Harrogate 2008: Making the best of the worst

No company or leader can be truly great until they’ve been through a time of crisis. This was the message for delegates worried about economic turmoil from Fru Hazlitt, ex-chief executive of GCap radio group, and formerly a managing director at Yahoo! during the dot-com crash.

In an entertaining and painfully honest masterclass, Hazlitt joked: “Mostly what happens is that I join a company and there’s a crisis – I’m not sure the two are connected!” But, in a tale that spanned the heady e-commerce days of the early 2000s, and the sale of GCap to Global Media earlier this year, she had a positive message aimed at HR people in tricky times: “When you get through a crisis, you will be great and your team will be great.”