Annika Bizon: "You give up a lot to go to work, so make sure you're enjoying it"
Annika Bizon has always had something of an entrepreneurial streak. At a very young age, she proudly announced to her parents that she had formulated an idea for a new business. “It was called Fluffy Puffy,” she tells me, still proud of her precocious brand plan. “And it was for making balloon animals at birthday parties, but out of clouds.” We both chuckle at the sweet notion, brimming with imagination, and decide that, surely, in this age of technological advance, we could make Fluffy Puffy a reality? “Maybe with a VR headset, you’re right,” she says, laughing.
Bizon has put that unbridled imagination to good use throughout her career, not least in her current role as senior marketing and omnichannel director at Samsung Electronics mobile division presiding over the UK and Ireland. “I think I am just a really inquisitive person,” she says, pondering where her early zeal for creative solutions came from (she also, incidentally, came up with an idea for reducing ice, and therefore accidents, on motorways, when she was a teenager). “I think that’s why I came into technology. I love seeing how you can make change happen, and also the good that you can do with change.”
It may initially seem a far cry from her previous career in the entertainment industry, where she spent 14 years working at Universal and 20th Century Fox. “I think tech and entertainment have a lot in common,” she says. “But the truth is, I came here because Samsung is one of the most innovative companies in the world, and connecting the consumer to technology requires innovative thinking – and that’s my passion. My job is to simplify the message, so people understand that it's not technology for technology’s sake, but technology that they can use in their lives. I love the challenge of making it fun and engaging.”
Indeed, the inventor of Fluffy Puffy loves a good challenge. She talks with excitement about the transformative era in which she worked in entertainment, overseeing the massive overhaul of the industry as a reaction to the dawn of streamers. “I'm really proud of the fact that we transitioned a company from being a physical business into a digital business,” she says. “You have to do that while still maintaining the passion points around how people want to watch content, but everything from changing our trading terms to changing how we talk to the consumer to changing how we built out a new business model. To do that well, you have to understand how you take people on that journey.”
Her most recent adventure in taking her consumer on a new journey has been launching the first artificial intelligence smartphone on to the market – using Galaxy AI. “We've got 4 million people that are now using Galaxy AI and I think that’s because we demystified the story,” she says. “Because AI means loads of things and our job was to make it simple to use and simple to understand. I think we’ve really done that.” We return to her earliest impulses – that desire to make changes that help people, whether revolutionary notions of motor safety or more fanciful creations at children’s birthday parties. “I love our new Galaxy Ring because it makes people's lives easier and they can understand their health, or how they're managing their life through AI in a more simplistic way. For me, these are massive triumphs.”
Another preoccupation of Bizon’s is empowering women. It has, in fact, proven to be a backbone of much of her career. “I was the youngest sales director and the only female sales director at 20th Century Fox and across much of the industry, which at times could be really tough,” she says, laughing. “I think that's why I want to create space for women in the boardroom, and why I was very proud of the fact I got to represent that industry, at that time, when there weren't many of me sat around the table.” As a female voice on the leadership team at Samsung, Bizon continues this work today, fervently advocating for women in senior roles, supporting Women@Samsung, and donating her time to mentoring. “I want my two girls to look at the world and say, I've got no reason why I shouldn't do anything,” she says.
Her championing of women feels a natural extension of her approach to leadership. “I'm not one person at home and a different person in the office, I'm just fair. I communicate. I'm there for people whenever they need me, and I set clear direction,” she says. I wonder how she approached her very first leadership role. “I had come up through the ranks and it's so much harder to step into a leadership role when you've been part of the team. You think: how am I going to change my style without becoming someone I'm not? So, I made sure to strike that balance. I make sure I always think about the person behind the job they're doing and I will never, ever, let anyone not know that I've got their back. It's my problem when something goes wrong. It's their success if it goes right…”
Bizon’s personable leadership style is no doubt because she practices what she preaches. She is very aware of the person behind her own job and makes sure to nourish her. “I'm one of those people that is always trying something new. Right now I'm trying to learn to play the cello,” she says, before listing off a roster of impressive achievements that she's accomplished in her spare time, including white water rafting, mountain climbing and trekking in the Arctic circle. She placed an enormous value on approaching her career holistically. “Four years ago, sadly, I lost my father, and it was quite sudden,” she says. “I was doing a lot of things before and, for a while after it happened, I threw myself into looking after my family. I stopped doing things for me. What I saw really quickly was that I wasn't sleeping as well as I used to because I wasn't I wasn't finding an outlet, I wasn’t finding my personal peace. When I started doing some of the things I love, everything fell back into place.”
Bizon’s insatiable thirst for new experiences and her appetite for accruing new skills fuels both her career and her free time. “I just I want to carry on learning,” she says, with earnest enthusiasm. “It's so exciting how people are using technology to enable their lives. I want to be part of that." Indeed, when I ask what advice she would give her younger self, she says the following: “What's the point in doing what you're doing if you're not going to enjoy it? You give up a lot to go to work. Make sure you're enjoying it.”
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