Paul Keel

It was an honour for us to be invited to be one of the founding members, so we jumped at the opportunity to join arms with like-minded organisations, high-performing groups of people focused on a common goal, in this case specifically to rebalance the gender imbalance in FTSE C-suites. So, our thanks to you and your team for leading the charge.

Smiths is an amazing company. It has been in continuous operation now for 170-plus years. Today, our biggest business is John Crane. It makes highly engineered flow control components for critical industries like energy or water treatment. We brought in a new leader there and that allowed Bernard [Cicut, President John Crane] to make some changes to that team.

When you go [in] a different direction, sometimes you need different perspectives. What got us here may not be what gets us there. And so, in that particular case, of the last four promotions in John Crane, three of those have been women.

Similar at the Smiths Group level. Let’s see, the last four folks that we’ve invited to join our executive committee, three of those have been women leaders. You’ve met two of them today. So, I think those are good examples of how changing course, you know, leads to opportunities for new leadership.

I’m reminded of a quote from Ayn Rand [the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged] – she once asked, what led to her success? And she said, ‘It’s not so much a question of who let me, it’s a question of who’s going to stop me.’ And when I think of Clare [Scherrer] and Vera [Kirikova] and Di Houghton, who joined our executive committee, that comes right to mind.
Clare, of course, previously led the Global Industrials practice for Goldman Sachs, arguably one of the most competitive talent pools on the planet. Vera was the Chief People Officer for Rio Tinto, a FTSE10. Di Houghton led Strategy and M&A for Allied Domecq.

These are leaders, who happen to be women leaders, but these are leaders who could work anywhere, for any organisation. And I think the reason they chose Smiths is because of the tight alignment between our values and theirs and the tight alignment of our purpose.