FROM THE INDUSTRY
Helen Wylde-Archibald joined the Wildanet board as a non-exec director in 2021 and became CEO in 2022. An expert in innovation and digital transformation, her experience spans Vodafone, O2, Parcelforce and the Transport Systems & Connected Places Catapult. Helen received the Women Business Leaders Award for Technology and Digital 2019 and joined Wildanet from her previous role as MD of LUMO, the alternative sustainable train company which she launched in 2021. In 2023, Helen was appointed to the newly formed Business Council, launched by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), to work in partnership with government and politicians of all parties to drive the future of the economy. She is based in Cornwall.
Helen Wylde-archibald, CEO, Wildanet, UK Wildanet
took an incredible amount of energy; I sort of suspected she had to breathe in when she got out of the car in the morning to do it, but she really filled a room. Mary McCrory had an intellectual background. She worked in the marketing team and she brought so much to that party in terms of, you know, challenge and overturning things, not being afraid to have conversations with people. So both these gutsy, really powerful women - I found them both inspirational. They would never, ever use their gender as a reason why they couldn’t be successful. What have you learned along the way as a woman in a male-dominated environment? I absolutely refuse to be the ‘bird on the board’. I am here because I deserve to be here. I’ve worked really, hard. I would not take a job where I was selected because I was female. That’s just wrong, and it also demeans me as a person, and it would demean any other woman who took a job just because they’re a woman. So you’re on my team because you deserve to be there. I don’t care how old you are. I don’t care what gender you are and I don’t care about your sexual orientation. I don’t care what your background was. What makes me really angry is that I sometimes have felt I’ve had to be better than the boys to get there. It’s awful to actually find yourself thinking ‘I’m gonna have to be better than them to even get considered’. That does now seem to be less of an issue, but in my early career I felt the need to actually prove I could be better than any of them instead of actually being selected as the right person for the job.
What first attracted you to the broadband industry and how did you get into this business? When I left university at the start of the 90s I managed to eventually find 2 jobs and I went home, talked to my dad. One was for a company called Coca Cola, and the other was for a little tiny company called Vodafone which was doing the very first bit of wireless at that point. I didn’t think Coca Cola was quite right for me. I felt that Vodafone are doing something worthwhile and that’s it. It was the single best decision that I have made in my entire career; they were so good to me. I had one of the best entrances into the workforce that I could have ever had. It was so exciting at that point; you couldn’t even be sure the technology all worked. We discovered there was this sort of accidental capability to text, that kids were texting each other on the dance floors in clubs, which led us to ask, how do you monetise that? It was just so much fun, and the people who were running it were a once-in-a-lifetime team. WHAT, IF ANY, MENTORS HELPED YOU ALONG THE WAY? My father; he absolutely didn’t look at me as if I were female; he and I constructed together all sorts of things, we built microlites together in the garage over the winter months. He was quite a character, so I was very lucky because there were no boundaries. I had a fairly modern upbringing. I was really lucky at Vodafone. I met a lady called Mary McCrory and a lady called Jenny Dusart-Murray. Jenny was ahead of her time. She was one of our sales leads and just inspirational, she would breeze into an office and light up a room and take no prisoners. And I realised actually that
I think things are getting better.
44
Volume 46 No.1 March 2024
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter maker