Jamie Heywood

Jamie Heywood ex-Uber and Amazon speaks on innovation, renewables, automotive, regulation, and new solutions to the productivity challenge.

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Jamie Heywood speaks on managing change in business and new ways of seeing the purpose of the corporation. He speaks from more than 30 years’ experience leading and advising companies at the intersection of digital, growth, and regulation across the UK, Europe, and Asia.

From 2018 to 2022, Jamie steered Uber’s UK and Northern European businesses through the many crises that followed Travis Kalanick’s forced departure, including losing its license to operate in London and being taken to the UK Supreme Court by the black cab drivers. Jamie successfully rebuilt the company’s reputation, ensuring that cities saw it as a solution to their transportation and mobility needs, rather than just a source of driver protest and congestion. Under Jamie’s leadership, Uber committed to be fully electric in London by 2025, recognised the GMB union, and gave UK drivers full workers’ rights.

Prior to Uber, Jamie led Amazon’s electronics divisions in the UK, more than doubling the size of the business in less than four years. He ran Virgin Mobile in the UK and launched Virgin Mobile in both China and India. He started his career by selling used Volvos in Taiwan!

Jamie is now a Non-Executive Director of Guys’ and St. Thomas’, the largest NHS Trust in the UK, where he supports the Trust’s digitally-enabled productivity push, and of Zolar, a Berlin-based SaaS provider to Europe’s solar and heat pump installers.

In Jamie’s upcoming book, Repurposing the Company: From Profit Machines to Problem Solvers (Oxford University Press), he looks at why The West has experienced fifty years of declining productivity and slowing innovation.  The answer, he argues, is that companies have become obsessed with efficiency and as a result are struggling to develop innovative solutions to the problems that really matter to society. To become more innovative, companies need to ‘unlock their Collective Brains’. By drawing on insights from anthropology, psychology, and history – such as: how ideas flow around the social networks of Silicon Valley and how Papua New Guinean tribes maintain trust and cooperation even as they grow – as well as from his own experience at Uber, Amazon and Virgin, Jamie provides a blueprint to the steps an innovative enterprise should take to place innovative problem-solving is placed at the very heart of everything they do.

Jamie Heywood’s Specialist topics include:

• Innovation
• Digital transformation
• Purpose-driven companies
• Crisis & reputation management
• Regulation