Michael Rake on the business challenges of technology

Michael Rake: On the one hand technology facilitates your ability to do things very quickly, to analyse things very quickly if you’ve minded to. On the other hand you have to move very fast because the competition moves extremely fast.

So however large you are, you have to learn to be very agile, fast on your feet, able to make decisions quickly in a positive and negative way, ie to launch things to move forward, to make decisions about people, and similarly to know when to stop doing things quickly and to avoid them. So these are the challenges of speed and agility.

Interviewer: And you’ve used that?

Michael Rake: Absolutely, I mean, you know, again, I think that one of the challenges is of a large company is in some ways to act and think like a small company from an agility and innovation point of view.