(DYNAMIC THEME MUSIC) Welcome to Dream Catchers, a series about New Zealanders living in the United Kingdom. I'm Hilary Timmins. This is a series that will enthral and inspire us as we meet some of those Kiwis living their dreams and taking a little piece of New Zealand to the rest of the world. Captions by June Yeow. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2018 The city of London's business and financial district has been governed from this site since Roman times. The current Guildhall is over 600 years old. It survived the Great Fire of London, and it survived the World War II bombing blitzes. Imagine how it must have felt to be the first woman to govern this city. Imagine how extraordinary it was that this woman is a New Zealander. It's very interesting, because a lot of the firsts in this country have been New Zealanders, Australians, Americans, and I think it's partly because we don't know that we ought not to do it. I've always described my life as a series of opportunities ` almost shameless opportunism. You see an opportunity going past, you grab it, you then decide what to do with it, because my philosophy is I'd rather try and fail than not try at all. I've done three firsts here. You know, the first woman to lead the city, first woman to chair the opera house, the first woman to be provost of King's College, Cambridge. I think that's probably enough for one woman. London's Central Business District is known simply as the City or the Square Mile. I knew I wanted to practise law in the city, which is what I did. But after a while working as a city lawyer, I realised living in the city and working in the city, I could stand for the City Corporation, which is the ancient local authority that governs the city. So I stood for the council, got elected, and then a few years later, found myself to be the first woman leader. That was in 1997. And it was a position Dame Judith would hold for six years. At the time, she would lead the team negotiating Europe's single market and financial services and was considered to be one of the most powerful women in the United Kingdom. Growing up in Dunedin, Dame Judith was only 5 years old when her father died and her mother, Joyce, would become her greatest mentor and influence. Attending Otago University, she was one of only two girls in a class of 80 to study law. And on completing her masters, she would travel to the United Kingdom, initially as an academic. The strong calling with the UK was the fact that both my parents were historians and my mother had imbued in us a love of things British, and particularly a love of London. And at the same time, when I was when I was growing up, I had hoped I'd become a ballet dancer, and as a little girl aged 6, I said to my best friend, 'I'm going to go to London and dance on Covent Garden's stage.' Of course, I never dreamt I'd be the first woman to chair the board of the Royal Opera House and the Royal Ballet. Little girls in Dunedin just didn't have those sorts of dreams. Dame Judith was chair from 2003 until 2008. And it was during this time she would also become the first woman provost of King's College, Cambridge. Continuing to hold senior advisory and mentoring roles in the business and corporate world, Dame Judith is also a governor of Westminster Abbey Choir and Westminster School and has a number of other community projects she is passionate about. I'm a trustee of the Imperial War Museum. And I had the great privilege of chairing the regeneration of that museum and developing the new World War I galleries. Given that both of my grandfathers fought in the first world war, it, for me, was very moving to be able to, in a tiny way, contribute to their story. I do a lot of work with the High Commission here in London, and particularly in relation to the commemoration of the first world war here. Been working with a group to make sure that the sites with the United Kingdom area ready for British visitors and just looking at how we have commemorated things like Gallipoli and the Western Front and the other activities leading up to 1918. A visionary leader; a remarkable woman, and an extraordinary New Zealander. Dame Judith has set the bar high. There are very few people who succeed straight off. There are very few people who succeed without a lot of hard work, a lot of preparation and a lot of planning. I'm afraid that is just a fact of business life and there's no point embarking on it if you're not prepared to work hard and if you're not really interested in it. It is still very important for women to have proper mentors and proper role models and also for organisations to be conscious that women are half the population and therefore their boardrooms and their senior executive teams should recognise that. I think the day the Queen made me a Dame is probably the biggest highlight. Going to the palace and getting a British damehood was a great honour, and the wonderful thing was that the Queen said to me that she'd been waiting a long time to do this. So I felt really` This was a fantastic moment in my life. With 33 million customers across 16 countries and assets under management worth more than twice New Zealand's entire economy, Mark Wilson is group chief executive of the global insurance giant Aviva. As one of the most influential people in finance, Mark is also the only business leader to have addressed the UN General Assembly as a global representative and champion of sustainable business. It was something that I think counts. It was something that personally, as a firm, we care a lot about. Because business is about looking to the future. Aviva was one of those companies that's this iconic British brand. It's been around 320 years ` probably just over. It was started in 1696. It was one of the very first business still in existence in the UK. The original company was called Hand-in-Hand. It's a wonderful name ` Hand-in-Hand. And back then, we used to do fire insurance ` we used to own all the fire stations. We were there to protect people's assets. It was 30 years after the Great Fire of London that destroyed over 30,000 homes in one single night. And so Aviva was this brand, but it had got itself into some trouble. Mark came on board as group CEO in 2013. And since then, he has slimmed down and refocused the group, rebuilt the balance sheet and earnings and also doubled Aviva's market capitalisation. Aviva is now the largest insurer in the United Kingdom and is at the forefront of the digital revolution in insurance. Mark is also a champion of gender and cultural diversity, believing balance and diversity adds to a leadership team making the right decisions. Business is about bringing along all your stakeholders ` society, economies, countries, people, customers. It is about thinking long-term. For us, it's about thinking sustainably. What can we do on the whole sustainable agenda? We invest funds for 30 and 40 and 50 years. We need to make sure what we invest in is the right sort of stuff ` stuff that doesn't destroy the environment, stuff that doesn't break up economies, stuff that doesn't support bad behaviour. And too many people in our world and too many governments in our world think short-term. In my mind, that's not acceptable. Mark's father and grandfather also worked in the insurance industry. And when he was at Rotorua Boys' High, his economics teacher encouraged him to do business studies with an international focus at Waikato University. From there, he would work at Wellington's iconic National Mutual before making the move to Asia, where his leadership after the global financial crisis would protect and save AIA, cementing his reputation as a CEO who can turn things around. There's no point going to a business if you can't make a point of difference, if you can't find out how to fix it and improve it, if you can't change a team to bring them on for you, if you can't set that vision. And, you know, Kiwis are good at that stuff. And one of the reasons that Kiwis are so good at turnarounds is because of the breadth and diversity you get when you start a business in New Zealand. If you're in a business in New Zealand, you have to do everything. You probably have to do finance or IT or people or marketing or sales, probably all of the above. And you can learn specialist disciplines in each of those. And you get a lot of breadth and depth in the subject. You know what? In my experience around the world, you just don't see that often. And that's what gives you the edge. (ALL PERFORM HAKA) And it was that edge that would see Mark receive the 2016 UK New Zealander of The Year award. It really was a remarkable evening, and I had my three daughters there with me as well. And it keeps you pretty humble, though, when they'd announced that I'd won that award. And just as I'm getting up to do a speech, and I guess say thank you, my youngest daughter leans over to me and says, 'Dad...' I thought she was going to say 'congratulations'. She said, 'Dad, don't embarrass us.' (LAUGHS) So it really` but it was a wonderful night, and it was a real privilege to, I guess, in some way do what we all do over here, and that's represent New Zealand. Because what we do or don't do reflects on our country, and at the end of the day, we're all trying to do our country proud. Coming up ` we meet the Kiwi in charge of Richard Branson's empire. * (UPBEAT MUSIC) Success is often about preparation meeting opportunity. We've all heard about the 30-second elevator pitch, but what if your elevator was a taxi ride across London with Richard Branson? That's what happened to Josh Bayliss. Now chief executive of the Virgin group, Josh was about to become a partner in an international London law firm when he got the opportunity to interview for the position of general counsel with Virgin. I'm guessing you're here to see one of the team. Well, to get started,... ...press the 'check in' button below... ...and someone will be with you shortly. A client of mine knew Richard Branson and knew that Virgin were looking for a general counsel, which is a senior lawyer. And so he called and asked me if I'd be interested. And actually, I said no ` 'Thank you very much, but I'm gonna stay here.' And I remember going home and saying to my wife that I've got this feeling that maybe this is one of those moments ` that opportunity to step over on to a more commercial role really appealed to me, and Virgin was a brand that I'd admired enormously. And so I called the guy back a few days later and said that I would meet with the people from Virgin, meet with Richard. Hello, and welcome to the exciting world of Virgin. I suppose I expected some waist-coated butler or someone to open the door, but it was Richard himself, telling me that he had to travel to Hackney and be double-booked ` my interview with this awards ceremony he had to go to. So did I want to join him in the back of the car or come back the following morning? And of course I took the option to go for a ride with him. And we spent two and a half hours stuck in a traffic jam getting across London. It was a great opportunity. I think most interviews are such a false environment. You have maybe 30 minutes, 45 minutes. The questions tend to be pre-ordained. You sort of know what you're gonna get. But because we had so much more time, we really got to explore a little bit more than that and understand a bit more about each other's motivations in life, and it was a great way to get to know him. Josh got the job, joining Virgin as general counsel in 2005. In 2010, he would become their joint CEO. And two years later, he took over single-handedly. I think it's really noticeable, actually, that there are so many New Zealand business leaders who have done very well in business relative to the size of the population. I think one of the reasons is that New Zealanders tend to be quite straight forward, which goes quite well, I think, with being an effective leader in business. Here at Virgin Management, we manage all of the Branson family's investments. So that's very largely investments in Virgin-branded businesses, but it also includes investments in other businesses. The second thing we manage is the Virgin brand itself, which we licence to about 90 businesses around the world which operate under the Virgin name in consumer-facing industries, from travel and tourism to health and wellness to financial services. The diversity of what we are involved in and the geographic spread of it is obviously very significant. So it's a 24-7, 365 days a year job. That goes with the territory, I suppose, of most CEO roles around the world. Of course, in any business, the people that you deal with are the thing that makes all the difference in the world. If I go back to the 1960s and '70s, when Richard was starting Virgin, his idea was that you start by looking after your people, and if you look after your people, they will look after your customers, and your customers will ensure that your shareholders get sorted out in the end. And we've taken that slightly broader. We also think businesses have a responsibility to the communities that they operate in, and they have a responsibility to ensure they're looking after the environment, the planet that we want to bestow upon our children. We have a commitment to flexible working ` the nature of business, I think, in the broader sense these days is that it's very mobile. We give people unlimited leave, we trust our people to make decisions about how much leave they should take. We have a very progressive maternity and paternity policy. Those are the sorts of things that really give people a sense that actually, we care, because we do care about their role in helping our business achieve long-term success, rather than this being something which is much more static and short-term. Growing up in West Auckland, Josh would study at Auckland university, attaining a BA in history and Spanish, with a law degree. Offered a position as a judge's clerk at the Court of Appeal in Wellington, he would work on some of New Zealand's most high-profile cases. Josh would also work at Auckland's top legal firm, Bell Gully, before heading off on his extended OE and his unexpected and fortuitous taxi ride with Richard Branson. I think the most important thing you have to do is keep your eye open for opportunity. A lot of what I've achieved in my career has been through hard work and dedication and tenacity and not taking the knocks too personally. But a huge amount of what I've achieved has been through sheer luck and being in the right place at the right time, and you have to acknowledge that. Need a taxi? Then just push the 'taxi' button. But I think it's all about putting yourself in a position where you can take advantage of that luck, and the way you do that is you stay open-minded, you stay opportunistic, you stay fresh in the way that you're thinking, and you drive yourself very hard all the time. Staying open-minded and opportunistic has helped enormously in getting here, but I couldn't have imagined the journey that I would have. (JAUNTY MUSIC) Oxford ` known as the City of Dreaming Spires ` is home to the oldest university in the English-speaking world. It's attracted many New Zealand scholars in pursuit of academic excellence. Made up of 38 colleges, Oxford University has been at the centre of learning and teaching since the 12th century. 27 British prime ministers and as many as 30 world leaders have all been educated here. As a young New Zealander arriving here in the late '80s on a Rhodes Scholarship, Professor Ngaire Woods had a dream to make the world a better place. She would go on to teach at Harvard before returning to Oxford and establishing their global economic governance programme. And thanks to her leadership, she helped create and is the inaugural dean of Oxford's first School of Government. Oxford had been playing with the idea for about 100 years, which, in Oxford terms, is just a warm-up for an idea. And so then I came along and sort of picked it up and just felt passionately that Oxford's such an extraordinary mixture of brilliant people from around the world. And that if you could set their minds to solve problems that governments face, and if you could set their teaching talents to helping train people for government, you could actually make government better anywhere in the world. The architecturally award-winning building, completed in 2015, is unapologetically contemporary and begins a new chapter in Oxford's history. I love this building, and there's no way I started this project thinking that I wanted to build a beautiful building. At all. It was the benefactor, Len Blavatnik, who really impressed on me that my view that we could teach out of portacabins was totally wrong; that we should invest in a building because it was a signal to the world that we were investing in being an institution forever ` that you could trust us; that you could share information; that research done in the school, people would be reading in 800 years' time. You know, what's special about building a school now ` if we'd built the school 100 years ago, we'd have been teaching British democracy to the rest of the world, undoubtedly. But we're building it today when everybody in the world, whether they're American or British or Zambian or Chinese, has had to step back and think, 'Actually, we're all getting a lot wrong.' We have about 120 students each year that do the Master of Public Policy. And they're from 54 different countries. And they go from age 22 to age 51. So they're an extraordinarily diverse group, and I think one of the things that we all learn in this environment is that every country faces some pretty similar problems and that you can really share solutions. Growing up on Auckland's North Shore, Ngaire attended Rangitoto College and did an economics and law degree at the University of Auckland. Passionate about social justice issues, she came to Oxford on her scholarship to study international relations. When I first arrived, I think I had a double reaction. On the one hand, I felt like I'd arrived in heaven, because I'd arrived in a place where you were expected to be as clever as you could possibly be, but at the same time, you're aware when you get to Oxford as a student, I still remember the sense of, 'Oh my goodness ` all these incredibly clever people.' 'Course, you know, New Zealand offers a really rigorous education. You quickly realise that you can compete with the very best. And compete with the best she did. Alongside her roles as professor and dean, Ngaire has written numerous publications on international institutions, globalisation and governance and sits on many global advisory boards. Every morning when I walk into work, it's a highlight. It's just a thrill because, you know, every day this school gets stronger and better and has the capacity to have more impact. And every day I walk in and I see these students who each are undergoing a transformation process, who look stronger, who are walking taller, who you know are going to go and do great things in their countries. There's this great quote in Latin, 'ad astra per aspera', which I love, which means you can reach the stars if you aspire to. So it's... Really think what your biggest dream is and pursue that. Don't ever start with your smallest dream because it seems more practical. Like, think about what your biggest dream is and go boldly ` like, be bold about pursuing it, even when you're feeling a little nervous and a little scared. Captions by June Yeow. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2018