Interview with Brian McBride

Brian McBride was born in the East End of Glasgow in 1955, he has seven siblings. His father was a teacher and his mother was a nurse. He says of his early life: “We didn’t have a lot of money, we lived in a council house, there was ten of us sharing a toilet. When I talk to my kids about it, they think it must have been hard, but I think we were loved, we were well educated, well fed, my mum made much of our clothing; it never felt like poverty, it felt like a very normal life.”

All of the family were encouraged to study. Brian says: “My father was a very strong advocate of getting educated.  He was a great believer in self-development as a way to advancement. In those days a lot of my friends were encouraged by their parents to leave school at fifteen so that they could start earning immediately and contribute to the family keep. My father and mother made that sacrifice, they did without that money by allowing us to go to university.  There was great encouragement from them, and that was a major part of me being able to embrace it and give it that time.”

Brian attended the local state primary school and then Lourdes Secondary School a state comprehensive, on the south side of Glasgow. He says: “I went to the state schools because that’s what you did when you came from that background. The education I got then has certainly not held me back, it was a very good education system.  The Scottish education system in general is pretty strong, and we had some great schools around Glasgow. … In those days the biggest issue was a lack of aspiration amongst the students.  I went to university and I think there were four from our whole year went to university.”

For his Highers (the Scottish equivalent to A Levels) Brian studied maths, Latin,  French, and Modern Studies which he describes as politics, economics and economic history. He adds: “It gave me a great hunger for what was going on in the world. I got a taste for politics and economics through that.”

With no PCs or mobile phones, the family’s TV and radio were the basis of Brian’s exposure to technology as a child. He adds: “Even when I went to university, computers were things that big banks and huge companies had hidden away in some air-conditioned, water-cooled, special factory set-up. Most people had no exposure to technology of any sort.  My exposure to technology was the television and the radio. In the mid-sixties there were two TV channels – BBC and ITV – and it was black and white.  BBC Two came along and then, in the early mid-sixties, colour television started coming along, but in a working class household like ours, we didn’t have a colour TV or anything.”

To earn pocket money, Brian delivered milk from the age of ten. He explains: “I was pushing a milk float around the streets of Glasgow at 6 o’clock in the morning, delivering milk.  Nowadays it would be seen as slave labour and be completely banned, but it was a good source of income. It was the only way that you had any pocket money.  I then graduated to a much more white-collar occupation of a paper round boy, I delivered newspapers which was not quite as physically onerous, and collected payment. I was about twelve and it gave me a bit of responsibility as well as some pocket money, so it was a good discipline.”

In 1972, aged sixteen, Brian started at Glasgow University studying economics, economic history, and politics. He lived at home and attended daily by bus. He says that despite it being a different experience to today’s student experience in terms of living away from home, he was still able to take part in the extra-curricular activities on offer, adding: “I thoroughly enjoyed it, apart from getting my degree, I was president of the union, I was involved in debating, so I was quite active in the corporate life of the university. In Glasgow the president of the union wasn’t just an honorary position, there was a physical student union building, bars, restaurants,  staff, a general manager, and the board of which you were the president, and I did things like determine the pricing policy for beer and food and which bands to hire. It was a great exposure at an early stage to really running a business, which I thoroughly enjoyed.”

In 1977, having completed his degree and Masters (MA), Brian left university to take on his first position.

With an interest in journalism but the realisation that it was a difficult profession to join, especially with papers closing down, Brian looked at alternative options, rejecting tax-inspector, teacher, and graduate trainee at manufacturing companies, he settled on becoming a salesperson for Xerox.

He says: “I saw an advert for Xerox, selling photocopiers, and they were paying 50% more than a standard graduate salary.  They offered a car and training.  I’d never sold anything in my life, but I thought it’s worth giving it a try. I did very well at the interviews, I enjoyed the training very much and I enjoyed having a car.  The role involved selling photocopiers to businesses, so you had to phone up companies, try and get an appointment and then turn up with a photocopier on the back of an estate car and do a demonstration. … This was in fact my first exposure to real technology, it was quite exciting.  Even in those days, the thought of being able to take effectively a print or a photocopy of a document or something was unbelievable.”

He says of the first experiences of technology: “I’ve never been a scientist, I’ve never known how the physics and the chemistry of it all works, but what was of more interest to me was what can you do with these things, what business problem does it help you fix, rather than the underlying electrons, protons and neutrons etc.”

After three and a half years with Xerox and having made good progress and been offered promotions, Brian decided it was time to move on. He explains: “I thought I’d probably taken this (Xerox role) as far as I can, although it was an exciting piece of technology, it’s relatively simple, it can only do one thing, and at that time, computers were becoming much more accessible. There were mainframes and smaller computers, and IBM was the big company.  So I moved into IBM which was the market leader. I took a step back almost to be retrained, that took me probably nine months, and then I started selling mainframes to big insurance companies and manufacturing companies. It was a very different industry, very different skillset, much more complicated, long-term sale.  Some of these products were several million pounds and it took, not just you, but a team of specialists to sell them.  So it was a much more collaborative, collegiate type of role.  I really loved it.  … I loved what computers could do in terms of automating and modernising business.”

Brian’s career with IBM saw him quickly progress, having started in Glasgow, he moved to Manchester to take on his first management role, and on to Camberley. He says: “I did four or five jobs there, including running one of the biggest branches. A role then came up in New York state in the US, where they were headquartered.” Despite the disruption to his family life, Brian took the role, he adds: “I thought these chances won’t come along very often in a lifetime, and I would hate to look back and regret not doing something.  So we went for it. As it turned out we weren’t there for long as I had to come back when another big job came up in IBM. I had about eighteen months there and the family had a full school year. We lived in Connecticut just outside New York, and it was wonderful to sample a very different style of living, a different culture.”

Speaking of his career overall and the impact that IBM had, Brian says: “I was lucky in my time at IBM I lived through the revolution that took it from a mainframe company that then had PCs.  When I left IBM I could see how PCs becoming connected allowed people to put together very simple local area and wide area networks.”

Brian joined Crosfield Electronics, a company in the printing industry which was making electronic equipment to make the printing process more efficient.  Brian says: “Unfortunately, they were on the cusp the emergence of the PC and Apple Macs with software packages that allowed you to do desktop publishing.  So I lived through two years of an industry being completely disrupted and turned upside down.  Although it was really, really tough, I look back at Crosfield as being my MBA. I was really leading a business in crisis.  It was a company owned by Fujifilm of Japan and DuPont of the USA. Being the chief exec of a joint venture with an American and Japanese parent meant you were almost like a diplomat trying to kind of keep both sides on side with your agenda.  It was really tough, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m glad I did it, and I enjoyed it.”

After leaving Crosfield Electronics, Brian joined Madge Networks which made Token Ring cards to allow PCs to talk to each other. The company was bought Lucent Technologies. Brian says of the experience: “I was starting to see where the internet was taking computers and making business much more affordable through the ability to communicate globally without needing a massive big mainframe.”

Next, Brian moved to run Dell in the UK and in northern Europe for four years.  Brian says: “I got to experience a lot of different cultures which was great. I saw the PC industry completely eat into the mainframe business. Computing now was starting to go to a server based architecture where you didn’t need the huge expensive ten million mainframes that the banks still had, you could actually run your business with a number of servers put together and when you needed more power you just add on a new server.”

In 2003, having lived through the PC revolution with Dell, Brian moved to T-Mobile based in Hatfield and owned by Deutsche Telekom of Germany, who were building a European network.  He says: “At the time it was a very exciting, the mobile phone had come along in the late nineties, so it was a very well developed industry, but the underlying technology was still GPRS, or 2.5G. When I started at T-Mobile, 70% of our phones’ usage was voice, 25% was text messages, and the other 5% was for those who were crazy enough to try to send internet messages using a numeric keypad.  Then suddenly the smartphone arrived.  We launched 3G which was the first mobile internet. These were technologies and capabilities that put the power of the mainframe into the pocket of consumers and small businesses.”

Brian stayed with T-Mobile until 2006 when he was invited to meet Jeff Bezos at Amazon.

In 2006, Brian was invited to interview in the US with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. He spent the day being interviewed by the thirty strong team on a one to one base before finally meeting Jeff in the early evening. He says of the experience: “By the time I met Jeff it was 6 o’clock at night, I was punch drunk, exhausted, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going, and then I had forty-five minutes with Jeff who was at the time one of the most dramatic and revolutionary business people on the planet. We got on very well.”

Having looked and dismissed Brian’s CV on the basis that he would not be in front of him if he was not any good, Jeff then asked Brian the ‘curveball’ question of how many windows were there in London. Brian took some time to work up an answer of 38 million and Jeff asked him to explain how he’d arrived at the figure.

Brian asked what the answer to the windows question was and was told that he just wanted to see his thought process. Brian adds: “That was the sort of person he was.  My thought process couldn’t have been too bad because I got offered the job and then I became the chief executive of Amazon in the UK on 1^st January 2006, and I spent almost six years there.”

Having had many experiences of new technology with the companies he worked for, Amazon was another opportunity to see a company transform from online book store to a major online retailer. Brian says of his experiences: “When I look back, I caught some amazing technology waves.  It wasn’t by planning or foresight, it was by serendipity and luck.  I always think of the great Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca who said, ‘luck is where preparation meets opportunity’, and I think there’s a lot of truth in that.  So I was very lucky, but I was ready for it when it came along as well.”

Of Amazon in the UK, Brian says: “It was a great company but the UK was all over the place, it had a very inexperienced junior team, it wasn’t really set up properly, attrition was very high, and it was succeeding despite itself, not because of it. My mission was really not to invent any technology or to design a better website, it was to build a management team and a structure that would take this thing from what was at the time probably about a billion and a half up to five billion of sales, which it was when I left.

“It was a little bit of a rollercoaster or like being on a bucking bronco. There was always something new, something happening, but it was an incredibly exciting time.  Amazon was breaking the mould with what they were doing, and going from books and CDs and DVDs all the way through to big electronics, then jewellery, clothing and everything.  Every six months we were launching some new category.”

Brian lived and worked through the arrival of the Amazon Marketplace, Prime and Amazon Web Services (AWS). He says of the AWS: “ It was a complete accident, they didn’t intend to invent it, it just came about as a by-product of the capacity that they already had.”

He goes on to say that AWS has gone on to become almost the bigger part of the business, adding: “Suddenly there was this massive demand for AWS, it took them by surprise. People were paying for it with their credit cards, there wasn’t a billing system because  it suddenly took off.  They basically invented the whole cloud computing services industry.”

Brian left Amazon in 2011. He reflects on his career, saying: “If you look at my career, apart from IBM where I spent ten years, I’ve spent three, four, five years in each place. I either come in and help fix something that’s broken, or I take a fledgling and get it ready to get to the next place.  Amazon was slightly different.  When I joined Amazon I was the oldest executive in the company, and I felt it, it was a real young tigerish team.”

One of the reasons Brian decided to leave after six years and at the age of fifty-five, was a diagnosis of prostate cancer. He says: “I was very fortunate I got it diagnosed early. Any men listening to this, get your PSA checked, because there is no downside in getting it checked.  I didn’t know there was anything wrong with me, I had no symptoms, but the PSA test pointed to an abnormality. Prostate cancer moves very slowly, so I had plenty of time to plan my exit.  It was diagnosed during 2010 and we agreed I would step aside at the end of January 2011, and I was going to get my surgery in February.  It was very simple, it was very successful, not too intrusive.”

Knowing that he would not return to Amazon, Brian lined up two potential successors. He adds: “I think that’s one of the roles of a great leader is to make sure that they leave a good bench behind them. It’s what is expected of you, it’s called level five leadership.  It doesn’t matter how big or how small a company is, you’ve got to have that scenario that says, if I get hit by a bus or if I want to leave in a year’s time, who’s going to take over, and that is the current leader’s problem, it’s not the future company’s problem.  You’ve got to sort that before you go.”

After leaving Amazon, Brian decided to take on a portfolio/plural career. He says: “I joined the board of Computacenter, and then ASOS who were looking for a new chair. At the point I started, I was clearly painted as a tech person and so any tech business that was going to do anything would probably approach me and say, do you want to join the board.  I was very fortunate to be spoiled for choice.”

Brian was also on the board of the BBC, he adds: “That wasn’t a particularly tech role, but broadcasting and BBC is quite a tech-enabled business and with its own website, the internet was very important.  So, from my Amazon experience, I was able to bring an understanding of digital customers, how to retain and acquire them.”

Brian also spent three years on the advisory board of Huawei, he says: “They were a great company, highly respected in the UK, brought a lot of jobs here. Again, because I’d been at T-Mobile, I had an understanding of the industry that they were in. Tech in its broadest sense is where I have enjoyed applying myself in the plural life.”

Alongside the tech companies, Brian has also ventured into private equity and finance joining Scottish Equity Partners as an adviser. He explains: “They used to be in oil and things like that, but they moved into tech and software and so, again, I had a very good view of that industry and where some of those companies could go, so I think I brought something to their party.  Through Bridgepoint I got involved in Wiggle, the online cycling business, and I chaired that.  Tech is a very broad platform and I managed to understand it from the customer end all the way through to the server and cloud and back office end.”

As part of his plural career, Brian is also a lead independent director with the MOD. He explains that in that role, he, along with his fellow board members, bring an outside perspective to the challenges that they face, many of which are long term, such as planning for the next fifty years.

He says: “The defence industry’s looking at a thirty-year horizon.  So it is a very different, very unique space.  What we bring to the party is a knowledge of the outside world and how it works, a knowledge of big project management and really a challenge that they would not have got otherwise. A lot of defence is very much tech-based or tech-enabled. When you look at the whole defence space, the ability to interconnect ships and aircraft and various other weaponry through data and you look at the amount of data that’s flowing around to do that, when you look at the use of satellites, when you look at us going into space, it’s a very complex tech-enabled space.  We’ve still got people in fatigues marching across Salisbury Plain, but a lot of the next war will be involved and enabled by great tech and so it’s the defence piece as well, business, government, and military all come together. I find that a very fascinating space.”

In November 2021, Brian was approached by the CBI to be President. He had been involved with the organisation as a member when he worked at T-Mobile. He says: “At first I thought this isn’t really me, I’m not really mainstream British industry, I’m more of a disrupter than anything else.  However, they explained they were looking for a different type of person at that stage. They needed someone that understood digital, who could help convene the digital community, who understood global business but also start-ups, and who understood business outside London.

“So I think there was a number of attributes and characteristics that made me quite a different person for them. I think the ordinary grounded working class person from Glasgow also quite appealed.” After meeting Tony Danker, the Director General, Brian decided that the role would work for him. He adds: “Business is a very important part of what goes in any society, whether we like it or not. If businesses don’t succeed and if they don’t make profits, then they don’t pay taxes, and if they don’t pay taxes we can’t build schools and hospitals and provide public services.  So there’s a whole virtuous cycle here and it starts with a successful business. Part of my role is talking to the government about what business needs in terms of fiscal policies, the monetary policies, the migration policies.  I believe that it’s the government’s job to roll the pitch to make the playing field level, and then to get out of the way and let business get on with it.”

Asked how he is finding the discussions with government, Brian highlights that he has only been in the role for six months, adding: “Nobody told me before I joined that I’d be on my third Prime Minister in four months and my third Chancellor.  Part of your role is making relationships with the PM, the Chancellor and the Business Secretary and the opposition.  So, I’ve had a pretty full on four or five months.  I’ve been to the Labour Party Conference, we’ve hosted our own conference where we had the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.  I’ve had a number of dinners and events where I’ve been speaking about the business agenda. It’s been a very difficult time.

“I think very few people could look back over the past six months and write their own report card and say they’ve done a good job, but I think what we have done is made business in general and CBI centre ground in terms of the solution to the problems that Britain’s got today.  The Treasury, the government, the opposition, do see us a key convening power to let them know what is going on on the ground.”

Brian highlights the role the CBI had during the Covid pandemic where they provided information, in the form of working groups, to the Treasury to help formulate the various schemes, such as furlough etc, that helped keep businesses running during that time.

He adds: “That’s the sort of role that we have, and it’s the same today.  Britain is in an economic storm at the moment.  The whole world is, but we seem to be getting some of these winds more severely coming at us. The next twelve months needs some steady hands, good counselling, good relationships with both government and opposition, and that’s part of my role.”

Being an “eternal optimist”, Brian believes that things in the UK will start to get better. He adds:  “I wouldn’t sugar coat the pill, we are in for a tough twelve or fifteen months here in Britain.  We are starting out on a recession here but by the second half of the year it will feel hopefully that we’re starting to come out of it, but it will be a slow exit from this, it won’t be a big sharp V-turn here.”

He also points to the skills gap that Britain currently faces with full employment but 1.2 million unfilled roles. He says: “Many of these are tech-related jobs. We just cannot get the skills we need in this country because we haven’t either trained enough of the right skills for people or we’ve turned off the migration taps, which is an understandable consequence of Brexit. …  This is part of what’s holding Britain back.  You can’t have productivity increasing if you’ve got a whole bunch of unfilled jobs in your company.”

The CBI believes that controlled economic migration is one of the solutions to the problem and are lobbying government on the issue. Brian says: “Industry, universities, government are working on the reskilling agenda, and there are initiatives happening, they’re just not happening quickly enough. We’re doing the right things but that will take three or four years for it to really work its way through into today’s skill base, so in the interim we do need more migration and that’s become a very thorny political issue, so this is where politics meets business.”

Asked about tax in the UK, Brian says: “Whether corporation tax is at 22% or 27%, it’s not that material.  The issue is there have to be incentives for business to invest, they have to be able to offset the cost of their investments against some of the business tax that they will pay.  … The government had a super deduction scheme which is about to disappear in April.   There are some incentives today but in our field they’re not enough.  Our thinking is have high business taxes, but for those companies prepared to invest in the future, allow them to offset it.  If you’re not investing and you’re just raking in big profits, absolutely you should be paying higher taxes.  But if you’re investing in jobs and in the future of this country, you should have an offset.”

On the subject of encouraging and supporting women back into work after a career, Brian says: “We have to do this because it achieves a number of things.  First of all, the senior levels of management in our industry today are still not diverse enough.  We have now got a much better balance at the boardroom level with females and males and with other ethnic diversities, but lower down the food chain and we start to lose females from the higher echelons of management, so we have to be doing everything we can to encourage that.  It also addresses the chronic job shortage in the UK. We have got qualified people who would like to get back to work, so let’s find the right incentives and support to allow them to get back to work to help Britain’s job shortage and to give them some form of income and earnings as well.”

For young people considering a career in tech, Brian advises: “First of all, find something that you want to do.  Somebody once said, the key to a happy life is to find something you like doing and get paid for it. I think that’s very true and that’s what’s always happened with me. There is no wrong door into a company.  Get into a company at any level, don’t get too hung up on the title or what it is, just get in there and start contributing because smart, bright people get noticed.  If you really have got an interest and a curiosity about tech and you’d like to go a bit further, you’d like to get into either coding or becoming a data scientist or into analytics because this is where the tech that we’ve got today allows us to use great technologies like AI machine learning to solve difficult business problems, make sure that you’re learning, you’re keeping up with where Artificial Intelligence, machine learning is going. If you want to be in that space there are going to be lots of opportunities for modern apprenticeships; you don’t have to be a graduate to get into tech.

“A lot of big organisations are going to be starting to ingest lots of tech, apprentices and graduates. Take one of those jobs, get a bit of training with them, you don’t have to stay there forever.  Do it for three, four, five years, then you can go off and become a great data scientist in investment banking or something else.  Technology’s going to be part of our working and personal life going forward and you can’t avoid it so if you can’t avoid it, start to get comfortable with it, embrace it and enjoy it.”

Asked about the UK’s ability to produce a large tech company such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft, Brian comments: “America’s created an Amazon, a Google and a Microsoft, and that’s what Silicon Valley is all about; it’s an incredible confluence of funding, skill, encouragement and also an ability to be prepared to fail. I wouldn’t beat ourselves up because we haven’t done that. There are lots of great companies that the UK has created. Britain is still a great place for tech to thrive.  It’s still a great global centre.  Britain was always a tech Mecca for entrepreneurs, for start-ups and people to come.  We’ve also got this great representation of the big companies  such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft which have massive capability in the UK, so that helps create that pull of tech knowledge.

“We’ve got a good skill base of tech in the UK and we still invest in terms of venture capital and private equity more in the UK than in any other country in Europe.  So we’re still very much a place that encourages and enables investment.  I see from my work at Scottish Equity Partners that there’s still a lot of demand out there for funding, still a lot of great ideas.  So let’s not beat ourselves up because we haven’t created an Amazon or a Microsoft. We are the place that is nurturing, creating, expanding tech skills and making sure that our companies are tech-enabled, because we have to get much more digitalised.  There are still companies around the world and in the UK that have got manual or old-fashioned back offices, and these are parts of the reasons why productivity isn’t where it needs to be, but I think we’re doing a pretty good job.  We could do better, but we’re doing better than most.”

Asked about the impact of technology on society, Brian says: “Nobody would have envisioned twenty years ago how we would live our lives through the mobile phone.  It transcends all age groups, and it’s not just social media chitchat, look at what the mobile is doing in terms of security, health, and telemedicine.” He highlights the use of AI in healthcare in particular, adding:  “I think the whole use of tech in medicine has extended lives, has helped with what’s going on in cancer research. The impact of tech on lifestyle, on health, on well-being, has been the most remarkable and useful thing that we’ve achieved.”

Brian believes that we are reaching the end of the ‘easy big wins’ as we reach the physical limits of what we can do, such as Moore’s law, miniaturisation etc.  He says: “We’re not going to get the big lifts. We have none of these easy wins coming along from fast or better, cheaper technology.  Through analytics, AI, and data science, we’ll still be able to do things a bit faster, but I think that the next improvement in productivity is going to have to be ground out by us doing things a bit differently, a bit better, a bit faster, but there’s no light switch change moments.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley