Leading with James Ashton

S2 Episode 1 - O2 and English National Opera

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Episode notes

Mark Evans and Stuart Murphy join James Ashton to discuss coping in a crisis, the myth of creativity, keeping connected and standing your round.


Mark Evans is chief executive of O2, the mobile phone giant with 33m customer connections and 6,700 staff that range from contact centre workers to network engineers. His mission is to keep up with multiplying customer demand for internet access on the move. That means sinking £2m a day into O2’s network and introducing 5G technology to soup up speeds.


After holding finance roles at cable group NTL and Vodafone, rugby fan Evans joined O2’s owner Telefónica in 2012 and was promoted to his current role in 2016.


Stuart Murphy is chief executive of English National Opera, a fixture in London’s West End for more than 50 years that prides itself on making opera accessible to all. On his watch, audience attendance is up 11% year-on-year, there are free tickets for under-18s and enthusiastic fans have started booing the baddies.


Starting out as a BBC teaboy, Murphy was a TV channel controller at 26, launching BBC Three in 2003 where he commissioned shows ranging from Gavin and Stacey to medical drama Bodies. Murphy joined Sky in 2009 to run entertainment channel Sky One and later Sky Atlantic, bringing Modern Family and Game of Thrones to UK TV screens.

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