Name: Dianne Thompson

Position: Chief executive of Camelot Group plc, operator of The National Lottery

Born: December 31, 1950 Dewsbury , West Yorkshire

Education: Batley Girls Grammar School, West Yorks, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, external degree, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Recently voted as one of 75 Women of Achievement

Lives: Near Beaconsfield, divorced, one daughter

I HAD no idea what I wanted to do when I left school in fact I still didn't have much idea after I got my degree.

My careers advisory officer thought I was the right type of person for a career in marketing at the time I did not know what marketing was.

I bluffed my way through my first interview for my first job as a marketing trainee at the Co-operative Society and went on to become a product manager.

I was there for just less than three years. I learned all the basics about marketing. However, one thing I didn't learn was anything about advertising and I was interested in looking for another job to learn about that side of the business.

I moved to ICI Paints still based near Manchester, initially as export marketing manager looking after France and Germany, before moving on to marketing manager for the UK, which was a bigger job looking after Vymura and Novamura paints.

That was where I learned about advertising and branding. At ICI, I had a small staff of four. It was a young team and a very good team. Marketing people tend to be extrovert and fun-loving.

I was 24 when I went there and I stayed for the best part of six years. I was not quite sure what I wanted to do after that I then wanted a fresh challenge and to learn something new but knew I wanted to stay in marketing.

At that time I was married and my husband was working at Manchester University as a research associate and it wasn't convenient for him to move.

I was looking for a job in the Manchester area and applied for a job at Manchester Polytechnic to become a senior lecturer in marketing and advertising initially and then business policy and corporate strategy.

I loved it. I had had no formal marketing or business education and to teach the students I had to teach myself first. By that time I had worked for nearly nine years so I had a lot of on-the-job experience.

In the main I only taught final year students and as it was a sandwich course, they had at least one year's experience themselves. This was particularly interesting as the students challenged what they were being taught.

While at the Poly, I and two partners launched our own advertising agency Thompson Maud Jones (TMJ) which is still trading in Manchester. That was really good as it allowed us to employ some of our students on placement and it enabled me to continue as a practitioner. Some of my clients/agents came in to give lectures. It was a win-win situation.

I ran that for five years before selling the agency to my two founding partners. It needed a full-time MD and I didn't want the job.

I learned a significant amount about running the agency, in particular about financial management, the hard way one of our clients went into liquidation and the agency nearly went under as a result. By the time I left it was in good shape again.

I had been at the Poly for seven years and felt it was time to move on to get back into the real world.

In 1986 I went to Sterling Roncraft where I was marketing director and was then headhunted to become MD of Sandvik Saws and Tools. I was 37 and it was my first corporate MD role. I loved every minute of it and stayed for nearly five years. It was the first time I was in charge of the whole business and I learned an awful lot.

My husband and I got divorced and I came south with our daughter. I took on the role of director of marketing at Woolworths.

We won Campaign Magazine Advertiser of the Year Award with my new communications strategy and I was absolutely delighted with that.

I also worked on their cultural change programme to make the business more customer focused. It has stood me in good stead.

After three years, I was headhunted for the most difficult job I have ever done as marketing director with Signet, which was Ratners. Gerald Ratner had already left and I never met him.

I was part of the team brought in by the new chairman James McAdam to turn the jewellery business round after sales fell drastically when Gerald Ratner made a widely-publicised remark which criticised the quality of the company's products.

That was really really hard work. The biggest and the hardest decision I had to take was whether we could save the Ratner name. I decided we couldn't and that decision put 2,500 people out of work. It was the right thing to do and we turned the business round.

I joined Camelot in February 1997 as commercial operations director and last December became chief executive on December 19 at 4.02pm, when we heard we had won the second Licence.

It is a big job. I can honestly say it is the best place I have ever worked. I have been here for four years and it feels like yesterday. Usually by this time I am getting bored but not here.

I have learned lots. Camelot is one of the best companies for internal communications and it really pays dividends.

We have a huge target to realise in terms of good causes and we have to get 25,000 new terminals in one of the things we are focusing on at the moment.

I have had an eclectic career and have been incredibly lucky. This job is the jewel in the crown and I wouldn't change it for the world.