Interview with Dr Martin Read CBE

Martin Read was born in February 1950, in Tooting, London where he lived until the age of three when the family moved to Basingstoke.

Martin went to the local primary school and then, having passed his eleven plus, he attended Queen Mary’s Grammar School in Basingstoke. He says: “I was fortunate in that it was a very good school and like many people at that time, it was the route onwards and upwards for someone from a modest, lower middle-class background with a good brain. I did extremely well and I got a place at Cambridge.  That was a tremendous opportunity for me and was an important foundation stone for my future career.”

Both of his parents encouraged their two sons to study hard. Martin adds: “My father was a very clever man but he came from a poor family, so after matriculation, roughly the equivalent of O levels or GCSE today, he had to go out and work.  My mother left school when she was fourteen. My parents, particularly my mother, always placed huge emphasis on working hard at school.  Although she didn’t have much in the way of education, my mother was always desperately keen that I and my brother should do well.”

 Martin enjoyed his education, playing sports, acting in plays and studying physics, chemistry, pure maths and applied maths at A level. He says: “I worked hard, I suppose I was really a bit of a swot.”

In 1968, after completing his A levels and working for a while as a bread roundsman, he went to Peterhouse, Cambridge to study Natural Sciences. Having completed his degree, in 1971, Martin considered his options which included getting a job or continuing his education. He explains: “I’d grown up thinking that being a scientist was my mission in life. I’d always wanted an academic career but some of the gloss had worn off and I wasn’t really very sure what to do.

Amongst other options, he was offered a job by the Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern and the opportunity to study for a PhD at Leicester. However, he also applied for a position at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. He continues: “This was a time when money was tight and they actually didn’t take anyone on that year.  However, they contacted me and offered me a scholarship to do a three year DPhil at Oxford which I accepted. I thought – well, that’s quite a nice way to spend three years, it’ll give me a chance to find out what being a research scientist is like. In some ways, it was the biggest non-decision I made in my life but also one of the best.”

He describes the experience of doing research at Oxford as being “really good” and giving him the opportunity to “complete his education in all sorts of different ways”.  He explains: “It is fascinating being at the frontiers of knowledge, so doing a research degree was special from that point of view. You learn to analyse data, and probably more importantly, explain it and create the narrative around it. However, Martin stresses that doing a research degree was just part of the much broader experience he had at Oxford and that he really felt he acquired a rounded education there. He read widely, continued his interest in acting and directing and played football. He also taught himself better French and German from scratch. He adds: “That exercise was really important because what it told me is that if you’re prepared to put the effort in, then there are very few things you can’t teach yourself.”

The experience at Oxford also enabled Martin to recognise that, while he enjoyed research science, he was more motivated by “making things happen through people, not thinking wonderful equations in a back room somewhere”.

At the end of his studies, Martin applied for a large number of roles and received ten job offers, ranging from Unilever and the insurance company, Willis Faber, to the civil service fast stream and the Ministry of Defence.  However, he opted for a position with Overseas Containers Limited (OCL), a consortium of four British shipping firms including P&O and Ocean Transport &Trading. These companies had created OCL to pool their investments to containerise the British shipping trades. Martin would go on to spend seven years with the company which would include an overseas posting.

He says: “I joined them as a sort of mature graduate trainee …  I had six months learning the ropes in the Liverpool regional office.  … I liked the people there and really got on with them.” As well learning the ropes, Martin also carried out an analysis of how effectively the container base was using its trailers. His report got him noticed at head office and he was appointed as an assistant to the corporate planner.

Martin explains: “It was a fantastic opportunity because although I was as a relatively junior nerk, I was up in and around the directors’ floor. I went to the budget and the strategic planning meetings.  I was the junior gofer but I was in the room and I saw how these discussions took place which was tremendously formative as I was involved in the whole process of putting together a plan and seeing it being reviewed.” Martin also continued to use his scientific skills working on projects but says that “most of all, it was the experience of seeing how the top people made business decisions” that was so invaluable.

While working as assistant corporate planner, Martin had to work closely with the finance department and decided to self-study for the Certified Diploma in Accounting Finance so that he could “take on the accountants on equal terms.”  He was awarded first place in the examination.

At the end of his time in corporate planning, Martin was posted abroad. Usually graduates were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Singapore or Japan but Martin was sent to South Africa. He explains: “This was June 1976 and three things happened that week.  There were the Soweto riots in South Africa, my wife found out she was pregnant and my company said ‘we’re containerising the South African trade and you’re going to be the lucky graduate trainee who gets to be sent out to work with our agents, Safmarine, to help make it all happen’.” Despite their reservations, Martin and his wife decided to accept the posting and spent “two great years” there.

Reflecting on this part of his career, Martin notes: “I always say to people that there’s two things you should try to do in your twenties; one is to live and work abroad for a while, and the second is to do something that involves selling, because I think persuading people to do something which they might not initially want to do is a very important skill in life.”

Upon his return to the UK, Martin became operational planning manager in the company’s biggest container base in Barking. Later, he would go on to run a big development project to design and implement a new export documentation system. However, after seven years with Overseas Containers, Martin decided it was time to move on.

In 1981, Martin took up an opportunity to join International Paint, part of Courtaulds, as Deputy Corporate Commercial Director of its Marine Division. He would soon progress to become Corporate Commercial Director.

Courtaulds was a leader in marine paint with a thirty per cent market share worldwide. Martin says: “It was an exciting and very interesting company because it had a serious global position. Technology, marketing and commercial controls were run from the centre but operations were carried out by a large number of subsidiaries scattered round the world, smallish companies mostly, that would manufacture and apply the paint.  It could be in new building territories like Brazil and South Korea, or big maintenance areas like Portugal and the Gulf, or worldwide for the supply of ships’ stores.  You were dealing with shipowners in very different countries like Greece, Norway and Japan. It was a hugely international business.”

Martin’s department controlled the international price lists, the big deals and contractual agreements, the ingredients that went into the paint based on the price of the raw materials, and stockholding policy. He adds: “It was a great place to learn about business and there were some really good people running the company. You had this worldwide global marketing chess game on the one hand and on the other you’d be visiting relatively small subsidiaries and getting your hands dirty on things like where’s the cash, who owes us money, why’s the inventory so high”.

 Martin reflects that “International business has been the core of my career. Because International Paint was such a well-run, international business with different cultures and different behaviours, it was a great learning curve for me”

After four years with International Paint, Martin decided he needed “to do a big line role” to develop his career. He was invited by a head-hunter to meet Lord Weinstock, “a giant of British industry”.  Although the meeting seemed to go terribly, Martin subsequently realised that Weinstock had just been disagreeing with him to test his ability to think quickly and respond intelligently. He was offered a job at GEC-Marconi as an assistant director, supporting head office initiatives in marketing and business development with the expectation that the next substantial line role in the company would fall to him. Martin believes that the combination of his scientific background and his experience of international business appealed to GEC, adding: “Developing businesses internationally was not something that the company was particularly strong on.”

Martin spent a year as assistant director and was involved with the first Plessey bid, and a potential joint venture in Spain, amongst other things.  He was then offered the post of General Manager at Marconi Secure Radio, a defence communications company. He explains: “There was a business in Portsmouth that had got into a hell of a mess and was losing large sums of money. I was asked to go down and take it over.” Martin had to begin by reducing the size of the organisation from around 750 to less than 500. He adds: “It was quite a difficult job and it wasn’t at all clear the business was going to survive.  But this was my first opportunity at serious line management.  We rebuilt the team with better quality people and steadily batted our way forward. In the end it was a profitable and growing organisation. I was then made a director of Marconi Defence Systems and given some interesting additional businesses to run in speech recognition, satellite communications and traffic control.”

He notes: “I was very keen to build this speech business which had evolved out of the Division’s cryptography capability. We were leaders in the field in many ways, although it wasn’t a very big business. We were doing speech synthesis, announcement systems and speech recognition systems.  I realised that we had a major opportunity and put together a plan which involved buying a small German company and two start-up American businesses in this field. We took the plan to Head Office but the idea of buying things that weren’t yet making a profit was an enigma to GEC.”

The plan was eventually passed to Arnold’s son Simon Weinstock who felt unable to back it. Martin adds: “In a sense that sort of typified the problem that GEC had at that time because its risk-taking days were basically over. Arnold Weinstock had created the business with great innovation and drive. However, I think the combination of MoD cost-plus contracting and the way that BT did its purchasing just made life too easy for the company.  These were relatively low risk ways of making money and to do the sort of thing that I was talking about was risky… I don’t fault the argument but I think this attitude towards risk and innovation – which ultimately comes from the investors and shareholders – is the reason why we have lost a leading position in so many technologies in this country.  There was a lack of understanding about developing technology businesses and certainly a lack of appetite for accepting risk and taking a long-term view.”

Martin continued to progress at Marconi and in 1989 was appointed managing director of Marconi Command and Control Systems, which was headquartered in Camberley.  In 1991, he became Group Managing Director of the GEC-Marconi Radar and Control Systems Group which included the research centre at Baddow, EASAMS, GEC Computer Services and Marconi Software as well as Radar and Command and Control.  The group employed around 7,000 people.  Reflecting on this role, Martin adds: “It was a significant part of GEC-Marconi that I was running then. So, I did indeed get my really big line job, all thanks to GEC.”

Of working at GEC and under Arnold Weinstock, Martin says “I learnt so much from that man. His attention to detail and his focus on the basics of running a business were superb; you couldn’t have had a better place to learn.”

In 1993, Martin was head-hunted for the position of Chief Executive Officer of Logica which had been founded by Philip Hughes and Len Taylor in 1969.

Speaking of his decision to join Logica, Martin says: “I was in a serious management position at GEC, I was responsible for a lot of people and a lot of turnover and I was – inverted commas – an important person.  However, I was now forty-three and knew that the one thing I hadn’t done in my career to date was run a public company. I realised that if I didn’t do it soon, I wouldn’t get the chance.”

Logica was a much smaller business compared to the GEC-Marconi Radar and Control Systems Group and had been loss-making the year before Martin joined. It had its challenges. Martin adds: “It wasn’t an easy decision but the key thing for me was if I was going to run a public company, I had to do it sooner rather than later and this was at least a tangible offer.  Also, I thought I could do something with it. Logica was an amazing company from a technology point of view. It had put the first CHAPS system in, for example, it built satellite systems, and did some seriously intellectually challenging stuff.  I felt if there’s that sort of an asset, one ought to be able to make money out of it.  The core problem was that it had lost its way as a company.  The two founders had taken it quite a distance but, when they retired, they didn’t really get the succession right. In addition, many of the senior management were rather snootily academic; the company was a bit more like a university than a business.  … It was full of Oxford and Cambridge graduates and had an impressive smattering of PhDs but it just didn’t have the commercial edge. Coming out of GEC, I obviously did and that’s what I brought to the party.”

Martin says he was really enthused by both the challenge and the opportunity. He set about putting in place a new strategy, a system of monthly divisional reviews to assess and drive progress and refreshed the management, adding “It was a classic case in that there were a hell of a lot of good people one or two layers down in the organisation who just needed to be liberated. Also, the finance director, Andrew Given was a class act. He was invaluable and became one of my closest business partners. There were also people like Duncan Craig and Laurence Julien who had been around for some years and knew their onions. In addition, I brought in some people from outside, including two or three people from GEC like my personnel director, Jim McKenna, who was to play a big role in the company over the years.”

He adds, ”I think I created a huge culture shock and a lot of people felt very uncomfortable about me. There were several senior departures.  However, many people were enthused by the focus on profits and growth and the key ingredients of success were there. We never looked back.  The company just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more international.  It became a very different company to the UK-dominated, academically-orientated business it had been when I started.”

Martin’s mantra for Logica was “value added, mission-critical, repeatable solutions” that could be packaged and re-sold. Martin explains: “We backed some quite good winners.  For example, we got in right at the beginning of energy deregulation and our energy business grew to be really substantial.”

The company also made a significant number of acquisitions. An early acquisition was Aldiscon, a small Irish company producing the short message service centres that controlled text messages.  This became incredibly successful as part of Logica. Martin adds: “We got in right at the beginning of the growth of texting and our mobile messaging business, or wireless networks business, got to be absolutely huge.  In fact, it eventually became a problem, because it was never an easy business to forecast and it got so big that it made forecasting for the whole company difficult.”

By now Logica had made it to the top echelons of the FTSE100.  Reminiscing on these years, Martin says: “The late nineties and the run-up to the year 2000 was a great time for the industry. The combination of text messaging, the Euro and Y2K made this a golden age for IT but Logica was always one step ahead of the pack”.

Martin had realised that if Logica was to have a long-term future it had to become a genuinely international business. He says: “if you didn’t have an international capability, it did make it really hard to build a sustainable future. Many of our acquisitions were therefore about creating a global footprint for the company. For example, fairly early on we started in the Czech Republic to develop our business in Eastern Europe and made our first acquisition in France. We developed our business successfully in the Middle East and went to India as outsourcing became more important in the late 1990s. The whole nature of the Logica business changed with the UK moving from being most of our turnover to barely a quarter. We were eventually to have offices in over 40 countries.

Logica survived the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Martin notes, “The great thing about having worked somewhere like GEC is if there’s a crisis you roll up your sleeves and get on with it. Those were hard years but we got through them successfully.  What I did recognise though, after the crash, was that the world was changing. More and more customers wanted to do business with a smaller number of international companies that they had the confidence could support them around the globe and for the long term.  So it seemed to me that Logica was either going to be a consolidator or consolidatee and that’s really what led to the merger with CMG, which I think was one of the most exhilarating exercises I have been involved in during my career.”

This merger saw Logica grow from 10,000 to 20,000 people, gain a significant business in the Netherlands and acquire further critical mass in Germany and Belgium. Martin adds: “There were some quite complementary things about the merger – Logica brought the international dimension, whereas CMG was more support orientated in many ways. It was our big competitor in wireless text messaging and short message service centres, a business that had boomed but needed consolidation.  It was a great cultural journey and I do regard it as one of my biggest successes – bringing two very different cultures together and making them work as a single entity. It was absolutely fascinating.”

Further major acquisitions followed.  Unilog was purchased in France and WM Data in Scandinavia.  However, Martin’s focus on building the business for the long term and creating a truly international major UK listed technology company sat uncomfortably with some investors who were looking for short term gains.  At the age of fifty-seven and with much success behind him, Martin left Logica after fourteen years and started a portfolio career.

Martin had already become an experienced non-executive director during his time at Logica.  He had served as a non-executive director at ASDA and Boots and when he left Logica in 2007 was still a non-executive director of British Airways.  He was to go on to sit on the boards of Siemens Holdings, Invensys, Aegis Group and Lloyd’s of London.  He also served as a senior adviser to private equity firms Candover and Actis and to Indian technology companies HCL and Zensar. In later years, he was to become chair of a number of different companies and organisations.

He recalls: “It was a funny feeling when I moved into portfolio life.  As a CEO of a big company, every moment of your day is taken up. Suddenly finding that you didn’t have much in the diary was definitely odd! I was still on the board of British Airways and I was a trustee of a few things.  However, it took the best part of two years before I had put together an absorbing portfolio that I thought was right for me.”

Martin’s portfolio life has included a substantial amount of work for government. Soon after he left Logica, he was invited to do a review for Yvette Cooper and the Labour administration on the efficiency of back-office services and IT in the public sector. He says: “I have spent quite a bit of time doing things for government.  I sat on the Coalition Government’s Efficiency and Reform Board for five years. I served as chair of the Commercial Steering Board and did quite a lot of major project reviews at various times, including Universal Credit.  In fact, I told David Cameron that he really shouldn’t give commitments about when this new system was going to be put in place because I didn’t believe the development plan was credible. I also carried out a review on management information and then I was asked to set up and chair the government companies that were to be put in place to manage the contracts and capacity payments arising from the electricity market reform programme; the Low Carbon Contracts Company and the Electricity Settlements Company. That was fascinating because I had to start everything up from scratch including recruiting a board and a chief executive.  The businesses were managing around £80 billion of contracts when I left, including Hinkley Point.  For the last six years, I’ve also been chairing the Senior Salaries Review Body.  This advises the Prime Minister on the pay of generals, judges, top civil servants, chief police officers and top people in the NHS.”

In the last decade, Martin’s focus has been on chairing companies. These have included VFS Global and UK listed businesses Laird and Wincanton. He has also chaired the Remuneration Consultants Group which oversees the code of practice for remuneration consultants in the UK.

Throughout his career, Martin has taken an active role in charities and education.  He was a director of the Portsmouth Housing Trust and its associated charity the Southern Focus Trust and for many years served as a trustee of the Winchester Science Centre. He has also served as a director of Shelter, as vice chair of the council of Southampton University, as chair of the University of Cambridge Library Advisory Committee and as a trustee of the National Council for Universities and Business.  Today, he is a member of the Council of Shakespeare’s Globe and sits on its Audit and Risk Committee.

Reflecting on non-executive life, Martin says that the experience has been extremely rewarding but in a different way to being CEO, adding: “You’re not the person that’s running the organisation, you’re advising, guiding and supporting just as much as holding management to account. You don’t get much for getting older but you do have a lot of experience. Being able to harness this and give something back is very satisfying.”

He adds: “For people who go on to be non-executive directors, and particularly to chair organisations, the really important thing is not to have an ego.  You don’t want to be doing these jobs if you feel that you’ve got something to prove.”

Martin was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Technology by Loughborough University in 2000, the Gold Medal of the Chartered Management Institute in the year he left Logica in 2007 and the CBE in 2011.  He is an honorary fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

Asked about why the UK was unable to successfully scale software houses and tech companies in the same way as the US, Martin says: “One thing we should reflect on, and I did very much during my time at Logica, was that nearly all the British software houses got taken over. That was very sad.”

Martin adds that “the thing that drove me more than anything else at Logica was a wish that Britain should have one UK headquartered, UK listed, significant global player in the software industry.”  More generally, he says: “I have seen so many British firms taken over, indeed, I’ve been on the boards of a good number of them – ASDA, Boots, Invensys and Laird, where I was chairman. One of the problems is that investors in the UK are a lot less inclined to look at the long term.  Over the years, everything’s become a lot more short-term, but I think that’s been particularly true here in the UK.” He points to his own experience at Logica where initially in the early days, shareholders were supportive of long-term opportunities but by the time he left in 2007, shareholders were under more pressure and being judged by pension funds on quarterly returns. Martin saw the make-up of the shareholder base shift away from long-term holders to people who “yo-yo in and out” making the longer-term development of a business much more difficult.

He adds: “I encountered friction with some of my shareholders over this issue. I can understand where they were coming from, they were interested in returns now, whereas I was much more focused on how do we make Logica a consistently successful world leader for the long term.”

Martin also sees an issue with the fact that UK investors do not really understand technology in the same way as investors in the US who are generally prepared to take a long-term view. He adds; “It’s a major national problem and it’s not just a tech company problem either. I think the stock market in the UK gives much lower valuations to companies than they deserve.” He recalls that when he was on the board of Invensys, the rail division was about one third of the business but Siemens offered to buy it for the entire market capitalisation of the company.  “They took a long-term view of its value; our shareholders simply did not see that.”

Martin goes on to say that “one of our strengths is having an open system but the other side of the coin is that it’s far easier for companies to be taken over in the UK because shareholders don’t put the right value on the underlying net worth. So they are more inclined to sell.  The end result is that the number of listed companies in Britain today is a fraction of what it was twenty years ago. Personally, I don’t think that’s very healthy for the UK.”

One of Martin’s proudest achievements is taking Logica from 3,000 people to 40,000. He adds: “We took it from a small cap listed business to a FTSE 100 company – in fact I think at one stage our market cap was bigger than Unilever!”

For anyone who is keen to develop their career, Martin says: “I think in the formative stages of your career, you need to be somewhere where you can learn a lot and gain experience by working for impressive people and in an environment that is challenging and subject to change. There are two things I would recommend you try and do before you get to thirty.  One is to work abroad for a couple of years and the other is to do something that involves selling.  Life is so much about being able to engage with people, finding a way to open a dialogue and getting your ideas and arguments across. Being involved in selling certainly develops those skills.“

“As you move on in your career, you have further options, because you can start to use what you’ve learnt. However, I’d put quite a big premium on working somewhere where there’s good working practices, good management, serious people running the organisation, complexity and where things are subject to change.  I’d also say don’t move too quickly or too often, that’s something I always consider when I look at a CV”

Interviewed by Tom Abram

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley