Interview with Rob Wirszycz

Rob Wirszycz was born in Newton Abbot in Devon in May, 1957. His father came to the UK from Poland. He served as part of the Free Polish Army in World War II under General Anders fighting at El Alamein, in the Sicily Crossing and the Battle of Monte Cassino. He was presented with the Polish Military Cross for his services.

After the war, he settled in the UK, and worked as a clay miner in Devon where he met and married Betty Perryman, a school dinner lady. Together they had three children, of which Rob is the middle child.

Rob’s parents encouraged their children’s education having had very little themselves.

Rob says: “My dad took me down the clay mines when I was 12 and I’m not sure whether he took me there to put me off or whether it was some kind of sociological experiment to see whether I was tough enough, but it wasn’t very pleasant. I guess they thought education was important but they didn’t know much about it.  I was a bright kid, I learned to read before I went to primary school. I was very curious and spent most of my primary school in the library sucking down every piece of written material I could find.”

Rob attributes Mr Baker, his fourth-year teacher in primary school, with giving him a  hunger for learning which he still has today. He says: “One of the big rules I’ve got is that if I’m not learning something, I stop doing everything else. Learning for me is everything, it’s part of personal growth. Mr Baker recognised that I was getting really bored at school and devised a curriculum for me to explore the world. He gave me loads of books, he gave me tasks, it was brilliant. Apart from that, my schooling was a little bit boring.”

Rob also joined in with sports, playing football, cricket, occasionally rugby, and cross country running.

Having passed his eleven-plus, Rob went to Newton Abbot Grammar School where he studied English literature, language, maths, art, history, geography, and German among other subjects. He says: “I leant towards the humanities. I probably could have done quite well but my science education was less than adequate.”

Another teacher who Rob attributes with inspiring him was Mr Fletcher, his sixth form economics teacher. Rob says: “He opened my world, coming from a little mining village in Devon, we never travelled very far, it was very much a rural existence. He opened my eyes to the world, to macro-economics and the impact of how economics worked, how money worked, and the social impacts of policies. He was genuinely such an interesting man. I looked forward to those lessons with absolute joy.  In fact, I got an A in my A level economics which was the only one I got, because it was the only one I was desperately interested in.”

Following his A levels at the age of 17, Rob went to work for the local government and a year later, decided to follow his then girlfriend to Exeter University to study for a B. Ed Art and train to be a primary school teacher. He says: “There was no real thought about a long-term career or anything. My mum and dad thought teaching was a great thing.  I had a great time, I really enjoyed it, it was a lot of fun.  It probably wasn’t very intellectually taxing, but maybe that’s okay too. I grew up there and eventually ended up being the student union president.”

While at University, Rob met the principal of the college, Francis Cammaerts, who had been an advisor to the Minister of Education in Kenya, post-independence, and who arranged for Kenyan teachers to come to the University for additional training. Rob says: “I really got on with these guys and I thought why not go to Kenya and volunteer to be a kindergarten teacher.”

The trip was Rob’s first time abroad and first experience of flying. He says of being a kindergarten teacher: “It was great. It was just huge fun, my experiences there were probably quite formative. Being a kindergarten teacher prepares you for a life in business because young children are just like dealing with senior executives. They don’t listen, they argue all the time, they need to be told what to do and they can be great joy, and they write very little.”

Having been bitten by the travel bug, Rob’s next trip saw him spend a year in Hong Kong where he was invited by a friend who worked in an advertising agency and for whom Rob did some copy-writing.

He then moved on to Japan where he worked as an English teacher. He says: “Japan in the 1980s was booming, they call it the bubble years. I had a phenomenal time working in Nagoya, Tsukuba, and Tokyo.”

Rob moved on to work in an international school and ended up as head of the Lower School. However, he realised that teaching was not the career he wanted for the rest of his life and returned to copy-writing and acting as creative director in an advertising agency. Rob also met his wife, Hilary, in Japan and the couple married there in 1987.

It was while teaching at the international school in Japan that Rob bought his first computer; an Apple IIC. He says: “I absolutely loved it and taught myself to touch type. The school I was at was very wealthy and they started buying Apple Macs very early on.”

Rob returned to the UK in 1988 and spent the next three years with Callhaven, one of the fastest growing value added resellers of Apple, Sun, and Oracle. Rob started as a trainer, and working with a team of four or five, started to grow the business finally becoming marketing director.

 Rob says: “We started off selling Apple and then Sun into education, and then Oracle off the back of Sun.  That was our journey and we also did lots of fun things like multimedia, which was the very early days of people trying to build interactive systems. This was pre-internet times; it was all dial-up.”

The company also sold Oracle databases and licences. Rob adds: “It was a pretty lucrative business at the time.  This is where I met a couple of rather famous Oracle people, Geoff Squire, and Mike Evans, who were running Oracle at the time.”

The company’s competitors included Rothwell, run by Richard Holloway. Rob says: “Competition is always good though, it sharpens your focus.”

With the growth in Calhaven, the team started to spin off into property and decided to then break the company into smaller companies. Rob was involved with Omnimedia, a multimedia company that became listed on the securities market, after which Rob decided to look for something new.

Rob was introduced to CSSA, at the time called CSA, by a friend. The organisation, the trade association for the software and services industries in the UK, of which Doug Eyeions was Director General, was looking for someone to manage their marketing function and Rob decided to use the opportunity as a stopgap while he continued looking for other opportunities. Rob says: “It was a bit of turning point in my career. It opened me to a whole new world of different types of businesses to the ones that I’d known before. So, I decided to learn a lot about IT services and other software businesses and so on. I was like a little sponge, I just learned everything I possibly could from everyone I met.”

Rob says of Doug: “Doug was a legend, a member of the very early days of the computing services industry from the bureaus and so on. … He could be a cantankerous old bugger but he could also be an absolute joy because he was exceptionally bright, exceptionally insightful. I was like a bundle of energy and ideas, and he shaped those ideas and that energy towards some kind of value that the organisation could generate from it; we were a good team.

“He was phenomenal. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, he wasn’t a big fan of dealing with government, which felt that the software and services industry probably couldn’t get much from interaction from government.  That changed though with the internet. As we came through the 1990s the government seemed to understand that there was a fundamental need for IT in schools and so on. There was something big happening during that 1990-mid to late 1990s period.”

 Following Doug’s retirement from CSSA, Rob was appointed director-general, he was 38.

 “It was huge fun at the time because there the world wide web was in its early days and the UK software industry was developing. Together with Philp Crawford at Oracle, we created the IT Manifesto. We sent it to all the heads of all the major parties ahead of the 1997 general election, and challenged them to put the 10 points in the IT Manifesto into their own manifestos.”

He explains that the CSSA became a campaigning organisation launching various other initiatives, including building the ‘Software Business Network’. He explains: “We got money from the government and were effectively trying to create experience-sharing and business improvement for the UK software sector. The US had its Oracle and Informix and all the others, in the UK, we didn’t have that; we were trying to develop a UK software industry.

“The only thing I could do in a sense was to use my marketing nous, and so we became a campaigning organisation. We campaigned on readiness for the year 2000, on the business of software, we campaigned around the IT Manifesto, and we also grew the association.  We doubled the number of members. We had a proactive outreach to get more people to join the organisation.”

Of Y2K, Rob says: “I initiated a group called Task Force 2000, with Robin Guenier which was partly government-funded. We spent a lot of time trying to make people aware that this could be an issue. I remember going on Newsnight being queried by Jeremy Paxman and being asked “Are you really saying that your industry is so stupid as to not have known this many years ago?” My reply being, “We never knew that the computers we were designing were going to last that long.”  It was a great campaign and then we lost control of it to a certain extent because the government decided to fund their own thing called Action 2000 which became very political and we had to back out of it.”

Rob and CSSA also had discussions with the Federation of Electronics Industries (FEI) to try to form an alliance covering the UK tech industry, from electronics to software and services, which eventually happened after Rob left CSSA.

In 1997 Rob moved to EDS taking the role of director of EMEA Marketing. He says: “Having worked for lots of different things in the past I felt it was important I added a branded name on my CV.  My profile was relatively high at the time and a number of people approached me with roles. I took a role at EDS and there was a lot to assimilate which appealed to my enjoyment of learning. There was an awful lot of things going on at the time, the outsourcing boom, Y2K, the Oyster Card for London Underground, changes in the armed forces salary system, the digitisation of DWP, tax credits, all sorts of things. From a marketing perspective, EDS was looking to improve its image. There were times when it was being hit by the work it was doing at the Child Support Agency and DWP – barely a copy of Private Eye came out without EDS being mentioned. It was a difficult time.”

Rob says of the work culture; “Because we were an outsourcing world, it’s a zero-sum game, you either win the deal or you don’t. Therefore the sales ethic it was brutal, the work ethic was pretty normal, but the sales ethic was strong, you had to win those deals, bids were done on a war room type impact; you bring your best and your brightest together to win those deals.”

Rob went on to be head of Global Alliances in Dallas before being head-hunted to be the CEO of ITNetwork, part of InterX plc.

Rob joined the IT Network part of InterX, a dot.com company. As well as a software division, they also had a publishing business which provided buying and trend insight for IT directors, and a distribution company which was sold off to fund the software arm of the company.  Rob says: “At that time, everybody was trying to create internet software. The bit of the company I was running was the bit that was using the software as almost like a demonstrator for anybody else to see what they could do with it.  What with experiencing both the early 1990s PC boom and the early dot.com thing, it really was wild.”

Rob’s experience of managing people began with his teaching roles, he says of his style: “I’m rather enthusiastic, encouraging, hopefully with a soupçon of inspiration, but effectively trying to lead people towards a goal.  I like to make sure that everybody has meaning in their life and meaning in what they do, otherwise, it just feels like you’re carrying out a task. That’s something I’ve learned over the years.  Inclusiveness is really important, people like to feel that they have a say in decisions and I like to make sure that people at least feel they’ve had an opportunity to give their opinion prior to a decision taking place.”

Asked about the biggest mistakes he has made in his career, Rob says: “Probably very early career, if I had better advice I think I would have gone into business a lot earlier.  I think I would have enjoyed that, but that’s not really a mistake, it’s more a regret.

“As a mistake, I think I may have jumped around quite a lot, but on the plus side, that’s allowed me to have a lot of different experiences and learning which I’ve been able to transfer into what I’ve been doing over the last 20 years which is working with lots of different companies.  I’ve made lots of mini mistakes, but no major ones; I have gained from everything I’ve done.”

Rob says: “Over the last few years, I have mentored a number of young people who are faced with decisions about how to start their careers and I recommend to do something and really throw yourself into it, but it doesn’t mean that’s what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.  You can do a wide variety of things as long as you’ve got some transferrable attributes that you can bring into the next thing.  That might be your ability to write, to sell, to create change, whatever it is, those attributes can be almost universally applied in organisations, in different places.  Find value personally and organisationally wherever you work and understand what it is.”

In 1997, Rob joined the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (WCIT) while he was working at the CSSA. He says: “Joining seemed like a pretty natural thing for me to do. I’ve really gained a lot from it.  I like the fact that the WCIT is the philanthropic part of the industry.  It’s about philanthropy, it’s about understanding what we can we do with IT or tech as a force for good. … I am currently Senior Warden and all things being correct, I will be Master of the Company in October this year (2022), which I’m very much looking forward to.”

Rob has two projects in mind for his year as Master. He adds: “One is one that I’ve been working on with a number of other people over the last year and relates to social value.  There has been a lot of stuff in the press about Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), and that is very much about managing the downside risks of the environment social and governance.  We see social value as being the other side, the positive side. It’s almost like two sides of a coin, you’ve got financial value, which as a company you need to develop, and then, in parallel, social value which you also need to develop.  We’ve got a group called The Social Value Leadership Group within WCIT, which has got about 20 different companies in it and we’re looking for more.

His second project involves potentially creating a ‘metaverse’ or digital twin for the WCIT following on from the increase in online activities forced by the circumstances of the pandemic. He adds: “The pandemic has meant a lot of stuff has been on Zoom and I think that’s not sufficient.  You can generate far more ideas when you meet with people in a group. Zoom is somewhat transactional in nature, but talking to a screen is not normal.  So, therefore I like the idea of looking at whether some of these digital twinning, metaverse style, virtual environments and so on, can be utilised to improve our work.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by TP Transcription

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley