Interview with David Thorpe

David Thorpe was born in in Stourport-on-Severn. His parents lived in Upton on Severn.  His father served in the RAF during the war and then became a potter at Royal Worcester porcelain.  David says of his father: “He was working-class craftsman. He was an amazing artist, but the war meant he never had the opportunity to go to art college, so, he turned his hand to potting, making cups and saucers, and, porcelain at Royal Worcester Porcelain. He was in fact the last hand throwing potter of his generation, and some of his work is in the Royal Worcester Porcelain Museum. His claim to fame was that he made some of the porcelain that was given to the late Queen on her marriage.”

David’s parents were keen on him gaining a good education. He says that while he did reasonably well at school, he wasn’t a particularly good academic. He adds: “I only got four or five O Levels at my secondary modern school, and it wasn’t really what my mother had hoped for.  I missed going to university, which of course, in those days happened to a lot of people, so she thought the solution to this problem was the town hall.”

David joined the local District Council as  trainee accountant and  started a part-time public sector accounting course going to evening school twice a week, and day release once a week.  He says: “It was a mark of genius on my mother’s part to find this job at Upton upon Severn Rural District Council as a trainee accountant, where I would get educated further, and eventually, if I was successful, get an accounting qualification  She corrected my waywardness, and I am immensely grateful to the fact that she was quite clever in pointing me in the right direction, because it did me no harm; as we all know, accounting and numeracy is a great asset in any part of life.”

David then moved to a role with Malvern Hills District Council as a trainee accountant.  He says: “That’s where I got a much wider experience of both life and accountancy.  I got married quite young and we moved to Malvern.  I did several years as a trainee accountant in Malvern, doing a variety of jobs, everything from rent collecting to switching  off customers  water  because they hadn’t paid their bills.”

David completed his studies and sat the Institute of Municipal Treasurers and Accountants exams.

After gaining his accountancy qualification, David and his wife moved to Basildon where he took a role as an auditor for the District Council. He says: “It had huge challenges and opportunities, and I was very fortunate to get that job. I worked for a wonderful Chief Auditor, and learnt a lot. It taught me a number of things, including team work. I had a small team of accountants working for me. It taught me about the importance of relationships, how to manage your business life in terms of priorities, what’s important and what’s not important.”

David was promoted to Housing Accountant. He adds: “I don’t think I ever actually balanced a set of books. I wasn’t that good an accountant, but I tried hard. I was very fortunate again that it was a great place to work because Basildon was growing, it had lots of challenges in terms of Local Government, and it was a great place to develop your career.”

On the subject of his management style, David says he aims to be supportive.  He explains: “What people  say is that I am hugely supportive until a point when I decide that’s enough. Then I’m reasonably ruthless in terms of dealing with it.  I get people’s confidence up, help them, counsel them, but I am firm but fair on objectives and on performance.  I don’t throw my toys out, I don’t thump the table very much, I try to get there by taking people with me and supporting them.”

Next David took a role as Financial Planning and Research Officer for the London borough of Havering. He would progress to the role of Assistant Borough Treasurer doing financial planning.

David says of his decision to take the role: “It was interesting because it was about financial planning, and it was about helping the Borough Treasurer negotiate grants at central government level.  So it took me into a new spheres, one, financial planning; two, research; and three, it was about moving up to the government stage in London, doing grant and funding negotiations.  I used to write speeches for the Borough Treasurer, and  prepare research  papers.  So I had a great additional set of experiences.”

The computing power for the Borough was supplied on a bureau basis by the Greater London Council which David describes as being “very constraining”. He was asked by the Deputy Treasurer and the Chief Executive to run a review of their computer facilities. David was told to take four people and work out what the council should do with computing- it was the early 1980s and technology was beginning to be adopted everywhere . He says: “So I took the four people, and we began reviewing where we were. It was quite clear that the Bureau Service, which was based on an IBM at County Hall, was coming to the end of its time. It wasn’t going to take us forward.  We then involved Andersen Consulting to help us with the review.  The suggested solution was that we should establish our own computer service.”

The next challenge for David and his team was from  where to source their systems. He explains: “There was no package software. There was no hope of transferring systems from the GLC because they were already out of date.  So, without spending millions of pounds, we invented a package software business.  We went around other councils and looked at what was the best of breed, we took them; we created packages of our own by begging , stealing and borrowing from other councils.  We then went out to tender inviting ICL, Honeywell and IBM to bid for that computing.

“It wasn’t really package software; it was just borrowing software.  Some of it was in good condition, some was in bad condition, but, it was systems for everything from accounting to libraries to social services. We got this set of software together.  It wasn’t easy. Honeywell showed the most proactivity towards the package approach so we chose them and we established the computer service with a very large Honeywell DPS 8 , and I became Head of Computer Services and Management Services. It took two or three years to implement.  It was successful.  We got the Council off the GLC bureau, and we got them on to their own computer services.  We established a computer room.  We installed the mainframe. It was a DPS-8 which ran GCOS.  It was enormous in size, took up a whole computer room, but it was very reliable, and it worked.”

David says the budget for the whole project was under half a million pounds. The system was used just by the London  Borough of Havering to do everything from payroll, accounting, etc. The council was used as a case study for Honeywell having created  ‘the package approach’, which was novel at the time.  Soon package software in Local Government became the way forward with developments by ICL ( LAFIS) and others

After ten years in local government David accepted a role as an Account Manager at Honeywell in Colchester. Honeywell had two sides to its business: controls such as heating controls, and information systems.

David says: “The information systems side came out of America; they had bought out the General Electric computing part in 1983 and they bought out Xerox which had the Sigma system.  They had a range of hardware, very strong software, and they had got into minicomputers.  They did try to get into PCs, but unsuccessfully.”

The company made DPS-8, DPS-7, and DPS-4, computers. The latter was a small system which was used in the early days of the internet.

Asked about Honeywell’s culture, David says: “It was a sales and performance led organisation. They really were good at customer service, but life was about selling and servicing your customer.  There was some innovation as well.  They tried to push the application of technology envelope quite considerably .”

David was given some accounts in Colchester including Felixstowe Dock and Railway Company, Townsend Thoresen, Woods of Colchester and Anglian Water.  He says: “It was a nice set of customers, but I was struggling to find what I was going to sell them.  My breakthrough came at Felixstowe Dock and Railway Company which was linked with Townsend Thoresen, a ferry company.” Having heard that the port was expanding, David persuaded the CEO that technology was key to the port’s transformation. He sold the idea that Felixstowe could be the leading port in Europe with co-ordinated Customs and Excise, freight forwarders, transport and storage companies.  Having convinced the CEO of the port, David then had to convince his support manager back at Honeywell, which he did and the sale was approved.

He adds: “We had two DPS-6 minicomputers which were forever running out of capacity.  We went from one crisis to another because it actually worked.  Felixstowe has become, probably, the premier port in the UK. I don’t claim any credit for that, other than computerisation played a major part in their success. But that did me the world of good because it involved the whole company.  It was the hardware , it was the systems integrators and , the systems developers.  We were pushing the envelope in terms of the capacity of our systems and our capability. Our biggest problem was communications.”

Following this success, David was promoted to Sales Manager and became involved with many more accounts, including Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. He says: “We did a project called Project Cedric, a surveillance system for shipping and aircraft etc .  One of the very earliest monitoring systems of its kind to support operational officers, where we monitored the presence of aircraft and ships and boats that were spotted.  It was an intelligence gathering system for Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Investigation Division. This was the mid-Eighties, and we were cutting edge  with some of these systems.  The era of package software started to come in quite quickly , and it was a good time.  I did well, and was successful.  Eventually I got promoted to Branch Manager in Birmingham.”

At Honeywell, the branch was the place where the business ran.  David says: “It was the business unit that mattered.  You had the customers, you had the support staff, you were linked to the engineering and service teams.  It was the fulcrum of the way the business ran, and there was a competition every year for the best branch.  It was the place where the business came together. There was a regional structure which was more compliance and governance. The business was done at the Branch.”

David remained Branch Manager for four years. During that time, he had many successes, of which he says: “I was fortunate in having some successes and I had those successes because of a lot of good people. Take the Felixstowe example, I didn’t do anything, what I tried to do was to encourage other people to grasp the opportunity, and to get other people in the company to get on board, and to take it forward. I delivered nothing other than leadership. The same was true in Birmingham as the branch manager.  It wasn’t a happy place when I arrived .  The last two branch managers had not been very successful.  I think we had about six customers who were out to tender and we turned them around.”

With the introduction of Council Tax by the government under Margaret Thatcher , David bid for the Birmingham City Council account with a determination to win having been invited in by the assistant treasurer for a ‘chat’. David says: “I grabbed the only salesman I could find in the office, and we went, established a relationship, got ourselves on the tender list, and we won.  Honeywell had been developing a Council Tax system for all of our local authorities, and we displaced IBM very successfully. I was very fortunate that it was on my watch.  It was successful. Honeywell replacing IBM at a flagship account of theirs was monumental.”

In 1988, following his stint as branch manager, David was appointed Honeywell’s director of the Public Authorities Group, running healthcare, local government, and all local government organisations. In 1993, David was appointed to the board of Honeywell UK as Director of Systems and was tasked with dealing with large-scale integration projects.

One of the projects was called Unicon which was worth £2/3 million. The aim was to equip the Army with information systems, and integrate it into the Army infrastructure.  David says: “It was a colossal, absolutely enormous,  project. It was not just linking up the individual battalionsand regiments  … It was a huge integration project of getting all these systems up and running; it was a very challenging project.”

Of his remit, David says that public authorities and local government were very good customers to have, but healthcare was a challenge. He adds: “I almost closed down our healthcare business at the time.” The team developed the HOLMES system for the Police Service, and the Casualty Bureau system after the Lockerbie terrorist attack. David adds: “We took  terrible situations, and we built software for them in the future  like HOLMES from the Yorkshire Ripper case . We built strong relationships with Chief Constables. It was a great time for innovation.”

In 1994, after a decade of working at Honeywell, David joined EDS as Managing Director of the Public Sector. At that time General Motors owned EDS, it spun-out and became independent again in 1996.

The move from Honeywell to EDS was a culture change for David, he says: “It was a strange mix of culture.  First, the level of empowerment was enormous.  … The culture was a fair one, but hard, very hard. There was a strange idea about globalisation, which was in its infancy; for example, the toilets in every location were the same, we had to have the eagle on the front drive in Uxbridge, Stockley Park.

“It was a culture where you didn’t know what was possible; everything was possible.  For example, I had a team at one time saying that EDS would outsource the entire Navy ship capacity.  It was just bizarre what we took on; everything was possible, nothing was impossible.

“It was a can-do culture, fair culture, high performance, heavy empowerment, and I learnt a lot aboutmanagement structures and business unit models  there.  The decisions were taken by the Account Manager so that they were the most effective, and in all likelihood they would be right. The decisions were taken as close to the customer as you could get.”

 EDS had a number of established government accounts including; DVLA, Inland Revenue, Child Support Agency, the Passport Office, and so on. Following on from Margaret Thatcher’s manifesto that promoted outsourcing the company pursued the public sectoraggressively for contracts . David says: “We were successful.  In 1995 we bid and won a contract called Project 95 for the Department of Social Security (DHSS).  It was a difficult deal to get approved but although the margins were initially low the change of Government in 1997 brought a host of changes in legislation and benefits – it became a very profitable contract  and it was amazing  we won it.”

 A year after joining EDS, David was appointed as CEO of EDS UK , a year later he became COO for EMEA and in 2003, he became the EDS President of Europe for a short period on his way to a plural life .

David says the promotions were “a bit of luck”. He continues: “The public sector was flourishing.  The opportunity was so enormous in the public sector that, frankly, most people  could have made a success of it.  It really was quite incredible.  The competition wasn’t good, Accenture would probably be the best of the competition.  ICL could not manage these complex government contracts.  We were doing well with DVLA.  And, and it was a time of enormous growth.  I think you must probably understand why people moved so quickly.  EDS in Europe was growing at 30 per cent a year.

“So the opportunity to keep on restructuring was just incredible.  The DHSS project, which was a highly successful colossal contract, gave me a chance to be promoted to .  Chief Executive of the UK.”

David’s second promotion came after the company won and delivered an exceptional and ground-breaking project for Rolls-Royce. A plan that David devised together with Bill Thomas now Sir . It introduced a new way of financing outsourcing which they called benefit-based outsourcing, i.e. EDS got paid on the benefits that Rolls-Royce received from the transformation project.  David adds: “It was a bit of luck. Bill drove it and made it successful, but fortunately I was in the right seat to get some of the credit, and I got promoted We backed one deal with everything we had . I was in Derby virtually everyday towards the deal closing  All the money was on one number ..”

In the late nineties, EDS started to face stronger competition with the likes of IBM and Fujitsu and as a result margins were reduced. David adds: “Not only did the competition get more aggressive, but the Finance Directors also got smarter. They cleanedtheir businesses   up so all the lower-hanging fruit, they took to themselves, and then wanted you to come in and produce a big saving , which is why we went for benefit-based outsourcing; you couldn’t compete on just the cost of a programmers or MIPS.”

Asked if the work done in preparation for Y2K was essential or a money making exercise by consultants, David says: “It was essential to make the changes to systems, but it was completely overdone.  It could have been done for a fraction of the cost.  We didn’t go out to mislead customers.  We didn’t go for the consulting approach.  We did essential maintenance for our customers.  We got some extra money for it.  I think it was done by EDS in a very sensible way.  We didn’t take them for a ride.”

In May 2003, after a decade with EDS, David decided to take semi-retirement and would go on to share his technology awareness, and management and leadership expertise with over 20 companies in a portfolio career. Most of these opportunities were in technology-based services companies.

David explains: “I was very fortunate to get into Private eEquity, and into listed companies, either as a director or as chairman.  They all had a technology component.  They were either adopting  technology, or technology was at the heart of their business model.  Even at companies  places like Tunstall thatwere in advanced  healthcare, it was about technology.  So David’s contribution   was the awareness of technology , its opportunities and its risks ,that he contributed but not the absolute detailed knowledge.

“In all of the private equity Companies , I was an investor, which I enjoyed. I was reasonably successful in reaping the rewards when they were sold very successfully.in most cases But I also did a few listed companies  Anite ,VT Group , Innovation Group and Interserve  … It was a very fortunate period, 20 years of being involved with some wonderful people in some great companies.”

As well as technology, David also spent time on his other love – horse racing and racing horses. He spent five years as Chairman of the  Racecourse Association Limited- the trade body for the UKS 60 racecourses . He says: “I went to see a headhunter about a particular technology company they wanted a chairman for, and in so doing I professed that my love of horse racing.  The role of Chairman came up at the Racecourse Association, which was the trade association for all the 60 racecourses in the UK, and I was persuaded to go for an interview. I said, ‘I know nothing about racecourse management.’  They said, ‘They want a negotiator, an ambassador, they don’t want someone who knows how to run a racecourse.’  I got the job, and I was very fortunate.  It was a challenging time, we reorganised the industry. I did that for five years and then I joined a listed company in the racing business.and I am still today Chairman of Arena Racing Company which operates 45% of British Racing and is now a global media rights business

David says his biggest mistake is not to follow his instinct.  He explains: “Every time I’ve got something wrong, my instinct told me that I should have done X and I did Y.

For example, the conversations about the restructuring of EDS.  My instinct told me it wouldn’t work, but I didn’t do anything about it. I let my instinct down in favour of following the path of ” logic”, when logic was never going to work.

“I’ve learnt that my instinct and other people’s instinct is often more powerful than the reasoned logic or presentation.  Not always right, but it must play a big part in decision-making.”

David believes that intuition is something that comes with experience. He adds: “You can’t learn it, you can’t go to school for intuition, you accumulate it.  I think you have to have an open mind and be very conscious and sensitive to what’s going on around you.  It’s a skill you learn over a long time, and it is accumulated experience.  You’ve probably seen it before and you dig deep into those archives of experience and that’s a great asset to have; I’m fortunate that I’ve got a bit of it.”

“The second biggest mistake is on leadership. I probably have left a few people in their jobs just a little bit too long, and not done the hard thing quick enough, and the business may have suffered.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Hutton

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley