Chris Moss is the keynote speaker at the Business Leaders Malta conference, Growth+, being held at the Radisson Blu Resort Golden Sands on Friday. He will be talking about his colourful career.

Chris Moss

Chris Moss describes himself as an Agent Provocateur in business. No, he doesn’t dress in womens’ underwear, but he is passionate about incit-ing business leaders to create wilful acts of recklessness, such as doubling market share, doing something different or refusing to take no as an answer.

One boss described his actions as “insubordination” and failing to agree with him was a sackable offence. “ He could only sack me once, so it seemed like a risk worth taking, and the odds were 50/50, ” Mr Moss says.

A better description would be as an intrapreneur, which the dictionary describes as “a person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation”. Intrapreneurship is now known as the practice of a corporate management style that integrates risk-taking and innovation approaches, as well as the reward and motivational techniques that are more traditionally thought of as being the province of entrepreneurship.

However, Mr Moss has over time delivered more than intrapreneurship; he has been an essential ingredient in at least three billion-dollar companies. He has had a stellar career in air travel, telecomms and banking, and is now set to change the world of home improvement.

He started his career in fast-moving consumer goods and sales and quickly realised that even though it was great “fun” out on the road, there was even more fun to be had in the world of advertising, product development and customer service.

For a while in the 1980s, he was tempted to follow his passion for photography, chasing motor rallies and Formula One around the world, but after joining Toleman Group and spending many months in F1 and offshore powerboat racing, he decided a more adventurous life would be found in commerce.

In 1984, he was introduced to the relatively unknown Richard Branson when he (Branson) and Virgin Group were invited to sponsor the first of Blue Ribbon Trans-Atlantic Boat races in a boat build by the Toleman Group. Before the crossing was completed Mr Moss had agreed to join Branson’s fledgling Airline, Virgin Atlantic, and soon they were embarking on the venture in the aviation and travel industry. He set about changing the airline industry as the airline challenged the inertia of the aviation superpowers, inventing seatback video, premium economy, on-board ice creams and kids rucksacks, in-flight masseurs and more. As well as managing the day-to-day world of advertising, PR, catering, duty free and product development, he also managed to direct Branson’s balloon crossings of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

The megalithic airlines of the 1990s struggled to keep up and Mr Moss oversaw the growth across the commercial groups for eight years, building the route network, moving to Heathrow and flying to Asia as well as the US. In 1992, he was approached by two technology companies. Both Apple and a new upstart telecoms company – Microtel – tried to lure him away from Virgin. After some deliberation he chose to move to Microtel, because in his words “the telecoms revolution was about to start and it needed more than evolution, it was a change beyond all recognition and he wanted to prove (to himself) that brands could be built with passion and presence”.

Maybe it’s his dyslexia or general stubbornness after struggling at school, but most of the successes have come from moments in his career when others have doubted the ideas or plans for growth

At Microtel he founded the Orange brand and successfully launched the first of a new kind of service brand that has been copied around the world. Telecoms brands without ‘phone’ or ‘tel’ in them, despite being told by his then boss “think of another name containing them”.

Clearly, Mr Moss doesn’t take no for an answer easily, maybe it’s his dyslexia or general stubbornness after struggling at school, but most of the successes have come from moments in his career when others have doubted the ideas or plans for growth.

During his career he has overseen some spectacular successes and some amazing failures. He was brand and customer marketing director for the merger of Lloyds and TSB, and also managed the brand ICO when they spectacularly spent $3.5 billion in attempting to launch a satellite phone service, and failed when they were unable to get a satellite into space orbit.

More recently he presided over the launch of several new telecoms services across the UK, Ireland, France and Italy after European deregulation of directory enquiries gave new opportunities against the incumbent telcos. The 118118 service launched to spectacular success in the UK, quickly followed by France and Italy. The success was followed in Ireland and Switzerland. He then spent nearly two years working in the US launching an “Ask me anything” text service and building the Knowledge Generation Bureau better known as KGB. His US experience includes having a Superbowl ad banned and skydiving with the Baldwin Brothers.

Described as mad, dumb, thick and stupid and a genius by a number of his peers, he puts it down to no more than a few lucky breaks and the dyslexic ability to see things differently.

The Growth+ conference should provide a fascinating opportunity to question the ‘Madness of Chris Moss’.

He will open the conference with some thought provoking stories and anecdotes on how you might build a business in, as he describes it, the Digital Riptide. A time of turbulent change, a time to create, a time to break all the rules and redefine the future.

For further information about the Business Leaders Malta conference on Friday, contact Debbie@businessleadersmalta.com.