The two-minute interview

What is the best piece of business advice you’ve been given?
Cash is king.

And the worst?
If you build it, they will come.

Favorite adage?
Good deals have no legs.

What achievement are you most proud of in your job?
When a founder, management team or person I work with over-reaches and succeeds. That’s a great feeling.

What has made the biggest difference to your company in the last year?
We lost a co-founder of the business last year. Pulling together the rest of the team around a common vision and passion has made all the difference in going forward.

What one thing would make your life easier at work?
Good food available for takeaway – I am surrounded by too many sandwich shops at the moment!

What is your biggest bugbear with your bank (either personal or business)?
They don’t always offer up the most cost-efficient or profitable solution to the customer in the first instance. The customer has to spend time to discover better alternatives and to propose these to the bank.

If you were made head of one of the world’s biggest banks, what would be the first thing you would do?
Building customer relationships and trust is paramount, based on the bank being a service provider to their customer base. The more wealth I create for my customers, the more assets I will have under management, as long as I can retain their loyalty.

Marion King is Chief Executive of Voca, the provider of payment services to banks and corporates.

What is the best piece of business advice you've been given?
Make sure you know what you don’ know and hire people who do. A strong team relies on complementary skills and knowledge. It is neither possible nor desirable to be the expert on everything.

And the worst?
Buy from a global brand as this will reduce risk; global suppliers have greater and deeper resource. This advice is not always bad, but you have to look beyond it to source really effectively. By dismissing smaller brands you might actually miss out on the best and most innovative solutions.

Favorite adage?
A thought, perfectly encapsulated by Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart:

“Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.”

What achievement are you most proud of in your job?
Making radical change across the business whilst retaining and building the motivation of our people. At Voca, we achieved business transformation on a major scale, and have emerged from it with a renewed passion.

What one thing would make your life easier at work?
A cappuccino machine in my office.

What is your biggest bugbear with your bank (either personal or business)?
I wish my personal bank was better at keeping me informed about new and better services and making it simple to take advantage of them. The pace of change and innovation in banking today can be difficult to keep up with.

If you were made head of one of the world's biggest banks, what would be the first thing you would do?
I would set out to ensure the bank's online environment was the best and most customer focused in the world. This is the future.

Nick Winters, Client Partner at accounting, business and tax advisory group Vantis

What is the best piece of business advice you’ve been given?
I used to have a secretary who was very adept at deciding whether interview candidates were likely to impress. Before each interview, she would sign to me either a thumbs up or thumbs down. Spookily, her judgement was almost always correct and she had only collected them from reception, exchanged hellos and led them to a meeting room.

And the worst?
Many years ago, my colleague was introduced to some scruffy musicians who needed help with their accounts and tax affairs. He decided that he couldn’t help them and sent them on their way. The scruffy musicians went on to become one of the biggest bands in the world. I learnt to take care before passing any opportunity by.

What is your favourite adage?
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

What achievement are you most proud of in your job?

I once scanned a magazine article that listed the top 50 people to meet if you really want to make your business big. I noted that I knew of a few of the people in the list. It wasn’t until a colleague pointed out the next day that I was one of the people on the list that I realised that I had scanned the list a little too quickly to notice that I was on it!

What has made the biggest difference to your company in the last year?
I think that the introduction of the Blackberry has made the lives of many of us so much easier. No more lugging round heavy computers or coming back to the office to check e-mails.

What one thing would make your life easier at work?
I would need more than one thing – a comfortable armchair, television, fridge and, oh yes, a blind for the glass partition so no one could see why I am spending so much more time in my office now.

What is your biggest bugbear with your bank (either personal or business)?
I have changed banks several times in the last 20 years, usually as a result of some incompetence on their part. The most aggravating is a call centre staffed by people who clearly don’t understand what on earth you are talking about.

If you were made head of one of the world’s biggest banks, what would be the first thing you would do?
I would make sure that I had a damn good team of people around me to help.

Daniel Meere is head of the financial practice at global project management consultancy PIPC

What is the best piece of business advice you’ve been given?
Don’t give up. If you believe in a principle, follow it through tirelessly. Setting about a challenge with this in mind focuses your efforts both on investing effort in the right activities and in following those selected through to completion. I’ve found that prioritising fewer, more important initiatives has paid dividends.

And the worst?
I’ve never kept poor advice in the memory for long. Though I am keen on an Atilla the Hun adage that “every (Hun) has a purpose, even if only to serve as a bad example”.

Favourite adage?
Expertise is the enemy of process. Knowing (or even worse, assuming to know) too much about an environment restricts your ability to be objective and ensure that any ideas generated are fully evidenced and validated before being implemented.

Then there is of course a great Bill Gates quote that “success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

What has made the biggest difference to your company in the last year?
Bedding down the practice structure in the UK and European business. This has enabled us to attract and develop sector expertise to complement our core skill set of project and programme management. We have noticed a deepening of our relationships with key clients as a result.

What one thing would make your life easier at work?
I’ve found that having a 3G card has helped immeasurably with communications and ensuring that urgent issues are dealt with quickly. This has been particularly useful working on client sites at major financial services institutions, where on-site policies often prevent access to mail servers.

What is your biggest bugbear with your bank (either personal or business)?
Lack of STP capability for relatively straightforward product applications (such as mortgages for existing customers). Online front-ends are convenient and take (some of) the pain out of the application process, but the requirement to supply the remainder of the documentation by post slows the process down considerably and loses part of the incentive to self-serve.

If you were made head of one of the world’s biggest banks, what would be the first thing you would do?
Assuming it did not already exist, introduce a ‘single customer view’ capability to enable sight of product holdings, personal details, contact history and other key information at a glance. Significant time and effort (not to mention lost opportunity) is wasted switching between systems to view all this information. More importantly, customer experience is substantially degraded through not having a single touch point for routine requests such as change of address.

Julian Fowler is Director of Financial Services, ILOG

What is the best piece of business advice you’ve been given?
Look at your role as if you were your own company. Your career is literally your business.

And the worst?
NASDAQ 10,000.

What is your favourite adage?
“Motivation is everything. You can do the work of two people, but you can't be two people. Instead, you have to inspire the next guy down the line and get him to inspire his people.” Lee Iacocca

What achievement are you most proud of in your job?
The success of the people I have recruited.

What has made the biggest difference to your company in the last year?
Our clients.

What one thing would make your life easier at work?
48 hour days.