Had Tomorrow’s Travel Leaders been around back then, I think I can say with some confidence that it’s not a list I would have made. I was what my mum liked to call a late developer. At the age of 29 I’d been a baker’s apprentice, a door-to-door insurance salesman, a bank clerk, a civil servant, a travel rep and a telesales agent – I was just beginning to find my way. A decade later I was commercial director at Thomson – I might just have scraped into 40 Under 40!
Those ten years were really important and my progress was helped a lot by a lesson I learned in those early days. It’s stuck with me ever since. I went for an interview for a role that would mean managing a large number of people for the first time. I didn’t get the job and as part of the feedback I was told that I needed to recognise the difference between doing and managing – up to that point I’d been riding a horse but if I wanted to progress, I needed to learn how to drive a pack of horses; a completely different skill. It was a tough message to take onboard.
When all of your success and recognition has come from your own efforts, your own results, it’s a real challenge to accept that you’re going to have to stop doing it all yourself and start working through others to achieve results.
My kids sometimes ask me what I do – not what my job is, but what I actually do – and I like to tell them that I don’t do anything, which is more or less true. I just make sure that I’ve picked the right people and that they’re doing what they’ve been picked to do.
Of course, that’s not the full story. As anyone in my team at Kuoni will readily tell you, the temptation for me to get involved, to get my hands dirty and get stuck into the detail, persists to this day. Never is this more apparent that when it comes to marketing, especially with our turn-of-year campaign.
Everyone thinks they can do marketing and I’m no exception. November is traditionally the month where the Kuoni marketing department (not to mention a few marketing agencies) take out their Derek dolls and pins and get to work. They should really just tell me to shut up – and actually I should.
I suspect that most managing directors and chief executives are the same; they’re all driving a pack of horses until they see an interesting one fly past, then like me, they can’t resist the temptation to jump on its back and ride again. And I think that’s OK, as long as the rest of the team know they can push me off whenever they’ve had enough!
Derek Jones is managing director of Kuoni UK
