The rebranding of John Browne has been a long and, to those of us living overseas, instructive affair. Readers will recall the unedifying circumstances leading to his dismissal from BP 10 years ago, when the country's usual gang of disagreeable and unkindly figures such as Paul Dacre and Tom Bower were snapping busily at his heels. Much has happened since.
In the classic style of the British establishment, his disgrace has been followed by a steady stalactitic drip of preferments and praise, committees and chairs and board memberships, much aided by quires of unctuous journalism, most tending to focus on the impeccable taste and artistic judgment (not to say financial savvy) with which he has furnished and stocked his digs in the fashionable quarters of London and Venice.
Now, after an inevitable confessional book about the benefits of ‘coming out' in the boardroom (which Apple's Tim Cook seems to have managed with rather less fanfare) and a pair of politely received business advice manuals, we have this very much more significant and satisfactory volume, which offers up an impressively repurposed John Browne. Here he is as public intellectual and national guidance counsellor, bent on directing the country out of its current post-imperial innovative quagmire and towards the sunlit uplands of a high-technology utopia, and presenting the very best of what he believes tomorrow's world has to offer to us all.
Though Browne is a corporate man to his very soul — variously described by former BP courtiers as organized, impeccable, driven, remote, aloof, and fond of quoting Intel's Andy Grove's remark that ‘only the paranoid survive' — he likes to say that he is, by intellectual preference, an engineer. He tells us that he became one in large part out of reverence for his adored mother — a Transylvanian Jew and survivor of Auschwitz — and her imperturbable optimism. So ‘when it came to earning a living I wanted to solve problems that others had not yet even conceived of', he writes here, and engineering was his chosen means of doing so.
That period of his professional life is now over; no longer enjoying the sheet-anchor of BP, for whom he worked for all of his career, nor of his mother, who died in 2000, he has decided here to delve into the minds of others who are themselves busily solving technical problems ‘not even conceived of', and who thereby are maybe bettering the world. This book, an engaging and stimulating trek through their thinking, is the result.
In Britain it is widely held that engineering has lately had something of a bad rap, with today's legatees of such technological giants as Watt, Whitworth, Maudslay and Brunel a handful of plucky but diminished figures, such as Clive Sinclair and James Dyson. Wisely, Browne — whose boardroom Rolodex must have been immeasurably vast — looks beyond his homeland, and such people, to find those who are really sharpening the cutting edges of the various disciplines that engage him. He looks far, but, as I will suggest later, maybe not far enough.
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