Episode 4 The Bottom Line

And now on BBC News, The Bottom Line, with Evan Davis.

You enjoy a life in power. The authority, the exhilaration, the

attention. Then, suddenly, it comes to an end. You could be Prime

Minister, a football manager. Today, we will talk to three leading

business executives about life after they were in charge. How do they

build a new career? How do they look back on their old one? Each week,

influential business leaders gather in London for the BBC Radio 4

programme, The Bottom Line. You can see it as well as hear it.

I have three experts with me in the studios, three ex-executives. --

exes. It would be a good place to start to hear about what you were

doing and what you are doing now. You come from different places. You

are in children's publishing, a fashion group. Let's start with

Gucci. You with the chief executive there. What state was it in when you

took it over? It was in a great state. As we saw in the late 90s, we

have the warring 90s and the coming together of groups by families who

did this. -- which companies were in this? Gucci, you've sent the run, a

high jewellery brand, and the famous UK brand Stella McCartney. -- Yves

Saint-Laurent. It was a natural ending. In 5-7 years, people were in

the same position. After that time, you do diminish little bit. I don't

want to say complacency but for the sixth or seventh time do I need to

do budget rounds with all of these guys and girls who are trying to get

a low-budget? I know the tricks, do I want to do it again? Did you step

down? The original founders of the company, which was then called PPR,

they would owners of the Gucci Group, it became more than 70% of

the total profit of the listed company. At a certain moment in

time, he said, and he is ten years younger than me, that there would be

a day when we would have to merge both positions and it would be

either him or me. And then in January, 2011, I said I thought long

and hard at -- he said he wanted to take my job. What is your main

activity now? I always thought I loved engaging with people. Thinking

through challenges and managing brands. It is still what I do. That

I combine it with a lot of free time and adventures. I love sailing. I

sailed across the ocean with my youngest daughter. Thank you very

much, Robert. I next guest is Kate Wilson. Used to be the managing

director Macmillan is books, then Scholastic UK. And you brought some

popular children's titles to Britain. I did. I brought to Britain

things like Judy Bloom's Forever, then Hunger Games. I also have

worked on other great names, like horrible histories, among others.

You didn't get Harry Potter. I am one of the 20 publishers who turned

it down. But I have never done before in 60 check out whether I

really was in charge of the company at that time. Your career is

interesting. You are running children's publishing companies and

running quite sizeable operations. The new thought, I'm going to be

adult publisher. What went wrong? What went wrong... I really had two

of the most exciting, I think, jobs in terms of publishing in the UK. I

had grown children's books significantly and then I had

Scholastic. One day I was called again by a company that was keen to

hire me and they had tried before. I said, all right, I will come and

have a chat. And I did. I ended up in an adult publishing world. I

ended up as managing director of a division of an adult publishing

house. Were you good at it? I was fired after five months. Tell us

about how they got rid of you. After five months, I submitted a strategy

paper and that was not in line I think it would be fair to say that

the direction that the head of the company thought was the right

direction. There had been a little bit of silence after the paper. I

asked to leave that day. You asked to leave? No, I was asked to leave.

When they tell you to leave, you are out the door by the end of that day?

Yes, you are out. It would have been much more painful if this had

happened within a context in which I made a very serious investment.

Emotional and time and effort. What, as it was, this was five months and

I think both sides had a clear and growing recognition, perhaps most

acute on the part of my boss, that I was not well suited to this role.

The truth is, having done my shuffle out on the Friday afternoon, I think

it was, with a big cardboard box of photographs of the kids and the

BlackBerry, which I was allowed to hang onto for a bit, at 2am on the

Saturday, I nudged my ever patient husband a and said, what are we

going to do? We will set up a children's publishing company in the

basement. That's what we will do. He didn't say, don't be ridiculous, he

said, but the business plan? Either next morning, we had a business

plan. -- by the next morning. Did the kids say, mum has gone mad! The

kids came down and the youngest one said, there were bits of paper and

half drunk cups of tea around the bed, I said with a going to set up a

company in the basement. She is eight, she looked at me and said,

you will fail. You will fail, Mum. A proper job! My third guest, John

Brown, former head of British Petroleum. We upgrade to call you

John for the sake of this programme. You are famously called by the

Financial Times the sun king, because it had a law and industrial

career at BP. How much did the market capitalisation of the company

grow while you with their? Because it was a good run. I had over 12

years as Chief Executive of BP. I suppose the best measure is the

increased the market capital why a factor of five or six. It grew quite

it. It was a pretty good company but small. And focused on a couple of

places, Alaska and the North Sea. In fact, a predecessor said to me, it's

no bad thing. You get into a ring with some heavyweight and if you are

a lightweight you can scamper between their legs. I thought, that

was quite a good advantage. But, actually, the heavyweights would

usually win. You needed a balance sheet, with real muscles, to do

anything in this area. You took over an eco-, the American oil company?

We did. -- Amico. And we took over Burmah Castrol as well, which used

to own BP. You also created this very large Russian joint-venture

team. That's right. It is interesting. Kate said it was less

painful for her to be edged out of the publishing company because she

hadn't invested perhaps quite as much in it, as she had in some of

the other careers. You had invested everything in BP. It was your

family, your entire career. You were an apprentice there from university

days. That's right. I typically joined on my 18th birthday. BP paid

me to go to Cambridge. Actually, my father, my late father had worked

for BP. This was a very long history. Oil in the veins almost.

Yes. Some people will know about the manner of your departure because it

was a bit easy. Can I get you to summarise it? Absolutely. I left

because I resigned, it was I got myself into a terrible mess. I am

gay and I am of a generation that could neither admit it to itself for

a little while, nor to the outside world. When I was at university,

people who did gay things, homosexual acts, usually went to

prison and stayed there a long time. So, lots of things changed but of

course people don't change as fast as their environment. So, I tried to

hide the relationship, a very bad relationship, with a guy who sold

the story to a well-known newspaper. And we tried to stop him and, in the

heat of the moment, I told a lie in the court, which I then corrected.

Ten days later. But it was fatal. And I realised at that very moment

that I had to resign at actually, because the court case was going

through the courts, I couldn't do it. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone

what had happened. So I had four months of this, until the court

documents were released. So, I resigned. I walked out of the

building on the 1st of May. But you decided well before the whole thing

exploded in the public arena. decided well before the whole thing

was watching the end come. You knew it was going to happen. You just

didn't know the date and the time. But when we were given 24 hours

notice, but was it. But it was messy before that? Because the company

were beginning to feel that they needed to get new blood into the

role and they were preannouncing your departure and you were kind of

saying, I don't want to go. There was a kind of... To an extent. The

thing about a succession, it is really handled well. Because

succession is about the transformation of power, of course

it is, and the moment the transfer is at least even imagined it

happens. So, I think there was a leak and then there were people who

were apparently trying to help me, who said, he will stay. Other people

said I would go. Messy. A big mess. There was nine months of mess. What

are you doing now? I am still in the energy business, you would expect me

to be, but I am in private equity in the energy field only. That's my

business activity. But I like to think that, in a very small way, I

write books and I have time to myself to be able to enjoy London

and Venice and the rest of the world. We have had the briefest

overviews of your careers. You have all really risen to the top of

something and then it stops and in fact these things tend to stop quite

suddenly. I suppose that interesting thing to ask, maybe you can each

tell me how you were feeling at the time, is the day after. Because

people often when they finish something big deal a gaping hole.

What do you do? The phone doesn't ring, though one is interested. If

the essence of that. Quite often, people start confusing their role as

CEO with who they are, actually. And they are inside. I'm a lot less

funny now that I'm no longer the CEO in a room of people laughing at my

jokes. I tell the same jokes but hardly anybody laughs any more. I

use that as an example but this is how people treat you. This is

nothing to do with me but the role that I played. I was rather

devastated, actually. I'm quite blurry about my identity and part of

my identity was someone who had run this publishing company and I liked

my status of that in mind for world. In my case, I felt the risk was that

I was jumping too quickly into something else. I did have to

balance up questions about the loss of status, financial loss, frankly,

there are a whole lot of questions that I was addressing at that point,

which were quite tricky. You were the same person as the match one. I

spent the first three days avoiding the paparazzi. People were trying to

take photographs through my apartment windows. Every time I

left, someone would be on a motorbike, chasing me. But quite

quickly, you are no longer important and you realise that in business,

everything that you achieve is completely femoral, actually, and so

you have to look at that and say it's ephemeral. I remember all the

exciting as I did, lots of stories and lots of people, but now I must

think about the future and that is exactly what I did. And I realised I

had to come back to the things that I think I was quite good at, which

is energy and business. That had to be the core and then other things

that excited me on top of it. Do you really feel that what you did was

ephemeral? Decades of your life? Do you really think what you achieved

was ephemeral? I think so. Business is as good as the leader who is

leading it today and the leader who makes it good for tomorrow. I'm the

chairman of Tate. All the Tate galleries in the UK. And I look at

all the things inside those places and say, now that is not ephemeral.

There was a lot of ephemeral stuff. Thousands and thousands of artists

who nobody remembers, but some of it does last. I would agree with John.

Business is not only one person who happens to be the leader at a

certain moment in time. Often, people become leader of an

organisation, a new leader, and they say, now we shall do this. And I

always find it a bit confronting. BP is not ephemeral. That is not what I

meant. BP is the sum total of millions of things that other people

have done. Some of BP will be ephemeral. Some of Gucci is

ephemeral. But right at the corner, it is adding value to mankind in one

way or another and that is the purpose of business. We have heard

quite a lot about your departures and the first moments after that.

One observation is how useful it is and how important it is to have some

other interests, something to get your teeth into, some hinterland,

some family, something that is there for you. John, your life was very

wrapped up in the business. I get the impression, Robin, yours was

perhaps a little less so. I always said that I stopped on Friday

evening at seven o'clock and I literally, physically switched off

my phone and my blackberry and I switched them on again on Monday

morning. It's better to have a good rest for two days and spend your

time in a completely different environment with 1's children and

1's wife and then go full speed again for the rest of the week. It's

a discipline you have to allow yourself. Kate, you are obsessive. I

am obsessive. I am not so good at dividing things. I don't want to

come across as the token woman multitasker, but I would talk about

the activities of me personally as much as the activities of the

business. When I stopped, they said that for the first nine months, you

have got to say no, and you have to remember that. Before you know it,

you fill up your agenda and you have not had the time to put a strategic

framework together as to how the next phase in one's life has to look

like. I agree with the weighting. In my case, I waited three months and

that was enough. It was not a strategy, like saying I will spend

2.2 days doing this and the other. I filtered out of it. I had to make a

realistic assessment of myself, and it was very important, to me at

least, to look in the mirror and say to myself, you cannot go on to a

public board because no one is going to ask you. No one is going to ask

you after the way you left BP because you are too controversial.

Remember that and don't do something silly like, oh, that didn't matter.

It matters to people. And so I said, here is what I should do will stop

and I went and did something in the private business area and I'm very

pleased that I did that because it opened up new vistas I had never

seen before. Do you look back on your legacy as successful or not?

You said, as you look back quite a lot of it is ephemeral. Let me be a

bit mean. Some say it's worse than ephemeral. When you leave, the new

guy has to pick up your mess. When you people take over, it's better to

build on the strength of the organisation than the finals the

weaknesses that there are, that there always will be and say now I

am going to change everything. -- define all the weaknesses. That is

not reality. If you jump on a moving train, it's not a still standing

train that you can put an engine in. There are chief executives today

who, when they took over, people said the end is nigh and that is not

true. They assess ten, 20 years of activity against two quarters and

they say these two quarters don't look as good as the last ten years.

I find myself looking at these large companies, perfectly well run, and I

think really positively about how well they are doing. I do. And I

think it's interesting about this ephemeral question. I'm still seeing

what McMillan is doing with the Gruffalo. I will be absolutely

furious if they drop that ball. They should make it the most exciting and

fantastic and most forever piece of children's publishing ever. Have you

ever given advice to the new guys? I have done the opposite. They would

organise on Fridays a pensioner's lunch once a month and people would

come in and out of the company all the time who, even though they had

lost touch for a few years, still had an opinion and it's not helpful.

When I left BP, I did not go back into the building for five years. I

think it's so wrong for former chief executive is to offer any advice, to

make any comment at all, unless they are asked. I'm a supplier to

Scholastic, so I'm not in a position to advise. What has been very

striking in this very fascinating conversation is I get the impression

that none of you entirely initiated your departure at the time that it

occurred from the company from which it occurred, and yet the impression

I have from all of you is that it was a great step for you. You were

pushed out that oil, the parachute opened and you all feel liberated by

the fact that your career have I. -- pushed out that door. I remember I

walked out that building after I came to an agreement and I

immediately phoned my wife of 33 years. And I said this is the last

step in our freedom. And the last bit of freedom that I really wanted

was the freedom to manage my own agenda and not having an agenda that

was completely filled three years in advance. I love being an

entrepreneur. I love having the autonomy of that. That comes at a

price because we could raise significantly more money than we

have chosen to raise but I choose not to do it because right at this

moment it's not as important to me as that freedom. When I left BP, and

awful lot of things changed for me. My whole life changed because I came

out. And that was one of the most extraordinary things. And I also

changed my professional life at the same time. It was an extraordinary

combination of things and I'm very pleased it happened. I really am

pleased. And it's now convinced me, of course, that I need to make sure

I keep changing what I'm doing because I find that very exciting.

You are feeling freer and I'm feeling the free-flowing reflections

from you. Thank you, all of you, for joining us today. And thank you for

listening. I will be back next week. Don't forget, the downloads of this

programme are available. Details are on our website and you can always

listen to it on BBC radio. We also like to get your e-mails. Drop us a

line. It's a case of mixed fortunes as far

as the weather is concerned. Saturday will be the best day for

many of us. It will be windy and there will be some rain, with the

best of the weather in the