without borders Archives

Articles

Tyto’s commitment to diversity: inside our DE&I podcast series

février 24, 2023/dans Content, Culture, Without Borders /par Shamina Peerboccus

Tyto takes a mindful approach to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I). This means creating a workplace where people from all backgrounds and with different perspectives can thrive. With our remote model, and a team that is eclectic and culturally diverse, the habits and cultures within our company need to be inclusive.

In line with Tyto’s core value of “borderless thinking”, we launched a DEI Speakers Series within our WithoutBorders podcast. We invite industry experts to help us see the industries we are closely tied to (media, communications and tech) from different perspectives. The aims of this series are to challenge our preconceptions around our industry, help us learn new insights and skills and create a culture of inclusive thinking that we can not only bring to our own company model, but also share with our clients.

Our recent staff survey revealed that 85% of people said that they are able to be their most authentic self at Tyto. By encouraging conversations, providing resources and engaging with our team, we aim to create this inclusive environment and contribute to an industry that is moving forward by offering more accessibility and equity for everyone.

Becoming change-makers

Our topics so far have been broad and very diverse. We were able to chat with different leaders and get their views on how to make our industry a better and more inclusive place. The more we give visibility to challenges that our society faces, the better we will address our own biases and decision-making processes. Our guests have shared their takes on various topics, but also tips and advice that allow us to be accountable for our diversity and inclusion efforts, and hold ourselves responsible for making changes when necessary.

For starters, we spoke to Molly Watt,who specialises in assistive technology, about accessibility in tech. Molly is a passionate usability and accessibility consultant and motivational speaker with Usher Syndrome, and she shared with us some great advice for designing accessible products and creating inclusive work environments. She candidly spoke about her personal story and raised the importance of diversity in teams to make sure products are built in an inclusive way.

We also welcomed Rebecca Vincent, who is an American human rights activist and current International Campaigns Director and UK Office Director for our pro bono client Reporters Without Borders, an international NGO which promotes and defends the freedom of the press around the world. According to Vincent, there is a worrying trend of violence against journalists in countries that are supposed to be at peace, such as the UK, the Netherlands, Greece and Malta, among others.

As a PR agency, we recognise our work is dependent on journalism. We have a responsibility to support journalists, so we are excited to be working with the RSF and to have had Rebecca as a guest on our DEI series podcast. Listen to Rebecca Vincent’s episode to learn about the work Reporters Without Borders are doing across the world, their World Press Freedom index, the Julian Assange case, and how the state of press freedom stands today.

Ella McCann Tomlin, founder at Ardent, raised that implementing a DEI strategy in a company goes hand in hand with transforming management culture. She recognises that starting a DEI strategy can be overwhelming. The most important thing is to work from the inside out and focus on strong internal processes that leverage the voices of people most excluded within organisations. Ella challenges the performative nature of companies when it comes to DE&I and discusses the need for companies to be held accountable. In our WithoutBorders interview, Ella recognises many companies don’t know where to start and leaves practical tips for companies to adopt.

This point of view was reinforced by Ritu Mohanka, MD at Syndio, who believes that representation matters, and encourages businesses to make it happen. It’s the leaders’ responsibility to offer opportunity equity in the workplace for all. Ritu spoke about workplace equity and diversity, and her journey from conservative India to becoming an award-winning executive in European Tech. Recognition, according to Syndio’s MD, is a powerful motivator, and breaking barriers for women and acknowledging the professional achievements of the BAME community is something Ritu is hugely passionate about.

Léa Lejeune, business journalist and passionate about providing assets and finance education specifically towards women, gave us insights about her latest piece of research on what she calls ‘femwashing’. While businesses may appear to be communicating about feminism, they often fail to actually prioritise women in their policies and decision making. This disconnect between rhetoric and action, suggests a lack of genuine commitment to gender equality and highlights the need for more thorough analysis and implementation of feminist practices in the business world. Her words are particularly meaningful at this time of year as many companies gear up to mark International Women’s Day on 8th March. Offering support and recognition to women at work isn’t something that should just happen on one day.

Raising awareness within and without

By educating ourselves and opening-up our minds, we are better equipped to drive conversations around communications strategies and progress overall. We help create a safe space for our guests and our audience to learn, discuss, and celebrate the diversity of our industry. In each podcast episode, we explore how we can make our industry better.

Experts and leaders from our fields share their knowledge and learnings. Additionally, we aim to facilitate conversations around topics like unconscious bias, privilege, and how organisations can create a more inclusive and safer workplace. We believe that by creating these conversations and learning from one another, we can make our industry better for everyone. We strive to create an environment of understanding and respect, and we believe that these conversations are essential to create meaningful change.

We hope that these conversations will help us continue to build an environment where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work and be respected for their unique perspectives. Tune in to our Without Borders podcast here. And, if you have any suggestions on who should be next for our DE&I series, reach out to us!

5 most listened ‘Without Borders’ podcast episodes of 2021

janvier 27, 2022/dans Without Borders /par Borja Iglesias

2021 has been a record year in the startup ecosystem with mind-boggling venture capital investments and a generation of unicorns never seen before. Global funding increased 111% YoY to shatter previous record, reaching $621B. There are now almost 1,000 startups with a +$1B valuation after the unprecedented boom in the last twelve months: a new unicorn was minted every day in 2021.

In our podcast, we have interviewed multiple companies that have achieved this unicorn status over the last two years. They have captured the interest of our audience by sharing their advice on entrepreneurship and building a successful organisation from the ground up, as well as the key communication and culture tips for business leaders. If you don’t have time to listen to all these unicorn leader interviews, we have compiled the main insights from these installments in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’ – you can download it for free here.

In 2021 we also started a new series of interviews with inspirational speakers from the worlds of technology, communications, media, which kind of take us out of our every day and challenge us to look at our industries from a slightly different perspective. We had the pleasure of interviewing Rebecca Vincent, Director of Campaigns at RSF, one of the world’s leading NGOs in the defense and promotion of freedom of information. We also interviewed Molly Watt, tech accessibility evangelist and founder of the Molly Watt Trust, which raises awareness of Usher Syndrome.

If you don’t want to miss our new interviews with unicorn CEOs and inspirational speakers (and there’s more to come – stay tuned!), subscribe to ‘Without Borders’ on your preferred podcast platform – you can listen to it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts… Without further ado, let’s take a look at the episodes that attracted the most listeners in 2021.

5. Greg Jackson, founder and CEO at Octopus Energy

Is it possible to be disruptive in a sector like energy? The company founded by Greg Jackson has shown that it is. Jackson explains how tech can be used to drive a more efficient system, lower energy prices, improve customer service and help make the switch to renewable energy sources faster and cheaper.

The CEO of Octopus Energy talks about how they have established a culture of trust and accountability that does not apportion blame or encourage defensiveness when mistakes are made. Jackson also highlights the benefits of having a flat organizational structure and that reaching unicorn status was merely an enabler of its long-term mission: driving the transition to a cheaper, greener energy system.

Tune in to this episode here.

4. Clay Wilkes, founder and former CEO of Galileo

Now serving as Vice Chairman of Galileo after Derek White became the new CEO, in this episode Clay Wilkes talks about the successes Galileo has seen during the Covid-19 pandemic and the incredible opportunity that it represented bringing together his company and SoFi.

In this interview you will find out how a global payments company is managed and why reading regularly is a great habit. For Wilkes this is so important to building a successful company culture that the company established a book club. He says that learning from great minds is the key not only to personal success, but fostering a company wide culture of self-improvement.

Wilkes acknowledges that it’s the CEO’s role to be the chief communicator to the extent that if he could travel back in time he would challenge his younger self to communicate more clearly, succinctly and directly. In his own words, “being able to communicate the company’s strategy is really important; especially as you’re starting a new and young business.”.

Listen to this episode here.

3. Chen Amit, co-founder and CEO of Tipalti

Back in March, we discussed with Chen Amit, Tipalti’s CEO, the impact of achieving unicorn status. He admits it helped improve its talent and customer pulling power. “We’re that hidden gem. We weren’t very vocal for many years but this round of funding elevated our recognition.”.

Amit also stresses the importance of hiring the right people and making sure that the company elevates and celebrates those who are examples of the company values, those who exemplify what Tipalti believes in, what makes the company successful.

This unicorn startup leader states that he is not a ‘natural communicator’, so he has been coached to improve his speaking skills and he has found that the best advice on how to communicate effectively is to “be yourself”. After years of public speaking training, he has discovered that rather than a deficit, his reluctance to communicate his successes and being prone to understatement has become a part of his personal communication style.

Listen here for more business and communications advice.

2. Vijay Tella, founder and CEO of Workato

Our 15th interview with a unicorn founder was with Vijay Tella, a serial entrepreneur now with his fourth startup and CEO of the leading enterprise automation platform, Workato, now valued at $5.7B.

Tella’s decades of experience in the technology sector make this episode one you don’t want to miss as he shares all sorts of fascinating insights on how to successfully lead a company. For him, culture is the most important element of any organisation and highlights the sheer importance of having a great founding team as it will establish the cultural cornerstones of the business. He recommends defining core operating principles over values – having some guardrails for how things can operate in the company and reinforcing those core guiding principles as the company continues to grow in size.

Throughout his ventures, Tella learnt that “you can never communicate enough” so he is always on the front foot looking for new ways to enhance connectedness of the team and ensuring employees stay in the communication loop with full transparency.

Tune in to this episode here.

1. Arik Shtilman, CEO at Rapyd

Arik Shtilman has the honour of being the most listened-to interviewee of 2021. And it makes perfect sense because his episode is a handbook on how to scale a start-up. One of his most valuable insights is that business leaders must recognize the huge value of mistakes because a great company is a one that knows how to fix mistakes quickly.

According to Shtilman, successful companies need to assemble best-of-breed teams, meaning recruiting plays a key role and the guiding rule must be to hire people who are smarter than you.

Rapyd – like most startups – was built as a global player from day one. Unicorns are often global business from the start, and this imposes a steep learning curve when it comes to setting and communicating expectations to a multicultural team. As Shtilman says on this issue, “You need to understand the culture you’re talking to before you communicate. The fact that somebody on the other side speaks English doesn’t mean he understands you. There is a difference.”

Listen to our top podcast episode of 2021 here.

Ten opinions from the UK’s latest Unicorn leader Sir Martin Sorrell

février 20, 2020/dans PR industry /par Brendon Craigie

Last week I sat down with Sir Martin Sorrell, who was at his buoyant and incisive best, for a new episode of Tyto’s podcast Without Borders – currently running in collaboration with the csuite podcast and its host Russell Goldsmith – as part of a series of interviews with European unicorn leaders.

The interview comes after S4 Capital’s impressive growth continued last week by achieving a £1bn unicorn valuation last week building on the $1bn valuation achieved in 2019. Sir Martin pulled no punches as he spoke his mind on a range of issues including unicorn valuations, Brexit, Trump, WPP, the limitations of earn-outs and the tech sectors need to be responsible. Here are ten opinions extracted from what Sir Martin had to say:

Sir Martin on if unicorn valuations matter

“A lot of the private unicorn valuations are pretty meaningless as they are extrapolations of minority funding.” S4 Capital’s unicorn valuation “has veracity because it is based on a market value.”

Sir Martin on S4 Capital’s European focus in Amsterdam

“Amsterdam is good for Brexit. It is one of, if not the European capital which is gaining most from Brexit… A significant number of companies are starting to locate their European headquarters there.”

Sir Martin on acquisitions

“We don’t make acquisitions we make mergers. We’re looking for people that want to buy into what we’re doing, that are philosophically aligned, and are not looking to sell out. If you want to sell, don’t come to us, go to Denso, WPP or Omnicom.”

Sir Martin on the failed holding company model of earnouts

“I was speaking to someone who worked at Dentsu and she said they [Dentsu] talk about unitary and one P&L but it is complete nonsense because everyone is focused on their individual piece. That is the problem with the holding companies. When you do earnouts people are just focused on their little piece of it.”

Sir Martin on President Trump

“He’s good for business. Whatever people say about him, he’s good for business. He reduces tax, he reduces regulation, he spends money on infrastructure, so America is going to become disproportionately more important.”

Sir Martin on communicating S4 Capital’s vision

“We’ve tried to simplify it.” “We live in the age of the two-second ad.” You need “very simple messages that resonate in a world which is 24/7.”

Sir Martin on management

“Good people are inherently difficult to manage or bring together and average people are easy to manage.”

Sir Martin on WPP’s decision to sell its minority stake in Globant

“The loss in value on that deal is $500m… half a billion dollars of value has been lost… It was criminally negligent.”

Sir Martin on the need for tech companies to take more responsibility

“All the regulators in Europe and in America on a state by state basis and on a federal basis are gunning for the tech companies because with size comes responsibility.”

Sir Martin’s advice for other leaders on communications

“When you take advice, the advice tends to be to err on the side of caution, keep your head down, don’t put your head above the parapet… You have to be responsive and authentic. Say what you feel.”

To listen to the full podcast episode, search for ‘Without Borders’ in your favourite podcast app or stream it on your device from our website. You can also find out more about previous episodes and please subscribe to make sure you never miss a future episode.

Presenting ‘Without Borders’ – a new podcast from the Tyto team

janvier 8, 2019/dans Content, News /par Brendon Craigie

It should be no secret that here at Tyto we’re passionate about the power of brilliant content and believe strongly in the medium of podcasts as a way to engage audiences and deliver strong stories, inspiring information and create emotional connections.

Which is why I’m proud to present a new podcast, Without Borders, produced and created by the Tyto team. Without Borders is a dose of fortnightly inspiration for passionate communicators, courageous creatives and entrepreneurial business brains. Expect candid chats with the wisest old hands, bleeding edge innovators and left field thinkers and doers.

As an agency we’re custom built around our PR Without Borders philosophy, from our location agnostic structure to the way we approach creativity and innovation, both internally and as a perfect partner for our clients. We’re inspired and empowered by people and brands who aren’t afraid to make left-field thinking the norm, especially when it comes to innovating and reinventing modern communications. We’ve created the podcast to encapsulate this philosophy, but far beyond PR.

As we begin to release our first series (you’ll find the first episode here), we hope listeners will note the unexpected mix of guests, from age and experience to discipline, viewpoints and backgrounds. We’ve spoken to everyone from agency trail-blazers and award-winning journalists to brand storytelling visionaries and even the director and cast members of a sell-out Edinburgh Fringe improv show.

My co-host, Zoe Clark (Partner and Head of Tyto’s Fintech practice), and I are excited to present you with an ongoing selection of brilliant and interesting people. The kind of guests who can and will change the way listeners think about communicating ideas, building purposeful and successful businesses, creativity, innovation, and overcoming obstacles to success.

Tyto isn’t inhibited by rules, or how things have always been done: from the very ground-up, through each strand of DNA, we’re about tearing up the rule book; doing things differently, learning and improving. Therefore, it’s been enormously exciting to me to have the privilege to sit down and talk about these ideas with likeminded individuals on Without Borders. I hope you enjoy the episodes as much as we did in creating them.