Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Philippa White, Founder and CEO of The International Exchange – TIE as she calls it – linking future leaders from the commercial world with social initiatives across the globe. Born in South Africa, growing up in Canada and finishing her degree in Thailand – pretty international – Philippa then moved to London to work in advertising but with a family that came from, as she says, the helping people industries, she wondered where the soul was in the industry she nevertheless loved. A turning point came at her uncle’s funeral, an inspirational man, who was Nelson Mandela’s doctor. Philippa witnessed speeches from people of very different circumstances that her uncle had reached out to and supported. She saw, as she says, “the power of expanding your personal circle, of breaking through barriers and stepping out of you silo.” The International Exchange or TIE was launched in 2006 as a catalyst for change, giving professionals in the private sector the opportunity to shape the future of their industries and companies and help to find revolutionary solutions to some of the world’s most intractable problems. TIE now works with some of the biggest companies from the communications and financial sectors and has created accredited online programmes for corporate clients and professionals around the world who don’t need or don’t want to be sponsored by their companies. Philippa White is my Business Shaper, all the way from Brazil.
Philippa White
Hi, thank you so much for having me, Elliot.
Elliot Moss
No, it’s an absolute pleasure. Welcome to Jazz Shapers.
Philippa White
A real pleasure.
Elliot Moss
A journey, a journey, Philippa, that started in South Africa, that went to Canada, that moved around over here and over there, that’s gone from one industry to another, that’s now trying to empower people and solve the biggest problems in the world. Do you like change?
Philippa White
Good question. We’re comfort zone disrupters and I think if I didn’t like that, that would be a bad thing, I guess. Do I like change? I like change, I think. Although it’s funny, I’ve been in Brazil now for seventeen years, which is the longest I’ve lived anywhere and a lot of people do say, “Oh my gosh, you know, really? Are you going to keep living there? Is that what you want? And it’s funny because, yeah, and so then, okay, maybe I don’t like moving around as much anymore but I also have to younger children and maybe that’s why but I think because the world is changing so quickly, there’s so many challenges that we do face but I feel like being in Brazil, at the front end of a lot of the things, like right now we have incredible flooding, you know the challenges from Covid, you know life is changing to quickly and I’m certainly not stuck in my comfort zone and I’m not stuck in a silo and I’m constantly having to kind of reinvent, we had to reinvent time in the face of Covid so, yeah, I think I do like change and I think I do like not feeling set in something and that’s perhaps why I like being an entrepreneur and doing what I do, where I’m doing it.
Elliot Moss
Now, we met and we worked in the same business for a while…
Philippa White
Yes.
Elliot Moss
…seventeen, eighteen years ago. You were in the advertising world and you wanted to make a change and we heard earlier about the precipitation moment, which I want to come back to and your uncle’s funeral and all that. How difficult was it for you mentally to move from the world of communications, which is my background too, to this, this lifechanging, transformational changing thing? Or was it actually, looking back, the easiest thing you ever did?
Philippa White
So, I remember, after we worked together at Leo Burnett, I worked at BBH and I was at BBH for a couple of years and I remember…
Elliot Moss
Advertising agency founded by Sir John Hegarty, a former Jazz Shaper.
Philippa White
Who’s actually one of our mentors for TIE and, yep, he was on my podcast as well. Amazing man. He talks about do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you. But as far as that move, many people did say, “Oh my gosh, you know, that’s the riskiest thing you are doing. Really? You’re quitting your job and then you’re going to move to Brazil?” And it’s funny, I remember when I did a business degree and I could finish my degree in Bangkok, Thailand and where I studied business, it was one of the best business schools in Canada, it was expensive, it was high profile, all this kind of stuff, I remember somebody stopping me in the hallway and saying “Oh my gosh Philippa, you’re really going to go and finish your degree in Thailand? Like, this is the best place you could be” and I remember saying to her but I can’t learn what I’m going to learn in a classroom where I’m at. The things I’m going to learn in Bangkok, Thailand, I’m going to learn things that are just, it’s impossible unless I go there and when people… sort of the same thinking, when people said, “You’re really taking that huge risk?” and I remember thinking, I think it’s more risky to stay where I am, where I’ve created this business case, I know there’s so much potential, I mean, worst case scenario I go back and get another job but I have to try and I guess I’ve just always been quite entrepreneurial, I quite like following my heart and having conversations and then seeing, seeing what can happen and then connecting people and being, well go let’s just try, you know, if you don’t try, it’s never going to happen and I think, you know, you can overthink things but unless you try, I don’t know, and then it works out and it has done now for seventeen years.
Elliot Moss
When you set this thing up back in 2006, Philippa, could you have imagined that we’d be here now, sixteen years later, having a conversation about the fact that you are in twenty-five countries, that you’ve changed x-thousand number of lives, I mean, at that point was it just I want to do something meaningful and I don’t really care where it goes or was it I’m going to build a scalable empire of change?
Philippa White
That’s such a good question. Wow, that’s a really good question. So, I knew our main markets were because my first clients were Leo Burnett and Wieden and Kenned, two agencies in London, well global but they were, the London agencies were my clients, and because I went to Brazil to pilot it, the organisations we supported were in Brazil. So, I think my view at the beginning, because I was an entrepreneur, I was funding this myself, I was you know after I got the job I moved to Brazil for six months with the savings that I had, which as… if you know anything about the advertising world, there’s you know an account manager, you don’t make a lot of money so it was like very limited funds and I was sort of funding this myself for six months and I’d created this business plan and then I went back to England to freelance a bit at Krow and a few other agencies to then get more money to then pilot this. And I think at the beginning, my vision was if I can just make this work and I don’t have to go back and forth to England, to just live and be able to sustain my life, I will be happy. The objective of TIE has obviously always been unleashing the potential in professionals, it’s always been making an impact to organisations and communities around the world that wouldn’t normally get that help, it’s always been empowerment and creating those incredible leaders that have the competencies that the world needs now but from a personal point of view, it was okay I just need to be able to live without having to get on a plane and freelance at agencies in London. What’s fascinating is obviously, we’ve been through a lot, the world’s been through so much, you know Covid and everything and we’ve revamped it and pivoted and all those words, we’ve grown our… you know the base of the organisations we work in, which are twenty-five countries around the world and we work now not just in the communications world but also the financial sector in different countries so we’ve, you know we have our companies in the US but actually recently I was speaking to one of my mentors and he did ask me, he said, “What is your manifestation of TIE in ten years?” Like, what is success? And that is really interesting because I feel like we are at a point now, there’s so much potential and there’s so many conversations, so many companies I’m meeting with, everyone’s getting really, really excited about this because it really is the moment where so many professionals are looking to expand horizons, broaden their perspectives, step out of silos, be able to make real change, connect with people who they would never normally connect with, so many people are desperate for that and companies want people who have cultural intelligence and embrace diversity and are able to be more flexible and so it’s our moment, actually, and so it’s now it’s just figuring out where to go from here.
Elliot Moss
But it wasn’t your moment in 2005, if you think about all those things you just said around the importance of empathy and kindness and flexibility. Was it ever thus? Great people do that and they have that and they want to embrace it. What did you face when you, if you can just go back to that moment, you land in Brazil, you find a place to live, you’re setting this thing up, there’s only one person in the world that knows what that’s going to look like and that’s you. How did that feel, right then?
Philippa White
That six months basically like when I arrived, well I also didn’t speak a word of Portuguese so that was hard. Like talk about being out of your comfort zone, I mean I arrived, I remember having to take a bus and I was taking Portuguese lessons and meeting with local agencies and trying to figure out what this model is really going to look like on the ground, like really how it’s going to happen and trying to sort of speak to people who have a bit of English and making sense of everything. That was scary but incredibly like unbelievable, talk about adrenalin rush and just like this is amazing and I loved it, I’ll be honest. But as far as making it all happen and turning it into something, I mean I have to say that was, once we got the pilot going and we actually made it happen then I was able to kind of okay, I think that there’s potential here but just to your question around was it our, you know, it was not the moment of where we’re at now and I still have to say thank god for those companies that believed so much in me because it was a risk, you know and I remember talking to Helen Doherty, Bruce Haines.
Elliot Moss
The HR Director and the CEO of Leo Burnett at the time.
Philippa White
Of Leo Burnett at the time and Stuart Smith, who was the Planning Director of Wieden and Kennedy at the time, again, I am so grateful to these forward thinking leaders who understood the power of this and why it was so important and they were ahead of their time, you know. I had a global perspective because of my background and because of what you know what you talked about with regards to my uncle’s funeral but not everybody had that vision and the companies that embraced TIE from the beginning did and I have to say my hat goes off to them because it was… now it’s more acceptable I guess but it wasn’t then.
Elliot Moss
Much more coming up from my guest, Philippa White, in a couple of minutes but right now, we’re going to hear a clip from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Robert Lewis and leading parent consultant, Rachel Vecht, discuss how to talk to children about difficult topics.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again, if you are feeling so lucky, and all you have to do is pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. But back to today’s fabulous guest, Philippa White, Founder and CEO of The International Exchange, linking future leaders from the commercial world with social initiatives across the globe. So those first few years, Philippa, you’ve made the leap and I can hear the adrenalin junky in you, I can see as you are talking, you are so animated, you are going god I just like creating stuff, that was absolutely brilliant. Obviously, the act of creation had to continue because once you’ve got over that hump of not having to go backwards and forwards and your Portuguese…
Philippa White
Like now my children were born in Brazil and they only speak to me Portuguese. I also had to have babies in Portuguese so when you have a being, being pushed out of your body, you do learn.
Elliot Moss
You need to know.
Philippa White
You do learn that language, yes.
Elliot Moss
It’s literally, survive. You are like, I need this so you better work out how to say it. Those first few years and the realisation that you were actually going to settle…
Philippa White
Yes.
Elliot Moss
…in a place and you were going to then build this thing. Again, just take me back to some of the challenges if you can recall that you’ve faced and talk to me about those and just how you overcame them as well because here we are again, success looking back and hopefully success going forward, it doesn’t just happen.
Philippa White
God. Well, we all remember what happened in 2008 so, I have to say when people would say, “No, like the most amazing companies were born out of a recession,” I have to say I sort of launched TIE in 2006, we had the first two projects in 2007, I remember I had so many companies lined up and then 2008 happened and I was like oh my god are you kidding me. So we had one company, Wieden and Kennedy as well, Ryan Fisher who is actually still at Wiedens and he is the MD of Wiedens London so he was our third person to ever go on TIE but I would say the challenges that I faced, I mean I… thankfully our model has evolved but there was many challenges. One, the way that we used to work and we still do now but it’s not the only way we do it, is people would physically have to be out of the company for thirty days and they would be immersed in a completely different environment to sort of run something from beginning to end. We were expanding to New York and luckily through the contacts and the agencies that we worked with in London, it was a little bit easier but I have to say one of the challenges that we really did face was, as we know, New York is a tricky market, people don’t even have holiday, they don’t even take lunchbreaks so then trying to sell in a come on, they can be out of the office for thirty days, like that’s absolutely fine. So, that would be hard. I would say some of the other challenges were we properly change people’s lives and we properly ignite new ways of seeing themselves, their purpose, how the world works. If that’s not embedded in a really strategic way within a company, which we believe really strongly in intrapreneurship, so I don’t know if intrapreneurship is obviously making change within a company, I believe the future of this planet is having more forward-thinking companies, we need to create more leaders that are able to make change within companies, so we do need to ignite that way of seeing themselves and seeing the power that they have, making change within a company but if the company hasn’t totally embraced this experience, you have these ignited professionals who then don’t know what to do with that energy and until we figured out how the application process could work, how to really embed it in a company, you just create a whole lot of amazing professionals who then are like, oh, I need to quit.
Elliot Moss
They leave. Yeah, which is not where you want to go with it. The other question I have in mind with regards to the challenges, obviously knowing the NGO world pretty well and I know you are a for profit organisation…
Philippa White
Yeah, we’re a social enterprise.
Elliot Moss
Social enterprise. Knowing how quote unquote “competitive” it is to help, and all those, the kind of when people think about charities, what they don’t always know is how complicated they are internally. Have you, as you built your own organisation, were you conscious of not making the mistakes or not replicating the kind of cultures that other similar organisations had done or were you, did you not even think about that?
Philippa White
I don’t even think it’s relevant, actually, to what we do because what’s fascinating is TIE is sort of the catalyst to this change for individuals and we use the partnership with these organisations to create that catalyst for change. Individuals are immersed within these organisations for short periods of time and help them for short periods of time but there’s no real risk of TIE becoming like we’re a small organisation, we’re tiny, we just provide that process to immerse people in these organisations and actually just, I’m not completely answering your question but it’s an important one. What’s fascinating is, a lot of people from the private sector because they… so many people want to be able to make impact, they want to be able to make change but they don’t really know what that looks like and they think the only way to do that is to work in an NGO. The thing is, if you work in the private sector, it’s very possible that your desire to work in an NGO, it wouldn’t fit because NGOs can be quite slow, very bureaucratic, they don’t have the access to the resources that we have in the private sector and so what’s really interesting is having gone through TIE many times, people realise no, you know that’s not really what I want to do and actually, I really like what I’m at and actually, I just need to see myself and my role in a different way and that’s what we’re doing with TIE and so we, again it’s a catalyst, we create that catalyst for a different of seeing themselves and seeing the world that they work in.
Elliot Moss
In terms of how many people have gone through the programme since you set up, do you know how many there are?
Philippa White
Yeah, I would say, now because we work in cohorts so, it used to be individuals, as I mentioned we had the immersive experience, now we’ve evolved, we do corporate and individual cohorts, groups of six people. So, now, over a hundred, I think.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of the changes that you have seen in people and the impact that they’ve gone on to have or as you said different perspective they’ve taken of their own lives, just talk to me about a couple of the most distinctive examples of those, where you’ve gone wow, that just really happened.
Philippa White
Yeah well, I think a really nice one, and this has just come to mind because we’re both Leo Burnetters, which is I think quite fitting but I think it’s such a perfect example. What we really want people to do we’ve sort of touched on this throughout this conversation but we really want to ignite people’s purpose, we want to ignite people’s understanding of the power that they have and you know we don’t have to wait for tomorrow, you don’t have to wait for somebody else to do it, the time is now and you can do it. And I think one fantastic example, Alice, Hooper at the time, she’s now married and I don’t know what her last name is, she was the fourth person from Leo Burnett to go through the experience. So, we had Chris, who was the first one and then Ed and then Harry and Alice, and at the end of every experience, we do some type of evaluation and this particular one, she was in Brazil and we were sitting around the corner from where I live and we were drinking a coconut water and she said “You know what Philippa, it’s so funny, I remember seeing these individuals coming back” and she said “There was always something different about them but I didn’t know what it was” and she said “It’s so crazy because I’ve got that now” and she said “It’s so funny, I couldn’t put my finger on it but I could see there was something different” and she said “But I now know exactly what that it is and I have to do something with this” and she went off, she went back to Leo Burnett and she set up Leo Burnett Change, now I don’t know if you remember, it doesn’t exist anymore but it was a global division within Leo Burnett, which was focussed on making a difference. Now this was not, not for profit, they won their first piece of business, which was a £10 million piece of business with UNICEF, so if we’re talking about return on investment, but it was also Leo Burnett Chicago won the first ever White Pencil Award, the D&AD, called Recipeace, it was a campaign called Recipeace, and I mean anyone could Google this and you can find the information. And she won numerous awards but what she said that she had discovered, what that difference was, was her purpose and she said, you know, “If this has unearthed a new way of me seeing myself, of me realising that actually I can change the way that things work here, I know there’s more that we can do within the system” and I think that’s what TIE is all about and that for me is a perfect example of what can happen.
Elliot Moss
And you, has it happened to you? I mean, I know you obviously ignited your own desire to go do something, to go and say you know what, I want to make a different impact, families from the caring professions, as it were. What changes have happened for you over this period?
Philippa White
Oh god, that’s a really good question. I mean, I sort have been following this path that I kind of felt like I just needed to follow, I’m sure a lot of entrepreneurs feel this, it sort of, you start doing something and you are probably quite competitive with yourself so you just kind of keep going and it’s you know failure is no option and you sort of keep going but whether I had known what my purpose was, as in what is this all about? I think that has become really clear for me over the last, certainly the pandemic really, really pushed me, you know, we had one very specific model which was people travelling internationally and my clients were only corporate and obviously that completely blew up with Covid and I really had to dig deep and see how resilient I really am and really understand, hold on a second, is the essence of TIE dependent on travelling internationally? No. Actually, the essence of TIE is so needed for so many reasons still, we just need to figure out how to make that possible. It’s so funny, because TIE is all about limited resources and constraints and in those circumstances what is possible so, with limited financial and human resources, TIE resources, people are able to create such extraordinary solutions following the TIE process and Covid for me, because I’d been through that so much with TIE, it was like I had to take my own medicine a little bit and see, okay Philippa, you gotta follow this process basically and see if you can make it work because you have no option. And suddenly I was able to dig deep and realise that resilience but also sort of following that and be like okay, it is possible, limited time, limited financial resources, everything, make it happen and I proved to myself that I can do that, that our team can do it and that we’ve actually come out so much better as a result and I probably realised more of my purpose and what, what we’re all about, what I’m all about. Like I say to people, Covid was like the worst thing but also the best thing that could have ever happened to us.
Elliot Moss
Philippa White is my Business Shaper for a few more minutes. If transformation of the individual and transformation in terms of the country where the work is going on that’s helping the local community in some form, whether it’s stoves or whether it’s I don’t know, so recycling, whatever it might be, it doesn’t really matter, if transformation is the thing, Philippa, and you talked about it before, this ten year vision for you and this ten year vision for TIE, where will it end up? Where do you want it to be? If we were having this conversation in 2032, what will have happened? What will have been transformed?
Philippa White
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think one of the challenges that we had where we had to physically send people to places and it was one person, it was not scalable and we weren’t able to impact, one as many people within a company but also as many people in the process and so one, I’m really happy with where we’ve got things right now because now we can work with cohorts at a company, we can bring more cohesion, we can get more people through that, there’s still obviously a limited number of these types of experiences we can do without sort of really growing TIE but I would like to be getting those numbers up, as far as more companies because that, it’s just more and more people within a company that can get involved which, that’s our objective, obviously the more people that can get involved, the more intrapreneurs and more purpose-driven individuals we have, more people understand what’s happening around the world and then more change can be made from within companies but when I’m looking at where TIE is at in sort of ten years’ time, there is so much content that we have, as you can imagine we have incredible stories that have involved extremely incredible people from so many different backgrounds and the material and the stories and the insights that we have, is extraordinary. So, what we’re wanting to do is almost create like an academy, we want to be able to create a place that companies can have access to that information, maybe it’s workshops, inspirational workshops. I do a lot of info sessions and I have webinars and I have people joining them and it’s just amazing when I’ve got people from big banks that it’s so easy for everyone to get so stuck in silos and in their little you know worlds of having the same conversations with people and going to the same pub and the same places on holiday and if I can just open up people’s minds a bit and just have people seeing themselves but also the world in a different way, I feel like I’ve done a little bit more of what I’ve been, you know, that’s what I want to do. So, if we can find a way that we can scale that a little bit more, maybe it’s more digital, we’ll still be doing these programmes but if I can just make it more accessible and this information more accessible to people then, yeah, I think that would make me happy.
Elliot Moss
It’s been lovely talking to you. That’s a really clear vision by the way and I think the whole learning and development piece has legs of its own. It will be monetizable, I am sure in a good way so that you can then go and fund even more projects so, the best of luck, it’s been so lovely seeing you after all this time.
Philippa White
Yeah, I know.
Elliot Moss
And you’re here in London, which is fabulous. Enjoy Brazil again. Just before I let you disappear though, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Philippa White
So, it’s Take It Easy My Brother Charles by Jorge Ben Jor. He’s a Brazilian artist. This is quite an old song actually. He’s just talking about the first time that he saw the man step on the moon and he said that just filled him with so much inspiration, so he sings about love, he sings about hope, he sings about positivity and liberation and he wants to inspire other people too and that’s what he’s singing about, in Portuguese.
Elliot Moss
That was Take It Easy My Brother Charles from Jorge Ben Jor, I hope I pronounced that properly, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Philippa White. She talked about the importance of learning and said you can’t learn in it in a classroom, you’re just going to go and have to actually learn it in the real world. She talked about that classic entrepreneurial attitude of just doing it, don’t overthink it, let’s just give it a try, what’s the worst thing that can happen. Creating catalysts for seeing themselves and the world differently, is a really big part of her mission in life and of TIE’s mission. And finally, that lovely though of the time is now, you can just do it. Absolutely brilliant stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.