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customers to impress upon them that we are human beings who genuinely value a long-term relationship with our customers.
What has been the biggest lesson from your experience of managing and leading Vitsœ?
The word that popped pretty quickly into my head is tenacity. I’m not particularly intellectually capable or gifted or anything like that, but I am tenacious.
I am absolutely passionate about having a belief and sticking to that belief. Things are constantly thrown at you to throw you off course, and there have been any number of opportunities where
I could have, probably should have, walked away from the difficulties.
Running a business in a way that benefits wider society is difficult – rather than running a business in a totally selfish way, or for the benefit of a few at the expense of the planet. That’s a relatively easy way to run a business.
What we are doing is difficult, and with that difficulty comes the need for great tenacity. When I asked Dieter Rams only a few months ago, as we were coming into Vitsœ’s 60th anniversary year, for his impressions, he said that what Vitsœ does
is very challenging, and that’s been the absolute constant of the last 60 years. We are not ploughing an easy furrow.
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