As this site is my personal blog I suppose I ought to introduce myself, so in the near future I’ll write a few brief paragraphs that might help some who don’t know me at all, or have not known me for long, or have known me only in one particular connection such as a business, a church or a professional association. It won’t be a long essay and I’ll try not to let it degenerate into self-congratulation. As for my ancestral background you’ll probably pick up bits and pieces from the Family History section as that develops.
The majority of my professional life was as a Management Consultant, but that’s not where I started. Chemistry fascinated me from my earliest years at Burnley Grammar School, and studying part-time at Burnley College then at what was then the Royal College of Advanced Technology (now Salford University) I worked in chemical research in the paint industry (Enfield Chemicals, and then Crown Paints) until I was almost thirty. At that point having studied, again part time, for the Diploma in Management Studies (the nearest thing to an MBA then available in the UK) I moved into Quality Management, becoming for three or four years Crown’s first QA Manager. Then followed three years as manager of Crown’s Stockport plant, a big learning experience at a time of somewhat fractious labour relations. To be honest I don’t think I was cut out for that kind of sharp end operational management but, having said that, think I left the place better than I found it.
One morning in early 1979 I was reading the Financial Times over a cup of coffee when I spotted an advertisement for management advisors. I wrote explaining that I didn’t match the criteria they had listed but would like to talk. A few months later I joined them as a junior consultant and gradually over the next twelve years moved up the ranks until I was a Partner in the global firm, the Hay Group, and jointly responsible (with a New York based colleague) for the development of our Strategy & Organisation consulting practice worldwide. During those years I worked in, and led, teams helping a wide range of both business and governmental organisations to improve their organisations and increase their effectiveness, until eventually I found it impossible to work within our own business’s changing culture and we parted company.
That was 1991, and there followed fifteen years as an independent advisor. This started off very well until in 1993 I had a head injury which led to my thinking processes being slowed down. A claim for compensation from the hotel in which the accident happened produced nothing other than my accountant’s and lawyer’s invoices. The following few years were financially very hard.
One good thing that came of this, though, was my starting to do useful work that was considerably less pressured than major organisational change. Alongside fee-earning projects in the field of business and professional ethics I gradually became involved in voluntary capacities with what is now “Faith in Business” and with “Transparency International”, the former being explicitly Christian and the latter, while secular in organisation, engaged in anti-corruption work highly compatible with my Christian values.
My work with these two led also to a wider range of activities applying Christian values to economic life, including with the Evangelical Alliance, the European Evangelical Alliance and Hope for Europe. As my health improved paid projects, first with CARE’s Eastern European initiative and later with the Christian micro-enterprise agency, Opportunity International, even though both were at less than full commercial rates, commenced the financial recovery and enabled me to develop the range of voluntary roles in parallel.
There’s more to follow.
