A Breed Apart...If we are to understand Corporate Man we must ask where he comes from and how does he live? Jim Hilton peers into the insular world of the high flying executive to survey the lifestyles of corporate man.
Rodney Chase will be 56 on 12th May this year. As Deputy Group Chief Executive of BP Amoco (shortly to become BP Amoco Arco) he is either the second or the third most important man in the UK’s largest company - behind Chief Executive Sir John Browne and Chairman Peter Sutherland. By ‘largest company’ is meant not the company with the most employees or the highest sales, but the company with the largest capital. BP Amoco has the 5th largest capitalisation of any company in the world, and is arguably the 5th most powerful company in the world.
The Life of an Oilman
What of Rodney Chase? Who is this man? Born during the Second World War, he went to Liverpool University in 1961 and did a BA in History whilst The Beatles played The Cavern Club. At the age of 21, Rodney joined BP and has remained there all his working life, climbing slowly through various jobs in marketing, oil trading, shipping and finance to become Chief Executive of BP Exploration and a Managing Director of the Company at the age of 49. Rodney earns approximately £2 million per year and owns a four story five bedroom house at 4 Eaton Terrace, Belgravia, London - worth approximately £2.5 million. He‘s been married to Diana for thirty one years and his two children - in their late twenties - have left home.
He‘s a notoriously keen golfer; indeed it is said that BP Ex. has held its global meetings at locations chosen especially for the proximity of a good golf course.
Clearly Rodney spends the majority of his hectic life - 5 or 6 days a week, perhaps 50 weeks a year - within the world of BP Amoco.
Travelling the globe visiting company assets and in dialogue with the 400 or so people who manage the company (a mere 0.4% of the total work force). But how representative is Rodney of the world beyond BP Amoco? How representative is he of the ‘class‘ of corporate executives of which he is a part.
The Financial Times publishes an annual list of top companies, graded according to their capitalisation, every September. The F.T Top 10 U.K Companies for the past three years have been as follows:
It is an arduous task building up information about the directors of all these companies, especially as they are constantly in flux - changing jobs, retiring, moving house, etc. But (aided by the Corporate Watch Address Book) we can look closely at the Top 10 in September 1997.
At this point there were 144 people holding the 150 posts of executive and non-executive directors of the Top 10 (six people held post on two companies) - of these we have addresses for 83 and detailed personal biographies for 69.
So how typical of these 144 executives is Rodney? For a start he is male - only 10 out of the 144 were women, which means that 93% of the directors of the Top10 were men (though only one CEO of the entire current FT-SE 100 is a woman).
And he‘s white, like 94% of the other directors. As we‘ve noted Rodney is 56, this makes him an archetype of his peers. More of the 144 were born in 1943 than in any other year and a good 42% were born during the Second World War (1939 - 1945). So Rodney appears fairly typical - a white Anglo Saxon male, born in the War, growing up in the Austerity Years of the 1950‘s.
He spent his twenties in the calm certainty of a British corporation whilst the cultural turmoil of the 1960‘s raged outside; raised his children during the anxious decade of the 1970‘s, before spending much of the 1980‘s and early ‘90‘s in postings in Australia (‘82-‘85) and the U.S.A. (‘89-‘94).
From Oxbridge to West London
Whatever the background of the family that Rodney comes from he, like his fellow directors, has become absorbed by - and has absorbed - the culture of the British Establishment.
Rodney is atypical in that he attended a non-Oxbridge U.K. university. Forty percent of the 144 directors for whom we have biographies and who grew up in the U.K. attended Oxford or Cambridge universities. These two universities, a cultural continuum of the Public School system into tertiary education, still dominate the boardrooms of the U.K. For sure, 35% of those studied did not attend any university, but Oxbridge has a disproportionate influence on the culture of the British Establishment.
Possibly the clearest representation of the way in which the ‘industrial elite‘ forms itself is given by looking at where the 144 directors live. In this, Rodney is typical. He lives at the heart of Belgravia, it is perhaps 20 minutes walk to each of the adjoining areas of South Kensington, Knightsbridge and Mayfair. Within the small radius of these four neighbourhoods, live a remarkable 18% of the directors for whom we have addresses. A fifth of all the FT-SE 10 directors we know to live in the U.K. live in this tiny pocket of West London, an area synonymous with the life of the British rich.
Perhaps this gathering of the elite is not surprising. The 144 are extremely wealthy individuals, why not spend it on expensive property? Many of us like to live close to our friends and work colleagues, why should top executives be any different?
Rodney lives just 5 minutes walk from John Browne, his immediate senior at BP Amoco.
The Cotton Wool Effect
We‘ve noted that at work Rodney spends all his working (and the majority of his waking) hours in dialogue with perhaps 0.4% of the work force of his company.
Even if he wanted to it would take him years just to meet all of his employees, he could never know more than a tiny fraction of them. He lives and works apart from the vast majority of his workers. During his leisure time he is shielded from the harsh realities of life by the perimeters of his favourite golf-clubs. And at home he enjoys the quiet affluent surrounds of Belgravia.
Inevitably the upbringing and educations of the corporate alpha male are disproportionately privileged but whatever their origins the ascent to the boardroom heights brings with it tremendous wealth and influence. It is a meritocratic system of sorts, but a self-selecting one, bestowing its highest honours only on particular kinds of men. Perhaps corporate man represents a new ruling class, wielding power outside of public awareness or accountability and totally insulated from the consequences their own actions. Rodney Chase, like so many of his peers lives a life entirely insulated from ordinary society…