LOCATION: London, UK
LANGUAGE SPOKEN: English
CURRENT ROLE: CEO, Cirata
PREVIOUS LEADERSHIP ROLES:
Chairperson, Tech Nation
Director, Kimble Applications
CEO, The Sage Group
Executive director, Micro Focus
CEO, Chordiant
Executive, Oracle
BOARDWAVE ROLES: Patron, Mentor and Angel Investor
Stephen Kelly has flown to the moon and back five times. Not literally – that’s the amount of air miles he estimates he clocked up during a lifetime of working for US tech firms while living in Europe.
“I don’t feel good about the obsessive work and travel schedules. I feel terrible about the climate crisis, and I know that technology has a massive role to play.” These issues became important to Kelly as the chairperson of Tech Nation, a company that fuels British tech scale-ups and has a big focus on green tech.Though he left the role in November 2023, it’s still an area close to Kelly’sheart. But back in the days when he was flying around the globe, they weren’t on his radar. In fact for eighteen months at the turn of the millennium, Kelly commuted from London to New York on Concorde. For a couple of years, he even commuted to California. One of his three daughters recently revealed that when he used to head back to the US at the end of the weekend, she would go upstairs and cry. “That just breaks my heart now. I never knew that at the time. I didn’t stop and pause to reflect on the impact on those around me.”
Kelly would leave on a Monday morning and take the 11am flight on the iconic jet. “If you were in South West London you would see this amazing bird taking off and roaring away through the skies.” He was mid-flight to New York when the Concorde operated by Air France crashed in July 2000. “We were met by a barrage of photographers and journalists at JFK asking how we felt about the flight that had just crashed. At the time, none of us passengers had a clue,” he says. He flew back on Concorde at the end of that week, which says a lot about his mindset at the time. “I was pretty much the only person on the flight, everyone had cancelled because of safety fears.”
How we work – whether we are prepared to travel and if we choose to spend time in the office or working from home – is a question firmly on the agenda following Covid-19, for both employees and firms looking to retain talent. For instance, Elon Musk told X (formerly Twitter) staff that they neededto commit to a ‘hardcore’ culture or leave. Back in the day, Kelly was living the Musk philosophy. “I was the guy who worked harder than most. There are probably three or four people I know who worked as hard as I did,” he says.
A typical day would make even the biggest workaholics seem almost sloth-like. “I was up at 5am, in the gym, then in the office for seven and then out to dinner with clients three or four nights a week, so not in bed until 11pm. I was a believer in hard work, fanatical about customers and presenteeism. I worked ridiculous hours and made massive sacrifices. I don’t feel good looking back.”
This lifestyle took a toll on Kelly’s mental and physical health and, 22 years ago, he was diagnosed with diabetes. While he cannot say that was due to his “crazy lifestyle, lack of sleep, and endless work and travel”, it likely played a role. So, nowadays, he is not in favour of Musk’s tough regime.
“As a CEO, you want to be the best version you can be.But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to work 100-hour weeks. I think you can build great companies without destroying your life. I would argue that what you really want, as a leader, is to have people who love coming to work and create an inspiring and compelling culture,” he says. “You have a huge duty of care and responsibility to your colleagues to make sure you’re watching out for their mental and physical health.”
Changing gear
Kelly has taken his own advice and now enjoys downtime: rambling with his wife, playing tennis and golf, and visiting Stamford Bridge to watch Chelsea with his grown-up daughters. He meditates and does yoga. When he was helping grow tech empires, there was a massive separation between work and life. “No one at work knew about anybody else. They didn’t know if their colleague was a Brownie leader, or coached kids’ football on the weekend. And no one worked from home.”
He feels that Covid-19 has played a huge role in changing attitudes and allowing people to “strike the balance”. Through Zoom and Teams calls that became a staple of the pandemic, Kelly says we learned “what artwork people had on their walls, the books they read. We even met their children and pets”. Kelly thinks that this mix between the work self and the self outside of the office is not only healthy, but offers huge opportunities for businesses. It is one reason why when he was CEO of Micro Focus and then Sage, he connected people with a strong social purpose. At the latter, he set up the Sage Foundation, which allowed employees volunteering time to tackle social challenges like homelessness and domestic violence.
The Sage Foundation has had a major positive impact, from building schools in Soweto to reducing youth homelessness in Newcastle where Sage was based. “People could pursue their own passions outside of work and use the company as a vehicle to do this. Charity projects they are passionate about, or working at say, a hospice. And we gave them paid days to volunteer.”
The idea that you needed to be first in the office and last to leave was instilled in him at Oracle, a firm he was headhunted for in 1987. “There was a culture where people worked exceptional hours. But it was also a culture where there were unbelievable rewards around performance. If you were a top performer, there would be incredible parties, clubs, trips. You know, going off to Hawaii for Achiever’s Club.” At the time, Oracle was “a pretty early -stage company” that no one had heard of. “Everyone thought I was mad,” he says.
Working for Oracle meant that Kelly saw one of the crucial transformations of the tech age: the birth of Silicon Valley. “Only 10 years before, it had been cherry orchards and fruit fields. It was incredibly embryonic and it was a transition that we witnessed, where farms and cherry orchards were replaced with glass buildings that became tech companies.”
It was a life Kelly could not have dreamed of when he left his working-class roots in the town of Folkestone, Kent, as the first generation in his family to attend higher education. While at Bath University studying business administration, he spied opportunity. “It was a time when the UK industrial heart was decimated and communities were on their knees in terms of coal mining, shipbuilding, steel works, textiles, but there was this hint of a brave new world of technology,” he says.
After nine years at Oracle, Kelly felt it was time to move on and see if he could apply the same principles that had transformed Oracle into one of the globe’s largest tech firms, to a start-up. He describes his time at Chordiant as being like a “field of dreams”. “We went from nought to $70 million in revenue in four years. We put it on the Nasdaq and it was a big IPO.It was a fintech company before we had the term, it was a unicorn before we had that word – it was valued at $2 billion,” he says. “The playbooks of building a global market leader that were developed at Oracle worked perfectly – 80% of the world’s top banks were strategic customers. We made a lot of people successful. Everyone in the company had stock options. For some people, it was life-changing.”
Kelly finally gave up his transatlantic commute in 2005, making the decision to settle back in the UK, mainly for the sake of his daughters’ education. He took a job at MicroFocus but announced he would step down in 2009. Again, MicroFocus was a case study for the growth “blueprints” – revenues tripled, profitability doubled and there was a seven-fold increase in stock price making MicroFocus the top-performing FTSE stock.
Prime time
In 2010, Kelly’s career path took a somewhat unusual turn. The government at the time wanted to “do some radical things for the nation”, digitising government services, creating Gov. uk, and it was keen to learn from private industry. A new role of Chief Operating Officer was created to oversee efficiency and reform across the Civil Service, under then cabinet minister Francis Maude. “They asked if I would be interested. I thought, I’ve been state-educated, I’ve had a full grant at university, I’m a lucky boy and it is time to give something back. So I rolled up my sleeves and became a civil servant.”
He was keen to see whether his playbook of success – the principles of “vision, growth, strategy, awesome execution, delivery, engagement, culture and success” – that hehad developed at Oracle and applied to Chordiant and MicroFocus, could also work in the public sector. “I can attest that everything in the private sector works perfectly in this 200-year-old institution called the British Civil Service.”
But Kelly found that private-industry excesses had spilt into the public sector. “I found one supplier who was spending£1 million a year on Wimbledon, hosting senior civil servants on finals day. I stopped that because you cannot have any contamination of conscience. You must treat taxpayers’ money with absolute sanctity,” he says. He chose to lead by example. “I remember going to a supplier’s lunch in Pall Mall and all the companies – HP, IBM, Fujitsu – were there. I took a packed lunch. It was very lavish, but I bought myself water and a sandwich,” he says. “I didn’t want it to be symbolic. It was all about delivering great services to citizens and saving the taxpayer money.” He left government in 2014, having led the team that saved £50 billion.
Changing the picture
Kelly joined Sage as CEO shortly after, where he oversaw a strategy conversion to the cloud, strong performance and growth, and a doubling of the market valuation. But, in 2018, he took the opportunity to slow down and reflect on a lifetime in the fast lane of tech innovation, leaving his position at Sage. “We all create deadlines in our heads, but they don’t matter. What really matters is to be with the people you love and who love you. You can build great companies and remember what your priorities are.”
But a few years down the line, Kelly couldn’t resist a new challenge when it came knocking, joining Cirata as CEO in 2023. “The company had been de-listed from the London Stock Exchange and it had undergone one of the biggest company crises of the last decade,” he says. “I love a challenge andhave dedicated 40 years to supporting and building UK Tech.I couldn’t sit back and watch what could have been a ‘UK Tech Darling’ collapse without stepping in to the rescue.” Since taking over, Kelly has introduced serious change: the board, company name, auditors and even management have all been adjusted. “There was very little in place that was close to adequate, let alone world-class. Pretty much everything has been changed in less than a year,” he says.
But it’s not just Cirata he’s aiming to improve: his three daughters have opened his eyes to the world of the patriarchy. He attended an early Women of the World conference and went to a workshop with his eldest daughter. “I was the only man in the audience
and, afterwards, she asked me what I had learned. I said it is less about what I learned. It’s almost what I need to unlearn becauseI have worked in a very male misogynistic culture for decades,” Kelly says. “A lot of things are unconscious and subliminal, so I need to really think about how we unlearn those things and think about things with a lot more insight, sensitivity and become a champion for diversity and inclusion.”
Life is, he says, a process of education, and you never stop learning with youthful curiosity. “I am still learning from the younger generations, especially my daughters and their friends, because they have got such an insight into how we can create and participate in a much better world.”
Tips From The Top
What are your tips for a successful business?
1. Develop a bold vision.
2. Obsess over the customer and the pursuit of product market fit. Grow fast and build plans to grow fast and bring people with you.
3. Build a fabulous culture where people can be the best version of themselves, take delight in coming to work, love what they do and who they work with.
What is the best advice you’ve been given?
It came from Chordiant’s chair, Sam Spadafora, who is the best chairman that I have ever worked for. When I was CEO, he said, “Just try to be yourself. Be the best version of yourself. And always do what you think is right.”
Can you tell us something surprisingabout yourself?
Like many, I get Imposter Syndrome. I still feel like the younger version of myself with little confidence.
If you hadn’t become a CEO, what career would you have pursued?
I love children and the joy of seeing their energy, enthusiasm and emotions. I believe teaching is a gift and vocation. I would have been a teacher – maths and sports would be a perfect combination.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?
An app called All Trails – my wife and I love walking and this app has opened our eyes to the beauty of nature, the outdoors and exercise.
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