From the high seas to corporate boardrooms: Suzanne Heywood in conversation
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Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Hi everybody, welcome to this event. I am Grace Lorden, the Director of the Inclusion Initiative at the London School of Economics. If you haven't heard of us, I would love if you looked us up and came to our events in the future.

It is my absolute pleasure tonight to have Suzanne Haywood here with me. Before I introduce Suzanne, I'll just let you know kind of some formalities. We're going to have a fireside chat that will run for maybe 30-35 minutes and then I'm hoping to get lots of questions both from the in-person audience and also the online audience. So for everyone online, welcome to the event. Debbie, my colleague, is here to take your questions and for everyone who's in the room, I also welcome you to the event.

For me, this is a really special event. We're going to talk about a book, Wave Walker, which I absolutely don't just love myself as a person to read, but I've gifted it to a lot of people. And I think if you haven't read it, you'll find out tonight just why that is. It was written by Suzanne Haywood, CBE, who is also the COO of Exor, one of the largest holding companies in Europe, and also chairs CNH Industrial and Avico Group and is on the board of The Economist and Louboutin.

Suzanne has written Wave Walker, which we are going to speak about tonight, and also another book which has been a bestseller, which is What Does Jeremy Think?, which we will also speak about. To kick it off, I'd like to just acknowledge for me reading Wave Walker was an amazing read because on the surface of it, getting to spend...

your childhood at sea seems like something that would have been extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily wonderful. And if you haven't read the book yet, you'll find these moments that you might actually imagine where we see sperm whales and dolphins and all of the things that you would expect to see when you're at sea.

But the book also charts a story of the childhood of Suzanne where it was undoubtedly extraordinarily tough. You were exposed to lots of adult situations quite early, didn't have a childhood and was able to establish friendships in the same way that many of us might have been here in the room. And for me, it's a real story of resilience. And actually, before I used to draw attention to people who...

were worse off than me when I was going through a bad day. And now I think about you, Suzanne, and I think about what you managed to achieve despite the odds actually being stacked against you. And with that, I'd like you just to say something in your own words about kind of describing your childhood and those moments on WaveWalker.

Yeah, thank you. Well, wonderful to be here. So the story really begins when I was seven years, well actually it begins when I was six years old. My father suddenly announced that he wanted to sail around the world. And the idea was to follow Captain Cook around the world. I should say my maiden name is Cook, although I'm not related to Captain Cook. But it was enough of an excuse to sail around the world. And my father wanted to sail around the world to commemorate Captain Cook's third voyage.

So that was the idea. We were going to set sail when I was 10. It was going to take three years, took Captain Cook three years. And then we were going to come back. I would be 10 years old. I'd go back to school. My dog, which was a water spaniel, would be waiting for me. My doll's house, which was going to go in my grandpa's attic, was going to be still waiting for me. Everything would go back to normal.

So we set sail from the UK and we sailed all the way down to South America. We sailed across the southern Atlantic Ocean to South Africa. And here I should say, for anybody who's a sailor, we were actually sailing a very odd way around the world. So normally if you're going to sail around the world...

and actually quite a few people do, not vast numbers, but a reasonable number of people do, you would normally sail east to west. So you'd normally sail kind of from the UK across to North America through the Panama Canal, keep going all the way around and back again through the Suez Canal. And the reason for that is that the winds are then behind you if you sail that way around the world.

But unfortunately, Captain Cook on his third voyage decided he was going to go the other way. He was going to go from west to east. And to sail west to east around the world, you've got to go really, really far south because that's where the winds turn the other way. And that meant that we were sailing across the southern Atlantic Ocean, which is a really rough and dangerous ocean from South America to South Africa.

and then even worse across the southern Indian Ocean from South Africa to Australia. And we're going to come back to that, I know, because we were very badly shipwrecked halfway across that ocean. But to cut a very long story short, and then we'll get into some more of the kind of details, we eventually made it after four years to Hawaii.

And Hawaii should have been the end point of our voyage. So we went from South Africa to Australia, Australia to New Zealand, all the way up the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii. And that was where, as I say, kind of Cook's third voyage ended because he was killed there. He had a

an altercation with the local Hawaiians in the midst of which he was killed so it was the end of his voyage and we had a family vote and my father had always said that the family votes were binding whatever we decided we would do and by that point I was desperate to come back I was incredibly bored I'd now been on this boat for four years

My mother had promised she was going to educate us, but she really wasn't. She'd had a few odd worksheets, but they long, long since kind of disappeared. I didn't have any friends. I just had a younger brother.

And my relationship with my mother was deteriorating rapidly. By this point, I was 11, turning 12. So I was kind of heading towards kind of puberty. My mother was a very difficult person, became even more difficult. So our relationship was really difficult.

She wouldn't talk to me for days on end, would call me names. It was really quite unpleasant. So I voted to come home and my brother voted to come home. My parents voted to keep sailing, kind of in breach of the original agreement. And when we had a split boat, my father announced that actually he was the captain. He would decide and we were going to keep sailing.

And so we did. And in fact, we kept sailing for another six years, basically, before I managed to escape from this boat. So it ended up being pretty much a decade before I managed to escape. And along the way, I decided I had to try and educate myself because otherwise I was going to get stuck on this boat forever, kind of going round and round the world. My relationship with my mother went from kind of bad to horrendous.

And eventually my parents basically dumped my brother and me in New Zealand. I was 16, he was 15 and sailed off, which is pretty much the most difficult bit for me. The shipwreck was quite bad. We'll kind of come back to that.

And then, incredibly, the kind of end result was I managed to get myself kind of back to the UK and into university. And I spent most of my life with people not really realising how odd this childhood was, or having the reaction that you kind of mentioned at the start, which was, oh, that sounds wonderful, you kind of grew up on a boat. So I was determined at some point that I would tell the story and tell it, you know, with all the kind of light and all the dark that it really consists of.

And I should say, so Lucy Lawler, who I know who you met, who's one of our donors, she introduced me to the book. And when I picked it up, that's what I thought that I was going to be reading, actually, was kind of this idyllic setting. And as you said, being on Weight Walker really, there was an endurance, I think, and also it probably taught you a lot about survival. So can you comment a little bit about that, the lessons that you can take from your experience there that you've brought into your life now?

Yeah, so it's interesting. I mean, I would not kind of wish my chances on anybody, despite the fact that I saw some amazing things. So you talked about, you know, we saw whales and dolphins. We sailed past an exploding volcano. Once we went to remote islands in Fiji that you can't normally go to. We went to, well, we were shipwrecked on a tiny atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, which I didn't know existed.

I know virtually nobody has ever been to, apart from the tiny kind of French base. So I saw some extraordinary things, but the kind of downsides were far greater than the upsides. However, there are definitely kind of strengths that you take from that sort of childhood if you manage to escape.

All the evidence shows, and I've gone and tried to read some of the studies around this, that if you have a very difficult childhood, about three quarters of people don't escape from it, don't escape from the effects of it. In other words, when they look at them all the way through their lives up to about 50, you can still see that they're badly affected in terms of their ability to create relationships,

stable relationships and their career, what they're managing to achieve in their career versus what you would expect them to be doing. But about a quarter escape and actually go on to have quite normal looking lives.

And though that quarter that escape, at least some of them seem to come out with some strengths, because it is quite interesting. There's also studies that look at really very successful people. And what it shows is a much greater proportion of them than you would expect actually come from these adverse childhoods.

So both facts seem to be true. The majority of people who have them don't escape. There's a proportion who do, who kind of come out with some strengths. I mean, we all can think of examples. Everybody from Boris Johnson, who came from a kind of famously kind of bad childhood, to Elon Musk, who also came from a really difficult childhood. But I mean, there's endless kind of lists of them.

So I do think that I, having escaped, I did get some things from it. And one is this kind of much overused word resilience.

And I don't quite know what resilience means, but for me, the way in which it kind of plays out is when I face a kind of challenge in my life, and we were just discussing the fact that you were mugged and lost your phone, which is a horrible experience to kind of go through. But when you face something like that in your life, I'm able to put it immediately in proportion because I can, I go back, I literally go back in my head to when we were shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean or when I was a

abandoned New Zealand and I think well yes this is not good but you know I'm physically safe I've got to sort this mess out

And that actually calms me down. It kind of hugely calms me down. During COVID, I had to step in and CEO one of the companies I look after. And everyone was kind of running around, as you might expect, because it was a very, very stressful time. And I found it incredibly kind of grounding and calming. I just kept on thinking to myself, this is not as bad as being shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean. It really isn't.

I'm not going to drown. It's going to be okay. And that, if you can stay calm, you can listen to people around you and you can absorb information and kind of keep on making kind of rational decisions. So that I think is a real advantage. I think the other advantage is, of course, I grew up in multiple different kind of cultural backgrounds.

And I don't just mean kind of infidels or Tonga. I also mean people who come from really different walks of life. So I grew up in a boat yard. I grew up with lots of people who took a lot of drugs. There's a lot of kind of theft going on, all sorts of things, people who were outside of society.

And I just think that kind of gives you an ability to kind of understand people in a more rounded way than if you had a much more kind of narrow experience of the sorts of people you might meet. One of the other threads throughout the book is your drive for education. Are you able to kind of pinpoint the moment when that started for you during your journey on Wavewalker?

So it kind of grew really. I mean, I always liked learning. I was one of these nerdy little kids, probably the worst sort of kid to try and put on a boat and take away from school. And even early on when my mother had those kind of early worksheets, I remember endlessly asking her questions about them, which would drive her completely nuts and didn't help our relationship at all.

I think where it really started to become very acute for me was that period when we were in Hawaii. And briefly when we were in Hawaii, we got a television. We hadn't had a television since we left the UK. We got one of those little teeny tiny portable ones. My father being my father, he kind of got a long cable and plugged it into the boatyard power, because obviously we had no power on board, so we just stole their power to run the TV.

And I discovered this amazing program called Cosmos, which was run by a scientist called Carl Sagan, an amazing kind of series at the time. And he was running the, you know, I remember one, for example, which was about the lost library of Alexandria and how, you know, it had as many books in it as a number of grains of sand somewhere or something. And I, you know, for me, this was like an eye-opening moment because, you

I'd barely ever been in a library. In fact, I don't think I've been in a library. If I have had, I can't remember having been in one. I'd never been in a theater. I'd never, you know, there's so many things I'd never done. And all of a sudden I thought, wow, there's all this kind of knowledge out there. Now, I have no way of getting at it. I'm not going to a school. My parents were refusing to put us in school in Hawaii. I don't have access to a library.

The books that we had on board were very limited. They were basically, my mother would change them over at the second-hand shops. So it was mainly a kind of ever-evolving set of Mills and Boons novels, of which I read quite a few as a kid, probably at deeply inappropriate moments in my childhood.

And quite a lot of kind of Van Daniken books, which my father was obsessed with, which were, it was an author who was convinced that the earth was populated by aliens. And he had very elaborate theories about this. That was about it that I had to read. But it opened up my mind to the idea that there was a ton of knowledge out there if I could get it. I think it also started my passion around science,

I think that started from those kind of programs. But I wasn't really able to do very much with it. I got to go briefly to school in Australia and then I finally managed to convince my parents to allow me to register to do correspondence. And I started teaching myself by correspondence, despite kind of multiple obstacles. And it kind of grew from there.

And juggling your correspondence work with the work that you had to do on the boat, how difficult was that? Well, it was really difficult. I mean, the problem I had was that the only way that I could educate myself was to, as I say, kind of get my parents to allow me to kind of do this correspondence course through Australia. But the problem with that, there's multiple problems with that. First of all, this is before the internet or anything like that. So you've literally just got a pile of books.

And as you work your way through the books, you write answers to the questions. And then the idea is you post them off and your teacher marks them and sends them back. But of course, if you're living on a boat, one thing you don't have is an address, which is a fairly fundamental part of that kind of whole scenario. So I would ask my father, well, where are we going to go to next? And he would go, okay, we're going to go to Samoa. So I would send off my lessons and say, send them back post-restant Samoa.

But halfway to Samoa, my father would suddenly go, "Oh, the wind's going the other way, so I'll go somewhere else." Or we get to Samoa and the lessons hadn't come back.

And my father would insist on kind of sailing off, you know, before the lessons arrived. So lots of lessons I never got back. But in addition to that, with Dangerous Sandy a little bit like Virginia Woolf, you know, I didn't have any space. I didn't have a room of my own. You know, all we had was one table down below, a little table that had space for four people. And by this point, we'd run completely out of money.

And so my father was taking paying crew on board to keep this voyage going.

And the paying crew, I mean, it was a bit like living on a floating hotel. So my job, and I'm afraid roles were very gendered on our boat, so my job was to work with my mother cooking and cleaning for these crew, which was like five, six, seven hours a day of cooking and cleaning. And so my mother, A, didn't want me to study because she really wanted me to cook and clean, but B, she didn't want me to, if I was going to study once I'd done all that, I certainly couldn't do it at the table because that was for the crew and not for me.

So I used to go and hide right in the bow of the boat, wrap myself in a sail. I should say my mother got horribly seasick, which is another dimension of the story. And so she wouldn't come looking for me in the bow of the boat because it was really unpleasant up there because it's the bit of the boat that kind of goes up and down most violently through the waves.

And that's how I used to study. I used to kind of wrap myself up, you know, kind of do that and then try and post off the lessons whenever I got somewhere. So it really, really wasn't straightforward. But I kept on pursuing it. And I think the reason why I did was in a world where I could really control almost nothing about my world, not even where we were going next, and I couldn't even get off the boat.

My education was something that felt like it was somewhat under my control. It was my choice to kind of do it and I was kind of pursuing it and it was my thing.

And before we take you off the boat and learn about the rewards for your correspondence, you've mentioned the storm that you faced, which I think in the book is, yeah, it had me at the edge of my seat when I was reading it. So maybe you want to recall it for the audience this evening. Yeah, so this was quite early on. So I'm still seven years old. And as I described, we've gone all the way from the UK, from Britain down to South America, and then across the Southern Atlantic Ocean to Australia.

to South Africa, which was a very rough passage. And then we set out across the southern Indian Ocean. So at this point in time, on the boat, you've got my dad, who by this point does have some sailing experience because we've obviously kind of covered some distance. We've got my mother, who hates sailing and gets very, very badly seasick and usually disappears for several days at the start of each voyage because she feels seasick.

Then you've got me, I'm seven, my brother who's six. And we have two novice crew, i.e. two crew who've never sailed before. Because another slightly unfortunate thing about my parents is they had a habit of falling out with the crew. So the crew never lasted very long. We were always on a new succession of crew. So we set out and about halfway across the Indian Ocean...

which is a very long ocean, if you look at it. Well, a very wide ocean, I should say. So about halfway across, by the time we're about four weeks into this voyage, it's about an eight-week voyage, so eight weeks at sea.

we run into an enormous storm that gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the waves get bigger and bigger and bigger, and eventually I think the wind moves direction and the waves are going in a different direction and the waves start to combine together as they do when you start to get a kind of change in the wind and the waves, and several waves combine together. My father recalls looking behind himself and seeing a wave

that is three times bigger than our, no, twice as big as our main mast. And our main mast is 60 foot, so it's like a 120 foot wave breaking on the top. And this wave breaks over the stern of the boat. And at this point, by the way, we're surfing down the waves. What you've got to do in a storm of that immensity is you've got to try and get down the waves perpendicular. Because if you don't go down the waves perfectly perpendicular, the boat basically flips and rolls.

but it came over the back of us, crashed through the centre of the deck, so it missed the first 35 feet of the deck, crashed through the deck, broke straight through the deck, despite the fact that the deck was like multiple inches of wood, it just went straight through the deck because you've got so much water, out through the side of the hull.

And I'm a little girl, so I'm not on deck when this happens. And it's quite interesting. When I was writing the chapter, I remember showing it to somebody and they said, it's amazing because you read lots of stories of storms at sea, but they're almost always written by the skipper who's up on deck, you know, kind of on the wheel and, you know, doing this and that and the other. But of course, for me, it was like being kind of trapped in this kind of wooden room, which was just being flung around everywhere. And you don't know what's happening.

After a while, you start to kind of realize you're going up a wave, you're going down a wave. In fact, we used to go up a wave and then almost like hover at the top of a wave and then go down a wave. But you don't really know what's going on. And all of a sudden, of course, the cabin just explodes. And I'm flung against the ceiling of the cabin and flung against the wall of the cabin. I end up unconscious under the table, fracturing my skull, breaking my nose, fracturing, you know,

My father breaks his ribs, but I'm the most badly injured. And incredibly, I mean, we almost die because the boat is filling up with water. The boat's too weak to get to Australia. We're not going to stay afloat for another four weeks. So our only hope is to find this little tiny island, which I mentioned before, Al Amsterdam.

which you can find on Google Maps, but you've got to zoom in quite a long way. And we found it, amazingly, which was a stroke of luck, frankly. This is before satellite navigation, so this is guesswork, basically, where the island might be. And on that island is a tiny French base of scientists,

And they have one doctor and the doctor operated on me because by this point I had a massive swelling on my head. And he said I would get brain damage if he didn't operate. But sadly, with no anesthetic. So I had seven head operations, no anesthetic on this at all.

Yeah. So you can imagine that then kind of colors the whole of what happens afterwards, because by this point, I'm really quite afraid of the ocean. And one of the other really interesting dynamics in my family is

And now we kind of now we would say, you know, gaslighting. But, you know, I didn't know that term. But, you know, my parents would not talk about bad things that happened. So, for example, the wave, you could not. It was called the wave. The wave was not something you were allowed to discuss. So I was never able to discuss the wave through my childhood. I had kind of repeated nightmares about it for many years kind of afterwards.

And it's interesting kind of reading the book or writing the book and now when people read it because you can see a lot of this stuff as an adult but of course as you're living through it as a child you don't understand what's going on. But that's a really pivotal moment because it goes from being an adventure to being really very frightening.

Talking about the storm, we left you when you were doing your correspondence course. I have to say one of my biggest disappointments in the book is that it doesn't end at LSE, it ends at Oxford. But you did end up in Oxford and obviously you've had a remarkable career and how you got to Oxford is actually quite remarkable. So can you talk about that? Yeah, well maybe I would have ended up at LSE if I'd known about the LSE. But unfortunately, so there I was, I got kind of abandoned by my parents in New Zealand.

and I become determined I'm going to try and get myself into university. I had heard of universities because we were getting these crew coming on board, so I was getting these kind of brief moments where you would kind of see somebody from normal life. And I'd heard of some universities because even on a boat in the South Pacific, people occasionally talk about Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard or the more local universities like Sydney University or Auckland University.

But when I was then left behind in New Zealand, I didn't have access to a library or careers counselling or anything like that because I'm sitting in a hut in New Zealand. My parents, when they abandoned us, my brother was enrolled in a school and I was left to look after him because I was a girl, obviously. And so I wasn't enrolled in school. I was working, still trying to teach myself in this hut. So I had no access to a school or anyone to advise me.

So I basically write to every university I've ever heard of in the world, and I make up the addresses, because I don't have any way to find out the addresses, being pre-Google, of course. So I write to Oxford University, Oxford, England. I actually did write to London University, London, England, and somebody wrote back, but I actually don't know which one it was now, because it's obviously a slightly...

slightly kind of weird thing to write to. I wrote to Harvard University, Harvard America. They never wrote back because that turns out to be the wrong address. I mean, that's really quite unfortunate, isn't it? So...

pretty much all of them wrote back and said no so sydney wrote back and said no because you're not australian uh new zealand wrote back said no because you're not new zealander the london university whichever london university was wrote back and said no because you're basically too weird and we can't consider you it wasn't lse because i did not know about lse i should have included lse on the list it did reputation of lse at least then had not reached the south pacific unfortunately maybe it would be different now um

And that made, incredibly, Oxford wrote back and said, well, write us a couple of essays. So I wrote them a couple of very odd, deliberately odd essays, because I thought if I wrote conventional essays, then they would be more obviously much worse than what anybody else would write. And then they said, if you can get here, we'll interview you. So I went off picking kiwi fruit to earn enough money, bought myself a one-way ticket and got to the UK and,

got an interview with Oxford and incredibly they let me in. And that was an incredible...

amazing kind of turning point because once I got that, I mean there were a few other wrinkles along the way like I had to convince them then to make me a home student and I didn't have a grant and then my parents disowned me but the fact of the matter is once I got a degree everything else gets kind of wiped out. Nobody ever asks you what happens before and I've been going talking to schools about my book and I keep on saying to people whatever has happened in the past or whatever you're dealing with

if you manage to get to a place like this, you know, whatever the kind of colour of your skin or whatever, you know, kind of gender or whatever it is, once you've got through that kind of barrier, actually you're kind of reset. Certainly that was my experience, you know, quite incredibly. And it just jumped me into a completely different...

Life that I wouldn't have had otherwise. What did you think the letter to Oxford? Well, the letters were very straight of the essays were weird The the letters were very straightforward and in in retrospect, I'm not surprised quite a lot of people just you know Didn't said no it basically said I've grown up sailing around the world on a boat and

I've been trying to teach myself by correspondence. I did have my junior certificates, like the kind of GCSE kind of equivalents through Australia, which I'd sat in a consulate building. I've met all these kind of, I've seen all these amazing kind of whales and dolphins at sea. I'm passionate about studying zoology. I want to study zoology. And please, will you consider me?

that was kind of it. Please write back to Prost-Restart-Rotorua in New Zealand. And the essays, what did you write on? Well, the thing with the essays is I thought if I write like the discovery of DNA or something like that, it's never going to be as good as somebody who's going to school because I knew in the UK you only do three A-levels. I was actually doing through correspondence because it was standard in Australia,

I was doing six subjects and I was doing six subjects with no teachers or no teachers physically and with no library, very limited resources. So I thought, okay, how on earth am I going to compete? My essay is going to be much worse. So one essay, somewhat obviously, was how to do science at sea, which described, for example, when I needed to do my A-level, I had to do a dissection for A-level biology.

And doing a dissection on a boat poses a few additional challenges to if you're doing it in a school. Challenge number one is you need to find your animal.

So I remember I had to organize a frog hunt on an island and I got the crew to kind of help me kind of we created this kind of ever decreasing circle and finally I leapt on a frog and I caught the frog. Then challenge number two having killed frog which I did by putting it by that point we had a fridge right at the end we had a fridge by putting it in the freezer of the fridge where my mother wasn't looking then I had to dissect it when she'd gone ashore on her chopping board.

which I then washed in the ocean and then I avoided having salad for some time afterwards. And luckily nobody else seemed to be ill, but I never admitted it to anybody else. So that was essay number one. And then essay number... I had other examples. And then essay number two was whether or not humans are a domesticated animal.

which is just sufficiently obscure as a topic that I thought nobody else will have written about this, certainly not in an Oxford essay, and therefore they won't compare me to anybody. So what was it like arriving at Oxford?

Well, I had all my financial troubles. But you see, I thought... My expectation before arriving at Oxford was that this was going to be socially amazing. I'd been trapped on a boat for basically ten years without being able to have friends, certainly not in any sort of sustained way. It was going to be like kind of Party City. I was going to kind of meet all these people and we're going to go out and it was going to be fabulous. I was going to have this, like, all the things that I'd not had in my childhood...

all of a sudden it was going to be wonderful. And then I was petrified about how it would be academically because I was really conscious of the massive gaping holes in my education. So for example, to study biology at university at Oxford, you were supposed to have done chemistry A level.

and I had not done any chemistry because chemistry was not offered by correspondence on the basis that it was too dangerous to study at home because you might blow yourself up. So it was not a correspondence subject. So I had no chemistry whatsoever. I had studied quite a lot of maths, but I'd never learnt my times tables. They were just kind of big, big holes in my education.

Actually, what I didn't realize was my pronunciation was really weird.

That I didn't realize, but became apparent quite early on that actually half of my vocabulary was really oddly pronounced because I just, you know, the vocabulary that you use on a boat with your kind of immediate family is quite basic vocabulary. It's kind of we're going to have lunch and, you know, can you open the tin can? You're not discussing the sort of stuff that you discuss at university. And I'd come up in my head from the books I'd read with all my own pronunciations.

many of which turned out to be completely inaccurate. What turned out was academically it was fine because the one thing I had learned on this boat was how to teach myself. I had this kind of absolutely, you know, obsessive determination on how I knew how to teach myself. And all of a sudden I had libraries and I had lectures and all this other stuff. It was amazing.

And I kept on thinking, "Surely it can't be this easy." I go into a lecture and they tell me about, I don't know, the kind of anthropods. And I write down about the anthropods and then I do an exam and they ask me about the anthropods. And it just can't be that easy. There's got to be a kind of catch here. So most of Oxford thinking there's got to be a catch.

And I think it wasn't that I was like a genius. It was just like I it's a bit like learning to run a marathon by practicing on the moon. It had been so hard for me to get an education. I was used to dragging bits of knowledge out of obscure bits of paper that I could find. And all of a sudden it was served up for me. And I, you know, that was...

So I slightly exaggerated. I mean, I did have to work, but I mean, that was okay. Socially, it was a complete disaster. It really was awful. And at the time, I thought that's because everybody, I was in an all women's college, by the way. I got into, I left the college blank because I didn't understand what a college was. And I went to Somerville and I owe them such a huge amount because they let me in.

but I hadn't realised it was an all-women's college. And so I went from living on a boat and then living on my own to being in an all-women's college. I thought they were really weird. I think they thought probably...

perfectly genuinely, I was really weird. I remember one of them saying to me at one point, "You're the worst person at small talk I have ever met." And I'm thinking, "Why would I care about that? Who wants to do small talk? What a waste of time. I haven't spent 10 years on a boat to come and do small talk." Which tells you as much about me and my inability to socialize as it did about them.

That eventually worked itself out. It worked itself out after about, I'd say, a couple of terms. But it was quite difficult. And I guess you moved from a very unstructured life that your parents chose to a structured lifestyle that you ultimately chose in Oxford and your career has been very structured. Was that a blessing for you? Did you kind of throw yourself into that or did you find it difficult?

Yeah, it's funny because I don't really think about it like that. I feel I for me, it felt like first of all, I was it sounds really odd to most people. It was like a massive rebellion. I kind of went to convention. And for me, it was like a kind of massive rebellion away from everything. My father. I mean, in some ways, I grew up in what you could call a cult. I mean, there's a cult of rebellion.

being a very extreme long-term sailor, which is very kind of anti-society. You know, we're living a better life, this is a purer life, you know, we're not kind of hemmed in by kind of nation's laws. I don't think my father ever paid any taxes. Before we left port, each time we left port, he would basically kind of chuck any parking ticket he got in that port overboard before we set sail with great abandon.

And I basically rebelled against all of that and kind of went and did completely the opposite. And on the boat, you say it wasn't very structured, but it was incredibly constrained. I had no choice. I didn't know where I was going. I mean, it's very interesting. I tried to explain to people that my father had ultimate freedom because he'd just chosen this life where he could go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted to. But I was like, I had no freedom whatsoever.

And all of a sudden I came back to England and I had freedom. You know, I was at Oxford because I chose to be at Oxford. And then I got to choose where I was going to go next and then what I was going to do next. And so for me, it felt it's never felt kind of constrained. It's suddenly like, OK, I am now empowered. I now get to choose.

So I guess as an executive at Exor, you work with companies who go through a lot of uncertainty and you experienced an incredible amount of uncertainty as a child. Are there any lessons that you're able to transfer from your experience on WaveWalker to your executive role? Yeah, I mean,

So a few things. One, the resilience point I made before is definitely very helpful. During the pandemic, I had to step into CEO Case New Holland, which is one of our companies with a large shareholder of Case New Holland. They make agricultural equipment, Case New Holland, as you might expect, plus Steyr and construction equipment. And at the time, they also still had in the group Iveco trucks and

buses, Magirus buses, engines, fire engines. So quite a kind of wide assortment of different things. Plants all over the world, 70,000 people. And we're in the pandemic and we're closing every plant around the world. And I get somewhat parachuted in as CEO in March 2020.

And the kind of ability, as I say, to kind of stay calm by just if I started to kind of feel myself beginning to panic. And there were definitely moments where people trying to deal with the pandemic restrictions and complications in multiple different jurisdictions at the same time with many, many people, with some countries in really some of our employees in really difficult situations.

You did occasionally feel like you were going to panic. And then I would, as I said, I literally would think, OK, this is just not as bad as sitting on that boat in the Indian Ocean because I have control. I don't have all, you know, I can't control everything, but I am, you know, I have much more control. I can do things and my life is not immediately threatened in the same sort of way.

So that's definitely helpful. I've definitely found that very helpful. I do find, I do think it's very helpful being able to talk to all sorts of different people and that is something I take from my childhood because I, as I say, I encountered so many different people in so many different types of worlds and lives. That's a huge asset. So if I go to one of our plants, I'm quite happy kind of chatting to somebody who's doing the welding and kind of talk to them about, well, you know, I can, it is an asset because you,

you can kind of relate to people much, much more easily. And I think kind of uncertainty is just part of life. I'm not too bothered by uncertainty. I just think it's part of the human condition that we have uncertainty. And one of the jobs that you have as a manager is to just help people work through that uncertainty and deal with it and accept it and, you know, make the most of it because uncertainty creates opportunities.

And before we move on to talk about Suzanne's second book, Wave Walker is available to buy outside and you can learn a lot about the characters that you met in your childhood, who are very colourful, the people that you met. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, back to the event. Suzanne's second book is What Does Jeremy Think? which was written about her husband, Jeremy Heywood, who held very senior positions in the British Civil Service. He's actually described by a friend of mine as the man who ran Britain.

He was the cabinet secretary. The book itself, I think, really describes the demands that civil servants have in the role. For me, it paid tribute to the civil servants here in Britain and also the delicate balance, I guess, between juggling family life and work life.

And I'm wondering what you would like to start off saying about Jeremy, what you would like people to know about Jeremy. Yeah, I don't want to exhaust people because two books is probably too many, or at least one too many. So it's a very different book. And it's a book that I always wanted to write. I wasn't sure Jeremy was going to let me write it, to be honest, because civil servants don't like to have biographies written about them.

But then sadly, Jeremy was diagnosed with lung cancer in early 2017. And I said to him, I really, really want to write your biography because now you're not going to be able to tell this story.

And I remember reaching out to quite a famous biographer at the time and saying, you know, how do I go about doing this? Because I, you know, I really, really want to write a story. And I know he's not going to let anybody else write it. And if I don't write it, it's going to get lost. And he wrote back and said, don't do it.

it's a really, really bad idea. You know, wives don't write biographies. So I dutifully ignored that advice. Actually, that's another advantage of growing up on the boat is because you grew up outside of society, I find it much easier to ignore it when people say you should do this or you shouldn't do that because I just don't... Because you're always permanently a kind of semi-outsider, I don't feel as constrained by that.

Although I did make the point when the book became a bestseller of kind of emailing the guy back and saying, thank you very much for your advice. I ignored it. And if you'd like a copy, it's now available. Anyway, Jeremy had an amazing career because he worked for, well, after, I mean, he started

and an obscure bit of the civil service and the health and safety executive, but most of his career was in the treasury, but where it becomes really interesting, and I actually start the book in 1992 when he's dealing with Black Wednesday, working for Norman Lamont. And he's right in the middle of it as it's all going completely pear-shaped. And then he goes on from that to work for four different UK prime ministers. So after a kind of...

a brief spell on the back of the treasury, he comes back and he works for Tony Blair. When Tony Blair comes in, and then he works for Gordon Brown. So he's one of the few people who work for both Blair and Brown.

And the great thing is that Jeremy had a very good sense of humour, a very wry British sense of humour. And a lot of that is in the book because I was able to... I was talking to him for 18 months before he sadly passed away. And we really enjoyed the process of doing it. It's very interesting. We...

When I first started talking to him about the book, it was very painful for about the first hour that we talked. And then suddenly we got back into all the stories, you know, and then it was fun. And it became a kind of shared project, which was a lot more fun, frankly, than talking about the kind of medical stuff or anything else that was going on. So it became our kind of shared project.

But he had all sorts of crazy stories, you know, meeting Ed Balls halfway down Whitehall so they could try and argue about the budget. Because of course Jeremy, working for Blair, couldn't possibly go to the Treasury, which is where Brown was as Chancellor, and Ed Balls couldn't possibly go from the Treasury into Number 10, so they ended up doing most of it in the greasy calf that existed halfway between the two.

surrounded by various kind of tourists who presumably had no idea that the two of them were sitting there trying to kind of thrash out the budget.

So the book is full of stories like that. So he does Blair, then he does Brown, and then he stays when Cameron comes in, Cameron and Clegg in the coalition government. It's a complete turnover in government, complete change of ethos and style and how he managed that. And again, quite a lot of entertaining stories. And then, of course, you have Cameron, and then his last prime minister was Theresa May, and he passed away right in the middle of the war.

the kind of Brexit process, just about when the kind of legislative stuff was about to go through. So it kind of charts kind of 30 years in a way of British history and then a big kind of chunk of kind of prime ministerial history, but told from the point of view of a civil servant. So I was just very keen that all of that knowledge didn't disappear.

because usually when a cabinet secretary steps down, they're able then to go and do talks and speeches and talk about their career. But of course, I knew he wasn't going to be able to do that. So it's all kind of in the book. And then in the background of the book, of course, you've got us, because, you know, one of the interesting things is people don't,

well, of course we kind of know all this, but we kind of forget it. People are dealing with the kind of daytime, you know, what's going on in their personal lives at the same time as what's going on, you know, in the kind of work. So there are all sorts of kind of crazy juxtapositions where something kind of

immensely significant is happening in Jeremy's work and then you know he's dealing with something else. I do remember and I put in the book because I was at McKinsey for quite a lot of this I hadn't yet moved to Exxon. At one point you know this was during the financial crisis Jeremy kind of said to me look I've got to go to work early again you know because and I said well I've got to go to work early we had three small children by this point I've got to go to work early as well he said well you know I'm going to kind of try and save the financial markets

And I said, look, we're not playing that game. Look, we cannot do the who is doing the most to save the world, and the person who's not doing the most to save the world is going to stay and look after the kids. It just does not work like that. And he agreed. That was not a fair argument. So we took that argument off the table. Otherwise, he would have won.

Every single time. But he was known, I guess, for being incredibly influential behind the scenes. What were the traits that he had that allowed him to get things done in a way that I think people really liked him? So he stayed likeable and was influential at the same time. Yeah, and it's another reason why I wanted to write it, because that was what he was incredibly good at. I mean, he just got stuff sorted.

He was very clever, but there's lots of people in those roles who are very clever then and now. His real kind of magic skill was he was incredibly good, the jargon, EQ, incredibly good EQ.

Jeremy was able to, you could kind of sit him in a room with kind of several and many civil servants and many politicians have said this to me, you could put him in a room with multiple people who had conflicting views and he would basically talk to them and get them to talk to a point where somehow they found a version of an answer where everybody felt equally annoyed by it.

And then they would all walk out and another one of his things was everybody has to walk out with some sort of mini victory. So everybody will walk out with something they thought that they got.

And everybody kind of compromised, but everybody felt everybody kind of compromised about the same amount. And he was just amazingly good at kind of charting a way to and there's loads of examples in the book, you know, trying to. I mean, Jeremy was he did a lot of work around introducing the minimum wage, which he got very kind of passionate about. But the endless arguments and then trying to find exactly a way through between what everybody wanted and, you know.

all of many economic debates about what was workable or not. That was his magic skill. His magic skill was getting people somehow to kind of find alignment when it looked like there was no alignment and to stop people just separating into kind of separate camps and shouting at each other, which is very easy.

So I have one last question before we take questions from the audience. So the title of the book is What Does Jeremy Think? So what would you think Jeremy would think about the state of the UK government today? Yeah, well, I should say that I credit the title. The title comes from Alistair Campbell. I remember I texted Alistair and I said, I'm going to come and have coffee with you, Alistair, because I...

In fact, when I was writing the book, it was quite fun because I would say the bit while Jeremy was still alive, I would say to him, okay, I'm going to go and talk to so-and-so, what do I need to ask them? And he would give me, right, these are the things you need to ask them. So I would have Jeremy's questions to ask them, which were often killer questions. They were great. But with Alistair, I said, I also need a name for the book because Alistair's brilliant at names. And so I walked in, sat down for coffee somewhere near King's Cross, and he said, the name of the book is What Does Jeremy Think? Because that's what people used to ask Alistair.

across Whitehall and it kind of works as a book title. My publishers hated it, so I had a bit of a fight, but I won in the end. They want to call it Jeremy Hayward, Cabinet Secretary, which just wouldn't help. What would he have thought? I think he would be...

you know, we've just, I mean, interesting. I was lucky enough to kind of meet Chris Wormald earlier this week, who tells me he's doing a lot of things that are very kind of Jeremy-like. I think he would be worried about,

about the state of the civil service. I think he definitely would be worried about that. The kind of morale in the civil service is not where we as a country should want it to be because we need incredibly talented people to go and do those jobs and they're not hugely highly paid jobs. They are now jobs where people sadly have fear that they may end up on the front page of the newspapers. They may end up being attacked

And if we don't have great civil servants, we can have great politicians, but the machine needs the civil service as well as the politicians. And we will end up finding that policies are less well thought through, less creativity, all sorts of things. So he would be very worried about that, really, really worried about that. I think, I don't know what he would think of the kind of geopolitics. I think he would just...

It's very interesting, actually. One of the conversations that I've had recently with a civil service friend is when Jeremy was operating, and you'll see this in the book, he always said, I'm no good at foreign policy. My thing is home civil service policy. In fact, you

particularly Treasury, particularly economics. And Jeremy came here, by the way. Jeremy did an economics degree here at the LSE, which he loved and was kind of really important in his career. So he loved kind of anything to do with the Treasury, but anything to do with the Home Civil Service, very comfortable. He always used to say, I don't really do foreign policy. And one of the things that's come out of a number of conversations I've had recently is there is no longer that distinction.

there used to be a distinction between foreign policy and home civil service policy, and that doesn't exist anymore. The two are completely intermingled because what's happening in terms of foreign policy is massively impacting domestic policy. When we put sanctions on countries, that is impacting domestic policy. All of the talk about tariffs is impacting industrial policy.

we are, you cannot separate the two anymore like you could. And so Jeremy would be quite shocked by that, I think. And I suspect he would have been okay at foreign policy. He would have had to accept the fact that he was going to have to get better at it. Fantastic. Thank you so much. And now we will go to the audience. If you're online, please do put your questions in. And Devi in the front will come to those. I'll come to you in a second. Devi, who would like to go first in the audience to ask Suzanne a question?

Oh, yes. Did you have a rapprochement with your parents? And the second question is being a parent of five children, are we domesticated animals?

Very good. So one of the reasons why I put off writing the book for quite a long time, the Wave Walker book, was because eventually my parents kind of followed me back to the UK, as did my brother, and we kind of had a somewhat, we had a functioning but very superficial relationship for a long time. So you could talk about the weather and my mother's dog and the pot plants and so on, but you could never talk about the past and

Apart from my father telling stories which kind of made him the hero, but you know, you could never talk or question the past. And the few occasions when I did, I was kind of shut down very kind of aggressively, so that was not allowed.

And I maintained that for a very long time because first of all, I think you feel this huge social pressure to do so. I hadn't grown up with any other family apart from my immediate family. So they were kind of all I had as family. And then of course I had kids and then they were grandparents and then you feel even more social pressure because then they're the kind of grandparents. But I knew at some point I was going to write it because there's a writer inside me and I wanted to tell the story. And

I just didn't know when because I feared when I did, that tenuous relationship I had with them probably was going to explode. I just couldn't see them tolerating any sort of criticism. And the moment kind of came really when my kids got to an age where I'd really struggled on WaveWalker, basically when my kids got to that kind of mid-teens point. And I suddenly looked at them as a parent and thought, I can no longer justify this.

the decisions my parents made. And I don't see why I'm concealing this. Why didn't I write this book? It doesn't have to be written in a nasty way, but I don't have an obligation to conceal this anymore. But unfortunately, they did indeed react just as badly as I thought. My mother passed away in 2016.

After her death, I discovered a very unpleasant letter where she was threatening to try and destroy Jeremy's career if I wrote my book. And then my father walked out on me and my kids in 2019, a year after Jeremy passed away.

But, and I will say this, it's been very interesting because I've talked quite openly about this when I've talked about the book. And I've discovered that in most rooms, most audiences, there are usually people who have experienced kind of parents, not necessarily exactly like mine, but kind of similar sorts of parents. And it is one of the big taboos, which is we don't talk about dysfunctional parents or dysfunctional parent-child relationships.

And people say to me, well, don't you want to kind of try and sort out this relationship with your father? To which I say, well, A, this is his choice, not mine. I did actually write to him afterwards and say to him, you know, the terms on which I would certainly be willing to have a relationship and he's not interested. But also my life is better, you know, because, you know, what I regret is that he wasn't somebody else.

But I don't regret him, given who he is and how he behaved to me not being part of my life. So the answer is no, no report. That was a very long answer.

You got that, that was kind of implicit wasn't it? On there, are we domesticated? Actually the evidence, as I put together my essay, I haven't revisited it for some time, so it's a little out of date, but all the evidence was yes, you know, if you look at, for example, wolves being domesticated into dogs or kind of wild cats being domesticated into cats,

Interestingly, as you look at humans, we followed a very similar sort of pattern in terms of our kind of behaviors and even some of our kind of physical characteristics. So I would argue we are domesticated, but maybe small children are still going through a kind of

a process of moving in that direction. So Sasha has given me a five minute warning. I'm going to take Tamara's question and then come to Devi and maybe you can answer both together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tamara, please. Thank you. And thank you for that, Suzanne. It was fantastic. So do you have another book in you? And if so, what's it going to be about? Devi? Yeah. So beginning your career trajectory, what do you think has been the most pivotal moment in your leadership journey?

It's going to be hard to combine those questions. It is, actually. Maybe that's what your book should be about. I feel like I'm on one of those cooking shows where they give you a kind of grapefruit and an egg and say, OK, please make some sort of...

So anyway, I'll try and answer them quickly. So the answer to the first question is yes, I'm kind of on my next book. As I say, there's a kind of writer inside me. This one is inspired by, or in fact based on, the many, many people who reached out to me after WaveWalker became an international bestseller, amazingly.

and have told me crazy stories about their own childhoods. So I now have almost a hundred of these stories, all different sorts, really, really kind of, you know, from being growing up in a kind of hut on an Indonesian beach to being dragged by a father obsessed by mistletoe across Africa. Yes, mistletoe exists across Africa. I never knew, but there we go.

But and I'm probably going to write a collection of Sailing ones because they gives them a kind of coherency. Also, I think they generally tend to be the most extreme and

So I'm very excited about those and I'm kind of working with some of those people. They're not all still here sadly, but all the ones I can kind of work with. So I'm quite excited about it. And there are some crazy stories. And then on the second question, most pivotal moment, I had lots of pivotal moments. I

There have been multiple moments in my career where I mentioned earlier I don't always do what people think is the correct thing to do next, where I've taken a kind of lateral step. So I was in the civil service working in the treasury, which is where Jeremy and I met, and then I left and jumped to McKinsey, which is not that unusual now, but then was a very unusual thing to do, and lots of people told me not to do it because I was leaving a safe job, etc., etc.,

And then, you know, in McKinsey, I took a slightly odd route of taking a kind of functional approach, which everyone told me was a really bad idea. And then even moving to where I am now, XOR, was not something most people said. So for me, not every...

Sometimes when I do what people don't advise me not to, it turns out disastrously, by the way, so it's not a foolproof method of making decisions by any means. But it has often been, the most pivotal moments have been when I haven't taken the conventional path. And that has accepted, in order to do that, you have to accept that you go backwards a bit.

bit, which sometimes people aren't willing to do. So sometimes you go back in terms of pay, certainly you can go back in terms of seniority, but those kind of quite lateral moves have often, I've found, A, been really interesting and longer term have paid off. Amazing. So Suzanne will be signing Wave Walker books, which are right outside, and if you've got any other questions, please do ask her. But for now, could you join me in thanking Suzanne for an amazing, amazing talk? We really enjoyed it. Thank you.

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