Interview with Andy Green

Andy Green was born in Solihull in 1955. He says of his childhood: “I was very lucky, I had a lovely home life with great parents and brothers and sisters, and went to some super schools including King Edward’s in Edgbaston, which in those days was a non-fee-paying school. It provided a wonderful education.  I particularly enjoyed being a Scout and getting out into the countryside, something I’ve kept up ever since.”

Andy’s parents were very keen on education, Andy adds: “With all of us, it was a really important part of the way the family was.  Neither of them had been to university, but my sister went and my elder brother, so they were really keen to progress us all on in life.”

 As a child Andy made crystal radio sets. He says: “I suppose I must have always been interested in science, I don’t know why, but I specialised in science very early, taking the decision when I was fourteen.  So I didn’t take physics or chemistry at O level because I knew I was going to take them at A level, which was the way they did it there.”

 Having been on track to finish his A levels at sixteen, Andy’s plans were derailed by illness and he ended up spending three years in the sixth form, adding economics to his science courses. After completing his A levels, he applied to study chemical engineering at Leeds University. He says: “It was a wonderful experience, I made lots of very good friends that I’ve kept all the way through my life. I was definitely interested in the  commercial side of technology and particularly in chemical engineering.”

Andy’s first encounter with a computer was at Leeds University using punch cards.

He says: “We just used them almost as training for ourselves, we weren’t using them for anything very serious in terms of research or anything at the undergraduate level.  But I do remember very strongly that all through my university life I was probably still using a slide rule.

“My biggest computer experience was at Shell. In 1979, I moved into a group and we had a personal computer, we were one of the very few groups who had one.  Our job was to work out the best output from a catalytic tower. We were trying to work out which of the various fractions we should take off to get the best economic input. We used to put all the things into this program and then let it go and you’d go out for a very boozy lunch for three hours and it would finish the calculation for you.  I guess my phone would do it now in a time I could think about it.”

After his degree, Andy applied for graduate roles at Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Cadbury’s and Shell. He says: “I was in Shell before I was twenty-one, I was really keen to get to work.  I had been fascinated by business the whole of my life.  Shell’s absolutely fantastic place to go, they move you around, give you lots of different experiences and, it’s really tremendous way to grow.  They’re very honest with you, they tell you how well they think you’re going to get on, there would be something called your ‘currently estimated potential’ that they did in those days.”  However, Andy ended up deciding to leave, he says: “I left Shell because I didn’t agree with them, I thought I’d do rather better than they said I would.”

After leaving Shell Andy followed a colleague into consulting at Deloitte Haskins & Sells which became part of PwC. He says: “I did a couple of years of consulting, but it certainly shifted me away from the chemicals and manufacturing world into the technology world in a significant way.”

Asked if he had fallen in love with the idea of computers at this point of his career, he says: “I’ve never been in love with computers, I’ve always been in love with the way business and society evolves, and I’d got into technology I became really quite focussed on the way that works. I’m much more a telecoms guy than I am an IT guy and I remain absolutely absorbed and fascinated by the way we continue to see everything change as a result of things that didn’t exist when I was at school, it still remains my passion.”

While consulting, Andy did a number of assignments, including ones at Portmeirion, a Sheffield Forgemasters, and BT.

In 1985, Andy moved to BT having spent eighteen months working with them as a consultant. He joined them to do IT marketing,

One of his first jobs was to sort out a price structure for BT’s domestic phone handsets of which there were many. He says: “I went in as one of several people in different departments of BT doing IT marketing, because nobody really knew what IT was, and it was interesting.”

After eighteen months at BT, Andy decided he would resign. He says: “There were loads of people doing the same job, compared to Shell it was very disorganised, and I decided it was not for me, so I’d better go and do something else.”

With BT in the process of reorganising, Andy told his boss to not include him as he was going to leave, however, he was convinced to run payphones instead.  Andy says: “We had an absolute disaster on our hands with payphones and the CEO had promised to fix them. Only about sixty per cent of them worked at any one time, they were losing a lot of money, and they were horrible. It was really a national disaster because people didn’t have mobile phones, and got very cross about it, it was all over Woman’s Hour and Radio 4. It was a real disaster.”

The project team had only fifteen months to fix the issue and realised that they would not hit any of the standards they established because the payphones were out of order for a long time before they were reported.

The solution, was to hire women who stocked supermarket shelves to check the phones in the area in which they visited their supermarkets. They were hired on a freelance basis. Andy says: “We got a contract with them and they each got a beat of payphones and went round, checked them, and when they weren’t right they told us. We hit the target and were considered great geniuses as a result of having fixed this big problem for the company. … Then it turned into a very profitable business.”

Andy worked on numerous other projects at the time the business was downsizing from 205,000 to 84,000 employees. He says: “I was really a change leader. The company tended to put me into places where they needed change, and that was what I was well known for across the organisation.”

Andy worked on projects that included installing new digital exchanges, introducing charging for directory enquiries, introducing a new highly bespoke IBM CRM system among many other things.

Andy adds: “Automating all of those things was really new and hadn’t been done.  Automating the exchanges meant that there was much less maintenance work. We reorganised into a national organisation as opposed to lots and lots of regional organisations.  People always thought of BT as a very slow place, it was actually incredibly fast moving and right in the heart of technological change.  One 1^st July, 17,000 people left the company on one day, it was quite extraordinary.”

Andy moved on to a divisional role with BT Openworld, a brand he describes as short-lived, which sold a fixed fee dial up service to compete with Freeserve. Andy adds: “That was revolutionary at the time. Then we went on to launch broadband over ADSL, very slow, two megabits a second but still very fast compared to dial-up. We did an enormous amount of work around portals and all those sorts of things, trying to work out what was the right way forward in terms of how much you should become a publisher, all these questions were buzzing around.  In the end I think we settled in the right place, we built BT’s market share from ten or fifteen per cent up to sixty per cent, which it stayed at pretty much until Sky dented it several decades later. It was a fascinating period, very different. We had the first open plan office in BT, on the river, we tried to create a different type of culture to enable us to move a bit faster and to be more relevant in that type of world.”

 While at BT Andy was also took over as Director of Global Services at BT while he was on the board between 2000 and 2007.  He says: “I was roughly seven years at Global Services.  We made eighteen acquisitions, including Radianz from Reuters, Infonet, which was a competitor organisation. We brought all these things together, built a very substantial operation that was the biggest division of BT because we moved all the big corporate clients out of retail into Global Services at some point, so it was a very significant organisation operating round the world.  It was interesting because it was a challenger. I used to live my life on a plane going round the world.  We had operations in South America, Australia, and US.  We had the joint venture called Concert with AT&T which I’d been instrumental in negotiating, which then fell apart, but was in existence for a significant amount of time. It was a really interesting period, running very big contracts and running big IT contracts as well.  We had an outfit called Syncordia.  We had very large IT services contracts as well as very big managed services contracts, contracts worth hundreds of millions a year.

“We did all of Unilever’s network management, all of Reuters network management.  They were being run, and with all the risk that goes with large-scale contracts. We turned the business to cash positive, made it modestly profitable.  It had great difficulties a few years after I’d left, and some of that was inevitable, some of that was because we were very exposed to the financial services sector, which of course went into a major downturn in 2008/09.”

Andy left BT Global Services  in 2006 and went into a COO job.  He adds: “So on several occasions I ran all of BT’s tech.  During that period I think we managed to get CSS out, having been involved at the moment when it was coming in.  We were continually working on the modernisation of the way we operated as an organisation. I had the CIO reporting to me three or four times in my career, but at the end I was responsible for the strategy. We were highly engaged at that point in the creation of Openreach and the separation of the wholesale network, the local loop network and the fibre network from the retail organisation and managing all of those types of things through. BT was so interesting, there was so much going on, there was so much change.  All the time you felt you were doing something meaningful.”

Andy had a discussion with Bill Gates regarding whether the service providers (Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc) should pay for the capital that was used to install fibre. Andy says: “Bill said: ‘Andy, it’ll be fine, we’ll not pay anything.’  However, it is quite interesting what’s happening now. Google and Meta are basically building undersea fibre cables and providing capacity because they are concerned about whether the industry is making the returns that will enable it to move fast enough.  So in a way the industry that needs the bandwidth is stepping in to try to deal with some of the things that some people call my market failures.  But I suspect the telco industry is never going to win that battle after all these years.”

 Andy highlights that teleco companies have provided great societal service despite the fact that today they are smaller than ever and do not provide great shareholder returns, he says: “Whatever the economics from a shareholder value point of view, you cannot argue about the societal value that people who’ve been involved in the telecoms industry have delivered.”

After BT, Andy joined Logica at the invite of David Tyler, the then chairman. He says: “I wanted to build a UK IT services champion, I was very focussed.  Martin Read had built a very interesting organisation, acquired operations in France, Spain, Scandinavia, and Germany, but it was still really operating as a series of independent operations.  So when I came in the most important thing we did was to stop it being Logica CMG in some places – there were all different brand names – and  ran the whole thing as Logica.  We did a really interesting cultural exercise across boundaries pulling all that together.

“Logica had been a quite sharply focussed organisation around high-end, hi-tech work in its early years and had grown into being a mini Accenture or Capgemini with a lot of outsourcing contracts and a lot of system integration contracts.  It was a very odd time, because everybody believed that the outsourcing contracts were the way you should go, all the shareholders believed that was very good, stable business and that system integration was a very cyclical and bad business.  Of course, it never really was like that because these big outsourcing contracts, unless you’re prepared to continually ensure they are correctly put in the books, they lead to these catastrophic moments in the industry.  But the shareholder base never understood that.

 “Whereas system integration, if you’ve got a team of experts in one of the security services or something, is a fantastically profitable and consistent business. So, there were very different views, but it was a very good time to be in the industry, it was very interesting.  We had big Indian players, TCS, Infosys, very high quality coming in.

“A lot of what we needed to do we did, we brought the organisation together, but I think in the end when the financial crisis hit in 2008/2009, we suddenly were seen as having too much debt and that, together with the fact that we turned down the sector and we needed to really shed quite a lot of labour in very expensive places like France or Scandinavia, to re-employ it in India, meant that it became extremely difficult to run it on the public markets because it needed very substantial restructure which the markets were not really up for.  In the end we sold it to the Canadian CGI, it’s doing very well since then, they’ve done a good job with it.”

“For me personally it was a disappointment, it was a good exit for the company, but it was a disappointment because I’d hoped to create a UK owned champion in the sector and had failed to do so.”

During his time with Logica, Andy became involved with the space sector. He says: “Logica had already been very strong in the sector and I spent a very happy ten years helping the space sector in the UK grow up until early 20s.  That was a lot of fun, supporting the government and working with minister, David Willetts in particular, getting Tim Peake a place on the Space Station etc.”

Andy’s first non executive director role was with Navteq who did mapping and was bought out by Nokia. He says: “We did in-car dash maps in the days before Google Maps and Apple Maps.”

Andy’s second role was with ARM Holdings. He says: “I went in as the company was maturing from being founder-led. It was a wonderful period, really world class people doing a world class job, becoming a FTSE 30 company, and therefore of great value and needing the sort of experience that some of us brought to the board table.”

Of ARM’s sale to SoftBank, Andy says: “I would much preferred for it to have stayed as a British company.  We still have the heart of the company here with the technology in Cambridge and it continues to play a really strong role on the world stage. It was a great experience and it was great to be able to help the team. From a business point of view my biggest influence was probably to really push with the people internally you needed to push, that we shouldn’t just make chips and then let people do what they want with them, we should think about how do you make chip designs that are right for automotive, chip designs that are right for different parts of the mobile piece, chip designs that are right for AI eventually and that sort of application, and customer market focus.”

Andy was also involved with the Catapult projects. He says: “The Catapults were set up when the RDAs were taken apart and they included some really good industrial work on high-end materials, or very large cranes, all sorts of things that an individual company can’t afford, but if you put it in place, can be used to help a sector grow effectively, that was the idea of Catapults.

“They decided to set up one or two knowledge-based Catapults.  We had to look at how can you stimulate the digital ecosystem.  When we set it up I talked to everyone, I said this is going to be very different, it’s going to be much more nimble, and have to change what it’s doing.  It proved to be just like that and on several occasions the government said we’re going to close this thing down and I managed with colleagues to really push for them to keep it, we were forever under the microscope.  It’s been really valuable.”

The Catapult has been involved in the successful development of 5G applications and also the interface between the creative industries and the digital industries.

Andy is also involved with Airtel Africa which supplies telecommunications and mobile phone services. He says: “Mobile phones in Africa transform people’s lives like almost nothing else.  They enable them to safely move money around, get educated, to have a side hustle and make some money.”

Andy also explains his involvement with the charity Abesu, saying: “I’ve had a long-term interest in development from a personal charity we set up, called Abesu, which  help women’s co-operative build homes for themselves and develop through to my time at DEC, and now as chair of WaterAid.  I’ve worked nearly everywhere in the world, one way or another, apart from Africa, so I was fascinated to engage in Africa and what’s going on there and I remain highly hopeful that we will find ways to bring that enormously talented group of people into a better standard of living than many of them have today.”

Andy is a National Infrastructure Commissioner. He says: “We advise the government on the next thirty years into the future and try to bring that sense of what technology can do.  I’m an enormous optimist about our ability to get to net zero, whatever the government’s doing of the day. … The world is moving towards an electric future, and that’s going to need all of the technological support in thinking about how we manage and drive that world where we’re no longer raping the planet all the time in order to exist. I think technology’s going to be at the heart of all that.  So I remain very optimistic as engaged as I can in the things of today.”

Andy says of the impact of technology on today’s society: “There is an enormous consumer surplus that’s delivered by technology.  Our ability to access information, entertainment, sport wherever we are in the world, our ability to communicate well, our ability to look after our health.  All these things don’t come through in the economic statistics but they are fundamentally transformational. I’ve been so privileged to work with some of these amazing people who have pushed that journey forward.  Including the telcom, chip, and IT industries, all of these things are pushing forward what is possible as a human.  There are lots of downsides with it too, but life is about us settling down and sorting these downsides out and not thinking about going back to the past.  Nobody wants to go back to the past.”

Asked about his thoughts on the Horizon Post Office scandal, Andy says: “It’s really chastening for everybody.  I have been involved in situations where the teams underneath me, despite everything that I would say and do and think, would agree with their customer to not change the way they measured things or other things without it being in line with the contract or without it being in line with things.

“As a director, I spend all my time working out who I’m working with and thinking about do we know which way is up. I spent lots and lots of my career talking about sustainable growth, culturally. The fact that if you really want to do things that worked over the long run, then you need to do them in a sustainable way. That sustainability isn’t about net zero, it is about the ethics of the way you think about things, the culture you create and the way you do that.  But I have been responsible in a large organisation for people who have done things which I would never do.  You always have to be modest about this, you can do everything you can to set up a culture that you think is the right culture, but in the end, things can go wrong.

“You should always be modest and worried all the time, about what can happen on your watch and also be prepared to stand up and say I got it wrong, because none of us even when we try, we can’t be sure we’re going to get that sort of thing right.”

Asked if he would do anything differently, Andy says: “I often think I should have left BT earlier, but then I think what a lot of fun I had.  There are things I regret, but it’s hard to find things I’d do differently.  I am very proud of the work I did on gender diversity from quite early on, but I really never got into ethnic diversity, and I did wonder about that. I was spending a lot of time thinking about should I have done more on that and could I have done more on that earlier on in my career.  I think that’s one thing. … But generally I just feel so lucky.  I look back on what things I’ve done and think, it’s great to be involved in those sorts of things, it’s lovely.”

Looking to the future, Andy says: “The edges of the creative industry and the tech industry are going to be absolutely a minefield for very interesting things to happen, and then there is the green revolution.”

He says the next big seven tech companies will come from people who solve some of those problems. Adding: “I’m optimistic that we haven’t made all the breakthroughs yet, they will come.  So the current big seven are not going to be the big seven by the time you get to being twenty years on in your career, the world will change.  Some will survive and some won’t, and whether they do or don’t will be to do with their culture and their adaptability and their ability to shift from one phase to another.

“The other area which I’d speculate on is this how are we going to enhance our own capabilities in ways using technology. There’s been a lot of thinking and talking, how will all that play out.  … I see no end to the possibility of change and, if we’re careful, change for the good in the way that I believe the technological revolution that we’ve been through over the last thirty, forty years has been for most people’s good.”

Offering advice to young people considering a career in tech, Andy says: “Being involved in tech is still a great thing to do.  People talk about AI and other things overtaking all of this. I don’t think that’s the way it will work, I think there will be new skills and new ideas. Whatever you do, don’t get stuck in one place when you’re early on in your career.  You want a variety of experiences.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley