Interview with Michael Tobin OBE

Michael Tobin OBE was born in Bermondsey, East London in 1964, he is one of four children. His father was a gang member and was in prison when he was born. Michael says: “He was a bit of a ruffian.  One of nine brothers, they had a gang that worked with the Richardsons, the Krays, all those sorts of people at the time.  Not a very nice chap, he was quite violent.”

At the age of seven, Michael’s mother, who was working for the British Rhodesian Steel company, decided to leave and took the children to Africa. Just after they arrived in Rhodesia, the country declared unilateral independence and civil war broke out. Michael says: “We were petrol-bombed four times, one destroyed the house.  I was shot at around thirteen times, one got me in the leg.” Despite all of this, Michael managed to find time to play football and was scouted by Northampton, Newcastle and Wolves but his mother did not want him to return to the UK.

When Michael was twelve the family did return to the UK. He continues: “We couldn’t take it anymore and we tried to get back to the UK.  At the airport in Africa, they took everything from us, our clothes, our luggage, our money, everything except our passports, boarding card and the single layer of clothing that we were wearing at the time. We landed back in Heathrow effectively as refugees.” Having returned to the UK, the family, including Michael’s now stepfather who was Afrikaans, lived in a squat in Stockwell for two years. He says: “We survived by breaking into old condemned houses waiting for demolition. You’d very often find old pianos that people just didn’t want to move so we’d tune them up and roll them down the Old Kent Road and sell them in East Street market for £20 each.”

 As a result of their upbringing, Michael says that he and his two brothers rejected the background they had come from; his eldest brother became a policeman and his other brother a fireman.

Michael left school as soon as he could and went to work. He has never regretted not going to university, he explains: “I’m a great believer in not regretting anything because everything that happens to you, helps shape who you are at any given time. In our house, with our kids, I just tell them; ‘We don’t have regret, we don’t have mistakes, we don’t have failure.  We simply have successes and learning.’  We learn more from things that don’t go the way we want or expect, than we do from things that do because we never assume that luck may have been involved in those things. If you look at life today, especially in technology, the rate of change is so fast that nothing can be taken for granted, certainly not in a business sense. The fact that you’ve got it right once, gives no endorsement to the fact that you may get it right again just by doing the same thing.  Looking back at all the things that didn’t happen the right way, those are all character-shaping, and I’m quite happy.”

Rockwell Automation
At the age of sixteen Michael left school with no qualifications and took an apprenticeship in electrical engineering at Rockwell Automation in Milton Keynes which specialised in making programmable logic controllers for industrial automation. He says: “I didn’t really know why I wanted to do that or anything else.  It just fell into my lap at the time and it was a way to earn money.” Not being able to afford the seven-mile bus trip to work, Michael brought a pair of roller skates and skated seven miles daily. He worked as many hours as possible to top up his pay with overtime.  He adds: “The work ethic was there and I tried to do as much as I could.”

In his apprenticeship, Michael learned how to fix and fault-detect in PCBs. He says: “This was when you didn’t throw PCBs away, you repaired them getting a solder sucker and taking out chips leg by leg, heating them up and soldering a new one in. I learned how to follow circuit diagrams, use oscilloscopes, that sort of thing. I also used to repair cathode-ray tubes. That involved understanding the circuitry that now almost all lives inside one IC, knowing how a transistor works, knowing how resistors and impedance can be exploited in things like light dimmers in your house.”

As part of his apprenticeship Michael moved around different departments learning about payroll, accounts, suppliers, quality control as well as three months on the shop floor putting rivets into panels. He adds: “You get to understand how difficult it is for people to do that day in and day out for eight hours a day and still have a motivation and an interest in working for that company.”

As his career progressed, Michael says he learned a lot from his apprenticeship in terms of applying problem solving to his businesses.

Goupil
Having completed his apprenticeship, Michael moved to Goupil, a French computer manufacturer based in Putney London. He says: “I went there as Technical Director. I had no idea, I believed I could not do the job, but I thought, you know what, I can learn.  I fluffed it a little bit and I elaborated on my skillsets and experience.”

Having joined and realised there was nothing technical about his role, he talked to the salesman and decided to go through Yellow Pages to see who he could call and see if he could sell them computers. He ended up speaking with Dragon Computers in Wales who were looking for a new range of computers and who eventually brought one hundred Goupil machines. He adds: “It was such a shock to the French headquarters who said, ‘Hang on a minute, where do we get 100 QWERTY keyboards from?’  They’re all AZERTY in France.”

This lucky break bought Michael to the attention of the CEO, who when he stepped down due to ill health, decided that Michael, at the age of just 23, was right for the job of CEO.

Michael says that he made many mistakes in the role being young and new, he explains: “When somebody didn’t quite do what I wanted I would shout at them.  I would smash a cup against the wall.  Do all the things that I thought a big boss should do and of course they just felt I was an absolute idiot. … I hadn’t even had that many bosses to have a reference point of what was good and bad. It was only through experience and learning that everyone is human and making mistakes and all those things, that you change your approach and realise that a collegiate, empowering and non-blame culture gets much, much, more done in an office environment.”

It was at Goupil where Michal met Bryan Adam’s cousin who taught him a lot about salesmanship which helped him greatly, he says: “He taught me that it’s important to look at what we would perceive as a failure as simply a step towards success. It helps us keep a positive outlook in life. He gave me the ability to negotiate which is a very important part of our lives, the ability to achieve what one wants without leaving a trail of destruction behind you. That messaging at that time was extremely influential for the rest of my life.

Michael moved to France to work at Goupil’s headquarters with the aim of helping them set up a Scandinavian operation. However, just weeks after arriving, Goupil was closed down when the president of the company was found guilty of fraudulent activity.

International Computer Group
Michael says that luck once more stepped in and while browsing a newspaper he saw an advert in English for a PA to the managing director of the International Computer Group in Paris. Michael says: “I phoned them up because the advert was in English and I said, ‘I don’t want to be a PA, but I can do stuff, and he said, ‘Well funnily enough, I’m employee number one.  The PA was going to be employee number two, so if you would like to come along and do business development or something, come along.’  So, I started working with them.”

Tricord Systems
After working with International Computer Group for four years, Michael saw an opportunity with Tricord Systems to set up subsidiaries across Europe. Michael adds: “I liked the look of that and took the plunge and started opening up businesses. I was based in Paris but moving around Europe.”

After eleven years in France, Michael was then headhunted by ICL, the English mainframe manufacturer, to help turn their business in Denmark, which maintained legacy mainframes, into a managed outsourcing business. Michael says: “I didn’t have any experience in outsourcing, mainframes, or third-party maintenance, but I thought, how bad can it be?” Michael moved to Denmark and picked up the role of transforming the business that four previous managing directors had already failed to do. Not able to speak Danish, Michael set out to win over the employees and as it was Christmas he ordered a Father Christmas outfit and spent the weekend delivering presents to every employee’s home. He also visited a local hospital ward for alcoholics where the wife of one of his salesmen worked as a nurse.  He says that doing this set him apart from the previous MDs, he adds: “It was something completely different. I couldn’t be put in the bucket of the last three people that tried. I didn’t want to be tarnished already from day one with a negative brush. They all said I was nuts but let’s see what else he’s going to do next and that was enough for me to have a differentiator.”

Three months after joining, having built up a good rapport with employees, Michael found he was still struggling to get the first deal in outsourcing because the company did not have a reputation for it. By chance and through the taxi driver who drove him from the visit to the alcoholic’s ward, Michael went to do magic tricks in the children’s ward of the local hospital. He also organised laptops from Fujitsu for them. The story made the main news in Denmark and as a result, Michael was asked to tender for outsourcing by the Ministry of Health, he explains: “I was encouraged to put in a tender and we won. While we were celebrating, the contact at the Ministry of Health said, ‘Look, anyone that cares that much about kids in the hospital is not going to let us down outsourcing our IT.’  And that’s how we got it.”  The success helped the company move forward in outsourcing.

Michael says it’s about creating luck and points to the networking he does. He adds: “The concentric circles that you can create around yourself create the luck that we define as luck when it happens but you’re just creating more luck.  I’m a great believer in saying yes as often as possible.  You’re a long time dead, you can rest in your box, and until then I want to do as much as I possibly can.”

In 1999/2000 Michael joined the Millennium Programme created by ICL to bring together around twenty people from across the globe to be the senior management of the future.  Michael says: “That was a fantastic thing, because first of all it put me in the limelight to set up their e-business operations in Frankfurt, but secondly, it introduced me to Jaglish Parikh, a yogi from India, whom I’ve subsequently introduced to every one of my management teams ever since. He teaches you how to hypnotise yourself and stand outside yourself.  I’m a firm believer in slightly alternate leadership styles.”

Michael joined Redbus Interhouse, a datacentre company, just after 9/11. He says: “It was just after the internet bubble had burst and I was still in Frankfurt as the head of an e-business operation which didn’t feel like the safest place in the world as I had a two-year-old born in Denmark and a one-week-old born in Germany, so basically I thought the best thing to do was to get back to the UK and hunker down and try to re-consolidate.”

Redbus Interhouse, was founded by Cliff Stanford and John Porter. The company had a market capital of around £6 million and was spending £2.3 million a month and had few customers. They had been banking on the market expanding but instead it collapsed when the dot.com bubble burst. Michael says: “I didn’t do my due diligence properly, just took the job because it was Internet-y and it was in the UK. I then suddenly realised that this company was going to go bankrupt.  …  So, I came in with a rescue plan which started a boardroom battle of gargantuan proportions.”  On a trip to Prague to open a new datacentre, Michael says: “All I could think about was, this is hopeless, there are no customers, nobody was then using them.  The Internet just hadn’t flourished yet.  It was a great idea ahead of its time.” However, luck was again on Michael’s side and a storm flooded the datacentre. The insurance company estimated that it would cost £50 million to rebuild the datacentre.  Michael continues: “I said, ‘Give me 8 million and I’m out of here, but it has to happen now.’  The insurance guy thought Christmas had come early for him, gave me the £8 million and I was able then to run the company for another five months while we downsized and got new investors.”

As the internet started to take off, the company became more secure and was made private, consolidating with Telecity, whose name they adopted. It was re-listed in 2007 for £200 million and was sold in 2014 to Equinix for £3.6 billion.  Michael left Telecity in 2014.

Throughout his interview, Michael tells stories that demonstrate the reason why he has been called a maverick when it comes to management style. He tells of how he made two teams, during a consolidation, face their fears by taking them diving with sharks. He says: “Fear and worry are irrelevant and nonsensical emotions. We don’t fear the past and we rarely fear what’s happening at present.  We fear the future because we fear what could happen. … Fear is like paying interest on a debt you haven’t drawn; it’s a wasted emotion.”

He also explains how he took senior management to an ice hotel in the North Pole in order to try to reduce the “them and us” attitudes post consolidation, by making people reliant on others for their survival. He says: “Using slightly alternative ways of getting messages across to your management teams has been sort of synonymous to my leadership style. I think that’s why I got the maverick trade name.”

On recruitment, he says that he has never looked at someone’s CV, he looks at attitude, he says: “I can teach skills, but attitude is a very difficult thing to teach.  So, the most important thing out of all my businesses is finding the most brilliant people attitude-wise, that you can surround yourself with. Then empowering a vision rather than a strategy.”

On working in technology, Michael says: “The great thing I love about working in technology is you work in every industry, because technology is as prevalent in every single walk of life.  … The great thing about technology is that it can be applied to any industry to augment or completely revolutionise that industry.”

Michael is a non-executive director with a number of start-ups in fast growing zones of technology including Ultrleap in Bristol and Audioboom, the largest European podcast platform.  He is also chair of Bigblu Broadband, a high-speed broadband into remote areas of the country which will never get fibre.

Michael has written two books; ‘Forget Strategy. Get Results’ and his latest ‘Live Love Work Prosper, A Fresh Approach to Integrating Life and Work’.  He says his latest book is a realisation that work/life balance does not exist: “If you try to put 100 per cent of yourself into something, at the forsaking of others, you cannot expect to have a work-life balance, because balance doesn’t exist. I thought there had to be a better way of trying to be successful at both.” He goes on to use the analogy of someone who is passionate about weightlifting and long-distance running and the incompatibility of getting a gold medal in either because the body shape is not conducive to either. He continues; “What you could do is to think about winning an Olympic Gold at decathlon which requires both of these disciplines. You won’t be the best in the world at either, but you will be the best in the world at doing both. It’s that finding ways to integrate both work and life together.”

Michael is heavily involved in many charities including the Prince’s Trust, the British Asian Trust, Action for Children and many more. In 2017, he completed 40 marathons in 40 days to raise money for the 40^th anniversary of the Prince’s Trust, he sleeps in the streets each year for Action Aid, and has recently returned from the South Pole where he raised £120,000 and the team raised £300,000 for children with brain tumours.

In addition, Michael also has his own foundation which is focused on education, empowerment and the welfare of children.

In speaking about the achievements of which he is proudest, Michael says: “I think I’ve got a lot more to give. The business ones don’t really even get on the list. I think the Antarctic and the 40 marathons for me were things that put me out of my comfort zone so much that it puts a lot of other things into perspective.”

Having struggled initially at the South Pole with altitude sickness, Michael says he realised the importance of the team. He says: “A team doesn’t necessarily need to like each other, but it needs to know that the team is what counts, not the individual.  It was a big lesson to me as I’ve become more and more famous for my individuality as time’s gone by.  It’s a big wake-up call that we all need.  We just haven’t got out of our comfort zone enough to realise we do.”

Looking back, Michael says that he wished he had learnt quicker that if you want something done, get it done yourself.  He adds: “Don’t rely on other people but empower them.  Invite them to share your journey and you will find that they’ll be doing amazing things that you hadn’t thought of in the same direction.  Don’t dictate to people, just give them a path and let them run.  … Get the best people around you and have confidence in them. It’s a lesson you can’t learn quick enough.”

One of the biggest challenges that the tech sector faces is the need to attract and retain more girls and women, says Michael, adding: “I think, we’re missing a trick in the IT environment with so little representation and that comes from, from the fact that there’s little representation in STEM subjects at school. I think that’s something that could really quantum jump tech going forward.” Michael also points to the fact that technology is changing faster than our ability to adapt to it as another challenge.

For those thinking about working in technology today, Michael advises: “Embrace it.  Don’t get too technical.  Don’t get hung up on trying to understand technology. … Focus on the benefits of the tech; don’t focus on the tech.”

Michael was awarded an OBE in 2014 for his services to the digital economy.

He is a Freeman of the City of London, a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists.

Interviewed By: Ian Symonds on the 30th January 2020 at the WCIT Hall

Transcribed by: Susan Hutton

Abstracted By: Lynda Feeley