The Notebook: Kate Willard on how building connections is the key to business
The notebook is a place where interesting people say interesting things. Today it’s Kate Willard, envoy for the Thames Estuary.
The best partnerships are forged in person
Ploughing through three feet of snow through downtown Detroit one bitterly cold February morning wasn’t perhaps the classic route to a new world of business opportunity. For one thing I was there on holiday and almost by chance. My girls were travelling through the US on their gap year, and we had pretty much stuck a pin in the map when deciding where we’d meet up.
But having landed on Chicago I wanted to use at least a little bit of my time exploring potential connections and opportunities to collaborate with my role as the Thames Estuary Envoy back home. Over the next few hours – once my hosts had recovered from the shock I had travelled by train from Chicago – it became clear my little holiday speculative side-trip had paid off as we bonded over our common interests. Waterfront?
Check. Ford Motor Company? Check. Converting big logistics fleets to hydrogen? Check. Autonomous vehicles? Check. Retelling the story of our region? Check. And on it went as we went through the list of the challenges and innovative solutions facing leaders both sides of the pond.
I’m building on those personal connections today, exploring and discovering synergies that work for us both and from that start we have now made meaningful links with a host of other cities and regions in the US, hosted a delegation from Indiana in London and expanded our portfolio of potential FDI partners for the future.
Going global doesn’t have to be fancy summits, cocktail parties and turning left at the top of the aeroplane steps (in fact it’s never that last one…) It means opening to the world and dealing with people on their terms, finding common ground and a win-win for us both. And those personal connections are always better in person than online.
Levelling up is no baseball whimsy
Field of Dreams is a perfectly decent movie – but it’s no blueprint for how to spread economic opportunity fairly. I’m fed up with that lazy line about how to implement the levelling up agenda through, like Kevin Costner, a just ‘build it and they will come’ approach.
Making a reality of levelling up, which requires reversing entrenched poverty and worklessness, isn’t some baseball whimsy. It requires deep, persistent, sincere and, above all, granular engagement to help identify and remove the barriers preventing people from getting on. Those barriers can vary from street to street, and no one size fits all.
The need for speed
Last week, I attended a business breakfast with the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves. For an hour or so, we were locked in conversation about how to achieve the growth the country so desperately needs. The business leaders in the room naturally all represented their own individual interests yet were united by a common goal, and the message from around the table was universal: the need for speed.
Whether it is attracting investment in a competitive environment or the nuts and bolts of planning reform, we cannot afford to take our time. We are in a global race and if we look closely, we might just find someone else already eating our lunch.
Powering the future with hydrogen
Harnessing the huge potential of hydrogen is a huge part of the Thames Estuary’s future, ideally positioned as it is to take advantage of this dynamic new technology. Getting everyone on board with a new energy source isn’t always easy, however. One recent visitor enquired nervously if it was safe. We gently explained to them they were – at that very moment – sitting on a hydrogen-powered baggage cart.
Taking a bird’s eye view
Selling the Thames Estuary to investors is not difficult. When I launched Investuary (www.investuary.com) in Leeds last month with investment minister Lord Johnson, I took the audience in the room – metaphorically – to the top of St Paul’s Cathedral and faced them east, looking over this incredible landscape that has inspired Caneletto, Turner, Dickens and Dr Feelgood.
This estuary reaching out from London into the sea and the world beyond is so obviously a land of opportunity that it pretty much sells itself. But then come the challenges of navigating 25 local authorities, three unitary councils, two development corporations, two LEPs and a mayor.
This is where the role of envoy comes in. In a nutshell, I told the crowd my job is to “get sh*t done”. My fears I may have caused offence were calmed when Lord Johnson repeated it three times. We swapped mobile numbers at the end of what I hope to be an awesome partnership.