Thursday 12 February 2009

How Martha Lane Fox Juggles Karaoke with M&S


This week’s ‘Juggle Tapes’ interview is with Martha Lane Fox. Martha is one of the UK’s best known entrepreneurs. She was a real icon of the dot com years having co-founded the travel website lastminute.com. She now juggles a business portfolio that includes running a karaoke business Lucky Voice (or as she prefers calling it, ‘a singing business’), being on the boards of Marks & Spencer and Channel 4 as well as having a charity foundation Antigone that provides funding to criminal justice charities. She juggles a portfolio that enables her to dip in and out of different interests, she talks about being excited by change and growth and – like everyone else in the series – says you should ‘only do stuff you are passionate about'.

Here are her thoughts on juggling:

‘You need to be brutal about what am I actually good at and what do I think will add something to the various things I’m doing’

‘it hadn’t been my plan to have a portfolio of interests quite so young … but things happen and you deal with them’

‘(Work and life) is knitted together; we’re lucky to have tools to live life in a more integrated way’

‘One of the great joys of having all these different things to do is that you can juggle them and you don’t really switch off’

‘By being across many different things you bring something a bit more interesting to each thing you’re doing’



WATCH THE INTERVIEW HERE


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ian,

Another terrific video to be sure! To hear someone speak of it being a personal responsibility to give back to one's community is a marvelous thing,particularly when supporting projects to keep folks out of the criminal justice system. I am working on a project to support working single parents and know how important involvement is!

Once again Ian, terrific interview and thanks to you and Ms. Fox for the knowledge!

Ian Sanders said...

Thanks Dave.

Martha supports this great charity Story Book Dads which enables dads in prison to record bedtime stories for their kids. It's a great initiative; good luck with your project

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