Thank you for downloading the Bottom Line podcast.

This week, Evan Davis asks his panel of top business executives how they plan for the unexpected.

Just how prepared are they for a crisis?

Hello and welcome to the bottom line.

Expect the unexpected this week as we think the unthinkable.

My business guests will tell us how they plan for unforeseeable events and prepare for life's nasty surprises.

And what to wear at work, we crack the dress code. But before we do any of that, let's spend

a few minutes meeting each of my three guests. And first is Neil Gaden, who's chief executive

of Pace, a company based in Yorkshire, the world's largest maker of set-top boxes for B-Sky-B and about 100 other broadcasters around the world.

And Neil, I mean, just to get the scale of it, you make different boxes for every set-top provider of broadcast services, right?

It's actually about 160 customers now, and some of the largest pay TV operators in the world, like DirecTV and Comcast, and each of them require a specific design. And these things, you know, some of them can take 30, 40 man years to create one product. And that's your job, so that's good business for you, of course. You were on the brink of bankruptcy about four years ago, weren't you? But you're back now. You were over a billion pound revenues. I mean, what ought happened? The way we were organized, we were just struggling to get products out on time and to make any sort of level of money for the company. So the whole operational side, where and how we're buying components

and where we were manufacturing, eight layers of management, people couldn't make decisions.

So we stripped this down into small teams who could be agile and really fast. We changed the company

into a behavioural driven company where people could make the decisions themselves with their

customers and we gave them all the

tools to do that and it was like unblocking a drain I mean suddenly these smart engineers could

talk to customers with all the tools they needed to start to create the products that our customers

needed and this brought a transformational change to the business now just tell us if you would

about where the set-top box industry is going,

because most people will be familiar with set-top boxes for satellite or cable TV

with a hard disk inside that records and allows you to pause.

When are we going to get the boxes that allow us to plug in the internet?

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