Tamara Littleton 00:12
This is the Genuine Humans podcast brought to you by Social Element. I’m Tamara Littleton
Wendy Christie 00:18
and I’m Wendy Christie
Tamara Littleton 00:22
in our podcast, we’ll discover the stories of the leaders behind the brands and the trailblazers who are making a real difference in our industry. We’ll delve into how they got to where they are today,
Wendy Christie 00:33
and we’ll hear about the genuine humans who supported and influenced them along the way.
Tamara Littleton 00:44
Welcome back to Genuine Humans, and I’m here as always, with my lovely co-host, Wendy. Wendy, how are you doing?
Wendy Christie 00:51
Hello. I’m very well, very glad to be here. How are you doing?
Tamara Littleton 00:54
I’m good. I’m good, and I’m particularly pleased that we have a fantastic guest on today. We have Nik Keane. And Nik has worked both agency and brand side, working with P&G, JWT, Diageo and Stoli, which we’re going to hear all about. He’s now also started his own venture in the no and low-alcohol beverage space as one of the founders of DioniLife welcome, Nik.
Nik Keane 01:21
Great to see you both.
Tamara Littleton 01:22
Well, shall we sort of jump in? So one of the questions that I like to ask is, how did you get to where you are now? So let’s start with your early career, if you wouldn’t mind, and just give a bit of a flavour of how you got into this space and some of the roles that you’ve had.
Nik Keane 01:40
Great well, the thing about is, like, divided into a couple of chapters, really. And so let’s start with the first chapter. And the themes that underlie these career choices, as I went back and was reflecting, is my deep sense of curiosity. I wouldn’t just say a drive, but I’d talk about a compulsion to make things better, big things, small things, people, and then that sense of personal improvement.
Nik Keane 02:04
And therefore, when I come to the career piece, my first job was at Procter and Gamble, known as the University of Marketing at the time. I moved up to Newcastle, had a fabulous time, up there in UK brand management in detergents or a core business. And that was, that was a fantastic experience. But one of the things they had at the time they stopped the program shortly afterwards, was the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and it made you reflect on what you really wanted. And one of the P&G rules, along with all the discipline of one-pagers and all the things they trained you to do, was the 80/20 rule. And I found I was spending 20% on what I really, really enjoyed, and I wanted to flip and make it 80% and what I really enjoyed was how the brands were positioned and developed and really connected with humans and that whole kind of piece.
Nik Keane 02:52
So I moved down to London to J Walter Thompson, the ad agency, and that was known as the University of Advertising at the time, so there’s a bit of a thematic here. And got to work, as you do in agencies, on tons of different clients and tons of different categories, and again, fueling my interest and curiosity on how things worked in different types of communication.
Nik Keane 03:15
I was there for a number of years and got increasingly involved in the drinks business before Diageo was actually Diageo and was working on brands like Tanqueray Gin and Malibu. I mean, I had a great chunk of my time travelling around the US, where Tanqueray was principally sold, and in the Caribbean making award-winning Cannes Malibu ads with clients like Ed Pilkington, who I’m still in touch with, and that was all wonderful and brilliant, until a pirate came along called Captain Morgan, and Diageo bought Captain Morgan in the acquisition, and in short, had to sell Malibu, and I was on the list of people involved in the business, and they said, “Well, we’ve done a bit of marketing. Come over and come over and help us out.”
Nik Keane 04:02
So I moved to Amsterdam for six months, and nearly 20 years later, eventually left my last role being Captain Morgan. But in between all of that, I’ve worked on gins, numerous Scotch whiskies like Talisker, like the Boone and Singleton. I led Guinness across Africa, worked in, yeah, I mean, I could go on, but a whole bunch of international brands, and I was, again, just thinking, coming into this, I think I’ve worked in over 40 countries now. And a bit back to adventure, curiosity, and understanding people in different parts of the world. And worked to bring about half the states in the US as well. So an international brand-building career that I love, you know, in a journey that I’m still on, I think that’s a very brief tour of, let’s call it 30 years, frankly, in those three companies.
Nik Keane 04:57
Chapter two, there was a change when COVID hit, and I’m at home changing all our programs onto different sort of content, filming things on cameras, doing all kinds of things. The brand, one of the best performing in Diageo, but everything I enjoy, getting out there, being with the team, seeing the world, all that was taken away from me. And it was that point, if I don’t, you know, what do I really want? If I’m not going to change now, will I ever change? And my friends always said to me, you’re always learning and developing. When are you actually going to get on and apply that in a different context, rather than talk about, you know, that endless journey of improvement and development in these larger organisations?
Nik Keane 05:39
And just at that time, a guy I knew, a chap called Damian McKinney, who was CEO of Stoli at the time. I’d first met him right back at the creation of Diageo when he was doing some integration work. And he said, “do you want to join Stoli?” and I’m kind of well, I’m not sure. I just asked him three questions, actually, how big is the mountain? How steep are the sides, and who am I climbing it with? Because I’ve come to the conclusion that you just wanted to kind of needed to be ambitious. I was looking for difficulty, not ease, and it is about the journey and who you travel with.
Nik Keane 06:13
And that was a real, again, acceleration of that, that learning and development curve, and just so different from corporate when I was sitting there, I walked into a cash flow crisis. You’re scrabbling around with smaller budgets. I think they’ve been through 15 CEOs in 20 years. This was never going to be easy, and I was aware of what I was, the reputation of the business, but the potential, the potential of the brands, was enormous. To make matters worse. Within six months, Russia invaded Ukraine, and I was working in a Russian-owned business, which was Vodka-led with Russian Vodka, and people were pouring our product down the drain on CNN, and bars were kicking us out, and senators were saying, “ban the product”. And you can imagine the scenario. And that was a proper crisis.
Nik Keane 07:02
And actually, we ended up hitting the best sales the business had ever had in 20 years, because we turned it around, and we turned it into a story of true for the founder’s resistance to the Putin regime, the 20 years he hadn’t been home for. But again, it’s maybe a longer conversation of a different time, but a proper crisis, where you’re literally sitting there going, “if we aren’t clear on what we believe in, the business will go under. If we are clear on what we believe in, our owner could be killed, or maybe one of his kids could”. And so that’s what we were kind of playing out, but we went with our values, and we went with what we believed in. And for a company with limited cash and scale, our story got enormous coverage in PR and we were doing Ukraine Limited Edition bottles and all that kind of stuff, and growing the full portfolio by just doing the right thing. So that was a terrific learning experience. Rather than budgets year to year, you’re in week to week, month to month, and eventually, the cash flow issues returned.
Nik Keane 08:07
I won’t break all that down as to the why, but some of those overdue were starting to increase again, and I felt that actually the impact I could make and the change I wanted to make was getting to a point where it was time to do something else, but I’m incredibly grateful for that opportunity because I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing that if it wasn’t for that. And after that, things got a little bit different for me. So I had a job the day I had a job offered my second year of university. So I walked out of university straight into a job. I’ve never not had a job. It was Christmas 2023 and the opportunity came up to help build this non-alcoholic business, what we’ll get in and talk about and I said, “do I do that? Or do you something else?” Pretty soon, this took my life over. So actually, I had a job. I didn’t realise initially what it was, full-time setting up a business, looking for funding, looking for acquisitions, doing the whole piece. The only difference was it was a job I wasn’t being paid to do, but it was a job that I’d never had to work so hard for because you can’t be half in if you’re going to set yourself up as a new business, you have to believe and everything you come across just has to be set up because it’s just not in place.
Nik Keane 09:23
Which led us to – maybe we’ll come back to this – on the 31st of August last year, we closed the financing round on the business. We’ve got a fully funded business from an American partner. We made our first acquisition, Mash Gang beer, partly owned by someone who used to work at the Social Element and work for me, Mike Baggs.
Tamara Littleton 09:44
Absolutely. Mike Baggs, the amazing Mike Baggs. Yeah, that’s such, such a great acquisition.
Nik Keane 09:49
Exactly, and we’ve been up and running since we opened business on 1st September. So happy to talk more about DioniLife and that whole piece, but that whole journey from work. Working for someone, from working for yourself to the challenge of fundraising, particularly in the current environment, we’re all new learnings and yeah, great spirits.
Tamara Littleton 10:09
Thank you. We’ll definitely come back to that.
Wendy Christie 10:11
Before we do. Do you mind if we go even further back in your journey and look at you know, what you were like as a child, and see if we can pick out any of those themes. I mean, you talked a lot about curiosity and being adventurous and that sort of always learning and developing. Did that start as a child?
Nik Keane 10:30
Yes, I can point to specific moments. I think the child context was I was unhappy with my circumstances, rather than necessarily, deeply unhappy with kind of who I was, and a bit of context then on the wire. I think, I think it is good to – it’s a great question Wendy – go back and reflect. I’ve been lucky to have various coaches over the whole time, and I think it’s really good to try and unpick some of this stuff, and it tends to fall into camps of my childhood was wonderful, and I loved it, or it was a complete disaster kind of piece. I guess my my piece was the context I found myself in. I think it’s definitely helped shape me. And there are a couple of things probably to highlight on that.
Nik Keane 11:15
Firstly, I moved around a lot, so back to this sense of adventure and curiosity. By the time I was 18, I’d had 20 different parental homes, well and so I was always on the move, meeting different people, moving around. And there were various reasons, including, at one point, my parents moving from the UK to Asia, and me staying in the UK. And that was formative. The other piece was my father was a terrible manager of money. So he was, he was quite a successful lawyer, actually, but he used to, he was just bad at cash flow. He couldn’t manage his money well, so he would spend the money when he got work when he did the work, and he got paid for the work. So it’s slightly irrelevant what you earn. It’s all down to what you’ve got left over. House sizes were going up and down, we were the state agent’s dream later in life, he was actually diagnosed with bipolar, which I think was one of the things driving that. And he actually died very young. He died at a similar age I am now, which is always a bit sobering. But he lived a very fast, full, adventurous life eventually. And I think the role of mum, again, I reflect on I’ve probably fully valued and appreciated as to how much she had to put up with, including dealing with a whole bunch of stuff, and principally us as well. And so that led to, let’s call it, a lot of movement, or whatever. For me personally, by 11, I was sent off to school, and I actually never really went back home.
Nik Keane 12:51
And that wasn’t that was where I felt entrapped, imprisoned and really unhappy in terms of my context, and the school was the best way to describe it, really, but run by a bunch of monks, and I was regularly beaten, pretty high up on the charts of the most beaten child in year.
Wendy Christie 13:15
That’s awful. I’m really sorry to hear that. That’s just…
Nik Keane 13:18
Thank you, Wendy. I think is, I don’t think all of that stuff is actually fully come out in terms of, I know there’s material out there, but, but not everyone’s held to account. Frankly, I think of it as child abuse, but it does sort of shape you for that type of experience. And so a focus on that. Their agenda was very simple. It was about, it was about Christianity first, and gentlemen, whatever that means. And then last, actually was academics, and mostly people were untrained teachers as well. So it was a slightly strange place, as I look back on it.
Wendy Christie 13:58
Did you have a sense that not all kids were going through this? It was, did you feel like was your normal, but not everyone else’s? Or…
Nik Keane 14:05
Well, I knew it was slightly unusual to be, well, the be brought up by a bunch of monks who arguably weren’t qualified for the job in the first place. So I knew it was unusual. But, you know, some people seem to thrive on it but for me, it felt like imprisonment. So for me, from all the moving around, excited, I was locked down, rule-bound, that whole piece, you know, very forced to fit in all that piece. And look, many people have much worse circumstances. And so there’s nothing to but I think the point is it shaped you to your point, Wendy, and I can literally remember the point at age 15 where I decided just to take the initiative and tell the school that things I had to stop, that there would be problems if they carried on any physical abuse. They said, “Well, do you think you should leave?” And we went a bit back and forth and all of that stuff. And we reached an accommodation where, essentially, I left school early, actually, but as soon as school was finished, and bear in mind my parents were on the other side of the world, I used to whiz up to London on a Saturday morning, hang out around Soho, Camden and all those kind of places. And, you know, sleep on a friend’s floor and stuff like that, and hit the clubs, and then the clubs and the music scene in the 80s, the 100 Club, the Mud Club, you know, down to Heaven, maybe later on, and all that stuff was it was remarkably liberating and fun and adventurous, and that brought amazing energy. And I’m sort of that was my outlet, and my connection with the world and my sense of adventure. Just turned 17, and I took all my A-levels. I was able enough to kind of get through those to a reasonable level. Got a place at university, and then accelerated from there.
Nik Keane
So yeah, went off to get a job, took some money, went to the US, ended up living with a Presidential Candidate, going around the US, helping them get the voters out, run their campaign. I was again doing all kinds of stuff from, I remember, having to ask Mike Tyson to do a job to, Linda Carter (Wonder Woman) I had to have dinner with her once and ask for her help on another project.
Nik Keane 16:25
But things really moved very, very quickly, and by the time I went to university, I’d had a ton of life experience and adventure about that. I think the driver of that was just seizing control, wanting to get out and just live a full life. I just think life was short. Seize the day, have some fun, etc.
Wendy Christie 16:46
Incredible journey, and on that journey, whether you know, when you’re a child, or you know, thinking about your career as well, have there been people who you’ve looked up to or who’ve really supported you and championed you in your career? Anyone that you can name-check?
Nik Keane 17:02
It’s quite a long list Wendy. The places I’ve worked, I’ve been really lucky with the talented people I’ve got to work for and be inspired by. I remember at JWT, a very young CEO at the time, a few years older than me, but, you know, he was in his 20s, so Stephen Carter and people like Martin, who went on to lead the AAR, were there at the time and again, a wonderful, smart, good people leading different piece of businesses, and the chance to kind of move around a number of them.
Nik Keane 17:33
A lot of the list would come from Diageo, from Rob Malcolm, the first CMO I worked for, as I think of the professor of marketing, and then followed by Andy Fennell, who I’m still in touch with. He’s just an extraordinary, brilliant person. You know, agendas like 10 out of 10, creative and marketing as the growth leading function and how the role of marketing is into Syl who took that GM mindset.
Nik Keane 17:59
Cathy Parker, actually, when Cathy left Diageo, that was, again, one of the folks that made me think about what I was doing. She was the best boss I ever had, just incredibly smart, technically, someone who should get on something like this, but probably, you know, might not want to do it, because she always, it was a play-to-strength game. She always demanding, but she always wanted you to be the best version of yourself and that be the route to success. And she put great teams together.
Nik Keane 18:27
Ed, I’ve touched on still, I think the best marketeers in Diageo. I mean, wherever he is, the work always gets better. And then I could go up more recently, James Thompson, Andy Gibson and Mark Sands with his orchestration piece, and Andrew Geoghegan I’ve mentioned as well, who’s now CMO at William Grant, he was head of planning just, I mean, they were all I’d be I would feel gifted if any one of them had been a mentor or supporter. And I feel really lucky that I’ve had so much opportunity to learn from good people who I’m, you know, a number of at least, I’m still very much in touch with.
Tamara Littleton 19:08
And let’s bring you back up. Firstly, just to say thank you for sharing your story, a lot of sort of resilience, and I can see how it shaped you. Bringing you back to the last 12 months, 18 months at DioniLife. Let’s, let’s go into that more because you have such an ambitious vision for reshaping the no and low-alcohol drink sector. So what inspired you to take that leap? And also, can you perhaps share a bit more about the USP of the DioniLife?
Nik Keane 19:41
Yeah, I think what is looking around the I spend a lot of my time in alcohol, and I love having fun going out for drinks, the role that bars and restaurants play in people’s lives. And my career there has taken me to say, lots of not just countries, but when we go to those countries, you know, wonderful places and meet wonderful people. I just think the role alcohol’s always had in the heart of socialisation, has always drawn me. And it comes back to the from/to of me wanting to go full fun and full experience, when I chose to really seize that moment right back when I was 15 and so that was the context, but I was well aware of all the trends, particularly when I was running Captain Morgan, and I was looking at, what are the risks and what are the opportunities, and there were so many headwinds, including the shift of younger people to experience and not drinking, or certainly a large number of them just drinking a lot less and being slightly indifferent to that.
Nik Keane 20:45
So if we were catching up, my default would be, let’s go for a beer, or let’s go for a drink, or let’s go to a bar. What was really the offer would really be, let’s catch up and socialise. But that was that was clearly kind of breaking down. And I’ve always prided myself in looking for emerging trends and that whole piece, and so I could see all the problems. And my thought was, it’s not actually, I couldn’t see why they would change. And beyond that, the growth of digital technology, I mean, very simple things like the fact that most of us have some sort of Fitbit or Apple Watch on, and the fact that we’ve found out that that brandy or whisky at the end of the night, or you know, that rather than settles you down and relaxes you, costs you three points on your sleep score. And that kind of constant nudging and realising that some things you thought, which are actually aren’t kind of true. And so the digital piece, the health and wellness piece, across all generations you put, yeah, these feel like fundamental things that are here to stay, and all of those, ethanol doesn’t help the situation.
Nik Keane 21:54
The one benefit of drinking, we talk about the science and the downsides and all that is actually there is benefit in socialising and we are, yeah, and that is really important to us as people and our mental and physical health. But the ethanol bit itself isn’t a positive. It’s just, it’s just the getting-together piece. So as I was looking at that, looking at all the trends and the growth of non-alc are, we’re, to be clear when I say pure play, we’re not no and low we’re only No. We want nothing to do with the ethanol piece. But our hypothesis was, at the moment, the choice you often get made is, I’m going to call it the worthy choice. We all know that, you know there are, there are worthy choices on offer, and the non-alc brands were leading on the fact that they won non-alc. And our view was, why do you need to compromise?
Nik Keane 22:45
You know, we need to get the taste right, at least as good as the alcohol equivalents when we’re developing products, we always taste against full-strength alcohol. We don’t taste against other non-alcs, yes, of course, there are implicit health benefits. But back to socialisation and brand experience, it is about connecting and having fun at the end of the day. And you don’t want to be the person just being marked out as the you know, I’m having the healthy option.
Nik Keane 23:12
And so what we wanted to do was create a scale business, and we’re a startup now that was multi-brand, multi-category, but offered an alternative to the large alcohol companies to customers, not just consumers, because it is hard to build a single brand. So a lot of these individual, non-alc brands, their only choice is to sell to an alcohol business, which to some extent defeats the object of what they were trying to promote, and we just advocate choice, so we’re non-judgmental, but we just saw a gap in the market for a business that wasn’t in some way tied or linked to the legislation and rules around alcohol or had to justify why their non-alcoholic version was the same brand as their alcoholic version or whatever. And we wanted something kind of clean and simple that just offered great tasting drinks that just happen not to have ethanol, that are wonderful brands, and that’s what we got the funding to develop over the next 15 years.
Tamara Littleton 24:13
Fantastic. And for anyone wanting to make the move, because you’ve obviously gone brand side, you’ve thrown yourself into this and any sort of key learnings so far over the last over the last year?
Nik Keane 24:27
I think so the first one is money.
Tamara Littleton
You need it.
Nik Keane
You need it. The journey to making money isn’t straightforward. So you and essentially is a cash flow game, not just a money game. You need to be in business as long as you can be to give yourself the timeline to grow and go to the next level. And there’s a challenge there between the speed at which you grow, and if you like, the cost of that kind of growth, but initially, it’s very hard to build a business that is growing sufficiently and making any money. In fact, most of these, not just in this sector, but most startups, for a while, will be losing money. So, therefore, how do you source your funding? To what extent do you bootstrap stuff to what extent do you go elsewhere, think to the future. So if you’re raising on friends and family and building up lots of shareholders, essentially, to get what you need to do to build your amazing vision to life, you can end up with very complicated structures, and you spend a lot of your time managing all your stakeholders, all of whom have different agendas as to when they want their money in or out, or what the return is. And you get a lot of people well-intentioned but takes you away from growing that business you came in to grow, and the other just dwelling on what the money piece is, but the world’s changed I think in the last couple of years, the low interest rates are just unprecedented in the last 200 years. And arguably, we’ve been in a low inflationary period for longer than since 2008 but certainly, there was a 10+ year period where money was essentially free and people just got used to it and it was easier to raise money when it was free. Now money should have a cost it does, and now money has got a cost. The fundraising environment in the last couple of years has got a lot, lot tougher, and a lot of businesses are running into trouble because when you have to start paying a price for your money it’s harder to borrow. That’s when things can go wrong, or businesses that aren’t fundamentally sound for frankly, go under.
Nik Keane 26:51
So what? What’s all this got to do with things? It just means that if I knew now how hard it was to raise money, I might not have jumped in. There’s something about if you knew everything you might not jump in and do some of these things, because I, at the end of the journey raising the money from the US investor, they said, “Well, we only do one or two years a year, one or two deals a year”, and you kind of go, “blimey,one or two deals a year? There’s like, 30 of you, well, like, how’d you just do one or two deals a year?” And that’s because their bar is so high. What was unusual about us is we didn’t have a growing business, an ongoing business. It’s really hard to raise money for just an idea. We’ve all got an idea, and, you know, we all got a book, an idea, something we’d really like to do. I do think it’s a lot easier if you’ve proven your concept and got some real evidence that it can work when you look for scalability, but your investor partner and your investor structure is really, really, really key, and then obviously spend the money, treat the money as your own, as you do. But what like I hadn’t fully appreciated, and it’s obvious to me now, is if you borrow a lot of money, as we do, they expect you to put your own money in so having joked I had a busy job that I wasn’t getting paid for, you could argue now I’m actually paying to work, and that’s because they really want to make sure that if they’re going to lose a lot of money, you have real blood. You know there’ll be blood in the game.
Tamara Littleton 28:18
Yeah, absolutely.
Nik Keane 28:19
Your kids’ futures will be affected in that whole piece. And first of all, is that right? And you kind of go, it does drive a certain focus and alignment so, and obviously, there are upsides, we hope to be tremendously successful. And if it goes well, you share in, you share in those rewards. But that whole piece was really interesting. The whole market analysis, finding the right acquisitions, the challenge of making an acquisition, we couldn’t set the business up without an acquisition, you know, landing that purchase again, lots of learnings there. But in the end, comes back to the consumer. Find a great brand, and make sure it’s really distinctive. I mean, the fundamental truths kind of stand, and then you’re just trying to make the numbers kind of add up.
Nik Keane 29:08
So, yeah, I’ve, you know, it’s, it’s so exciting. But every day we come up with everything. Nothing exists. You all know this from your own business. But when you start a business, anything, I don’t know payroll, anything, you come up, because nothing’s in place. So, yeah, oh, I’ve got to work out how to do that. Thank God for Google and ChatGPT and in part as well.
Tamara Littleton 29:28
Yes, well, exactly. Yeah, we always have a sort of a bit of a saying that anything can change in a day as well, honestly, it’s just the the highs and the lows. And have you sort of sensed that you’ve changed as a person just over the last 12 years as a result of this, this new venture?
Nik Keane 29:43
I think I am, sort of am who I am really. So I don’t think I’ve changed as a person. But as I look back between since leaving Diageo, that time at Stoli, and now setting up a business has really, really accelerated my learning and development curve, and that is really, really important. I feel I can play bigger, make a bigger difference, again, big and small ways, both broadly to the shape of how people, you know, socialise in the world, but in a micro-level, helping people develop, creating employment. You know, it’s really, really rewarding. When I come back to that now, it’s hard, but it’s really, really rewarding. So I don’t think I’ve changed the person. I’m just getting on with doing what I love doing and feeling empowered to do it.
Nik Keane 30:41
And I definitely look I hope this is massive for the next 10-15, years. And I don’t see why it wouldn’t be, but I definitely see as I look forward, you know, now, this is, this is the journey that I’m on and, yeah, I want to keep building on what I’m learning and doing, but it’s so exciting. You have to get involved from, say, nose to tail, I mean, at one level tomorrow and in as a distributor, meeting in one State, and then next week, it’s a board meeting with a bunch of bankers and McKinseyites in New York. I mean, it’s, you go from big to small in a way that you just wouldn’t in a larger organisation, because the lines are more, you know, a more thinly cut in terms of, yeah, so then I don’t know if that answers it.
Tamara Littleton 31:24
No, it really does. And we’re wishing you so much success on this journey, really excited to see what the next acquisitions are as well. So we’ll move on now to the last part of the podcast. So these are very quick-fire questions, and I’ll, I’ll let Wendy jump in with the first one.
Wendy Christie 31:39
Okay, so what’s your idea of a perfect weekend?
Nik Keane 31:43
Right now, what’s important to me is spending time with my wife and the kids. So I think there is an inherent downside, particularly not just around startups, but I’ve always worked all hours. I love what I do, I choose to do. If I didn’t love what I do, I’d go off and find something else that I love, that I do, and that’s so important to me. But there is a little bit at times of guilt and selfishness of putting that so high on the agenda, and so rather than all the things I love to do and enjoy beyond you know, personally, when it comes to the weekend, including I’m often working at the weekends, particularly at the moment, spending time with my two boys, 14 and 10 and my wife are really important. And if I can do that with things that I also enjoy doing, then that’s even better. So if I can get the get the boys around and down to some live sport, if I can have some wonderful food, that’s fantastic. I don’t really mind where I am.
Well again, I talk a lot about curiosity and going off and venturing all that. One thing I think has changed, and it’s partly circumstantial driven, is you can have an adventure anywhere you know you can have an adventure, but you can have an adventure just talking to someone. Talking to someone different that now I’ve got Mash Gang non-alcoholic beer and often carrying up to people, giving one, swapping out what they’re drinking for one, and then surprising them it hasn’t got alcohol in and why? That sort of stuff. So even in in a world where you know, time’s constrained and you’ve got all these things you need to kind of get through, you can just walk into a different shop or take a different route, or there are so many ways one can find people things and just get different perspective on stuff. And so that’s what I would love doing. The only thing I would add to that, and I don’t do this, but I should do this in my ideal weekend, it would include a newspaper. I do get bothered by all the social media that I spend time looking at, as we all do, constantly feeding me what I like. And I’m always trying to, for example, on the BBC website, not register or not follow because essentially back, you know, I think to bring the world together, you need different perspectives. Given I keep talking about my interest and curiosity, I’m looking for an external view, things I haven’t thought about, things I haven’t seen, not more and more of what I like, and just that constant kind of narrowing. And I think a piece of paper in the form of a newspaper does that wonderfully. Now, I can’t remember when I last sat down. I read a newspaper on Sunday, but I love the idea of it.
Wendy Christie 34:24
Yes, I know exactly what you mean. How would your friends describe you?
Nik Keane 34:29
Yeah, words like creative, curious, supportive people when they get to know a surprise that I’m very introverted, and again, that might come back partly then there’s some nature and nurture in that, so I’ve always been one the small groups, rather than big groups. I’m happy to talk at a large event or do any of that stuff, but in terms of where my energy comes from, that makes me, at times, actually, initially quite hard to know. And so people kind of recognise that whole piece. But yes, you know loyal people. You know, as I say, I have a small group of friends, and as people get to know me, I think you know that those deep relationships are really important to me. And I think they get to recognise when they describe who I am, and the fact that I’m back to resilience, if it’s the right thing to do, I’ll swing out on it. I was surprised, and I find this in meetings when I can be the outlier in a meeting and aware that I’m an outlier, and people go, “well, did you read could you not see what was going on?” It’s like I could see what was going on. But I felt a different perspective was needed. I thought that was wrong. It was the right thing to do, and I needed to put that on the table. And so again, was people see the behaviour, and then they understand the drive and some of the background to improve things and make a difference. They understand the contribution that I can make, and the fact that if I see trouble, I go towards it. And it took me quite a long time in life to realise that most people take a more sensible choice, to go around it or avoid trouble. You know, why pick up a hot ball? I go, just pick up the hot ball. That’s where the action energy, and fun problems are.
Tamara Littleton 36:16
Which goes all the way back to what you were saying before about, you know, standing up for yourself back in your school days. So, yeah, I can, I can see that that’s a really strong streak in you. Nik, random question, I don’t know if we’ve asked this one before. Do you have a favourite dinosaur?
Nik Keane 36:32
I do. So favourite dinosaur? I’m going for a T-Rex. Now, that’s a bit of a cliche, I expect in terms of APEX predatory in all the movies, and all that stuff, but I’ve gone for the T-Rex because it’s the dinosaur most closely related to chickens. And I love the idea that living, living amongst us right now are all these mini dinosaurs. And if you look at a chicken through the lens, through a dinosaur lens. I think they are remarkable, extraordinary and, frankly, very tasty creatures. But so that’s that’s my dinosaur of choice.
Wendy Christie 37:15
If you could time travel to any point in the past or the future with no consequence, where and when would you travel to?
Nik Keane 37:23
I’m going to London. I think I’ve worked in over 40 countries. I’m very interested in the world, but, but I am a Londoner. I’m proud to be a Londoner. And I think London 2300 so, so lets go a couple of hundred years into the future. I think would be interesting, because I think there is much in the world you can visit and discover now, much you can understand about the past. But why do I want to go to London in a couple hundred years’ time? Because I don’t know what it’s going to be like, and I couldn’t wait to see what it’s like. So yeah, that’s my that’s what I would do.
Tamara Littleton 38:04
How would you fare in a zombie apocalypse?
Tamara Littleton 38:06
I mean, badly, I’m actually a keen podcast follower of yours, so it’s an honour to kind of be on here. I’m quite surprised how many of the people on the podcast, think they’re going to survive. I think the answer is, in the question, question, it’s an apocalypse. I mean, everybody dies. So why on earth do I think at the end of the world that somehow I’m going to be fine, you know, staying at home with a good bottle of whisky and doing whatever? Yeah, yes. So there might be, if there might be, an immediate, short term, I think there’s a question of time, but I don’t think I’ve got an enormous amount of chance, particularly, as I say, living in a place like London, where you kind of think would be one of these things, that this would spread really, really quickly. So I think the answers to the question, as much as I could talk about some very short-term survival techniques, I think, yeah, all over sudden death.
Tamara Littleton 39:05
Okay, well, I’m going to finish with my last question, which is, what would be the tagline on a poster for a movie about your life?
Nik Keane 39:14
I’m not going to have a movie. I think, I think it needs to be serialised. I think I’d want to get onto Netflix,
Tamara Littleton 39:21
brilliant.
Nik Keane 39:22
And I think I’m going to call it Never Ending Adventure. I think if I could make it a game show, somehow, that would be fun. But I really like something that’s yeah, really leans into that sense of big adventures, small adventures, and meeting people on the way. And I think, as I said, in small ways and big ways, that’s how things need to work. We all need to be able to rub along together. And there’s so much joy and stimulus in terms of visual and sound. And if you, if you’re trying.New things the whole time. So the Never Ending Adventure would be the title.
Tamara Littleton 40:04
Well, Netflix. if you’re listening, we have your new commission for you. Nik, thank you so much for coming on. This has been an absolute joy and just so wonderful to to hear your story and hear how everything is going. Have we missed anything? Is there anything that we should have asked you or I’ll hand over the platform. Any closing thoughts from you
Nik Keane 40:22
So a few closing thoughts as I come into this. I think one thing I didn’t touch on is, I mean, I call it Project Interesting. If you want to do interesting stuff, do interesting things, you’ve got to be with interesting people. How do you get there with interesting situations? I’m a strong advocate of meeting interesting people. I literally used to have a project room on my edges. I want to meet someone interesting every month to build out that muscle. If that isn’t your thing, and we all are different at different strands, then make sure in your team you find someone who brings that diversity of opinion and interest and stimulus. Because I think the best teams are diverse in a multi-faceted kind of piece. Clearly, you know, as I say, I advocate curiosity and creativity the whole piece, but we all are who we are.
Nik Keane 41:12
So I’ve seen teams kind of go actually, let’s make sure I’ve got someone who’s like that, who can play that role in my organisation. I don’t try and hire me. I try and hire people who are who are different from me, which makes managing a challenge, but the outcomes so much richer and better. The other thing, and I haven’t talked about it, probably deliberately, actually think I’m in the flow, is neurodiversity a really important piece around who I am is, that I’m dyslexic, and I wasn’t diagnosed at school though. That was all a bit of a disaster. I was at the very end of university, my very final year of university, but it wasn’t of much use academically. And I turned up to my job, and I thought this is quite cool. Lots of interesting people are dyslexic, and my boss, I felt my boss used it against me, so I never talked about it for another 20 years, and I haven’t talked about it today till the end of this.
Nik Keane 42:05
My son was also diagnosed as dyslexic. I’ve never wanted to be labelled or put in a box, and I’ve never wanted excuses, so it’s never really served my purpose to emphasise it. I’ve always but, but as I look back on it, that’s something you know, I’m trying to lean in and correct. Why? Well, because I think you need to be a role model to other people, too. If I look back at some of those best bosses I’ve had, they’ve really understood what I could bring to the table, and they’ve understood what I struggle with, and we’ve worked together as a team to kind of compensate and help each other and get to amazing outcomes. And I do think having to make sure that you have in your team people who think differently, not just are of different backgrounds, etc, is really, really, really, just so important to be to be successful. So I do want to put that on the table, because it is part of who I am, even though I choose not to go around with a bad chart, it is me, and I need to own it.
Tamara Littleton 43:10
Nik Keane, thank you so much.
Wendy Christie 43:17
You’ve been listening to Genuine Humans brought to you by Social Element. If you loved what you heard, remember to rate review and subscribe.