Mike Harris

Founder and former CEO of First Direct and Egg, Mike Harris is a renowned conference speaker on leadership, innovation, customer service, technology and strategy.  He is currently Chairman and co-founder of digital identity experts Garlik and a founding partner of the Difference Engine(UK) - a business accelerator and incubator for SME's.

Mike Harris is a regular speaker and seminar leader on entrepreneurial approaches to leadership, customer engagement, building brands, marketing, culture change, innovation and growth aimed at all sizes and types of organisations.  Mike also covers speciality topics  from the world of finance, technology and identity.

Mike offers individually customised speeches and will tailor a keynote both in content and length to a client’s exact specifications.  He is also more than happy to participate in extended Q&A sessions - in fact, the more challenging the better!

He was a regular speaker at the mid career MBA course at the Sloan School of management at MIT where he supervised a number of student research projects.

Mike Harris spent the first 15 years of his career in IT at Midland bank.  He was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and has been creating big businesses ever since.

He was a founding CEO of the world’s first major telephone bank Firstdirect, Chief Executive of Mercury Communications (a Cable and Wireless Company) and Chairman of the mobile operator –One to One, (now operating as T-Mobile).

In 1995  he moved on to the position of founding CEO of Prudential Banking plc and then the CEO of its successor, Egg – which he took from concept to a billion pound public company in just 2 years.

In 2007, Mike Harris set out to explore and define the intrinsic principles behind some of the world’s most successful new businesses.

As well as drawing on his own wisdom, he conducted countless in-depth interviews with some of the world’s most esteemed and accomplished entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic. 
Find Your Lightbulb: How to Make Millions from Apparently Impossible Ideas  emerged as the result – a step-by-step guide to building billion dollar businesses from nothing more than a simple idea.

Mike Harris was born in 1949 in  Dudley, an industrial town in the heart of the UK and graduated in 1970 with a degree in chemistry from London University.