90 Second Interview with David Shriver

Charlie Green, Managing Director at tml Partners, sat down with David Shriver, Chief Reputation Officer at Ocado, to get his thoughts on career development, influential leadership and marketing trends producing opportunities and challenges for communications leaders.

Who is your business hero and why?

I admire risk takers and entrepreneurs whose work has wider and enduring social impact: John Cadbury, the eponymous founder of Cadbury chocolate, was already a good example of this, 60 years into the industrial revolution

What is the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?

Early on in my career, as a young equity analyst toiling away on the trading floors of the City of London, a very senior (and kind) banker came up to me one lunch time and said the following seven words: “shoe leather, my dear boy, shoe leather”. He meant, of course, get up and about, meet people, learn from them, and develop your networks. I duly did so and never looked back

What has had the most influential impact on your leadership skills and why?

I am a big believer in the power of collegiate and collaborative working. Leadership is about motivating teams to be more than the sum of their parts. To this end, when I began to build a comms team at Carrefour in Paris twenty years ago, I took all the behaviours that were common practice from my days in investment banking and did the 180 degree opposite.

What future trends do you think marketing and communications will see in your sector over the next five years?

Silos have no place in the digital world, especially in communications and corporate affairs. Smart companies will look to eliminate them and create joined-up conversations with stakeholders to help build, and protect, corporate reputation, and create market value.

What has fundamentally changed about your industry since you started working in it?

I started work 36 years ago, before the era of the internet. Technology has developed at an extraordinary pace, disintermediating traditional opinion formers. We haven’t seen this scale and pace of change since Gutenberg invented the printing press back in 1450. This creates incredible opportunities to inform and shape a conversation. What a time to be alive and in the comms profession!

What do you consider to be the biggest challenges for marketing & communications leaders?

Convincing others of the value of what you do.

If you could go back 10 years, what career advice would you give yourself?

Things always seem to work out for the best

Who are tml Partners?

tml Partners are Marketing and Corporate Affairs recruitment specialists with access to a global network of Consumer & FMCG leaders.

Our Corporate Affairs practice work across senior roles in Investor Relations, External and Internal Communications, Public Affairs, Content and Brand on a permanent or interim basis.

To learn how tml Partners can help you, get in touch with Charlie Green: