Podcast: From The Classroom To CIO: A Career Journey with Phil White

Written by Dave Seddon on 16 Oct, 2022

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Transcript

On this episode of the changemaker podcast, Dave met with Phil White to explore his journey from a student with a keen interest in computing to an experienced CIO in technology consultancy. Phil joins Dave to share the importance of understanding your motivators, offer advice to those considering a career change and explore the future of the workplace.

Dave: Firstly, a very warm welcome to a close friend of mine, a work colleague who I have known for, I was trying to think, probably 17 or 18 years. How scary is that?

Phil: It's very, very scary. I think sometime around 2005 - 2004 time. So yeah, quite a while, Dave.

Dave: So yeah, been a good mate and working colleague for a number of years and then spookily, a client for another number of years as well. It just shows you've got to be careful what you wish for.

Phil: Indeed, I think professionally we've probably covered all the bases of who works for who in what capacity and when.

Dave: Yeah. So a very warm welcome feel as part of this changemaker podcast.

The purpose of the session is I just want to share some experiences of careers really, and how people have got where they are today. And I guess importantly, what they've learnt through the process.

So yeah, just to kind of kick us off a little bit, tell us a little bit about your career to date and how you’ve found those sorts of roles?

Phil: Yeah, that's a good start.

So hi, everyone. So my name's Phil White. As I've said, I've known Dave for a fair few years. I'm going to start on the career journey explanation with at what point did I figure out what I really wanted to do in life? And that was probably when I was in junior school and I got my first computer.

Up until that point, I was fairly neutral and reasonably disinterested in school in general. And then I got a computer, learnt to programme and got very excited about what we now call IT, which in those days - and I'm going to disclose my age - kind of the late 70s to early 80s was computing and computer programming.

So from that point on it was like, well, I love this programming stuff and that's what I want to do. So I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer. Did old-style O-levels and A-levels in computer studies and computer science and got to that stage where I was doing everyone's homework because no one particularly knew how to do this programming stuff, and I was pretty good at it.

Dave: Were you entrepreneurial enough at the time to charge for it?

Phil: I might say that there was some tuck shop bartering that used to go on.

Dave: I like to hear that.

Phil: So I took the kind of the school interest in programming and did a degree in computing science which was one of the first degrees in the country that had a placement. And this is kind of leading into why my career has taken the direction it's taken.

So my computing science degree was four years. So in year three, you had to go out and get yourself a job. So I went and got myself a job working for the Atomic Energy Authority, and I'll kind of cut to the tagline here, I'm really intrigued by the whole concept of the built environment. So physically things getting built and working that make our lives work and make our lives better, and how technology is kind of interwoven with all of that stuff.

So I'm at the Atomic Energy Authority, I'm a 19-year-old, extraordinarily naive programmer, and I get exposed to the realities of how it is done in the real world, which is a really cool experience working in a teeny tiny team. And it turns out that as well as programming, I was able to explain to - admittedly engineers - non-IT people what I was trying to do.

So there were some light bulb moments during that year where they went, ‘Oh, we've never had this thing explained like that before, Phil. That's quite unusual’. So I was like, okay, that's fascinating. So my career basically from there on in has had this bizarre mix of being really interested in the technology that drives the built environment and a passion for simplifying how it's explained.

And those two threads are kind of what drove me for the first ten years or so of my career. So that's kind of the potted answer to the question, Dave. Then the career path started traditionally and then took a sideways step. So I'll tell you the kind of potted history of that.

So after doing my placement year, I graduated and then I remember I got job offers from Oracle and Hoskins and there was another one, I forget. And Oh yes, it's all coming back to me now. So the job that I took had nothing to do with the nature of the job. It was all to do with where my girlfriend was living at the time.

Dave: Right, okay. So we're going to come on to motivators later. But yeah, that's a good one indeed.

Phil: And when it comes down to career pathways, sometimes you follow your heart as well as your head. So anyway, I joined a company called Hoskins which was an IT consultancy shop. It was later taken over by Capgemini, which more people would have heard of than they would have Hoskins.

So I joined Hoskins because I wanted to stay close to my girlfriend, and I got placed by Hoskins on one of their main accounts, which was PowerGen. So again, the built environment. So I was all interested in how power stations worked and I was put into a team of programmers and by the end of, I think it was nine months, I was running the team of programmers and by 18 months, I was running the account for PowerGen as well as running the team of programmers.

So I kind of had this mix of being able to talk to people without using geek language, as well as being able to talk to the geeks about what they were doing. I classify myself as a geek, so I’m allowed to call myself and others geeks. So I got a couple of years into working for Hoskins, which was taken over by Capgemini, and then I had an unplanned career event.

So I was working in the offices, and then got talking over lunch one day to a personality. And I got on like a house on fire with this person. And so he was a larger-than-life personality, bundles of energy, and we got talking about a particular technology project that was going on within PowerGen, and he went, ‘I'm going to try something that has not been done before. Not sure if it can be done, but it's really difficult’.

And at the point where he said, ‘It's really difficult’, I said, ‘Hello, interesting’. And I left a very predictable career path. It was going pretty well with Capgemini, so I left after two years and went to work for a start-Up company of which I was the fourth or the sixth employee. So I was in there pretty early on and I stayed there for ten years.

So I spent a couple of years working for Cap, pretty predictable career and then stepped entirely sideways, closed my eyes and went, ‘Well, what's the worst that can happen?’. This looks like a really challenging problem space, so I closed my eyes and jumped from a predictable career into a start-Up environment and loved every minute of it.

Now, in particular the first few years while the company was growing, I'd say 0-250 staff was possibly the best, most enjoyable years of my career, 250 staff to 500 staff, which is roughly where we were when I left after ten years, that was good but different. And that was probably the end of the main phase of the first part of my career.

Dave: Just a quickie, other than the excitement of this is a problem to solve, what were the other things that attracted you to that particular role?

Phil: Well, it was the personality of the guy I went to work with, the energy, the entrepreneurialism. And look, people work for people is kind of one of the universal truisms of not just our industry, but careers in general. When you find people that you want to work with and for, it makes the whole doing a job so much easier because it doesn't really seem like a job.

So that's one of the main reasons. I got on with a guy like a house on fire. Let's hope he never listens to this, but he was an extraordinarily challenging boss. I mean, yeah, it was a constant challenge, which I utterly thrived from. It turned me into a rabid workaholic. So I worked seven days a week for many, many, many months because I wanted to.

So on a weekend I remember I'd take my wife to work - she had to work weekends - then I'd drive for an hour and a bit, go to the office and work (these were the days before remote working) all day Saturday, go back home and do exactly the same thing. So basically, I'd kind of lost my work-life balance a little bit, but the reason why I went to work for the guy was because he was a force of nature. The problem space was fascinating. It was grounded in still being the built environment. So all the stuff that I was doing, I could go to a power station and go, ‘I’ve just made that run better. I've just made that visible thing better, more efficient, whatever it was’.

So the link between the technology and the thing that the technology was making run, yeah, at the time I was absolutely passionate about that.

Dave: So did you know some of these things were motivators at the time? So the problem to solve obviously was a great motivator to you because that was the bit that attracted you as well as this guy. So you're already forming some of those motivators. As well your girlfriend’s just down the road, so that was another motivator at that stage. But were you just forming some of those motivators at this stage in your career?

Phil: I'd say it was quite a lot later on before I was able to discover what made me tick and what my motivators actually were. So at that point, I had no idea really why I was enjoying doing what I was doing.

Dave: Seat-of-the-pants type stuff.

Phil: Yeah, seat-of-the-pants for ten years.

It'd be interesting to get to the stage where I needed to find out what my motivators were. So I'd spent ten years at this place. And then you and I met and I ended up basically going into consultancy, which again, I love to bits and it turns out because there's a variety of different problem spaces, so I really enjoyed that. And then I ended up working with you for a client. So the Caravan Club I went to, this is a story I tell so many times, Dave. I went to do a two weeks holiday cover and stayed there.

Dave: I know I sold you on the two weeks.

Phil: Yeah, he did really sell me on the two weeks and I stayed there for several years because I loved the client, loved the environment and it was a very difficult problem space to solve. But the challenge with that particular consulting engagement, having stayed there for many years, it was about 150 miles away from where I lived. So I was away Monday through Thursday doing the consultancy thing because I still didn't know what my motivators were. This was sort of late 2000s before 2010.

So I was living away from home, absolutely loving the work gig but was a bit challenged by the fact that I was away from home at the time and my wife and I had started a family. So my personal motivators, I was loving life because I was solving lots of problems and living the dream. And my wife was going, ‘You do know you haven't seen your kids all week. When you come back at the weekend, you're a little bit completely exhausted. Shall we have a chat about this?’

Dave: And you never gave her my name, hopefully. Did you?

Phil: Just your home address and your wife's name.

Yeah, so we had that conversation every six months or so and I kept going just another six months and then yeah, I'll move away. And we got several years into that discussion and eventually, I went actually, you're right. I turned 40, and when I turned 40, that was one of those life events where I went, ‘Oh, hold on, what actually am I doing?’. And it was probably the first time where I cared about trying to understand what my motivators were.

So the next period of my career is the bit where I had to find out what my motivators were because I burnt myself out. So I moved away from the Caravan Club, went back to a company that I'd first worked for, that startup company that had changed quite a lot. And I threw myself back into working for them for a couple of years and took on way too much and managed to burn myself out pretty comprehensively.

So two years into that particular gig, I was spinning so many plates. I was loving problem solving, but I'd developed a sleep issue so I couldn't sleep at night. And I started to be quite confused about what was going on. I didn't realise I was burning out. So having to start to talk to people - and I'll call them counsellors but they were basically some friends who were pretty switched on into this stuff - I started trying to find out more about myself. So my career journey at that point, I started to look at it and go,’ Why do I do the things I do? Why do we enjoy doing them? And do I need to find a balance of sorts?’

Dave: And how tricky was that talking to somebody about those sorts of things? Because I guess other problems in your life, you've just thrown yourself into and solved when you got to that sort of position where you needed to talk to somebody. Was that tricky or did you find that quite easy?

Phil: I would say it was initially easy and then it got really tricky. So it was initially easy because I had a coach who knew me and because he knew me really well, he could see that I had burnt out. So the first time round was reasonably easy.

I then ended up working with another coach who didn't know me at all. Yeah, that coaching experience I would say I found harder but was more rewarding eventually.

Dave: Okay. So if you look back over your career now from sort of start to end, if you were talking to your younger self again, you know, you're just that fresh-faced individual. What would you be saying to him?

Phil: Trust in your own capability. Whenever you get an opportunity, close your eyes and jump and you're better than you think you are.

Dave: Anything else?

Phil: Yeah. Listen, listen, listen. And I'd probably also tell them who won the Grand National every year from then to now.

Dave: Let me just come back to something. So when you've changed roles in the past and you've hinted at some of these things as well, what are the things that have been really important to you that you could put your finger on? Which of these is the reason I've made that move?

Phil: Okay. So the first one is I get bored easily. So there's a thing. And that's why I used to enjoy consultancy because of lots of different problem spaces, so never being bored. So why? Why did I make the move? Each time I'd say there's an underlying element of I'll call it boredom, but recognising that I need a lot of ongoing mental stimulation. So I look for environments, companies, situations and projects that are either broken or need significant work, change or transformation in them.

Whenever I'm interviewed, I say if you're after a caretaker manager or a steady state, business as usual person, I'm not it. If you want someone to come in, change, disrupt and improve, that's why you might choose to look at me.

Dave: And I know you're the father of two children who are coming up, I guess, to that place in their times of life, where they'll start thinking about careers and stuff. You know, at university, they’ll often go off and do the thing which they love, and then they come back from that and it's like, now what? What would you be telling them?

Phil: Go broad before you get narrow. So experiment and explore different areas of the career domain that you're interested in before you go, ‘I'm going to go specific’, because you never necessarily know what you're good at until you try doing something.

So I go back to that example of when I thought I wanted to be a programmer, and it turns out that I'm better at communicating abstract concepts and managing and leading teams of technical people rather than just being a programmer. I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't gone broad.

So my advice to my kids is, yeah, experiment a little bit with what career options you might explore. Do that for the first couple of years. And then throwing yourself into that. Some people are just naturally suited to one very specific career domain, so accountancy or finance or HR, but others are more generalist, so management degrees and/or academia, for example. So I think for both my kids, you know, I'd just do a bit of exploring for the first couple of years, even if you know what area of skillset you want to pursue.So my son is quite literally a clone of me. So he's currently studying computing science at university. He's on his placement year at the moment and it's all very, very, very familiar territory. He's his own man, but I'd encourage him to use the skills and traits for a number of different companies in the first couple of years before you figure out what area of business or industry or even country you want to work in.

Dave: Yeah, I guess because the generation coming up, they've got so much more choice in front of them now in terms of if I look at job roles and titles, probably a vast majority of the job titles we have now never existed when we first started our careers. And I guess if you roll it forward another 10 or 15 years, there'll be other jobs which we can't even think of now.

So how much do you think it's about playing to your strengths and how much to stuff you actually love doing and what you're good at? Bearing in mind at that stage, you're not always fully sure what you're really good at.

Phil: Yeah, quite. It comes back to experiment, try to close your eyes, throw yourself in at the deep end and a little bit of just believe in yourself and your own capability.

There's a lot of kind of - not just from the parental perspective - there's a lot of nurturing and support that you take for granted that would give you that confidence to experiment and explore different roles within a company. But yeah, it's not necessarily going narrow and specialised too early on, especially with the post-COVID environment and the way that that's made pretty much everything a little village. We all talk to people on podcasts, teams, calls, Zoom calls, and geography issues that I cited earlier during this chat about having to drive 150 miles each way to work every day. Those issues, they're much less relevant than they were even two years ago, which means that the opportunity space to work across geographies, that's just going to increase.

And I think we'll start to bias the people skills and maybe even the side of people skills that you need to leverage whilst you're not physically in the same room. So distance-based empathy, I think there's going to have to be a shift in how the next generation are able to empathise and work together because the opportunity spaces are extraordinary.

Dave: Hmm. Yeah, it's what I kind of call the, I guess, the fourth industrial revolution in many respects. And Covid's certainly brought that forward substantially in the way that we work and how we work and how we deliver stuff. As you say, now, you can be based effectively anywhere around the world delivering stuff. We still need some of that human interaction, of course, but it opens up a much bigger workforce to do delivery of things.

Phil: Yeah, quite. And with that different way of working comes a slightly tweaked and changed skill set for how you do that work. How do you create teams? How do you energise teams? How do you create agility of thinking within teams where you've not necessarily ever met them before? So it's just an example of the sort of skill sets that I think the current and the upcoming generations are going to have to lean into pretty hard. But I would go back to the core question. I'd say just experiment, close your eyes and jump and trust in your own innate abilities.

Dave: Hmm. Yeah, that's some good advice. And what do you think some of the key ingredients of your success have been then? When you reflect on those, if you were to sort of put that into, I don't know, say three blocks. How would you attribute your success?

Phil: Okay. Three blocks. One would be positivity. The other would be, I'll say never settle for being bored - so relentless learning. And the third one… The third one is the tricky one, but figure out an approach to understanding what makes you you and how you tick. And that third one, it's something I've only really been exploring for the past 5 to 8 years or so. Having that understanding has unlocked another gear, I would say, in me. So, yes, those three things with that third one probably being the one I'd encourage the most. Get a coach and or start to ask yourself questions about why you're doing what you're doing.

Dave: Back to your motivators and drivers again. Why are you doing stuff?

Phil: Yeah. Understanding yourself is a very powerful tool. It's not necessarily a pleasant process to go through when you go, ‘Oh, Lord, is that why I do that? Oh yeah, of course. Of course, that's why I do that’. But yeah, it's a very rewarding process.

Emotionally, it's difficult from an energy perspective, it's extraordinarily difficult. I'll tangent very, very briefly here. I had one of my first coaching sessions I did in one of my company's offices down in London at 10:00 in the morning. It took about 90 minutes to do a coaching session, and at the end of that, I was in tears. I was like, Oh my God, that's how I work. Oh, dear Lord.

It was one of those places where if you're going to have a coaching session, choose where you do it. Choose the time of day and make sure you're in a safe place once you've finished doing it.

Dave: Yeah, very, very wise advice. And on the motivation thing as it has kind of been the theme throughout some of this as well, and a hugely important one, do you think those motivators change over your career or is there some consistency with some and others?

Phil: I think hindsight's a wonderful thing. So I would say I didn't know it at the time, but my consistent motivator has been to find a really difficult problem to solve. Now, I didn't know that when I was 20 years old, that's what was influencing my career direction. But in hindsight, I also think life's a process. You start out single, you end up ultimately getting married. You might have a family. There's a process that you go through in your life that changes your motivators and changes the balance that you need between the amount of energy and yourself that you throw out of your career versus your family versus your friends. Note that I used the phrase verses there, which is particularly upsetting. And it comes down to where you spend your time, I think, and that's a choice: where you spend your time and how effective you are within the time that you spend. And you can tweak and tune efficiency as to when you spend time doing something, actually do it.

We can all be very good procrastinators, but to come back to my motivators, they've absolutely changed over time. I guess across a 30-year career where I started was not knowing, but I needed really interesting and difficult problems to solve. 30 years later, I now know that that's what I need, but I still need the same thing. And that's still pretty top of my list about the roles that I choose to do are the ones that I'm going to find interesting, difficult and challenging.

Dave: And I guess when they're not fueled and sort of encouraged, that's the sort of time that it often people move on to go and find those motivators somewhere else.

Phil: Yeah, indeed. And in the last few months, I've gone through a process of going, what do I want to do next? And I actually thought, ‘Well, is it time to not work?’. And the self-awareness kind of kicked in and went, ‘No, no, I need problems. I want problems to solve’. And after having the conversation with myself, kind of structured with my coach guiding me through the process, I came to the conclusion that I want at least another two or three problem bases, jobs, at least that yeah, it still comes back to being motivated by solving problems.

Dave: So one of the things I wanted to share was often, people will reflect from the outside when they look at your career, thinking success after success after success. But some of the things that people often don't realise when we're going through that, especially those that don't know us as individuals, is how have we overcome those doubts and fears throughout that sort of time. It is part of life's learning and growth and development really when you've come across, I guess, difficult challenges, difficult things that you've had to face, how have you sort of overcome those sort of doubts and fears?

Phil: That's a really good question. So as you were asking, there were a few work events that anchored in my mind where you go, oh my God, how did that happen? So I'll say context first.

So the nature of some of those problems, if you're in the IT game, then there are programs and projects called ERP replacement projects that are a.k.a the widow makers. And one classic interview question for senior leadership positions is how many ERP programs have you done and how many have you done that have failed? And it's a key test and you need to have done at least one that's failed. And these are major programs that you're trying to change business, business processes at the same time as technology. So they're pretty flippin difficult. And I've been on the receiving end of a couple of those not going well.

So whenever a project of that scale, complexity doesn't go well. Well, what happens? So the first thing is for me, I beat myself up. And the second thing is my network of colleagues typically picks me up, reflects on success rather than not success and grounds me. And helps me move on, which is all summarised by a talk about it. So whenever you have a challenge, whenever something goes wrong - because stuff goes wrong all the time - talk about it. Find someone who's good at listening. And talk about it.

Dave: And actually, I mean, that's really interesting. I guess even more relevant in today's environment with COVID, where we can go very in on ourselves. It's been a difficult environment, but equally, I guess we live in a society that often talks about success and not failure. Whereas it was interesting when you sort of raised the question, which is you want to know how many failed attempts that they've actually had. Now, is that because you feel you need to understand failure before you kind of think what have you learnt from that process and hence how have you done things differently or is it just a challenging question to them?

Phil: You know, there's a fair bit to this. Let me unpack this a little bit, because I encourage failure. So let's start with that. So encourage failure. What do you mean? I think there's a cultural strength in the way that the Americans in particular are really good at trying things, starting businesses, having them fail, and then just going, ‘Oh yeah, I'll do another one and then another one and then another one’. Because they are taught to experiment and they're taught that experimentation ultimately leads to success and that they almost never get things right the first time around.

Now that premise and philosophy of experimentation, I didn't ever see that growing up in the UK and being educated in the UK. I think there is a presumption that you must succeed and that failure is bad and there's no positive aspect to it. So if you kind of take those as a bit of a comparison, I'd also note that some of the planet's most successful companies and creative endeavours have come from experimentation and failure.

So in my current mindset, I'm looking for people who are willing to fail because they've been comfortable trying something. Just because it hasn't been done before or they've not done it before, and having that mindset of going, it's good to fail. Not just it's okay, it's good to fail because experimentation, trying things, you carve new boundaries and take things into new areas. So by essence, you have to go and try something new in order to create something new or in order to extend an existing thing.

So I think experimentation is hugely important. From what I'm watching in the education establishment, I think we're getting better at this and I think that over time, culturally we will learn to be better at failure such that when we fail, we won't need strong colleagues around us to kind of pick us up as often. Try, fail. Try, fail. Try, fail. That should be the natural mindset for approaching problems.

Dave: There was a view which is you often learn more through failure than you do through success. And I remember reading a quote, a few years ago, so I may have it wrong, but Thomas Edison was being interviewed by a young reporter and he was saying, ‘Mr. Edison, how do you feel about sort of failing 2000 times inventing the light bulb?’ He says, ‘I haven't failed 2000 times, I found 2000 ways that it's not working, which means I'm even closer to finding how it does work’. So he needed to go through that. And I think Dyson did exactly the same before he launched the first-ever hoover thing. It was one of those things which I think it went through about, I don't know, 20,000 iterations before he launched the final model because a number of them had failed.

Phil: Yeah, completely. Completely.

Dave: And final question, because I'm very conscious you’ve given me loads of your valuable time today and know you're just at the very early stage that you've just joined as CIO of a great organisation, so tell me what it was that attracted you for that move?

Phil: Yeah, good question. So I'm at the end of week one of the role that you've mentioned. So why did I come to the company that I've come to? I'll probably cut to the chase and go, ‘It was the people who interviewed me’.

I had a couple of roles that I was going for at the time, and the other one was plan A. But when I met the individuals during the interview process, the one I went for became immediately the one that I really wanted, which wasn't what I was expecting. It wasn't what I was targeting, but people work for people. And the people that I met is ultimately why I took the job. So, yeah, I'm in week one of the new job working with and for people I'm excited about working with. That's why I took the job.

Dave: So is that one of your other underlying motivators? It's not just the challenge and the problems that you've got to overcome, the difficult things and some of the other stuff that you've talked about, but it's the people and the culture that's very important to you as well.

Phil: Yeah, I think yes, absolutely. The culture is defined for me by the people. There is almost no culture if you don't have a good set of people creating, defining, shaping and keeping a culture moving and alive.

And yeah, for me, I tend to spend more time at work than I do not work. So my work colleagues become akin to a family for me. So I choose to work with people who I want to spend time with because I find the way that they think engaging. I find their energy engaging. And typically that's because they're not necessarily like everyone else.

Dave: Well, Phil White, thank you ever so much for being my guest today. Really appreciate your honesty throughout. So thank you for that.