What are some challenges you ΄ ve faced throughout your career, and which achievements have you been most proud of? Some of what I’ve been proudest of has been aspects of my early work, when Sky was first brought to the UK. I was one of the first in the team to work on direct response television, which I then carried on into the work I did with telecom companies. I was also part of the original team that helped launch BBC iPlayer. I’ve worked with some fantastic companies in Hollywood – James Cameron’s company, Cameron Pace Group, with his 3D tech that went into Titanic and Avatar , and filmmakers in Bollywood. I looked into efficiency in editing, given the scale of films they produce. I’ve had the opportunity and been privileged enough to live and work in some of the most beautiful places in the world.
You earned a degree in positive psychology. How do you apply this line of thinking to your career, and how does it shape your everyday decisions? I’m a lifelong learner; I have several degrees and I’ve always continued to learn and evolve. When I was working for the London 2012 Olympics, I worked with a lot of sport psychologists. That got me thinking about our brains and neural networks: how can we create the maximum possibility for success? I started a master’s of science in positive psychology as a way of building on sport psychology. I wanted to understand how we can engage, motivate and be as focused as we want to be, as individuals but also as teams, and then applied that specifically to the media and technology world. That was a game changer for me. It was fascinating to learn how our mindsets can change from a psychology perspective. If you look at the psychology scale, zero is taken as a neutral mindset, and minus on that scale would be anxiety, PTSD and so on. If you go to the other end of that scale, you get to positive psychology; that’s where you’re able to optimise your brain and achieve optimum success in focus and flow. How do you get yourself into that state of mind? You can bring it into everyday life, and into work scenarios where you’re building and leading teams that are incredibly dynamic. It depends on how deep you want to go, but it’s about applying it in a practical way: what’s our outcome? What are we looking to achieve here? How do you get the most out of different people, different personalities, different ways of working and communicating? Can you tell me a bit about your Technology & Diversity podcast series? This podcast series was something I was asked to do by another
psychologist; it focused on how we drive diversity – not just diversity of gender but diversity of thinking. People think in many different ways, they come up with solutions through different routes. If you can understand the science of how that works, and communicate that, then you can help people understand how they work together and overcome specific tools and techniques to get to a neurologically strong place. It’s all about how to build your neural networks, but also how to work with other people to be the most creative and successful, whatever that looks like. It uses a bit of science, some tech and business, but is also centred around how you can best support your team. challenges in their careers. The podcast series covers
TEAM SPIRIT Williams (third from left) at NAB Show with IABM peers
SHOW TIME With Purminder Gandhu, Josh Arensberg and Stephen Nuttall
Powered by FlippingBook