I wanted to not give anybody the issue having to dispose of me.

Andy Coulson: Right. You felt, “I've done the job.”

Rupert Soames: No, I felt that it was time for me and for a Aggreko- you can just become too embedded, particularly if you are sort of a big personality. It was time to go. You lose that freshness. By the time you've done your twelfth budget review you lose a bit of the freshness. I was also in charge- I was getting this yen, I wanted to get something in public service that touched more on government.

And when I saw what had happened to Serco I rang up and I said. “I think that could just be for me.”

Andy Coulson: Paint the picture for us. The crises were sort of multifaceted. It was a crisis of financing but it was a reputational crisis on a number of people as well.

Rupert Soames: It all came from the reputational crisis, is that they were accused by their largest customer by far, which was the British government, of having been dishonest, of having misstated things across a couple of contracts that had.

Andy Coulson: This was offenders on tag.

Rupert Soames: Partly yes, it was offenders on tag, exactly. And the government went at it with a will, to go and show how tough they were going to be and unforgiving they were going to be to suppliers who were in their view ripping the taxpayer off. And I don't blame them, they were quite right to do that.

But the organisation was- the lesson is the damage that the market does to a business when a business has fallen out from its customers is far greater than the damage that the customers can do.

So we immediately- I arrived there, these allegations were swirling around and, you know, inquiries, SFO inquiries and all this were beginning to grind into being, pretty much straight away. So Angus Cockburn came with me, we started looking underneath the hood, and there were a whole lot of contracts that had been taken that were losing money, that we had to go and own up to and say, “We've not only got these ones over here, we've got a crisis with the government over here where we have got to either- where we need to make up with them and get to a position where they can trust us. But we've also got all these other contracts over here that are now losing money, where we've signed contracts that we shouldn't have done.”

Andy Coulson: So this is a business in trauma of a very different kind. What kind of reception was waiting for you on arrival at Serco as compared to Aggreko?

Rupert Soames: Well obviously, “Who is this person? He's come from a generator rental company.”

Andy Coulson: You're coming from a business that is absolutely flying.

Rupert Soames: Coming from a generator rental company. “And what does he know about public services?” It has to be said at that stage, they didn't have a lot of choice. I was appointed CEO. The day I arrived we had to do an emergency rights issue.

Andy Coulson: That was day one in the job.

Rupert Soames: Day one in the job, day one in the job. And at Aggreko we had to give a profits warning on my day one. We didn't actually have to raise any money. In Serco we had to raise 120 million pounds on day one. It really was, it was all hands to the-

But again, here was an organisation that was traumatised. There is a slight link here to the CBI, because the people in Serco could not recognise the behaviour that Serco, or a very small part, indeed, one contract in Serco, was being accused of doing. Because the people in Serco believed they were doing a good job. And to the extent that the more that you believe that the job that you are doing is of value to society and you've got an important mission, and you then go and discover that- or are told that actually you're doing a bad job, you are falsifying things, you're stealing taxpayers money, you're doing all these other things, people say, “What?”

It’s a huge and traumatic shock.

Andy Coulson: Yes. So how did you manage that? What was the approach?

Rupert Soames: My first approach, which- people would come up to me often and say, “You don't understand the effect that this had,” is I got shirts printed, my work shirts printed, like this blue one, that said, “Serco, and proud of it.” The last thing that anybody in Serco was feeling at the time was proud, and having a CEO walking around with a shirt saying, “Serco, and proud of it,” and my emails, “Rupert Somes, Serco, and proud of it.”

Andy Coulson: That was your sign off? How interesting.

Rupert Soames: Yes, from almost day one. And it got attention of the people, it diverted the attention, it put into context the fact that the vast majority of stuff that Serco did was really important, providing good services to people at terribly difficult parts at times of their lives, vital services to government.

For God's sake, we were helping manage everything from the nuclear deterrent to prisons, to hospitals, and we were doing this around the world. It was an organisation that believed fundamentally- There were people there, a lot of them were former public servants. Half of the people who worked in Serco had been formerly- and then they were there because they believed that public services were really important and needed to be delivered well. And suddenly being accused of lying, cheating, it was devastating to them.

And my thing was going around saying, “Sod it, I'm proud of this company. Just look at the stuff that we're doing.” And it I think helped to stabilise it, and it also made people realise I think that I was there for the long term. Because one of the things that happens when you come in as a new CEO is that there's a period of avoidance. Particularly with any organisation that has big connections with government, they just take, you know, it's duck and cover. It's like the 1950s nuclear drills they used to do to school children, duck and cover, go under the thing. New boss comes into government department, duck and cover, because they're not going to be here for long anyway.

Andy Coulson: Were you enjoying that challenge? Because as I watch you talk about it I can see the sort of excitement around it.

Rupert Soames: Hell, yes. But I enjoyed-

Andy Coulson: So what's that about, Rupert? Because there’s a lot of risk in there.

Rupert Soames: Well, because nobody said it was my fault. So I was not there, everybody knew, I had no- I might have a big arse, but I didn't have one to cover.

Andy Coulson: You were free.

Rupert Soames: I could say to the organisation, “Really, what's gone on in the past, we will clear that up. Let's concentrate on where we go forward.” And taking the organisation forward and getting it to concentrate on the road ahead, and helping it to feel that it was not bad, it was not evil. We do good things. Serco to this day does many, many good things.

Andy Coulson: It strikes me that a sort of sense of fairness is important to you, right? The idea that this company actually may have done things wrong, may have made mistakes, but the idea of chucking the entire company under the bus-

Rupert Soames: There were elements of- you may remember . Which government would like? I don't know. I don't know. There was elements. There was elements of. So you may remember that one of the things was, “Do you know what? Serco were even charging us for tagging people who were in prison.”

Andy Coulson: Yes. Or people who were dead.

Rupert Soames: Or people who were dead. Well excuse me, how are we- unless government says, “These people who we've told you to tag, we've now put into prison.” But they never told us. They never said, “We've got a death certificate. This person has got a death certificate.” You know, so it was actually the- there were bad things went on, but it was limited to a civil contract. And it's all been subject to endless inquiries.

But the fact is, is that organisation employs 55,000 people around the world who are delivering vital government services. And it does a good job. Part of the issue funnily enough that I enjoyed, was the debate about whether private companies could provide public services, which is a really fascinating debate, and where the dividing line is between public and private.

Andy Coulson: Yes, and you were happy to dive into that. But you also with the communications, I touched on this earlier, that this is a core skill of yours, is the ability to get out and make the case. And you weren't afraid to do that with a company that was that was paralysed with fear. You went out appropriately and at the right moments and strategically-

Rupert Soames: Well, quite often inappropriately and at the wrong moment.

Andy Coulson: But your message, when you saw when you saw an attack against Serco that you considered to be unfair, you would get out and say, hang on, we're not going to take it. I think your phrase was, “We’re not going just going to sit back and continue to take the shit. We are going to deal with it.”

Rupert Soames: No, we're going to deal with it, and we're going to go and- not confront that’s the wrong word, because if you are providing a government service paid for by taxpayers money, you've got to be prepared to engage with people who think that that's fundamentally wrong. So we had debates about people who believe it's fundamentally wrong that the private companies should run prisons. And engaging with that debate, and explaining why it's fundamentally right that you have both public and private provision in prisons is really interesting. And it's a non-trivial argument. And it's one that you can't just say, “Oh well, I'm not going to engage with you on that,” you've got to be prepared to do that.

Andy Coulson: You engaged on the debate, but you also engaged on the criticism. That's where the, “We're not going to take any shit anymore,” bit comes in

Rupert Soames: When I say take any shit, what we’re going to do is we’re not going to hide under a hole and let people- without us responding to that and explaining in a responsible way, because it's public money.

Andy Coulson: Yes. The Serco story was pretty public. It was at times pretty unpleasant from a media point of view. I think I'm right in saying that there were occasions where people would come up to you on the street or when you're out and about doing your work, and be abusive.

a) Tell us a little bit about that, but b) I'm interested to know how you protected yourself against that or how you handled that. Are you someone who takes that stuff home with them?

Rupert Soames: No. Well yes I do, because I work at home, because I love my work. I’ve said my children have been brought up with an addict in the house, and my addiction is work. And like all addictions, it's- you know, I don't say this lightly, it has side effects on the family. So my children had to put up with me working weekends and actually preferring- the awful thing is he prefers to be in his office than coming and watch me playing football.

Andy Coulson: Was that the truth?

Rupert Soames: I don't know, no comment.

Andy Coulson: But there have been times.

Rupert Soames: There have been times, of course, but we have lovely times. But I am a work addict so of course, I take it home. And the other thing is, I think that the- and it's a thing particularly about Serco, because delivering government services, you have to be prepared to be held accountable. And if that is from a mother whose son is doing their first night in Thameside Prison, who is desperately, desperately upset, feels that that's been mishandled, or their belongings have gone to the wrong place, and they have got hold of your email address, always respond.

So what some CEOs do is their email address is rcs@office.whatever When I was at Serco, Rupert.soames @serco.com Couldn't be easier. Rupert.soames@CBI.org.uk. I've always put- so people can always find me. Because you have to, half of the thing is being able to put a face to it.

And I didn't often get abuse in the streets, but I'm not- I'm physically quite big, so I wasn't worried about people jumping on top of me.

Andy Coulson: But the sort of, you know, there's still the impact of that, of someone coming up being unpleasant on whatever level. Not a nice thing to experience.

Rupert Soames: I think it's quite interesting. I mean-

Andy Coulson: So you engaged.

Rupert Soames: Well, at least it wakes you up and at least it shows they can, that you matter, that you're doing something in their lives that- honestly I don’t do fear, and I don't do hiding.

Andy Coulson: Interesting. I don't do fear.

Rupert Soames: Well, not fear of people, and it's quite useful in the political context. With the CBI and previously with Serco, is that there's a breed of politicians who believe that having got into the role that they have, they are able to intimidate and they can go and come hot and heavy on you. And again, this is about balance, because they are elected politicians, and I am not. And you’ve got to be really careful. They have a mandate, I don't.

But it's quite important, I'm just not- they don't scare me. I want to engage with them, I want to persuade them. But don't think that- you're talking about a person to be one of the most unpopular people in the in the press, I've been splattered all over the press. I don't do that sort of- and that's good because you can look them straight in the eye and you can have a conversation. But just don't try and frighten me because it doesn't work.

Neither should I try to be disrespectful to you. So I think there's this idea of mutual respect.

Andy Coulson: Yes, I'm sort of tempted to say that we could- it's never too late when it comes to politics. Because that's exactly what we need a bit of that on the other side of the fence, don't we?

Rupert Soames: I think that there are a lot of able people in politics.

Andy Coulson: That's true. But later in life has there not been-

Rupert Soames: It is so intense, and so- finding a place that you can have an impact on public life in a meaningful way without being completely tied down by the system, and being able to talk freely is something that I find- and that comes back to being the difference between politics and business.

Take somebody like Archie Norman, a fantastic businessman. I don't think even Archie would say that his time as a politician was his most successful.

Andy Coulson: No. He's often held up as the example of-

Rupert Soames: Yes. Michael Hesseltine managed to do both, Jeremy Hunt has managed to do both, but they are few and far between. One of the things that that I have noticed about this government, that the gap of understanding between business and government, and how to get things done seems to me to be getting wider, in my lifetime. That the hinterland of people in government does not really stretch into local businesses, small businesses, medium-sized businesses. And when I go and talk to politicians of both sides of the house-

I mean your first boss in politics, David Cameron, you wouldn't say that his knowledge and understanding and background of industrial management was of the highest order but he was intelligent enough to get it, and his father had been involved in the City.

Andy Coulson: He was curious, he had the curiosity.

Rupert Soames: He had the curiosity. But it really disappoint- and we're doing a lot of work at the moment on the Employment Rights bill, which the CBI is trying to explain and help government come to a sensible landing place. Part of the problem is that you are dealing with civil servants and often ministers who just don't have that insight into what makes a small business tick. It's not being part of their hinterland.

That’s not just of this government but of previous governments as well. There's been- this division between politics and business and life has got- politics has become more professionalised. Which makes it all the more important that we need to listen attentively to each other, doesn’t it?

Andy Coulson: It does. And that brings us neatly to CBI, because that is that is one of its purposes. The CBI is there really to argue for British business, and as you’ve just touched on, one might say given where we are economically right now that has never been more important.

But once again, you arrive into an organisation that's in difficulty, or in the throes of a near-death experience, or perhaps coming out of a near-death experience would be more accurate, as you put it previously. There had been allegations swirling around the leadership that had caused the CBI severe reputational damage.

So again, you’ve turned Serco around, it's been an epic success for you as a leader, and you think, “Yes okay, that’s the role for me. I'm going to dive in at the CBI as chair.”

Rupert Soames: Well, I really thought it was important. I went to meet Rain Newton-Smith who had- like Cincinnatus, she had dropped everything. She had left the CBI as its chief economist to go to Barclays, a smashing job, and then when asked to- over a weekend, said that she would come back to lead the organisation as its director general.

She and her team have done an amazing- have been incredibly resilient in putting in place all those processes and things that you would expect an organisation that has just had a big reputational issue to deal with.

My role, as was the case funnily enough in Aggreko and Serco, I’m not quite sure what the right- but just sort of think of me as a paramedic. I turn up after the event. I'm not there when the crash happens but I'm there after- or like the post-operative- And the Board there had had really, really difficult things to deal with. It's a voluntary, it's a member organisation and it had lost a lot of members.

But you said earlier on that the CBI is there to speak for business. It's more than that. I described it as the CBI is there to be the Google translate And it works both ways. To speak truth unto power. And that means- we talked about the gap between business and politics, is that a lot of our work is actually explaining to business what government can and cannot do. But we also need, and it's a pressing need, to be able to engage with government not on a shouty shouty way, but in a way that enables civil servants to engage with policy at a detailed level.

So we have got what is probably the largest policy and economic group outside of Whitehall. So on things like the Employment Rights Bill we are able to engage at a level of detail with the 200 amendments that came out last week, to say, “If you do it this way it will work, if you do it that way it won't.” And doing that sort of detailed interaction is what the CBI is about and does really, really well. I think that the striking oil for me at the CBI was arriving at a time which was in the run-up to an election, because then people- two things happened.

During the crisis of the CBI in 2023 a lot of members left, and by the time I turned up at the end of 2023 they were beginning to say kind of, “We miss it a bit actually,” and government was saying, “Okay, we can't meet the CBI but we quite miss the CBI,” So having an organisation that people valued.

It’s been wonderful. I've gone back to being a salesman. I'm doing eight calls a day, running through my call list talking to CEOs and saying, “Come back.” And it's amazing, we've now got nearly all the big members have come back and we're doing things with the government and we are influencing things with the government, and we are doing what we should do, and doing I think a really important thing.

Andy Coulson: And you would say the core lesson here for a business that's in trouble, for whatever reason, is to focus in on your purpose. Ask yourself the hardest question, which is actually, “Are we needed? Is there something here that we can provide of genuine worth?” And you would say that the CBI in this darkest hour if you like was able to look hard at itself and say, “Do you know what? We need to survive. There is a purpose.”

Rupert Soames: That there is a purpose, and for your customers to realise that you serve a purpose.

One of the things with Serco was government would have dearly liked to say, “No more contracts for Serco, away with them.” But it couldn't, because there were so many contracts. So actually there had to be an accommodation in the middle, between us saying, “We've done terrible things wrong, we’re sorry, we're going to make things right,” and government saying, “We're going to oversee you making sure you get things right, but actually we don't want you to go.”

And a similar thing with the CBI is that British business discovering that it needs a voice of the scale and of the research and the capability that the CBI has got, to be able to affect government.

One of your previous interviews was with Michael Gove and his first leader of The Spectator was to accuse us of being Labour's little helper, saying that we were being too nice to the government. And I wrote to the letter page and said the idea that we should be standing outside Whitehall throwing rocks, c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. It’s not the way you get results. We need to be in there debating clause 24A of the- that’s the purpose that we serve.

There’s so much stuff going on in the world. We've got the renegotiation of the terms of several terms of trade with the EU, we've got all the Trump tariffs, we've got a country where the level of debt is too high. We've got public services that are not well run, we've got a whole lot of challenges to deal with.

Andy Coulson: It sounds like the addiction level is perhaps ticking on the on the more active end of the spectrum for you.

Rupert Soames: The thing is, is I’ve retired.

Andy Coulson: Right. It doesn't sound much like a retirement, Rupert.

Rupert Soames: It's a new definition of the word retirement.

But I'm also then Chair of another public company called Smith and Nephew. I don't know how your hips and knees are, but you know, we'll be happy to look at those.

Andy Coulson: Rupert Soames, thank you so much for joining us on Crisis What Crisis, it's been a proper conversation for which I'm very grateful. And I'm sure that those listening watching will feel the same way. Thank you for being so honest with us. Thanks for being so frank with your story and your analysis of the of what has been an incredible career.

We started Crisis what crisis in the hope of creating a place where those who’ve been through trauma - whatever its cause - could tell their stories safely … and in the knowledge that what they had to share would be treated with respect and put to work in a way that would be useful to others.

That Rupert chose to tell his story the first time to us is properly meaningful for the Crisis What Crisis team.

He wanted to show that even the worst crises can be overcome … and that a happy and productive life can be achieved. The key to this, in Rupert’s view, was that the abuse was discussed among his family and close friends whilst he was still young. And the perpetrator dealt with through the courts. He recognises the role his loving family played in enabling him to move forward.

The abuse he suffered has not defined Rupert’s life and it therefore did not define our episode which was so full of humour, of insight and of advice that anyone seeking to progress in life - in business or elsewhere - will want to listen to. So many takeaways in particular around what makes a leader … consistency of message and action.

And courage … something Rupert is not short of.

If you have been left feeling inspired, please do leave us a review and if you found this episode useful, we would be delighted if you shared it with your friends and network.

You can follow us on Instagram and Tik Tok and if you hit subscribe you’ll find a lot more crisis conversations As always, full transcripts along with helpful links are available on our website. Just head to crisis what crisis dot com. Thanks also to the CWC team Jane Sankey, Hana Walker Brown and Bill Griffin and the brilliant people at Global. And thank you so much for listening.