All posts by Althea Taylor-Salmon

Press Releases

US Firm Acquires Irish Start-up

US sleep therapy group ResMed has acquired Irish start-up BiancaMed in a multi-million euro cash deal. The University College Dublin spin-out has developed a sensitive motion sensor that can detect movement and respiration without being connected to the body and then convert the data into measurement of sleep and breathing patterns.

A major application for such technology is in the diagnosis of sleep apnoea – where breathing is interrupted during sleep.

The companies will not disclose the value of the deal but venture capital group Seventure, which led a €6 million fundraising for BiancaMed in July 2009, said it had made an excellent return on its investment.

Altogether, BiancaMed has raised €11 million since it was founded in 2003 to commercialise research from UCD’s School of Electrical, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering.

ResMed, which is a major player in the global market for therapies for sleep apnoea, was an early investor. Other investors are Enterprise Ireland, UCD, InvestNI and venture capital group DFJ ePlanet Capital.

The US group does not currently have a “contact-free” means of diagnosing the condition, with most monitoring requiring electrodes and chest bands. The BiancaMed technology is seen as considerably less intrusive, cost effective and convenient.

BiancaMed expects to launch its first product – a sleep monitor for adults – over the next year, initially in Asia and the United States. It is also developing a monitor for infants

The technology is also being trialled at Vincent’s Hospital for patients diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

The trial, which monitors patients at home for sudden weight gain, a factor that can signal a problem then sends the data to the hospital via mobile phone. The hope is that the technology will be able to cut hospital readmissions significantly.

BiancaMed co-founder Conor Hanley said ResMed was particularly excited by the potential for the technology in the area of congestive heart failure. ResMed has recently restructured its management roles specifically to target this area.

Founding directors Dr Hanley, Dr Philip de Chazal and Prof Conor Heneghan are among those to benefit from the sale of the company.

Dr Hanley said all three would remain with the company under its new owners, who have committed to retaining, and hopefully, adding to its Irish presence. The company is based at UCD’s NovaUCD incubator centre.

Dr Conor Hanley is a Sainsbury Management Fellow.

Press Releases

The Vital Ingredient in Creating a New Brand of Crisps – An Engineer?

When the opportunity came along to develop a local crisp I jumped at the chance. The client, Quex Foods, manages 2,000 acres in Kent. After years of supplying the multiples they wanted higher value add products and suspected that crisps could do the trick.

How would you have proceeded? Would you perchance come up with a few flavours, make some initial samples and try them in the market?

In the beginning, before the mid 20th century, manufacturing technology developed products at never before seen quality and cost. This facilitated the “if you build it they will come” philosophy of building stock then worrying about selling it.

In today’s consumer brand driven market place the exact opposite is true. The critical success factors of products are the emotional and communicative elements of the offering rather than the tangibles. New products need a strategy to build emotional resonance between the potential users and the new product’s values.

In these markets, manufacturing and supply are commodities without significant competitive advantage.
The product design process (which I call marketing) is complex and includes both emotional and functional components: core values were defined, a list of marketing concepts were devised such as ‘traditional’, ‘home made’, ‘nature’, ‘super premium’, ‘alternative’ and ‘landmarks’. Each had a set of messages and visual translations e.g. black & white rural scenes, ribbon tied Gingham check, wildlife shots, and Kentish icons such as the white cliffs of Dover.

Concurrently, food trends, retail channels, and Kent associations were examined. A similar process focused on the brand name, tag line, and the choice of initial flavours.

The resulting bundles were then tested with target consumers. The ‘New Coke’ debacle in the 80s demonstrated the dangers of directly asking consumers what they most like. Instead, such testing can only attempt to fire shots across the bows of the decision making process.

75% of UK sales are cheese & onion, ready salted, and salt & vinegar. Having developed Kent versions of these, Whitstable’s heritage led us to Oyster & Vinegar crisps – the first in the UK to contain real oyster (If you are curious: they taste wonderful, the way a fish & chip wrapper smells).

The final Kent Crisps (tagline ‘From the Garden of England’) are a handmade premium crisp celebrating Kent landscapes and flavours. Product sales romped through 100,000 packets within 5 weeks from launch via farm shops and continue to grow fast. Kent News summed them up as “an edible tourist guide”.
Too many British manufacturing companies today still follow “If you make it, they will come” instead of “Find out what will make them come, even if they don’t know it yet themselves, then make it”.
This latter approach means constructing a ‘virtual machine’ comprising research, questionnaires, emotional analysis, market creativity and a final pinch of serendipity in order to maximise chances of success.
At this year’s Manufacturing Summit it struck me just how many of the success stories demonstrated not only good manufacturing capabilities but, crucially, also superior market and commercial skills.

Blog, SMFs (Members)

Creating Strategy Middle Up

Paul Christodolou Group
SMF Paul Christodolou

The age of top-down strategy is long gone. This doesn’t fit with the guiding principles of modern, empowered business cultures as it tends to disempower and demotivate the people who are our greatest asset. Strategy is now developed ‘middle-up’, often involving cross-functional teams of managers, subject experts, and the handful of wise old heads that often sit quietly hidden away in every organisation. This, in theory, shouldn’t be a problem. Indeed, since the people that live-and-breathe the business everyday know the strategic levers better than anyone, this should be the ideal way to create breakthrough thinking. All we need to do is liberate this latent power within the organisation to beat the pants off the competition (and, at the same time, save a fortune in high powered consultants).

The problem is that this middle-up, consultative process for creating strategy is prone to severe pitfalls if managed poorly. Without structure, process and clear deliverables, this can end up as ‘strategy by committee’. One board member of a leading airline recently expressed her frustration and horror at this modern, workshop-based approach, bemoaning the ‘death of individual thought’.  Furthermore, since strategy naturally destabilises the status quo and challenges territories, organisational politics can often interfere and create unhelpful tension and even strategic paralysis.

However, the prize from getting this right is so big that middle-up strategy needs its own definition of best practice. This approach is too good to miss. It not only taps directly into the best source of rich and vibrant thinking, but it automatically creates a motivated and unified implementation team. And anyway, the best alternative is to use expensive consultants whom the in-house team will just end up resenting and whose outputs they will almost certainly disown.

There are golden rules that can help make a success of this empowered strategy approach. Here are seven important ones.

Plan a structured ‘journey of discovery’: It’s no good just scheduling a strategy workshop and expecting this to lead to innovative, joined-up thinking. Developing strategy this way should be a structured ‘journey of discovery’ for the project team. Designing the journey is the first crucial task. There are natural phases and milestones in the journey, and different types of activities to ensure the right blend of workshop, individual thought and background analysis.  Carefully planned workshops typically form the backbone, with supporting analysis filling out the flesh. The project needs to start with divergent, creative thinking and move steadily towards more convergent, analytical thinking. The journey needs to cover exploratory pilots, decision points that help distil new strategic principles, and practical planning sessions so that everyone understands how to make it all happen. 

Create a ‘burning platform’: Launching major strategy projects with cross-functional teams requires a sense of urgency – the so-called ‘burning platform’. The term originates from the oil industry (i.e. a burning off-shore oil platform) and refers to the urgent need to move from an uncomfortable position.  In business terms, this demands a clear articulation of exactly why we need to change in a simple and compelling fashion. This might also paint a disturbing picture of what might happen if we just let the status quo drift while the competition forge ahead. Without the burning platform, time-starved managers will not be motivated to get involved.

Get everyone on the same page: When a major strategy project is launched, it is amazing how quickly key participants develop different ideas of what it is all about. Some will want this to fix their own pet problems, some will have wildly over-ambitious views of what this can achieve, others will just get the wrong end of the stick. Creating a clear project charter is the obvious way to get everyone on the same page as they become engaged. This may be a written document or, more likely, a short presentation to guide a personal briefing. This can be followed up with workshop techniques such as roadmapping – simple but powerful visualisation approaches that help liberate, structure and distil the accumulated wisdom of the team.

Predict winners and losers: As soon as the project is launched and the team is engaged, the likely winners and losers will start to become apparent. The problem is that at least some of the big potential losers will be on the team that is shaping the strategy and, as the saying goes, turkeys rarely vote for Christmas. The strategy leader needs to be considering this right from the project inception as this can create a negative influence or even derail the project completely. The key point is that individual roles will almost certainly change during the course of a major strategy programme. If you want to take everyone with you, you need to facilitate a change in every individual’s position and contribution that aligns with the emerging picture.

Blend experience, gut feel and facts: Developing innovative strategy requires a balance of ‘hard’ data analysis and ‘softer’ inputs such as the collective judgment and experience of the management team. Many organisations go to one or other extreme. Intensive strategy workshops are the perfect means for combining hard and soft inputs in a balanced way. But this means careful preparation of meaningful data pitched at the right level – it’s easy to try to ‘boil the ocean’ of possible data. It also means preparing each workshop in full detail, using appropriate visualisation and analysis tools, and making sure that every activity leads to a useful outcome and a clear set of strategic insights.

Expose the really breakthrough thinking: Strategy development can tend to polarise around two extremes – constraint-driven improvements on today or sexy blue sky thinking on what might be possible. The former can lack ambition and the latter is often unrealistic.  Both of these are useful calibration points, but the best answer lies somewhere between the two. Breakthrough strategy refers to that elusive middle ground – the point that represents new, visionary thinking that is also practical and do-able. Getting to breakthrough requires particular workshop approaches, constant iteration and dogged determination.

Move seamlessly from planning to doing: A common problem in traditional approaches to strategy development is that, even when the final strategy has been agreed, there is huge inertia that delays the launch of implementation. There are various ways of ensuring that the transition from ‘planning’ to ‘doing’ is seamless. One crucial issue is seeding implementation champions into the process early on. These may not be the clearest thinkers on the team, but they may be the barrier-smashing enthusiasts who will make it happen. Another important step is to define pilot implementation projects and not be afraid to launch these even before the overall strategy is complete. Strategy shouldn’t be developed in an ivory tower and there is a lot to be said for learning by doing.

But can we demonstrate that middle-up strategy works?:  One leading multi-national recently used this consultative, workshop-based approach to develop an innovative strategy across a large, complex organisation. This $5bn global leader with 15,000 staff had grown significantly by acquisition over the preceding 10 years, leaving a latent need for integration. The imperative was to develop a unified, global strategy that would optimise the operational network to reduce cost and provide a platform for growth in the major emerging markets.

This company was made up of three autonomous regional businesses (Americas, Europe, Asia) co-ordinated across four global product lines. The dynamics and tensions within the complex matrix of responsibilities was a key feature of the project. The strategy process involved running a set of pilot strategy workshops within each global product business, followed by a set of aggregation workshops organised by geographic region, then culminating in a finalisation workshop covering the whole business. All this was interspersed with significant exploratory and then validating analysis. The strategy development process involved 110 senior and middle managers and took around 12 months. These managers, of course, had to run the business at the same time (although special backfill support was organised to free-up some of their busy schedules).

The outcome of this intense and dynamic process was a multi-faceted strategy that was truly both global and local, and that could naturally be implemented by regional teams with consistency regarding globally standardised products and processes.  It provided the blueprint for a $250m transformation programme which required a Wall Street rights issue to fund. Five years on, the project has created $55m in repeating annual savings for the company, has helped to reinvigorate its lead in technology, and has forged market-leading positions in Asia, South America and Europe.

So it can be demonstrated that middle-up strategy not only works, but can produce stunning results. It fits the modern business culture, it intimately involves the people who know the business best, it automatically primes and motivates implementation champions, and it gets results. It is far  preferable to top-down decree or simply outsourcing strategy to external consultants.   Running effective middle-up strategy may have just become a critical success factor in 21st century businesses.

About the Author
Paul Christodoulou has over 20 years experience as a strategy leader working in international business. His career has seen him working in senior management roles, heading up global strategic projects covering manufacturing, marketing, M&A and post-M&A integration. Originally an engineer, Paul switched to strategy after completing his MBA at INSEAD which was supported by the Sainsbury Management Fellowship. SMF was established in 1987 by Lord Sainsbury who believes talented engineers make a valuable contribution to the senior management of an organisation.

Paul is currently working for the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing managing collaborations with partner companies aimed at putting university research into practice in the general area of global strategy (ifm.eng.ac.uk). Paul also runs a strategy consultancy Strajectory which provides innovative and practical strategy support to businesses of all sizes (strajectory.co.uk). Paul’s recent book “Strategy Workshop Toolkit: How to Herd Wild Cats and Create Breakthrough Strategies” is available through online booksellers.

Blog

Recruiting Trends in Engineering

Mike Astell 2

SMF Mike Astell has both engineering and business qualifications, the latter he gained through his MBA study thanks to a hefty bursary from Sainsbury Management Fellows which champions the idea of having engineers in board positions because they bring a multiplicity of skills to these roles.

Mikes’ MBA enabled him to transition into senior management posts where his is responsible for hiring a diversity of staff including engineers.  Mike’s view on current recruitment is that “Engineering recruitment is at a turning point.  A major shift is taking place within  graduate recruitment as many more are seeing engineering as an exciting long term career choice.

“Our industry has long lamented the fact that large numbers of talented engineering graduates have not seen their careers in engineering roles and have been lured by City employers which offer big incentives and salaries to attract people with strategic, analytical and project management skills.

“The failure of so many financial institutions has led to the restructuring of the economy  (eg headcount reductions, divestments) and engineering graduates are starting to look at things differently.  They are exploring engineering roles more carefully and beginning to appreciate the potential for challenging careers with long term prospects for advancement.

“This shift in perspective has increased the pool of graduate talent from which to select the very best engineering graduates, creating a very competitive market – many graduates are having to do work placements or part time work to improve their competitiveness.  Now  we are recruiting some amazing graduates; not only in terms of their academic achievements, but their energy and enthusiasm to contribute to industry.

“And it’s not just engineering graduates. The upheaval in the job market has resulted in a large churn and highly experience engineers who may have stayed at one firm for a long time, becoming frustrated at not progressing, have joined the candidate market, creating even more opportunities for employers to access the best engineers. This diversion of talent into industry will most definitely help to rebuild the British economy.”

 

 

Press Releases

Re-Engineering the Boardroom

Reengineering the boardIn the late 1980s David Sainsbury (now Lord Sainsbury of Turville) became concerned that in comparison with the UK, overseas businesses had more senior executives with professional engineering and science qualifications in the boardroom. Over the years, and particularly in light of the economic folly of recent years, he has become increasingly convinced that in order to increase the UK’s international competitiveness there should be more directors in UK boardrooms who understand how things are innovated, manufactured and sold. He is not alone in his views.

Indeed, Akio Morita, Chairman of Sony Corporation, while delivering the inaugural Innovation Lecture to the Department of Trade and Industry in 1992, famously expressed his confusion at why British companies persist in appointing accountants to run their companies. He remarked pointedly, “For an accountant the central concern is the analysis of statistics and figures, of past performance. How can an accountant reach out and grab the future if he is always looking at last quarter’s results?” In other words, if you’re driving down the road, wouldn’t you look through the windscreen at the road ahead rather than staring into the rear-view mirror? Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are accountants and I’m certainly not on a financial-professional-bashing crusade, but there are some convincing arguments for ensuring that the skills often found in engineers and scientists are better represented in the boardroom.

Before we get into that, I should admit to being a product of Lord Sainsbury’s vision. I am one of the 270 British engineers who have been awarded a scholarship by the Sainsbury Management Fellowship (SMF) scheme to complete an internationally recognized MBA course. Lord Sainsbury has certainly put his money where his mouth is, paying out seven million pounds in bursaries since the scheme began. His protégés have been educated at the cream of international business schools in Europe and the USA. In 1999, I subjected my wife and young family to INSEAD’s intensive so-called “divorce course” (I’m still trying to make it up to them). The result has been a diverse cadre of British Professional Engineers with the relevant skills for contributing to UK plc. Have these professionals, returning from their intensive re-branding experience, educated in the dulcet tones of strategic marketing, profit and loss accounts and discounted cash flows, been embraced with open arms by British corporates? Well, the answer appears to be “not really”.

The SMF has just published an interesting document summarizing the findings of a survey they have carried out with 100 HR directors. The findings make sobering reading for engineers. The backgrounds HR directors value most in the boardroom are accountancy (still number one after all these years!), sales, marketing, HR and legal, with professional engineering still firmly “off the back”. However, 80 % of the same HR directors agreed that professional engineers with MBA’s are most definitely qualified for board positions. So, qualified but not valued; it brings a tear to the eye. The report then sets out in a pretty comprehensive matrix all those sterling qualities one can expect to find in a professional engineer. A few of the skills struck a chord with me.

The first skill is one that even the most hard-nosed HR director must surely concede. Engineers understand how stuff works and are generally interested in staying abreast of the latest technology. They are typically early adopters of technology and as a result are useful at being able to predict potential alternative future outcomes. Our world is changing at an unprecedented rate, much of it driven by new technology, globalization and environmentalism. Most professional engineers I know have a strong opinion on these issues which can help UK boards future-proof their businesses and exploit new opportunities for growth.

The second skill that is often strong in engineers is that of being able to quantify risk. From an early stage in their careers engineers are taught to make an estimate. It starts at a young age with judging how thick the legs on a Lego bridge have to be and develops into an interest in financial models that work out a balanced investment portfolio to provide for a comfortable retirement. It strikes me that a few of the things that have gone off the rails in our economy in recent years could have benefitted from a few judicious estimates on likely outcomes.

The third skill-set that engineers bring to the boardroom is an insight into effective project management. This is the bread and butter of a career in engineering, combining the short and long term viewpoints in order to bring a complex project successfully over the finishing line. While engineers can be creative, it’s their ability to see something through to a working reality that brings profitable results faster.

So, what is it that I’m advocating? Positive discrimination in favour of engineers and scientists at board level? Hopefully not even engineers are naive enough to join that particular queue. We live in an increasingly competitive world where people need to put their best foot forward and be prepared to be judged on their merits. If Professional Engineers want to be appointed to the board of a company, they had better be prepared to deploy their freshly-honed sales skills because it certainly won’t be presented on a plate. What I am asking on behalf of Lord Sainsbury and the SMF is that when the interview shortlists are drawn up, HR directors take a leaf out of the book of their overseas counterparts and think twice before relegating applications from engineers and scientists to the bottom of the pile.

Press Releases

MBA Scholarships Open Business Doors to Engineers

MBA Students

Sainsbury Management Fellows (SMF) has set a further eight talented professional engineers on the road to senior management following their MBA graduation. This brings the number of SMFs to 283, with a further eight currently undertaking their MBA study.

The graduates had to persuade a panel that they were the best of the competing young engineers in order to be awarded a £30,000 bursary each to offset their MBA study costs at a leading business school.

Founded by Lord Sainsbury, the not for profit organisation champions the value of a combined business and engineering education and has, to date, awarded over £7m worth of bursaries for MBA study.

The funding enables engineers to add business, finance and marketing expertise to the skills gained through their engineering training and experience. Most graduates go on to secure posts in blue-chip companies, while 10% of SMFs set up innovative businesses.

Already, graduate Kimbal Virdi has been appointed by Samsung to work in the company’s corporate strategy team in Korea.  Fellow graduate Phil Westcott has joined IBM’s General Management Leadership Programme and is working in the Smart Grid Consulting Division in London.

“The SMF-sponsored MBA opens doors to exciting new careers for engineers,” says David Falzani, SMF President. “SMFs hold 220 directorships, including non-executive director posts. It is our ambition to see many more engineers sitting at the boards of British companies because we know they make a significant contribution to their performance.”

Every year up to ten top young engineers receive the bursary after going through a rigorous assessment process run by the Royal Academy of Engineering on behalf of SMF. On securing their MBA, the graduates become members of SMF and gain access to an international network of contacts, continued professional development and mentoring by captains of industry.

 

Blog

President’s Letter

annual dinner 2010

SMF Ernest Poku
Each time I look through the profile book it impresses me how unique a group the Fellows are. Although we work in a wide variety of industries and roles, we all share a common perspective and experience. We have also all participated in the vision of Lord Sainsbury.

The Society has in essence two broad aims. Firstly to add value to the UK and international economy by supporting the aims and vision that Lord Sainsbury expressed in setting up and supporting the scheme and associated bursaries that we have all benefited from. Secondly, to add value to each individual Fellow by organising and encouraging interaction, and otherwise supporting our careers.

We are entering a period where the future form and role of the society may well be decided. There are now almost 300 Fellows, representing a considerable network of talent covering all major sectors and functions, and many countries. The debate on what makes us unique, what aims we should have and how we can realise them is coming to a head.

Recently, a strategic review was initiated to better understand what role the Society should or could fulfil. To further understand the Fellows’ profiles and their current views on the scheme we have asked Hall Associates to undertake a telephone review. You will therefore be contacted over the next few weeks and asked a range of questions. At one end of the spectrum we can be a mere alumni association, at the other, we can seek to positively influence views and attitudes across commerce. We are interested in your views on the Society’s future role and how you would like to be involved.

Re-Engineering the Board
You will have found enclosed our publication Re-engineering the Board to Manage Risk and Maximise Growth, or “HR Pack”, targeted at key HR decision makers. This pack was designed by our Communications Group to challenge the view that accountancy and legal training are the best qualifications for effective boardroom directors, and to highlight the strengths of the engineering mindset. Most of our outward communications to date have been via Public Relations. The HR Pack is a deliberate break from this approach and provides a more direct channel. If the evaluation of this new approach is positive then we intend to look at additional opportunities for new publications and forums for challenging views and arguing for wider adoption of our values. Please give us your feedback on this pack.

Website & Improved Engagement
We will shortly be launching a new website and interaction platform. Many of you will already be members of the SMF group on LinkedIn but this new website has vastly increased functionality and a new social engine to allow for private communications between Fellows.

As Fellows are geographically dispersed, the website is also intended to provide a material forum for useful interaction on a variety of initiatives irrespective of geographic location.

How we support each other and add value as a community will no doubt dictate the future success of the Society. We hope that the website will enable a higher degree of interaction and engagement by delivering value to every Fellow that uses it.
Funding
As you know, the SMF bursaries are funded by Lord Sainsbury via his Gatsby Charitable Foundation. However, the Society itself has been funded to date almost entirely by Lord Sainsbury’s private funds. Whilst we have been informed that the future of the scheme continues to be assured, and all recent feedback on our performance has been most positive, we have also been asked to take a hard look at whether there is a point at which the scheme becomes self funding.

We are currently reviewing whether to incorporate the Society and establish a registered charity to further pursue this question. A key benefit of this incorporation would be a tax efficient vehicle for those Fellows who have expressed an interest in investing back in to the scheme.

We also collect annual subscriptions from the Fellows. These subscriptions go directly to supporting the Society’s aims. They are not a ‘social fee’ but, rather, they underline the identity and activities of the Society and point to the responsibilities of the individual recipient of the award. We continue to ask for your support in collecting these fees.

Mentoring and Other Activities
An outstanding success of last year was the launch of the mentoring scheme. Fellows have been partnered with mentors at the very highest levels of UK PLC. We intend to look not only at how we can extend the scheme in size, but also how to access new key sectors of Fellow involvement such as Finance and Entrepreneurship.

We also launched the successful Energy Roundtable. This is a forum – currently physical but soon also to be online too – to exchange latest ideas between those with a role or interest in the Energy arena. We would like to have additional roundtables in areas of key importance to the economy such as Finance and Manufacturing. Please let Cathy know if you would like to be involved in this.

Other activities where our involvement continues include supporting the next generation through the RAEng’s BEST Programme and the Engineering Leadership Award scheme. If you feel you now have the time and would like to become further involved please do not hesitate to contact Cathy or myself.

There is no easy way to measure the sphere of influence that the Fellows have. However, by rising to the challenges we are set, and increasing our ability to collaborate, we can exert a positive influence of a disproportionate magnitude to our size.

Lastly, I would like to warmly thank outgoing President Ernie Poku for all of his hard work, initiatives, and achievements during his term of office.

case studies

SMF Case Studies – In Brief

 Adam Bazire, Vice President, Business Development, AMETEK
Serge Taborin Andrew Jones and Adam Bazire on the right
Adam Bazire (right) with Fellows at an SMF Networking Dinner

AMETEK Inc is a leading global manufacturer of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices with annualised sales of $2.5 billion. The company has over 11,000 staff working at more than 80 manufacturing facilities and more than 80 sales and service centres in the USA and around the world.

Expertise: Power, instrumentation, process control, motors, aerospace, industrial.

Michael Astell is a Chartered Professional Engineer and a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
Mike Astell 2

Mike’s business achievements and MBA have led him to become one of 300 SMFs who provide support to boards of UK and international businesses.

Michael most recently worked for Centrica as Director of the East Irish Sea business. This included the Morecambe gas fields with 9 platforms plus the Barrow terminals and Heysham base. Michael’s career includes:

  • Managing Director Designate, Dounreay for the UK Atomic Energy Authority
  • EMS Project Leader and Corporate Strategist for Shell, which supplies transport fuel to 900 service stations in the UK, as well as meeting the demands of businesses – construction industry, aviation, chemicals and shipping
  • Operations Manager for Shell, responsible for an area in the North Sea with a budget of £120 million, producing 40,000 barrels a day
  • Non Executive Directorship at Acrobot, a spin-out company from Imperial College London specialising in surgical navigation systems and robotic devices

Michael is a keynote speaker at oil industry seminars and a lecturer on various university business and engineering programmes as well as a mentor for junior engineers and professionals.  Michael’s business knowledge and experience allow him to provide insight on:
•   Risk analysis and strategic planning
•   Developing effective marketing strategies
•   Finance
•   Problem solving
•   Project Management

Sam Cockerill, Founder and Managing Director, Libertine FPE
sam-cockerillSam is the founder and Managing Director of Libertine FPE, a low-cost, high-efficiency engine start-up. Sam is an independent management consultant and entrepreneur. He consults in the renewable energy sector for a range of industrial, academic and public sector clients. He is also the non-executive director of Providence Holdings, one of the UK’s major agricultural supply chain management companies.

Sam has co-authored several published scientific papers underpinning the sustainability of grain biorefining, and published scientific papers on the sustainability of biofuels and biofuel feedstocks, and is a named inventor on several patents.

Expertise: Global ethanol market and pricing dynamics, biofuel/biomass supply chains and sustainability, renewable energy policy, new vehicle technologies; as well as business related topics – growth strategy development, international business development, creative career development.

Tom Delay, Chief Executive, Carbon Trust
Tom Delay 2013_DSC5769

Previously an engineer with Shell for 16 years, Tom worked for five years in consulting before joining the low carbon sector as founding chief executive of the Carbon Trust. Tom was the first SMF President and one of the first two Fellows to receive an MBA through the scholarship scheme.

Expertise: International business development, creative career development.

Simon Duncan, Chief Executive Officer, A Shade Greener:
A Shade Greener is a renewable electricity generator. The company promotes solar energy that is accessible to everyone. Up until now only the wealthy could afford solar panels, however, new legislation that came into effect from April 2010, provides the company with guaranteed income for the electricity its panels generate, enabling A Shade Greener to fit free solar panels onto any roof that is suitable. Now nearly everyone can have access to free electricity all year round.  Expertise: Solar PV, installations, solar power, renewable energy.

David Falzani, CEO, Polaris Associates / President of SMF
David Falzani President SMF MCP_3834 (landscape)
Polaris offers strategic perspective and analysis, linking activity to drivers of success; revealing buyer decision-making process. Polaris works in a variety of sectors including energy, technology, software and charities; helping clients with business and financial development, technology projects, marketing and strategic planning, and general commercial management.
Expertise: Business development, finance, operations, marketing.

George Fowkes, Owner, The Clear AlternativeGeorge Fowkes Cropped

The Clear Alternative performs critical business development work for young clean technology companies. Services include market study and research, business planning and fund/grant raising, sales and project management, supplier selection and contracting.
Specialist topics: Market analysis and opportunity evaluation, supplier/partner/client development, project and interim management, market entry, ‘first deal’, product launch.

Graham Hastie, Managing Director, Bellfield Consulting: .
GrahamHastie

Bellfield consulting provides strategy, operations and rankings advice for the Higher Education sector.

Expertise: Higher education, strategy, operations, rankings.

 

 

 

David Hardy, Operations and Technical Director, Envirowales
David Hardy SMFEnvirowales is a recycler of lead-acid batteries and lead scrap materials.  Expertise: recycling.

 

 

 

 

 

Nick Laird, Chief Commercial Officer, Ceridian Corporation:
A business services company that helps customers maximise the power of their people, lower their costs and focus on what they do best. Ceridian’s suite of innovative managed HR solutions includes payroll and compensation, employee benefits administration, staffing, compliance, HR outsourcing and employee assistance programmes, work life, health & wellness and productivity management solutions.

Expertise: HR, business process outsourcing, payroll, compensation, employee benefits administration, staffing, compliance, tax filing, HR administration, HRO, employee assistance programs (EAP), work-life, health & wellness, productivity.

Chris Martin, CEO Spirogen Ltd and Chairman Crescent Diagnostics
Chris MartinA Chartered Director and highly qualified chemical engineer, Chris Martin took an MBA as the basis for a successful entrepreneurial career in the clean tech, high tech and biotech fields. He is Chief Executive of Spirogen, a clinical stage cancer drug development company and non- executive Chairman of Sciona inc and Crescent Diagnostics.

Chris is veteran of high tech start- ups and spinning out technological advances made by academic institutions into successful commercial companies. He started his career at the Atomic Research Establishment but his business mind led him into more commercial roles. After his MBA at the Swiss business school IMD, Chris led a management buy-out of consultancy Marex, setting up Paras Ltd as a consultancy to assist companies in the oil industry make sound technology decisions.

Chris set up Xenva as an early stage feed capital company to work with embryonic companies based on campus research as they grew. Spin-out companies he has worked with include Solcom, which develops web-enabled systems monitoring and management systems and Sciona a genetic personalised nutrition.

His interests in corporate finance and fund management include board membership of the RCM Technology Investment Trust PLC. He also holds the ICAEW Corporate Finance Qualification.

Expertise: startup experience, business funding / venture capital, e-commerce, international business development, creative career development, women in business.

Ian Peerless, Owner, Peerless Engineering Limited and Director IPKA Consultancy Limited

Ian has spent the majority of his career working for Shell and Corus in a range of positions including Operations Director, Strategy Director, Sales Manager and Logistics Manager. He is one of the founders of IPKA Consultancy Limited which spun out of Shell and which assists board members around the world to implement change. In parallel Peerless Engineering Limited pursues new product opportunities. A current project is the commercialisation of a robot designed for extreme oil and gas operations.

Expertise: Hydrocarbon project front end loading, subsurface engineering and operations, steel value chains and strategy, commercialisation of new products, mergers and acquisitions, driving change through large organisation

Andrew Phillipps, Successful Serial Entrepreneur
Andy PhillippsAndrew Phillipps is a entrepreneur whose professional engineering background and MBA has helped him to make his mark on a multitude of ambitious and innovative business ventures.  These include:

  • Co-founder of Active Hotels, the UK’s leading provider of technical solutions that enables hotels to sell rooms on 15,000 sites and through 84,000 travel agents
  • Chairman and founding investor of i20 water, a company set up to save the UK a fifth of the 3.5 billion litres of water it wastes a day
  • Chairman and part MBO of Toptable, the UK’s leading restaurant reservation, review and search site
  • Chairman of Greentraveller, a site that helps travellers reduce their carbon footprint
  • Director of Reevoo, a site that houses a collection of over one million customer reviews on electrical products.

Andrew lectures on entrepreneurship at INSEAD and London Business School.

Expertise: e-commerce, international business development, creative career development.

James Raby, SMF Treasurer and VC Specialist
James Raby, SMF Treasurer Opens the SMF Tax Debate 24 June 2015James Raby was formerly a Venture Capital Executive with the VC arm of Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) where he provided venture capital investment in early and middle stage media, wireless and technology companies.  SEB is one of northern Europe’s leading banks.

James has spent the majority of his career within the operations and general management functions of broadcast, media and wireless services companies including NTL Broadcast (now Arqiva) and VT Communications within Europe and Asia. James studied for his MBA at EAP in France in 1995 and was one of the first two Fellows to receive an MBA through the SMF scheme.

Expertise: New media, venture investment, restructuring, recovery & turnaround, privatisation & cultural change, innovation & due diligence, finance, banking, wholesale banking, retail banking, mutual funds, life insurance, pension.

Bill Sneyd, Founder and Chief Operating Officer, HomeSun:
Bill SneydHomeSun is the UK’s leading ‘Free Solar’ business – bringing the benefits of renewable energy to tens of thousands of households. HomeSun makes home renewable energy commonplace, starting with Solar PV. The company is breaking down barriers of price and complexity to make it easy for homes to generate their own energy.

Expertise: Solar PV, renewable energy, free solar PV.

Mark Spence, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of three businesses
Mark Spence SMFMark is a successful entrepreneur with diverse and successful businesses in engineering, chemicals and mobile communications. He is chief executive and founder of:

  • Telemetrics, which was set up to exploit the revolution in M2M technology, improving the service for engineers and other personnel ‘on the move’
  • Cosmetic Rheologies, an innovator in polymer technology for hair and skincare products.
  • Mass Measuring, which provides weighing, conveying and process control equipment and utilises the same expertise as Telemetrics
  • CRL and Telemetrics have won SMART awards for innovation.
    Specialist topics: International business development, creative career development.

Gordon Wylie, Director, Free Green Electricity Corporation: Free Green Electricity Corporation is focused on the free installation and free long-term maintenance of small-scale renewable energy generation systems for both domestic and commercial property owners in the UK, and on delivering an attractive sustainable financial return for investors. Expertise: Renewable energy, solar power.

Richard Robinson, MD, Heathrow Express
Richard RobinsonRichard describes himself as being the beneficiary of a “top-class engineering education”, first at Nottingham University, then during an eight-year spell with ICI Acrylics. Richard studied for an MBA in general management and venture finance in HEC, Paris where he won an exchange programme place at the Stern School of Business, New York. Today, Richard is Managing Director of Heathrow Express – a business unit of BAA Heathrow. He is a commercially driven executive with full P&L experience running a £100 million turnover, £1 billion asset base business.

Expertise:

  • Working as Operations Director for a subsidiary of Anglo American, charged with turning around the company’s manufacturing operations
  • Brand building and business development whilst leading a consumer-facing startup business
  • Modern sales and marketing techniques, coupled with an engineer’s natural understanding of the operational and technical side of business – providing ‘the perfect platform of skills for senior business leadership roles

Case studies correct at the time of publication.  SMFs may have moved to new posts since publication.  For the latest career information on our Fellows visit our SMF Profile Page.

Press Releases

Manufacturing Company Performs Strongly in Higher Value Sector

Manufacturing and engineering company Ilika plc has recently been floated on AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s international market for smaller growing companies. The listing comes just days after Lord Sainsbury’s address at the annual SMF (Sainsbury Management Fellows’ Society) dinner, whereby he stressed the importance to continue to move the UK’s manufacturing and service industries into higher-value areas to help them to compete in global markets.

Ilika is an advanced materials company which accelerates the discovery of new and patentable materials that are used by the energy, electronics and biomedical sectors. Experiments carried out by the Ilika can be executed 10 to 100 times faster than using traditional techniques.

IIika’s chief executive Graeme Purdy is a Sainsbury Management Fellow. . As such he received a scholarship to study for an MBA . SMF was established in 1987 by Lord Sainsbury to position engineers as UK business leaders. Each year up to 14 scholarships are awarded to top class engineers.

“Ilika is the perfect example of how a UK manufacturing company is performing strongly in a higher value sector. The SMF Society strongly believes that to increase the competitiveness of the UK economy more directors are needed in UK boardrooms that have the knowledge of how products are imagined, designed, made and work, combined with complementary business and management skills set within a global mindset. Graeme Purdy’s has proven this with the success of Ilika,” said SMF president David Falzani.

“We are delighted by the strong support new and existing shareholders have shown for developing the business through an AIM listing. Ilika is already generating revenues from its own two successful biomedical products and has a pipeline of materials partnered with large multinational companies. This listing marks the beginning of a new phase in the Company’s development, where its technology will help meet the need for advanced new materials, particularly in the energy and electronic industries,” said Ilika chief executive, Graeme Purdy.

The income generated through the floating of Ilika will be used to fund the further development of identified materials for the energy, electronics and biomedical sectors.

Press Releases

Re-engineering the Board

Reengineering the boardHR directors must re-engineer the board of directors to both mitigate and capitalise upon an increasingly ‘crash’ prone global marketplace

Many of the news events of the last two years and the damage done to company balance sheets and brands show that the traditional focus on financial, legal and accountancy qualifications and experience within UK company boards are not enough to avoid business disaster, according to SMF (Sainsbury Management Fellows’ Society). The organisation is urging HR directors to consider professional engineers with business qualifications and experience as an attractive complementary skill base for board director positions.

The call comes as new research commissioned by SMF demonstrates a discrepancy between perception and recruitment reality when it comes to professional engineers’ recognition as board-level appointees and the lack of diversity in the viewpoints represented around the table that this brings.

SMF believes that to increase the competitiveness of the UK economy more directors are needed in UK boardrooms that have the knowledge of how products are imagined, designed, made and work, combined with complementary business and management skills set within a global mindset. This will help drive organisations forward, maximising innovation and the opportunities of new markets while controlling and mitigating the inherent risks in rapid growth businesses.

SMF has undertaken a survey among 100 FTSE250 HR directors to establish the level of awareness within the HR community of the suitability of engineers to fulfil these important roles. Results show that, while 86% surveyed were open-minded about employing directors with non-financial or legal backgrounds, only 66% believe that engineers have the skills and attributes necessary to move onto boards.
“Our research shows a discrepancy between perception and recruitment reality,” says SMF President, David Falzani. “Over 250,000 engineers are employed in the UK, contributing to the
economic strength of the nation and it is essential that organisations understand the benefits they can derive from having an engineer among its management team.”

The SMF research goes on to reveal that while HR directors do acknowledge core competencies of engineers, including the ability to deal with complex issues (both financial and operational), to lead cross functional and cross geographical teams and to provide a rigorous yet balanced risk
management and governance function, only half of the companies taking part in the survey have board directors with engineering backgrounds.

Where engineers have MBA qualifications and business experience, HR directors surveyed felt reassured that engineers had the skills to move into the boardroom (80%).

“Historically, engineers have not been seen as a natural choice to be members of boards of blue chip organisations,” explains David Falzani. “Conventional wisdom means candidates tend to come from financial and legal disciplines. However, HR directors are discovering that once engineers possess the requisite legal, financial, and marketing training, they have a breadth of skills that can be used to help organisations grow faster and more reliably.”

Professional engineers, who by the very nature of their job are creative problems solvers are not seen as board material and are often lost to more forward thinking international organisations. HR directors can avoid this talent leakage by encouraging their professional engineers with leadership qualities to expand their existing skills by studying for a first class business education and degree qualification.

“Up and down the country, the collective skills and experience of the boardroom are being analysed,” concludes David Falzani. Board directors have traditionally not been trained to manage the risk of failure positively by working with variables where mistakes, unknown consequences or side-effects might develop. These risk analysis skills are an integral part of the skill set of engineers and we are urging HR directors to reflect this when assessing the skills mix of their board.”

SMF has produced a booklet for HR directors encouraging them to seek more information on the role of professional engineers in the corporate world. Within the booklet is a skills matrix to assist in the assessment of an organisation’s needs and how a business-qualified, professional engineer can enhance the board. Copies of the booklet are available from SMF.