Way back (two months ago), when I first came up with the concept of Link-on, I knew that someone one day would nominate their mother. It has happened! Why? Because people respect their mother’s and that’s a beautiful thing. If you read Lizzy’s interview, you may recall a detailed answer about her role models. After hearing Lizzy espouse the inspiring qualities her mother, I was very excited to be able to meet her.
I have to say, that for me at least Link-on is already becoming a beautiful rainbow of women beyond my expectations. I was not intending to produce a feminist chronicle of driven young women. Instead I wanted something more true-to-life – women of various ages, opinions and backgrounds with expected and unexpected livelihoods and professions… More importantly I wanted to allow an honest expression; how they think what are their aspirations and who they aspire towards… hence the whole nomination process. I also wanted that personal journey to meet the people who inspire them in a personal or professional way. And share it with you.
Tish is the kind of woman I want to be when I get carried away watching a few episodes of Suits, Scandal or another American drama-series based on politics, law or the corporate world. She has a brilliant career and a very interesting path that led to it. But what’s most interesting for me about her is that her course was not obviously driven by ambition. In fact, she tells me that she was never an ambitious person. Having met her I think she got there by being a highly intelligent, decisive, achieving person with incredible integrity but also someone who loves people. And I think when you love people, they can really feel it and respond to it.
Tish was born in New York and, growing up, dreamed of one day working in the Foreign Service. But as very often happens, life had other plans for her. She went on to work in speech writing, crisis management, public relations in banking, marketing and then financial services at PWC (Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand), where she is currently focusing on their global brand and also internet risk management. Or something like that! As Tish herself jokes “my kids have been asking me what I do for years and I’m still not sure.”
Five famous people at your dinner party. Who are they?
Oh my God, I should have prepared this!
Jane Austen, Gandhi, Putin… I find it difficult to comprehend how someone can be almost as evil as him. I guess my feeling is – if we ever are going to defuse people like Putin, you have to first understand them. I want to be able to fight head on, but to do that you need to listen to them to understand them. I think very often our reaction to people like Putin or Donald Trump is just to turn off. Their views and their behaviour are so repugnant that we just don’t listen, and I think that’s a very dangerous thing, when you don’t listen to people like that.
Nora Roberts. She’s a romance novel writer from US. Interesting character – she was a housewife and then started writing. Probably one of the most prolific writers in terms of volume. But, she was a classic housewife and started writing, found the gift. It’s not profound or philosophical, but I find her dialogue, her ability to create the characters, to really understand and enjoy fascinating. Her books are translated into 77 languages around the world, millions of copies sold, yet in her blogs and running of an Inn in Maryland she comes across just being normal every day person. I’d like to ask her “how do you manage that?”
Who’s my fifth? God… Muriel Siebert., she was the first woman to get a seat on the stock exchange in New York. Breaking through the barriers on Wall Street and still being true to herself. I guess I’m probably drawn to her, because I spent a lot of time in the maze of financial world. Almost a generation behind her. I saw a lot of really bad behaviour, but I never really experienced it. Almost all of the men that I worked with treated me as absolute equal, maybe a bit rough around the edges and language was a bit coarse, but that was the trading floor and that was the way trading floors were. No quarter was given for the fact that you were a woman working there. It was that sort of environment, and it never really bothered me. So I’d be interest to hear what it’s like being first in something like that.
Who were your role models (real and/or fictional) when you were little? What about now?
My father. Right up until the time he died. I thought about this when I knew that there was a role model question and I can’t really think of having role models. I guess I’ve always taken my own path. I mean I have more people that I admire. There are qualities in people that I really like and admire: bravery and outspokenness and the ability to fight against the system, but I’ve never really seen them as role models. That sounds a bit stupid, but… I guess with my father, the thing I found with him is that he’s a very quiet man, incredibly intelligent, but probably the most moral person I’ve met in my life. I’ve been really lucky that I’ve surrounded myself with people that are very much in the same way, but I guess that would be the role model version for me.
What do you value most in yourself? And in others?
I guess in myself the ability to listen and not to feel uncomfortable in any kind of situation. When I was working in New York my sister and I had rented a house in the Bahamas for a week and we were looking for people to fill it. I met a woman at work, who I really liked and who seemed very overworked. So on the spur of the moment I literally invited her, I said “look if you want to come down for a long weekend, not expensive to get to, you’re welcome to come”. and I discovered afterwords that she asked a couple of friends at work about me and somebody described me as being the kind of person that you could invite to tea with the Queen or to a rockstar’ party or to something unpretentious and she will feel equally comfortable in all the environments and treat them all the same. And I hope that’s what I can do. I think it’s a great compliment – to have the ability to not be upstaged by environment.
I was really lucky. I was thrown in lots of varied situations. When I was in Brazil, I lived in the favelas for a month and a half because my sociology professor was studying the area and he took us up and we basically lived in the favela for six weeks, trying to understand better what life was like there.
My father was always an adventurer, when we went on holiday, we’d go with no reservations, because his attitude was that you just sort find your way, which led to lots of interesting things and lots of wonderful discoveries.
And I guess it’s what I admire in other people – fierce principles and not being afraid to try things, not being afraid to put yourself on the line. The difficult thing you see as you go through life is there’s a tendency to compromise more and more. It’s really easy to be fierce and idealistic when you’re 20. But as you start to have relationships and family and other people that are dependent on you, it’s a lot harder to be fierce about those things, when it’s not your life only that’s going to be impacted by those decisions. Making decision to stand up to your boss and risk losing your job when you’re the sole income provider for the family is an incredibly tough thing to do. When it’s just you, you can tell them where to go, be moral and stand up for it. So I admire people that have the ability to do that and are able to take their dependants along with them.
What was the hardest decision you had to make?
It’s not really hard I guess, but the scariest decision was moving to the UK. Making the decision to leave all of my family behind. We were close and I knew that transatlantic travel wasn’t exactly tough, but IT really was a breaking. I basically made a decision to do what I want to do, rather than try to fulfil other people’s expectations of me. It didn’t seem tough at the time, but it was probably the most difficult decision, the boldest decision I’ve ever made.
What’s the most ambitious thing that you have accomplished?
It’s difficult to answer, because I don’t think I have a lot of ambition. I think I tend to go with the flow. which has taken me to lots of very interesting places. I’ve never been driven to achieve some particular thing, which I guess is what I associate with ambition.
I guess from the ambition point… Being involved in a social enterprise and making sure that there was space to do that within my own career was an ambition and I think I pretty much succeeded in doing it. But it’s not a single decision. It was a feeling that I needed to find a balance, particularly working in pretty monetarily driven occupations.
Years ago I was one of the first participants of the program called “Common Purpose” who’s concept was – if you can get leaders really form the public, private and non-profit sectors together to look at issues in their community, then you can achieve all sorts of interesting partnerships, that can get things done in a non-traditional way. I was really lucky, because the program exposed me to things that I would never have seen. I had the power of the reputation of the bank behind me, which allowed you to do things which you perhaps couldn’t do on your own. I did a lot of work with Hackney and I met such incredible people. I’m still involved, I sit on the board, but what I’d like to do most work on is a small project back in Cornwall called “The Three Villages Youth Project”. Cornwall, as you can imagine, is economically deprived area, there’s not a lot for kids to do in Three Villages where we are. This group works really hard to find activities but also to find mentors and open kids up to things that they probably wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise. My husband and I are founding financial members, but I’d like to do more with my involvement.
What is success for you?
I guess success was really Lizzy’s interview and the way my son talks and my family looks at me. To be admired by a child is a pretty awesome thing, it really is. I have two fabulous kids, very very different, but I think I’ll leave the world a better place having the two of them in it.
The best and worst things about my job are…
The best is the flexibility to achieve the best that I can and I guess really the people and the opportunities that it’s given me. The worst is that there is very often a lot of bureaucracy and I find I’m not very good with bureaucracy. People used to joke when I went to meetings, “well, Tish, tell us what you really think”, because I am very outspoken and I get frustrated with the lack of decision making. Coming from banking where you’re basically paid to make a decision, you make a decision and you take the fall if its bad, you protect your people publicly, you ring them out private if they’ve done something wrong. You’re the face to those people. In the partnership it’s a lot different, everything is by negotiation and it takes much much longer. Very often they don’t like to make decisions. So thats what I dislike most – inability to be sharp and decisive.
What advice do you wish someone had given you when you were a teenager?
I actually think I was given some of the best advice ever! It was right when I graduated. “You can go out drinking with the boys until 5-6 o’clock in the morning as long as you’re in here at 9 o’clock awake and ready to do your job.” and the second was “Most people spend their professional lives looking at a person above them, figuring out what I need to do to get that persons job. Far better is to look at your job, do it to the best of your ability, try to do more than you actually can, find the person underneath you, train them to be better than you and then go to the person above and say – the junior person can do my job better than me, I’m redundant, what are you going to do with me? “
That ability to bring people from below up, rather than constantly looking up and trying to drag down, I think, is probably the best piece of advise and I think I followed that, I hope I did.
Describe yourself in the words of someone who’s in love with you.
I hope that they’d say that I think of them more than I think of myself, that my concern for them is all encompassing. I don’t know, I gotta ask my husband what he’d say. “She can be a real pain in the ass”, what else would he say… Controlling, very head strong, a good cook, refuses to take a driving license, annoys him no end, passionate about whatever I’m involved in.
And, the question from Lizzy: what would your teenage self would say to you now?
Keep taking risks. Because, as I said, I think as you go through life and become responsible for other people you tend to take less risks and I was always fearless risk taker as a teenager. I travelled around Latin America before you could call everyone every ten seconds on your cell phone, I did all sorts of things and was encouraged by my parents to do all those things. I’ve taken a lot less personal risk as I’ve gotten older, so I would say as I approach my next phase of my life, my teenage self says keep taking risks.
What is your favourite thing about humans?
Their ability to keep constantly reinventing themselves. There is tremendous individual compassion in the human race. We just have to remind ourselves to apply it on individual basis. It’s really easy to say I, as a concept, am so sympathetic to Syrian refugees, we got to do everything we can. But to actually take a Syrian refugee into your house or on a one-on-one basis to do something to help that particular person, that’s where it becomes a little bit trickier. I think the human race has a great ability to do that, if it has confidence in itself.
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