Top 30 Dido Harding Quotes

When I was 14 my mum told my chemistry teacher she thought it was a waste of time girls going to university because they’d only just get married. I remember being so angry with her.

I’m still here, living proof that sometimes it’s OK to admit to your fallibility.

I am enormously proud of how we have transformed the TalkTalk customer experience.

We don’t have very many nights out on our own, and by most people’s standards we don’t have much of a social life. But for us the compromise works, and I think the best thing I ever did was to have a family.

I miss the racing hugely. If you told me I could go off and do it tomorrow afternoon I would. For me that’s always been my way of shutting everything off and relaxing.

I don’t want to give a false impression of confidence where I don’t have it.

Every single company knows that there is more that they can do to keep themselves safe from cyber-crime.

I’ve had 20 years, 25 years of running business. I’ve been well trained by a number of amazing organizations and I’ve got a lot of implicit, subconscious pattern recognition on how to make business decisions.

If you have a bonus scheme that is so complicated or so sensitive that you can’t tell people what it is, then you shouldn’t be doing it.

If being open and honest with my customers is naive then it’s fine with me. CEOs who hide behind that all-seeing, all-knowing veneer are playing a game anyway, it’s not real. I am quite happy to be seen for who I am.

After seven extraordinary and fulfilling years, during which we have transformed TalkTalk’s customer experience and laid the foundations for long-term growth, I’ve decided it’s time for me to start handing over the reins at TalkTalk and focus more on my activities in public service.

My mental analogy for TalkTalk is an ageing Ford Cortina going flat out in the fast lane of the M4 in the pouring rain. We are always hammering along faster than anybody thinks is sensible, with things not quite working, but huge enthusiasm.

I think we’d be cutting off our hand to spite our face if we demonize private health care.

If you’re a cyber-criminal, the days of stealing data and then selling it for cash in the dark web – they’re not so profitable as they used to be.

Competition drives growth in the end as opposed to monopolies.

It’s not a normal thing to receive a ransom demand in your inbox. I felt physically sick.

Internet safety is quite like the road safety issues when I was growing up as a child. You had clunk click advertising and the green cross man coming into schools to talk to children.

It is not often that one of the world’s best entrepreneurs rings you up and says ‘I’ve got this business we are about to float off as an independent company and we’d like you to be chief executive.’

I’ve stood in front of 500 extremely angry people in Waterford when we closed a call centre there. That’s not fun, and the day you think it is fun is the day you shouldn’t be doing it.

I think that Britain’s broadband vision needs to be about more people using broadband rather than macho claims about the speed of the technology.

I had this extraordinary role-model of rags to riches success in my grandfather and yet I was a girl, and girls in a very military family were not meant to have professional careers. I think that created the spur and edge to drive me on.

The number of things that can happen to a child online are just as many as can happen to a child in the playground, only it’s more immediate and they have the whole world at their finger tips.

I’m a really big believer in chief executives not staying forever.

I am a physical retailer by trade – if your shop is burgled you don’t immediately think, ‘Is it North Korea? Is it the Mafia?’ But with cyber you don’t know initially whether you’re dealing with a state actor, as they call them, a small-time criminal, an insider.

I was that sort of obnoxious girl, I remember being 10 at careers things where people were talking about becoming secretaries and I said I don’t want to be a secretary, I want to have a secretary, and people would sort of look at me slightly perplexed.

It’s very tempting to go part-time and take up a number of non-executive directorships because everyone is crying out for talented women.

I promise you I try very hard to stay out of party politics. I run away from it.

But I was an utterly hopeless politician and I worked out that I would be much better suited to making money and running businesses than the compromise that is politics.

I enjoy being slightly scared.

I have an enormously privileged position. I make a lot of money – a matter of public record – I have a huge amount of help, and I’m more in control of the day and what I do than someone working shifts on the checkout, or running the produce department in a supermarket.