UK Associate

What made you want to join Bath Consultancy Group?
Due to my 25 years in broadcasting I have become very sensitive to words - especially those people use to describe themselves. Bath Consultancy Group is the only consulting organisation I have found that mentions ‘higher purpose’ - the real reason we all do what we do.

As my specialism is Corporate Social Responsibility, which in the best cases becomes a manifestation of a company’s higher purpose, the opportunity to help people and organisations to discover their higher purpose is a great privilege, and I believe Bath is uniquely well equipped to do this.

What has struck you most since joining the team?
There’s a great collegiate atmosphere - discussions in the office always seem to be enriched by someone popping their head round the door with an insightful comment. There’s also a real commitment to taking clients forward with new thinking and new techniques, and that’s very refreshing.

What is your major contribution to the business going to be?
Corporate Social Responsibility is gaining in importance on corporate agendas, partly due to new Company Law requirements to report on social, ethical and environmental concerns, but also to a growing realisation that all these aspects really contribute to business success. Your work already touches on many aspects of CSR, and I intend that my contribution will be to draw the threads together and present coherent solutions to clients who are looking to improve the effectiveness of their CSR by integrating it into everything they do.

Over the past months, what kind of moments have inspired you?
I was greatly encouraged by the way CSR issues reached the mainstream in the second half of 2006 - especially concern for the environment, with the film ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ playing to packed cinemas and the Stern Report providing the hard economics to convince us that it is better to act now rather than later.

Oddly, I was also inspired by the passing of right-wing economist Milton Friedman, who died in November - he was passionately anti-CSR, but in a valedictory article I applied his 1970s rules for companies to the modern context and found that they took you in the direction of CSR…

What have you read recently that has informed your learnings?
On the book front, Peter Senge’s ’Presence‘ impressed me, and took me back to read Joe Jaworski’s ’Synchronicity‘ - both excellent combinations of thought leadership and biographies of lives lived towards a higher purpose.

In other publications, Michael Porter’s December Harvard Business Review article linking competitive advantage to corporate social responsibility was striking both for his concept of ‘Corporate Social Integration‘ and the fact that such a leading corporate thinker should write that he is “convinced that CSR will become increasingly important to competitive success”.

I also loved the graffiti artist Banksy’s ’Wall and Piece‘, a book recording his guerrilla artworks placed alongside ’proper’ art in public galleries - some of them were there for weeks before officialdom realised!

What would you like clients and colleagues to know about you?
That I am passionate about new ideas and new ways of working, but always with the human aspect to the fore - too many innovations founder on the rocks of human indifference, and getting the spirit right is always essential.

What would you most like your career with Bath Consultancy Group to be remembered for?
I would like to leave behind a deeper understanding of why companies exist (no, it’s not just to make a profit) and to be remembered as someone who helped others to discover their true core values, and created the context where they could bring them to work.