The Future Of UK Plc

For the second breakfast of our Spring/Summer season, we debated the future of UK Plc with three high profile business speakers…

Mark Wood is the former CEO of both Axa and Prudential. He now chairs a Lloyds underwriter, a digital marketing firm and the NSPCC, and serves on the board of the RAC. He turned around Axa and cut costs at Prudential UK by 40% (while increasing profits by the same amount). Mark addressed the leadership challenge of transforming a business, and dug beneath the surface of official statistics.

Newsnight’s Economics Editor Paul Mason sums up his agenda as profit, people and planet. A former musician and deputy editor of Computer Weekly, he has also written on the global working classes in Live Working or Die Fighting. He expects protectionist measures towards China, and serious social unrest stretching from the US to Israel and Iran – and explored whether we’ve entered an age of ‘repressionomics.’

PY Gerbeau has taken on numerous corporate rescues – including The Dome. He now heads one of the UK’s largest leisure owners and lectures students in the ‘experience economy’ as a Visiting Professor at LBS and Imperial College. Having decided to settle in Britain because he finds it much more business-friendly than his native France, PY believes every company must be increasingly agile to improve the prospects for growth.