Interview with Campbell McGarvie

Campbell McGarvie was born in 1946, in Paisley in Scotland. He has one younger brother. He says of his childhood: “It was very much a happy childhood, spent in Paisley and for a while in Edinburgh.  We lived in tenements, and looking back on it now, it seems quite a deprived childhood compared with today, but I had super parents and I was extremely happy with it all there.”

Having thrived in primary school and passed his eleven-plus, Campbell went to grammar school as a top stream student. Unfortunately, he struggled, he explains: “For reasons I can’t fathom today, I completely lost my way. I went very quickly from the top stream to the bottom stream. I didn’t really understand the school and I don’t think they understood me, and so I drifted out of education as early as I could, at the age of 16, having considerably fluffed the opportunity in grammar school.”

He says that his parents were not disappointed as they had no expectations of him going to university, adding: “We’d never had anyone in the family who’d gone to university so the expectations weren’t very high on their part, or I suppose on mine.  All that really my parents wanted me to do was find a steady trade or a steady job, and further education was not really something they would have discussed or considered.”

Having little choice, Campbell left school and found a job in a bank which he describes as boring. He realised, as his friends started to pursue their further education, that the only way out of the situation he found himself in was to get some qualifications, so he started to study for banking qualifications through the Institute of Bankers. He says: “The course was typically a five or six-year course done by further education. The bank I was part of didn’t offer any further education so I went to night school four nights a week for four years.  People tell me the sixties are remembered for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, well they weren’t if you were going to Paisley Further Education Centre four nights a week.  I emerged as the Scottish Prize Winner from about 500 candidates in the examinations.  I knew I wasn’t the smartest guy who’d taken the examinations, but such was my incentive to succeed that I’d proven that a lot of effort can get me somewhere, so it was a great lesson to learn.”

Having gained his banking qualifications, Campbell immediately left the bank. He says: “I wanted out of there.  The whole purpose of getting a qualification was so that I could go elsewhere and say, look, I’m not as dumb as I seemed to be at school.”

He applied for a couple of jobs, one with Burroughs and one with McKellar Watts, a pie and sausage manufacturer. He was successful in both interviews and chose the Burroughs job because it chimed most with his banking experience, he adds: “the reason I really joined Burroughs was they offered the grand sum of £100 a year more than the sausage company.”

Campbell stayed with Burroughs for 13 years, working in a number of different capacities. He says of the experience: “It was a super company, excellent training and development, lots of technical training, lots of personal development – which I needed at that stage in particular. I followed the standard career progression in those large businesses of systems, sales, sales management, branch management, general management, and I enjoyed it very much.

“I struggled very much when I made the move to sales which I’d moved into because that’s where the money seemed to be and they seemed to be having a lot of fun, but at the time I moved I didn’t really have the self-confidence or the background which would allow me to succeed easily, so that was a struggle. I was very fortunate that I had, as I continued to find through my career, some very good mentors, people who guided me and helped me through difficult periods.  So I had a successful and excellent time at Burroughs, I have great affection for it.”

Speaking of the American culture of Burroughs, Campbell says: “Most of the management were UK people, but there was a large-scale American influence.  I quite liked the American culture of you can succeed, dependent on a lot of effort.  The standards demanded were quite high and that was good for me. There was a lot of time and money spent on personal development which was exactly what I needed at that time.

In 1979 Campbell was headhunted by General Automation (GA) who were among the leaders of the minicomputer market, alongside Digital Equipment and Data General.  Campbell says of the move: “GA fell out of the race very early, but it gave me my first general management job and my first taste of international management, because I also had responsibility for the Scandinavian operation. That was a bit of a baptism of fire. The very first time I went to Stockholm, as the new International Manager, all 30 people in the Swedish office told me they were on strike. They were on strike for a very collegiate Scandinavian reason, which was their boss had not been paid his bonus.  That was an interesting challenge, but we got through.”

After two years with General Automation, Campbell moved to Control Data to run a company called Control Dataset, he says: “This was probably one of the greatest fun things I’ve ever done.  Back in those days there was a very large market for what were generally known as computer consumables, there was a lot of paper, a lot of punch cards, there were things called floppy disks, which were a great new thing, there were removable disk packs.  It’s the closest I came in my career to consumer market, fast moving consumables, it was an interesting market because you could change the pricing or a marketing strategy and see the results within a few weeks. I also had the last punch card factory in the UK, which was great.”

On managing the decline of the punch card factory, Campbell adds: “What was interesting was the factory had a very strong union leadership of the print unions and their principal reaction to anything was to immediately have another strike, so that was good fun.”

Campbell was then appointed to the main board of Control Data, charged with helping the company shift focus from hardware to software and services. He explains: “There was a recognition in ’82, that the future was not in hardware, it was in software and services. So they selected an individual in each country to try and lead the change from hardware into software and services, and I took that on as a director of Control Data UK across the various companies.  I have to say, I failed, as the others did, to make any real impact.  The hardware culture was so deeply ingrained, the idea of moving to software and services was just too challenging for the organisation.  The cultural resistance was huge within them.  The whole business had been built on one aspect of the IT industry and they really couldn’t see themselves moving. It was a fail but it was an interesting thing to have tried to do and I learned a lot about myself and about some of the challenges.”

In 1984 Campbell moved to Storage Tech. Campbell explains the role: “Storage Tech had been around for ten years or so and had been a great success, moving into various aspects of the IT industry, particularly storage and retrieval of information, and they had expanded rapidly.  I was headhunted to head the UK operation, and much to my surprise, and indeed most people’s surprise, within a few months the US company went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.” This type of bankruptcy allows a company to trade its way out of the situation.   Campbell adds: “In the case of Storage Tech, they were able to do that just by sticking to the knitting, pulling back on some of the more extravagant new product range ideas, new industry ideas, new plans, because there was fundamentally a very sound business there.  So the success story was that after two years of Chapter 11 the corporation emerged, paid everyone their debts in full, most people retained their jobs, most customers retained their supplier and most of the suppliers to that company retained their customers.”

In the UK, Chapter 11 did not apply, Campbell continues: “We were in a strange situation of being the wholly owned UK subsidiary of a company that was bankrupt. That was the most exciting thing I ever did by far, just to try to keep this thing alive against all kinds of challenges.  Customers were worried about were we there to support them, understandably, employees were worried if the customers would go away would they get a salary next month.  Our competitors were making hay, of course, and the computer press were having great fun at our expense.  So it was a really, really challenging time, but a great learning experience.”

In 1988 Campbell took on the role of President of BellSouth Europe.

 He says he was attracted to the role by the promise of major investment in Europe, adding: “They’d already bought four or five IT companies in Italy, Germany, UK, France, and wanted someone to help drive these forward and expand them.  So it seemed a very attractive situation to get into.  What I discovered was the acquisitions were not particularly well judged, they didn’t relate to one another.  Some were software companies, some were PC maintenance companies, it made no sense, so very quickly I had to go back to BellSouth’s headquarters in Atlanta and say you have two choices and they both cost a great deal of money.  One is to write off what you’ve bought and the other is to invest in at least the same again to try and make some sort of cohesive business.  Understandably, they weren’t enthusiastic about that and no one wanted to take responsibility, so it was quickly time to move on.  The role was a  misstep on my part, but it was interesting.”

In 1989 Campbell returned to Storage Tech based in Denver.  He says of the move: “It was interesting from the cultural change, but also, the role was something I still see IT companies wrestling with today, which is to attune research and development to immediate future market needs.

“Typically, people in the field, the marketing people will not be able to identify very clearly future technical developments, so the field requirements tend to be whatever features and capabilities the competitors have that this company doesn’t have.  On the other side of the coin you have the research and development people who very easily go off track and just find cleverer, smarter, quicker ways to do things that may not be of any value to anyone. A classic situation of a solution searching for a problem. Trying to marry those two is very challenging, and I think still challenging for the IT industry today.”

Campbell returned to the UK, to return that organisation to its top spot among its competition, he explains: “The UK Storage Tech company had always been the number one world operation and for various reasons it had fallen out from that position and I felt a great deal of affinity for it, I’d been part of it in the most challenging times.  So I was quite enthusiastic about the idea of going back and regaining our rightful position, which we did with a very good team of people.  The secret always is to have the right team of people.”

Speaking about IBM, he adds: “We loved competing with IBM.  Our only advantage could be that we’d be more agile, more responsive, more aware of what customers were saying, and we had to do that constantly.  So it was great fun, it was not quite David and Goliath, but we were very much smaller, had far less in terms of resources, but if we applied ourselves in the right way we could be successful.”

His final role in corporate life was as vice president Europe, Africa, Middle East, responsible for a dozen countries and 4,000 employees. He found this demanding and rewarding but has less fond memories of the airports, long haul flights, hotels and taxis that are an integral part of a global role.

In 2000, Campbell decided to take on a number of non-exec roles in small software companies as well as follow his growing interest in the Information Technologists livery company and its work.

He says of the experiences: “I went along to the start-ups as the sort of greying figure in the corner who’s been around and seen some of it before.  The start-ups were all down to younger, sharper, technically aware people who had bright ideas.  Generally this was a tough time, because there was a great boom in IT in the late 1990s, and then there had been the crash, and so it required quite a lot of enthusiasm and determination to start again and a number of these guys did.  I don’t know that I contributed that much to them other than having seen a few of the mistakes that had been made and I had made, you were able to point people in the right direction.”

Asked why so many entrepreneurs prefer to sell out quickly rather than go on to grow a large UK based IT company, Campbell says: “In general the stock market’s not very enthusiastic about UK companies in that area and we don’t have a strong venture capital industry supporting tech in this country.  There’s complex reasons for why that’s the case, or undoubtedly if we were to build a large-scale IT presence globally, a number of things like that would need to be fixed.

“A lot of these issues are institutionalised and will require a great deal of attitudinal change. It often gets contrasted endlessly with software and IT company development in India, in the west coast of the United States, and sadly the UK does not compare well as a development area compared with those countries. Unfortunately, I don’t see a Microsoft or a large-scale IT organisation developing in the UK.”

Campbell joined the Information Technologists livery company (WCIT) in the late eighties, he says he liked the paradox of the IT industry which often sees itself as disruptors, embracing the 800 year old traditions of the livery companies, adding: “I identified with it, particularly the concentration on charity and education, and I think those are the strongest offerings from the livery company. I was involved in a few developments there, including an apprenticeship scheme and we eventually finished up helping fund an academy in west London amongst some of the poorest areas of west London.  In a south London school, which had been a failing school, we helped them become a very well-established technical school for the IT industry.  So being involved in that through the livery company was quite rewarding.  After a few years of being involved in various things they asked me to be Master of the Information Technologists, which was  great honour, great fun and something I feel a real privilege to have been able to do.

“I enjoyed all the tradition, I also enjoyed seeing what the livery company can provide and what it does provide.  We have 800 members, we contribute a lot in charity each year.  The contribution we make is in our members giving up their time, their skills, their influence to help other organisations, particularly small charities, use IT to their benefit to help those charities do their job better.”

Outside of his family, Campbell says his proudest achievement is understanding that the had “blown it” at the age of 16 by failing to leave school with any qualifications. He continues: “I had to do something about it and no one else was going to do it for me. So sticking it out and going to night school four nights a week after work for all those years as a teenager took a bit of dedication, so I give myself a wee gold star for that.

“I also think suddenly discovering one evening that your company’s bankrupt which came as a complete surprise and, against the odds, getting the business through that, keeping all the customers, keeping all the employees, somehow or other having the credibility that people believed that it was worthwhile hanging on there.”

Asked about if he would do anything differently, Campbell says: “Errors and regrets are not the same thing. I have made a couple of missteps, but I learned from them. So I don’t think you should always regret a misstep, if you learn something from it.  Regrets?  I was very fortunate in the people that guided me, I had a lot of fun in what I was doing. I don’t have any great regrets.  One that I do have is that through the years I worked with some great teams of people and I really enjoyed their company, but I was always looking to the next chapter and once I moved on to something new, I was rather careless with keeping up connections with the people I’d worked with before, and it’s very difficult to pick that up 20 or 30 years later.  So I regret that people I was close to I perhaps unwittingly, unthinkingly turned my back on because I’d found this new exciting thing to do.  That would be a real human regret.”

Campbell comments on the slow, but steady growth of women in IT today, saying: “I look back to Burroughs and it was an all-male environment. Females worked in the office and in HR, and that was it. Now it’s great to see so many women bringing what they do to IT. In the livery company we’ve had a number of female Masters and that’s good to see too, they’re prominent people in the IT industry.”

Asked about a potential brain-drain to the US, Campbell says: “I don’t think there will be one currently, but these things change so rapidly all the time. On the west coast we’ve seen recently the large numbers of layoffs with Elon Musk and people like that are making, so I guess people are pretty wary. However, if you’re someone with real skills, business skills, entrepreneurial skills, technical skills, there’s no doubt about the fact there is a much wider field of opportunity in the US than there is in the UK, or anywhere in Europe. So I suppose that will always be an attraction for younger people.”

Looking to the future, Campbell says it’s hard to predict. So many smart people have got it wrong in the past. But he is interested in the idea that so much development now does not involve a device such as a computer. He adds: “I’m interested in the idea of technology in its broadest sense being available as a utility, for example, like we can connect a plug anywhere in the world in the wall and get electricity, I guess is what we’re heading to.”

On the subject of AI, he says: “There’s a long tradition of scaremongering about new technologies and the dreadful impact they would have.  If we go back to the paperless office, that’s happened to some extent but not fully.  So robots taking over the world will happen to some small extent. Regardless of what’s being said, we will press on and we should press on with caution, and I believe that’s what will happen, there’s enough good sense around.”  He is optimistic and excited about the future.

Asked about advice for those considering a career in IT, Campbell says: “Do it, because it’s got to be a great thing to do.  Stay abreast of the technology as long as you can.  It’s still an industry which is not too hidebound about the way people can get into it and the way they can expand their careers and the way they can develop in it, and I think that’s important and hopefully will stay that way.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley