Timpson’s boss on upside-down management and business secrets
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy
Channel 4 News
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 February 2024
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you measure a business’s success? For James Timpson, CEO of the Timpson’s Group, it comes down to two things: the satisfaction of its staff, and what it gives back to society.
His employees only have to “put money in the till and look the part”; for the rest, they have complete authority to do whatever they think is right to offer a quality service to customers. This “upside-down” style of management doesn’t mean the business is not profitable - quite the opposite, in fact.
In this episode of Ways to Change the World, the boss of the shoe-repair, key-cutting and dry-cleaning group tells Krishnan Guru-Murthy the secrets behind his unconventional leadership style and why fostering a culture of kindness, giving ex-prisoners a second chance and cultivating a happy workforce are key to Timpson’s ethos.
Produced by Silvia Maresca.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World I'm Christian Gary Murphy and this is |
| 0:06.1 | the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their |
| 0:09.9 | lives and the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week is James |
| 0:13.8 | Timpson. James is the CEO of Timpsons, the the retailer and they include not |
| 0:19.7 | just the shoe repair stores where you might get your keys cut or your shoes repaired but |
| 0:24.2 | snappy snaps and a couple of other big brands but you might get your watches |
| 0:29.9 | repaired and he has written a book called The Happy Index, Lessons in Upside Down Management, |
| 0:36.4 | which is a delve into Timpson's pretty well known unconventional management philosophy, which comes from James's father I guess. |
| 0:46.2 | Sir John is that right? |
| 0:47.2 | Yeah sort of a combination of him and me and picking up lots of ideas from other businesses we've seen and been inspired by really. |
| 0:56.5 | Now I mean let's get through the words first so what is upside down management? |
| 1:01.2 | So upside down management is pretty simple. Most businesses are |
| 1:04.4 | run from the top down so the people who actually serve customers, drive trucks, |
| 1:08.8 | put money in the till are told what to do and have to follow lots of rules and processes and if they don't they get told off. |
| 1:15.2 | In our business those on the front line can do whatever they want. |
| 1:18.8 | Whatever they think is right. |
| 1:20.4 | As long we only have two rules, you put the money in the till and you look |
| 1:23.8 | the part and the rest they can do whatever they think is right and everyone else's |
| 1:27.2 | job is not to tell them what to do but to support them. |
| 1:30.1 | When you say they can do whatever they want just explain a little bit more about what that is. |
| 1:34.8 | So imagine you're working one of our shops and you want to give someone a discount, |
| 1:39.7 | you want to give something away for free, you want to change the displays, you order whatever |
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