Lessons learned on the FT’s Next Gen Board

In 2024, FT Strategies had its first representative on the Financial Times’ Next Generation Board. The ‘NGB’ was initially started by Hannah Sarney, Head of Audience Engagement and Editorial Product Director at the FT, as a way of bringing fresh voices and perspectives to the FT Board. Each year, ten representatives are chosen from applicants across the business. Next Gen Board members meet regularly with the FT Board and lead cross-functional initiatives. Each NGB member is partnered with a member of the Board. In this blog, Aliya Itzkowitz, Manager at FT Strategies, shares her experience. 

 

Aliya - blog image

 

Why I joined the Next Gen Board

FT Strategies was founded in 2019 to share the FT’s own expertise with peers: a new revenue stream with a higher mission: strengthening the media ecosystem. As a consultant at FT Strategies, I typically spend my days interacting with stakeholders from other news organisations. We often cite our own experience, working collaboratively with experts from our wider business, to showcase best practice. Our own leadership team includes the FT’s former Managing Editor, Lisa MacLeod. 

That said, prior to joining the NGB, I sometimes felt like I was telling someone else’s story to clients. I became increasingly curious about my parent organisation. I felt that, by understanding how the FT truly operates, I could offer better insights.

In this blog, I share a ‘look behind the curtain’ from my time interacting with the Board and getting into ‘good trouble’ with other young leaders across the FT.

 

What I learned on the Next Gen Board

  1. The FT is continually evolving its AI playbook. In one of the first projects I worked on at FT Strategies, we helped a legacy newspaper launch subscriptions. We’d been there, done that and had the FT playbook to share. Today, with the disruptive force of AI, the FT is writing a new playbook. Through the NGB, I got a front-row seat to our own AI transformation at the FT, joining the company’s AI taskforce, running surveys and focus groups. In a year when we announced a partnership with OpenAI and launched our first reader-facing GenAI products, it felt like being in and watching a business case study in real-time. 
  2. In a data-rich world, our leaders look for human detail. During one of the most daunting parts of the NGB, presenting the findings of a company survey to the CEO, I observed that the parts of the presentation that often led to the richest discussion were individual, specific stories. Alongside the quantitative results were qualitative, anecdotal examples of how staff were feeling, or how they were personally using AI in their day-to-day work. Beyond the charts, specific quotes from the presentation seemed to stay with the C-level, long after they left the room. 
  3. Effective working groups get into ‘good trouble.’ Perhaps the most important part of the NGB was working with a team from departments as diverse as Tech, Finance and Editorial. ‘Cross-functional teams’ have rightly become a buzzword at media organisations. Yet, I saw the value of how we were able to push more doors open, and respectfully push new ideas because we were acting together. We tapped into different skill sets, each playing our part in recruiting participants in hackathons, focus groups or surveys. In one instance, we managed to gather over 700 participants. Each of us had done no more than speak to our teams or our managers, and we were able to build something bigger than the sum of our parts. 
  4. Being a leader is about service not status. My mentor on the Board was Matt Fotrell, President of FT Specialist and Financial Times, US. I was nervous for our first coffee, given the disparity in our status in the company. Matt was candid and warm. He gave me a ‘look behind the curtain’ at being on the Board. In one of our sessions, we talked about how he sees himself as a steward of the FT brand. Through Matt, I realised the responsibility of being on a Board. Behind the headshots and job titles, this often looks like a group of smart people, talking late, trying to make the best decision for the company with their collective judgement. 
  5. We could all think of our companies as our ‘client.’ Even though I usually work on projects for other companies, working for my own organisation I found myself in a familiar thought pattern; asking tough questions: What kind of workplace do you want to be part of? Is there something leadership might be missing? These are the kinds of questions that consultants often ask but they are questions that we can all ask ourselves when seeking to drive change within our own organisations.

Parting thanks

As my time on the NGB comes to an end, I would like to thank Hannah Sarney for starting this initiative. My fellow NGB cohort for their collaboration: Andrew Howard, Emily Robbins, Hugh Allman, Jamie Brown, Joanna Kotyrba, Lindsay Nicol, Lucy Warwick-Ching,  Madhumita Murgia & Sean Durkin; my mentor, Matt Fotrell and the entire FT Board.

 

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About the author

Aliya Itzkowitz, Manager
Aliya Itzkowitz, Manager

Aliya Itzkowitz is a Manager at FT Strategies, where she has worked with over 20 news companies worldwide. She previously worked at Dataminr, brining A.I. technology to newsrooms and at Bloomberg, as a journalist. She has a BA from Harvard University and an MBA from Said Business School, University of Oxford. She is currently a member of the FT's Next Generation Board.