Told by a Teen / Female Founder Stories
From Graduate Trainee to CEO: Alison Rose on Culture, Courage, and Outcomes
The conversation
Dame Alison Rose ran NatWest, and wrote the review that put a number on what the country loses by not funding women.
You are not the problem
She said it straight out. You’re not the problem, women don’t need to fix themselves. Coming from somebody who ran a bank, that lands differently than it does in a school assembly.
The gravitas trap
There was always a question about women, she said. Does she have the gravitas? She calls it the gravitas trap, and the trap is that it cannot be answered. You cannot demonstrate your way out of a word that nobody will define.
250 billion
The Rose Review found that if women could start and scale businesses at the same rate as men it could add 250 billion to the UK economy. At the time, only 1% of venture capital funding was going to female led businesses.
Her answer on success was that her first job is always to hire her successor, which is not what I expected a chief executive to say.
What I took from it
You don’t have to be the smartest in the room to do that.
You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room.
Everything at school points the other way. Exams, sets, predicted grades. Then Dame Alison Rose, who ran a bank, tells me what actually counts is who puts their hand up and who’s willing to be wrong in public.
I’m going to try that and I’m going to hate it.
