Women on Boards - Becoming Board Ready

Kathleen O’Donovan is Founding Partner and Mentor at Bird & Co Board & Executive Mentoring.

Kathleen draws on extensive experience of executive and non-executive responsibility on a global scale, serving on major UK and overseas boards including multi-sector businesses. She has a deep understanding of boardrooms and their dynamics, with broad-based experience of the City, financial strategy, M&A and restructuring.

She is currently:

• Senior Independent Director: ARM Holdings
• Non-executive director: Prudential and Trinity Mirror (and Chair of the Audit Committee)
• Chairman: Invensys Pension Scheme (and Chair of the Investment Committee)

Kathleen is also Co-chair of International Rescue Committee UK, a charity which supports people displaced by conflict in areas such as Darfur and the Afghan/Pakistan border.

Previous key roles include: Non-Executive deputy chairman at Great Portland Estates (and Chair of the Audit and Nomination Committees); Non-executive director at Bank of England, EMI, O2; and Chief Financial Officer at BTR/Invensys.

Her career has earned her places in The Times ‘40 under 40’ list of young high fliers, the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow and The Times Power 100.

Kathleen chalked up this remarkable breadth and depth of boardroom experience by starting early. Trained as a chartered accountant, she was a partner in Ernst & Young by 31 – leading major international audits and M&A deals for the Big Four firm and already mentoring younger colleagues. At 34 she joined the board of global conglomerate BTR (subsequently Invensys): the FTSE 100’s first female executive director and its youngest-ever CFO.

Zarin Patel is Chief Financial Officer, BBC and Non-Executive Director, BBC Worldwide. She is a member of the BBC's Executive Board, reporting to Director-General, Mark Thompson.

Zarin joined the BBC in 1998 as Group Financial Controller. During her three years in that role she achieved a transformation of the organisation allowing the BBC to redirect substantial new investment into programming from overhead savings. She also reformed the BBC's financial management disciplines as part of the implementation of SAP.

In October 2001, Zarin became the BBC's Head of Revenue Management and was responsible for the collection of television licence fee income across the UK, which now totals £3.4bn. Under her leadership, evasion was brought to an all-time estimated low of 5%.

In 2004, Zarin Patel was declared 'Client Marketer of the Year' by London-based direct marketing trade magazine Precision Marketing, an accolade that recognised her skills at spearheading the marketing operation of TV Licensing.

Since becoming Chief Financial Officer at the end of 2004, she has led BBC Finance through a period of significant change, re-shaping the finance provision across the BBC, moving non-core financial services off-shore as well as implementing two major pan-BBC efficiency programmes. She has also been a key player in the BBC's strategy to outsource both core and non-core services and return significant savings to into programme-making.

Zarin played a key role in negotiations with the Government in 2011 to secure the Licence Fee settlement, providing the BBC with funding certainty and enabling it to create a robust financial plan to underpin the BBC’s strategy of “Delivering Quality First”, developing new ways of realising more value from the BBC’s IP for the benefit of Licence Fee payers.  In 2011 Zarin led and delivered the BBC’s pensions reform, creating a new and sustainable pension strategy to ensure affordable long-term health of the scheme and reduce the BBC’s pension deficit. 

After graduating in economics from the London School of Economics in 1982, Zarin trained as a chartered accountant with KPMG, where she gained 15 years' experience at a senior level with multi-national corporations across the industrial and commercial sectors.

She is also an alumnus of Harvard Business School Advanced Management Programme, and is also a Governor for the University of Arts in London.