Biography

Miles Templeman, Director General of the Institute of Directors, began his business career as a marketing specialist with brands like Daz, Ribena and Levis jeans before becoming Managing Director of Threshers and then the Whitbread Beer Company.

To watch the interview as a full interactive broadband experience, please click here. A text only version of the interview can be seen below.

Are entrepreneurs born or made?

Bit of both. I think there are some pre-dispositions within individuals either where it’s genetic or from their early years, which does make them more able to be entrepreneurs but there’s a lot of other factors around them, and training and so on and skills and certainly opportunity.

What drives you?

I think a desire to achieve. What ever I am doing, I like to be successful. I mean I like winning but I don’t have to win. I like to enjoy what I do as well as achieve something at it. But a lot of drive I think.

Who do you admire – and why?

Well the person I admire most in the last couple of years, despite all the recent furore over cricket, was Martin Johnson in the World Cup Rugby team, because I think that displayed very cool, great leadership, understated very often, and I think the way he handled the media was pretty clever too.

What does innovation mean to you?

I think it means finding a new way of doing something. It can be anything, large or small. It could be a great new invention of a macro scale, or it can be just doing a little task more efficiently and more productively, but it’s thinking about what you are doing and using your skills and your brains to say “how could I do it a bit better?”

How do you encourage innovation within your company?

I think for the country as a whole, and for companies in particular, it’s about creating an environment where there’s support, there’s the freedom to fail, the skills, the tools, but most importantly the clarity of objective. If you give people a clear objective and say, look you find a good way of doing it, lo and behold they will do it.

What is the greatest barrier to innovation?

The opposite of all of that, excessive regulation, restrictive climate, a mood where people don’t feel they can express themselves or use their ideas, they are slightly scared of failure, in fact all of those opposite things, push down and stop people innovating.

What keeps you awake at night?

I can’t think of anything, apart from missing a vital putt on the last green.

If you had your time again what would you do differently?

I think I would be bolder. I think there are situations where I have been too cautious. Where I should have said, I’ll take the risk; I’ll push out here. I’ll express something rather than hold back, and I think things might have been slightly different, but I’m fairly happy the way they have turned out.

What are the best and worst decisions you’ve ever made?

I think the worst decision I ever made was when I was running a company, and I really didn’t try and take us forward enough. So it wasn’t a single decision. It was a compound of being a bit too conservative, rather than saying “let’s take the risk” and I think that the best decision was when I was developing in the beer business, some new products and we really said lets’ absolutely go for it, and we developed widgets and we developed new brands, and we had a whole rolling success and indeed we ended up saying to the business and to the people, rather than set a target, what target do you think you can achieve, and they came up with targets that I wouldn’t have dared set them.

What is the secret of success?

Ha ha! If I knew that, I’d have more and I could pass it on, but I don’t think there is a single secret.

What one piece of advice would you give to anyone starting a business today?

Look for people around you, who can help you develop your ideas, use all the available resources in terms of getting the knowledge, building the skills, focusing in on particular areas. I think great steps forward, come from intense focus, and they don’t come from anything else, so you’ve really got to say, “here’s where I am going to go for it”, and “here’s how I am going to achieve it”, and then concentrate on that.

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