Sky

CEO James Murdoch wanted to raise Sky’s strategic aspirations and ability to deliver, from his Executive Team to the top 300 leaders through to the performance culture.

Synonymous with satellite television in the UK and a world leader in digital television entertainment, Sky has been a revolution leader from the start. The company exploded the choice of channels available to us, first with the analogue signal, then digital. Now we have the technology in our living rooms to pause, record and replay live TV. Getting there has been an epic series of campaigns, and tales abound of how teams of staff who love what they do have repeatedly beaten down the doors of conformity and refused to bow to constraints of imagination.

With twenty years of phenomenal success behind them and a strong culture of getting things done, the time came when the company knew that the next cannon in its arsenal would have to be something quite different. The need they identified was for a more thorough and strategic planning process, and at the same time they knew their greatest cultural challenge was not just more of the same, but to adapt to a new style, to develop its staff and their ability to engage differently with each other and with different sorts of customers.

Leading this change – a revolution in itself and not one Sky had ever tackled before – was James Murdoch – combining the definitive media family name with unstoppable passion and vision as one of the youngest CEOs in the FTSE 100. James knew that huge challenges lay before him, that the company needed to think ahead and that to support it the strategy and culture would have to move together. One without the other was not an option. Just the sort of situation on which Sky thrives!