Lawrie: So my guest in Leadership Listening today is John Berriman, whom as I did my research for this particular episode, that research told me that I’d known John for over 35 years.

And like me, John was a partner in Price waterhouse Coopers, PwC, originally on the audit side with very major clients like Ford, BT, Vodafone, and the Cabinet Office. John also, in the latter years of being with PwC, set up the cybersecurity advisory practice, which is a very significant part of the firm’s offering in these cyber aware days today.

John was on the PwC board as a member for six years, and was the firm’s chief operating officer, COO, with 1,400 people reporting to him. Not content with that marvellous PwC story, on retirement, John then spent a couple of years as the global COO for the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. To add to all of that, John was for many years the chair of the trustees of McIntyre, an organisation that offers learning, support, and care for more than 1,400 children.

John was also on the board of the RAC club, and chaired its audit and risk committee. And quite breathless as I am, John was also a council member and treasurer of Chatham House. I’m not sure how you could fit much in beyond that, John, but you’re very welcome this morning. I saw from your background that you were, in your youth, a very significant tennis player and like me you were something of a water skier for a number of years. So that joins us together as well. So welcome. John, a little bit about where all this came from in your earlier years maybe. 

John Berriman: Well, good morning, Lawrie. Thank you. I came from a family where my father was a very successful businessman.

And if you read out all the things he did, the list would probably be up three times longer. I do remember one of my partners in PwC saying to me, “I get the sense, John, you’re always trying to do at least as well as, or if not better than, your father.” And I pooh-pooh’d his comment at the time.

And funnily enough, when I was reflecting on our upcoming discussion today, I think he was probably right. My father was incredibly supportive and he didn’t push me in any direction, but the advice he gave me was superb. Indeed it was he who set up MacIntyre, and very wisely brought in a number of younger members of the board, myself included, just as we were all sort of turning 30.

He died last year, but reached a grand old age of 96, and still had, you know, all his faculties. And so I was incredibly fortunate to be able to enjoy his advice and guidance throughout my life. I would also say that when I joined the C part of PwC, Coopers & Lybrand, back in 1975 I found myself working for a lovely partner, Peter Walsh, who was both the partner looking after Ford Motor Company, but he also looked after Southeast Asia.

It was probably no accident that later I became the partner looking after Ford Motor Company, and I also spent a significant amount of time both living in Hong Kong, and then for six years looking after the audit practices and business development for the Coopers Southeast Asia firms. 

Lawrie: And the operational mindset is something, with my consulting background, that I find very interesting indeed because, you know, people look at implementation, execution as it’s sometimes called, as ‘that’ll just happen’.

I don’t look at it that way. So what kind of views have you got around this thing which is operational mindset and efficiency and effectiveness and implementation? 

John Berriman: I suppose in my case I’ve always been, I guess, what’s called a completer finisher. I find it sort of unattractive if something’s 90% done and the rest is not done.

And funnily enough in a firm like PWC where you’ve got, you know, the best part of 1,000 partners who are all busy doing their own thing, but within a strategic intent that the firm lays out, you don’t get a lot of people who fancy making their time doing operations, but I did enjoy that.

And I think if I look back, when I first joined Coopers, I was allocated to an audit group, and we had 30 people on the group. 26 people on the group went to Oxford or Cambridge and I came in from a nine-month foundation course in accountancy at North London Polytechnic. I’d had a very good education at private school, but I’d spent more time on the tennis court, I hadn’t found water skiing at that stage, than I did studying.

It was probably a bit of a shock to me and probably to my parents. I went off to the Poly. I came top in the Poly, which was what enabled me to apply to and secure a role with Coopers. But I was very conscious that I was in an environment where if I was going to succeed, I probably needed a slightly different string to my bow.

This may amuse you. One of the very early things that I did operationally is that I found the filing system in our office to be very frustrating. Whenever I wanted to find something, it was never in the place it ought to be, and I guess I’d been in the firm a couple of years at that stage. I was only 20.

And one Saturday I took the tube down from my flat with some screwdrivers, and I unscrewed all the filing system and completely revamped it. I have to say I hadn’t had permission for doing so, but, when everyone came in on the Monday, of course, no one could find anything. But soon after that, people actually appreciated that the new structure was rather better.

So – Yeah … it was only a small example, but things like that sort of worked for me. And I soon found that, you know, I might not have the intellectual heft that some of my colleagues had, but I tended to see things in much more practical ways. Life’s a competition, isn’t it?

However much we like it. Finding, you know, that extra edge that enables people to see you and mark you out as being different I had, I had it naturally, if you like, because operational things were what I enjoyed doing. I then spent a career, as you say, looking after clients both in an audit context and an advisory context.

But it was probably no huge surprise to people when I first of all became the COO of our audit practice, and then of the firm. Because just the mindset that you need to do operations and actually deliver things as opposed to say that you’re going to deliver them, is a slightly different one.

And I guess everyone listening to this will, you know, you only need to look at government of whatever persuasion it might be, they tend to seem to fall on actually implementing the things that they say they want to do, and finding people who want to do implementation work is not easy, and the civil service tends to, you know, build itself around very strong intellectual capability.

And to a degree, you know, that’s the same challenge that faces some of the large professional services firms as well. 

Lawrie: Very interesting, John, because as you know, I didn’t go to university either, and funnily enough, way back when, I was actually taught how to file. There were those days. And a good skill it was, too.

Along the way, John, I guess it’s fair to say certainly with all of the people I’ve had as coaching clients and leadership teams, there are what I might call difficult bosses, difficult in all sorts of different ways, and I guess it’s also fair to say that you can learn something from difficult bosses, but you at the same time have to maybe grit your teeth on many occasions.

Where have you encountered difficult bosses, and what might we say about them, without of course naming them? 

John Berriman: No, of course. Well, I think one of the fantastic things about being in a firm like PWC, and particularly actually in the audit practice, is the incredible range of people that you get exposed to, both in your own organisation and also in the client organisation.

And if I think, you know, how many different bosses have I had at different levels in my lifetime, well, it’s innumerable. Most audits would be done through a different manager. The partners often were the same, but they changed over time as well. You went out to clients. I ultimately ended up sitting in the boardroom at BT when BT was Britain’s biggest company, so, you know, I’ve seen the board in operation there.

I’ve seen how the bosses worked in BT. I had, one of my other clients was Oxford University Press, you know, the other end of the scale, 500-year-old printing and publishing company, and so that breadth of exposure to different people enables, certainly in my case, enabled me to identify the things that I thought worked really well.

Also unsurprisingly I saw things that didn’t work so well. I undoubtedly had people that I worked for who I didn’t find easy to work for. I think your word gritting your teeth is spot on. I was always very clear that the boss was the boss. I may have different ideas, and so I think that sort of mindset’s quite important in terms of, you know, I wasn’t trying to push against the boss.

What I’d always hoped was through force of personal character, I could perhaps persuade people who saw things differently to do things differently. For me, you know, the very best bosses were the ones who really understood how to motivate people, who understood people. I’ll give you a small example.

When we had a board meeting when I was on the PWC board down at the Vineyard Hotel near Newbury, and it had a Michelin star restaurant, and the chef invited the board to come round and see the kitchens. He said, “The board…” There were a dozen of us on the board. He said, “I’ll take you round in two groups of six.”

And we went into the kitchen and I think it was in around 2005, so it was very much when Gordon Ramsay was seemingly always on the TV shouting and swearing at people, and generally being a bit unpleasant to them. And we went into this kitchen, and it was the quietest place I’ve ever been in my life.

They were serving that day. They were serving as I recall, best part of 200 people. And as he took us round the kitchen, he said, “ I’ve got one job, and that is to know what’s going on in the lives of all of the people here in the kitchen.” He said, “So I’ve got someone here, you know, whose wife’s had a miscarriage, and so, you know, we’re spending time supporting him and them.”

And I just draw that as the sort of comparison, if you like, between the sort of Ramsay style boss, which I would have hated, I couldn’t have worked in that environment and someone who appreciated, the standards were absolutely superb, but he really appreciated how important it was to look after your people.

I think I was lucky in that I didn’t have any bosses who didn’t look after people, but I had, I had bosses who definitely saw the clients at one level, and the staff looking after them at another level, and had a degree of pushing and pushing staff. But, you know, you could argue, well, that’s actually, that’s good business, just a matter of knowing how far you push and when you, when you back away.

I’ve always tended to think of myself as a bit like a sponge in terms of all of these different experiences have enabled me to look at what works well and what doesn’t work well, and I hope that I ended up becoming an amalgam of the good things and rejecting and not using things that I’ve seen that haven’t worked so well.

But it would probably be for those who work with me to say whether I was successful. 

Lawrie: Yeah. And the opposite of difficult bosses, certainly in my case, a couple of occasions through a long career, there were very senior people who sort of spotted me for one reason or another. Did that happen in your case?

Spotted me and then backed me and developed me and pushed me very hard, in a way that actually turned out to be extremely helpful and beneficial. Did you have that? 

John Berriman: Undoubtedly. Again, when I joined PWC, and the partner I mentioned who was looking after both Ford and Southeast Asia, he undoubtedly, supported me all the way.

He was quite old-fashioned. A bachelor who read jurisprudence at Oxford and whose writing was absolutely beautiful. And mine was rubbish, and he taught me how to write very nicely, which I’m hugely appreciative of. But I could just see small things in the background. He was not someone who’d say, “Oh, John, you, you’ve done a super job here,” or something.

It would more just be sort of suddenly another opportunity would arise here and you’d think, “Oh, yes, that must have come through Peter.” I remember when I joined Coopers, I was a member of the RAC club. Well, I think soon after I joined. My father had been a member and made me a member.

I got an internal letter from this partner saying, “Dear Berriman, I understand you’re a member of the RAC club. I’d be grateful if you’d put me up, please.” You know? It’s the sort of thing you could either sort of slightly bristle and sort of say, you know, “Why should I?”

But on the other hand, you think, well, actually, here’s a very senior member of the organisation who’s asking if I would, you know, if I’d care to put my name to his membership, which of course I did. He had a brother who had learning difficulties, and I have a brother with learning disabilities, and we became very, very close friends.

And, very sadly he was diagnosed with prostate cancer on the day he retired. He was 57. 

I spent a lot of time then later with him, talking about how we made sure that his brother was going to be safe and secure in his life after he’d died. So you know, you could have never painted that picture when I first joined the organisation.

The other thing he did was, I got it in my mind that I wanted to go to Singapore, and my wife, Lindsay, was quite happy to come to whichever country we chose. He said, “No, no, I want you in Hong Kong.” And it wasn’t really until I got to Hong Kong that I understood why they were trying to get a grip on things in Hong Kong and why they were sending me out there.

You know, he didn’t always necessarily tell you all the story, but rather, like, as your experience, you know, everything was being done for a reason. 

Lawrie: I think as COO, John, you were then also responsible for the firm’s money? Not an unsurprising subject in a place like PWC. But, my next sort of line is, what actually keeps a COO awake at night in a major professional services firm?

Beause, I mean, I start from a position that says no organisation, no company, has an abiding right to exist. The worst can happen. 

John Berriman: Absolutely. I mean, I guess there’s a sort of generic answer and then there’s perhaps the specific. So when I joined the board, Coopers and PW had been merged for two years at that point.

So this was the first opportunity partners had to vote for a new senior partner who appointed his board, as opposed to, you know, appointments that were made when the merger took place. The merger took place in over 150 countries around the world, which would make it the biggest merger ever, to my knowledge.

Certainly bigger than any corporates in terms of sheer, sheer scale. Relationships were not always easy, as you might imagine, and there was a lot to do for pulling the firms together. The economic background was fantastic, and the whole profession was growing very fast. We significantly underperformed in the first two years before I joined the board.

So actually, the atmosphere in amongst the partnership was not hugely positive at the time I came in to the COO role. And generally, the operational functions hadn’t been pulled together on an integrated basis. They were still reasonably standalone. So there was a lot to do. There were a lot of people.

I guess there were 1,200 people or so who lost their jobs as a result of all of the restructuring that we did, and that was probably one of the biggest challenges, trying to make sure I had the right people in place. The money was very important and the money’s important for all professional services firms, because if you’re a shareholder in a corporate, you either invest, either or both invest for improved capital return on your investment or indeed dividends or both.

Of course, in a partnership, your shareholders are sitting in the offices next door to you. They’re experiencing every decision you take personally. The partners get paid out of the profits that are left at the end of the year, so you can’t actually calculate what the firm’s going to earn in a year, let alone how much is going to go to each individual partner.

So any COO who isn’t bang on top of all of the money issues, budgeting sensibly, putting in sensible contingencies, is gonna get in a mess and certainly I’m aware of in other organisations, not necessarily other Big Four firms, but, you know, where they’ve paid the price because partners haven’t been paid what they thought they were gonna get paid at the end of the year.

So communications is a huge issue, absolutely huge issue, getting it right with the partners. I think also walking the floors with your fellow partners, I was always concerned, we as a board sat … I mean, we didn’t have any different offices from anyone else but, you know, every partner’s office was a partner’s office was a partner’s office.

But we sat together to try and foster a sense of a board working together, but the danger is you then get messages going back and forth between board members and just reinforcing sometimes just the same message. So I found it very important to get out, you know, we had two big buildings in London, nine floors in the building I worked in, and just getting out and about and talking to partners and seeing what was going on.

That was the quickest way to know what the problems were. In terms of other things, I think that would generally would keep me awake. Technology definitely. The difficulty was technology was moving so fast. I mean, when I took on the role in 2000, you know, we weren’t using mobile phones.

I introduced BlackBerries later on and we had several hundred people, technology developers up in Manchester and we outsourced the whole of that capability in due course. But partners always wanted more and more and staff and, you know, we was felt as if we were lacking what we could get if we were on our own rather than as part of a big firm.

So there was always a challenge about how did you make sure you had enough money, and the technology budget was over 100 million when I took office. It’s a long time ago. There was always a push, “Well, can I have this?” or, “Can I have some extra software?” or, “Can I have a smarter machine?”

And actually we held the line everywhere on that. The only people who we had to upgrade the kit for was our actuaries, our actuarial insurance practice, simply because they needed more powerful computing than we could give them. So I think the technology always bothered me, both in terms of, of it, our understanding of it, and its price.

The other thing I was always fond of saying to people, when you’re doing an operational role, it’s what doesn’t work that people spot rather than what does work. So no one would come up to me at the end of a day and say, “Oh, John, what a fantastic day. All the lifts worked and no lift broke down at all.

My technology worked when I plugged it in,” you know? “I got all the help I needed from the transaction processing centre.” Of course, you never get that, but when one or two things don’t work, you hear about it. And so one of the ways that I tackled that is I created a survey mechanism which we used to do every quarter amongst all of the client-facing staff to give their views back on how we were performing internally and actually I built a bonus scheme around the results of that survey so that our people were actually being paid on how they were being viewed by all the people receiving the service in the business.

That actually had two benefits. It firstly got us very connected, and it meant that people who understood it became a key part of my team, and people who didn’t, didn’t for obvious reason. But it also sent a very strong signal to the business that we were listening and we wanted to do what was right for the business.

I was always very fond of saying to people, “You know, if we’re getting a 96% hit rate on a particular target that we’ve set ourselves, that means that there are four in every hundred occasions that we’re dealing with people we’re not getting it right. So, you know, let’s forget about looking at the 96% and let’s look at the 4% and how we reduce that.”

I think one final thing which probably wasn’t high on my list, I took on my role in July 2000 and fairly shortly afterwards we had 9/11, and I remember being in the office. We had our media team quite near to where we sat, and so they had a TV on and I came out of my office and I saw one of the planes flying into the World Trade Center, then started picking up the news about what was going on.

So I shot straight into the senior partner’s office and said, “Look, there’s something really strange happening here.” And at the time, when it initially happened, there were reports of planes flying loose over London. It turned out not to be true, but you can imagine. So amongst my other responsibilities, was making sure that we could track everyone in America who we had working out there.

At any one time we had a lot of people and funnily enough, one of the side benefits was we had a contract with Hogg Robinson, who did all of our travel for us. And partners were increasingly moaning that they had to go through Hogg Robinson. Why couldn’t they go on and buy a cheap flight themselves and save the firm money?

But of course, part of the deal was Hogg Robinson actually could tell us where absolutely everyone was, you know, where they should be. So I ended up spending many hours in the office, and then found myself doing the same thing five years later when there were the London bombings on the bus and tube. So I’m not sure I would have necessarily ever sat down at the beginning and said that would be something that would be keeping me awake at night. But certainly after it first happened it became an important part of my portfolio. 

Lawrie: Yeah. And powerful as the professional services firms are, I think your hint earlier on was that if things go financially awry, then there is such a thing as a cash call.

Which means that partners have to put their hands in their pockets and put cash into the firm as opposed to taking it out of the firm. 

John Berriman: Absolutely, and that was sort of what I was hinting at. And certainly we never did make a cash call in our time. But we certainly at the time I joined the board, we had significant levels of funds owed by fellow member firms.

Mercifully, as I say, the financial climate generally was quite positive, but we ended up, in the first couple of years, I think we were the 68th biggest organisation in the world at the time we merged. I think there was some old newspaper article about it. And certainly some partners, I think more in the US than in the UK, started getting a little bit excited about their own self-worth and, we’re a big organisation so we ought to be able to fly first class and we ought to be able to stay in swanky hotels and all the rest of it.

And part of my job was to say, “Well, actually, we’ve got a set of policies and rules and we’re going to apply them.” because costs can very quickly run out of control. And it was around the time I joined the board that we started having quite a big cost reduction exercise globally because we’d built too many intervening roles of management. But if you make a cash call, I suspect you’ve lost, you’ve lost the partnership in terms of, you know, their confidence in the management. There’s nothing more important. Because if you think about it, well, as you would have, you experienced, because you and I worked together, you know, every partner is going to budget their life on the firm’s budget.

If you’re an employee and you’re being paid X for the year, then you know what you’re gonna get paid every month, and unless you lose a job, that’s what you’re going to earn. But the partner is told that this is what we’re aiming to achieve in the year and of course, some partners are sensible and they live their lives targeting to spend very much less, and others spend rather a lot more. And then so that, the cash call is a significant issue if it ever happens. 

Lawrie: I should say at this stage that if viewers or listeners want to write into us, then there is an email at podcast@leadershiplistening.com That’s podcast@leadershiplistening.com

John, then moving on, having been in a firm which is a firm of many parts, many professions, many disciplines, you know, huge geographical reach – How do you create operational discipline inside a partnership structure where, if I may be polite about it, I think people are highly autonomous, even somewhat self-possessed and can be difficult.

How do we sort of deal with the operational discipline piece? 

John Berriman: My personal experience is a lot of it is down to the tone that’s set by the senior partner. I was always very conscious that if there were really significant things that I wanted to communicate to the partnership whilst I could do them in my own right they never carried the same weight as if the senior partner, you know, went out there and clearly communicated.

And I said to you earlier on, communication is absolutely fundamental. I think the best I saw it in PWC was when Ian Powell was elected senior partner, and he came in 2008, which was a remarkably difficult time with, you know, with the financial crash. He had a background in business restructuring and insolvency, which made him ideal, and he’s a very talented man.

And one of the things he did was he laid out the strategy for the firm in 2008, which he followed consistently for the time that he was senior partner. But we used to have an annual partner meeting, and he would make it explicitly clear that every partner in the room had personal responsibility for delivering on that.

And I think, I mean, it sounds a simple thing to say, but I’m not sure I ever remembered anyone saying that before at partner meetings. So there was a tendency, you’d go to a partner meeting, you’d hear the management telling you what they were gonna do, and then you’d go away, and if the management didn’t do it, you’d slag off the management, you know.

And what Ian was saying was saying, “Look, you’ve all got the chance to contribute to the thinking on where we’re going. But once we’ve done it, we’re all in this together, and we get on, and we take personal responsibility.” He also did an exceptionally good job working with his board in terms of putting out a very simple Sort of two, three-page document which had the strategy and all the key actions that the board was going to take, and then we all developed our objectives underneath that to fulfil the firm’s objectives.

And I think that helped to stamp out what one of the one of the board members at the time said was stopping us doing stuff for money. And obviously we put in process, so partners don’t like to be told that they need someone else to approve the pricing of a job, for example.

Well, generally, the partner can determine the pricing for a job, but we put in thresholds whereby, you know, if it was of a certain size, it had to come to a committee, a mixed committee. Quite often people in the same business, but not on that project, just to get fresh thinking into it. And, you know, initially, that was challenging because people didn’t like having someone interfere, but there are these interventions you can take that just help to make sure that, you know, we’re all on the same page and no one goes rogue on us, because obviously the cost of making a mistake on these things is very high because certainly if it’s a consulting assignment, you know, you’re basically in for having to do the assignment again, or paying for someone else to do it.

You touched on the global dimension. I mean, that is difficult. That is very, very difficult. I think that was always challenging. If you’ve got 150 odd countries, it’s important particularly for the major territories, it’s important that every country adheres to the standards that the firm sets.

But it’s very difficult for some of the smaller firms to pay their way and do all the things that are required to meet those standards. And so I think there was a lot of thinking done and some sensible work done in terms of sorting out, you know, the priority territories who would take responsibility.

If a key decision was taken, every priority territory would have to be behind it and push it immediately and you could have some more leeway in terms of timing on some of the smaller territories. I mean, everyone was expected to get there, but, you know, you could otherwise, with that volume of countries, you could just spend your life going round and round in circles. I think global relationships are very difficult. I mean the law firms, you can see it, you know, now a lot of the British law firms trying to make their way into the US because the US are coming over here and they hoover up the really big assignments.

It’s a real challenge. It’s a real challenge. You’re not necessarily welcome in their market and that can be just as true internally as externally, so I think the global roles in professional services firms are pretty challenging.

Lawrie: And I can remember now that I sort of think back on the occasion when I was admitted as a partner, Sir Brandon Gough said to the clutch of us who were there for dinner with him that evening, “You now have the signature on every other partner’s check book.”

And that was a very telling statement about the potential for liability that could leave us in difficulties, shall we say, from a liability point of view. 

John Berriman: I think that’s a very interesting. I hadn’t heard that one. What I was very struck by, again, going back to when Ian Powell was senior partner, after he was elected, he did a series of sort of town hall meetings, and he’d just come, you know, into the middle of a floor and everyone around would could ask him questions.

And he said, “Just think of me as a gold card.” He said, “You know, If you need me to come and talk to your clients, you know, to smooth things or what have you, then use me.” And that wasn’t something that had typically been said before. Certainly, I don’t remember of having experienced that before.

I thought it was a powerful way of looking at things. 

Lawrie: Terrific. I guess it’s fair to say that at least in some dimensions, John, we live in a somewhat unfair world. And I guess it’s also possible then for people to have misconceptions about how firms like PwC really operate.

You know, the accusations is it’s too big, it’s too powerful, it soaks up huge concentrations of talent and so on. But misconceptions about the real truth of a place like PwC? 

John Berriman: Difficult one because obviously I spent 41 years in the firm and sort of saw it for all its best aspects.

I suspect a lot of people think that, you know, going into the audit practice, you’re sort of cannon fodder. I don’t see it that way. I think it was probably more fun and more interesting, you know, when I started in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, because, you know, computers were first sort of coming into business life.

We weren’t all sort of staring at screens, and I think we were out talking to clients and learning a lot more. I mean, in a sense, you only have to look at the different things that I did in the firm. You know, I spent 20-odd years in audit. I had six months in tax, which was good experience in terms of learning about doing things differently.

I lived in Hong Kong for two years, six years in Southeast Asia. After the board, and I think this is perhaps noteworthy, after the board, I had a further career in the firm for nearly 10 years. So PwC focus on what’s called cycles of experience, and there’s a recognition, if you’re trying to keep 900 or 1,000 partners content, you know, you’ve got to find ways of giving people more experience and developing them.

You know, development, I think, is crucial. So after I came off the board, I went into our public sector team. I ran the education practice. I looked after the department for business. I did major assignment, as you referenced at the beginning, for the Cabinet Office.

Then I ran the real estate practice for the firm before setting up the cybersecurity business. And in some ways that I was at my very best as a client-facing person after I’d done my stint on the board, because I’d had the experience of doing board work as well as doing my prior client work.

I suspect most people looking in from the outside at a professional services firm like PwC would generally be surprised at the range of opportunities and how we do move people around. I think the firms, from what I understand, I’m not just talking about PwC here, do understand their position in society in terms of helping to keep the capital markets, you know, with the right information flow.

I don’t think it’s all about nakedly trying to sell more services to clients. Some partners will be more focused on that than others, I understand. I think the audit partners understand very well that they get remunerated for the work they do as auditors. There’ll be people who come into the firm and are bored rigid, you know, and that’s the way of the world.

It’s probably true of any job, but, you know, for some people, you know, the early auditing piece they find very dreary. They’ll go back home and tell their parents, “This is very boring.” and so through that, you sort of change. There’ll be a number of people who just say, “These sort of firms, you know, they’re not for me.”

Having said that, when I was on the board, my recollection was, we had a 96% hit rate, so of the graduates we offered jobs to, 96% of them accepted them I ran graduate recruitment for Coopers between ’86 and ’90 before we merged with the UK firm Deloitte Haskins & Sells, and our hit rate was 44, 45%, just to give a sense.

So basically, when I was trying to fill the Coopers slots up, I was having to make as many offers as 10 years later we were making to get PwC full when we were recruiting vastly more people. It’s just that, you know, the hit rate was so high. So that would sort of suggest that people do understand, you know, what’s going on in the firm.

I think there’s a long, a strong focus on sustainability in the organisation. Certainly that started sort of at board level. That started in the early 2000s in PwC. But I suspect I’m more likely to tell you the positives because I lived through them and I enjoyed them and of course there are gonna be aspects.

People will think that, you know, partners earn too much money and all the rest of it . So I’m not sure one’s ever gonna change that. I think the fact we converted to a limited liability partnership and we had to publish accounts and be much more transparent probably helped on that, on that journey as well.

Lawrie: Both you and I in our respective careers, John, have sat around very many boardroom tables, and C-suite tables, and chief executives’ offices, and the question comes to mind about leadership, that vexed subject, and the balance between intelligence in an individual or I guess in a board, and judgment and that balance I think in many senses is often in quite short supply or not understood properly.

So is leadership more about judgment than intelligence, do you think? 

John Berriman: Well, what a good question. There’s a core level of intellect that is gonna be critical for doing the job. We’ve already talked about the fact neither of us went to university, so I’m not sort of trying to tie that back into, you know, whether you’ve got a 2:1 or a first class degree.

Judgment, I think, is crucial, and I do remember in my early days of operational work back in the 1990s when I was in the audit practice, having a fierce debate amongst a leadership team of three of us as to whether pragmatism trumps policy. You’ve got your policies, and there’s a good reason for having them, but there are times when you just get pragmatic and you get on and do things.

And, I think sometimes the 80/20 rule can be quite important. If you’re driven primarily through intellect, then the 80/20 rule’s gonna feel an uncomfortable one. 

So I think as with any board, having a good mix of people around the table who can cover off all the angles for you is important.

Certainly there were two or three things we did in PwC that were really complicated. One was selling the consulting business. We sold it to IBM. And trying to sell a business around 100 and odd countries in the world to a corporate where everything was sort of very, you know, in stovepipes and ours was sort of a bit all over the place, that was a huge challenge, both practically and intellectually.

Similarly, when we converted to limited liability partnership, there were some very complicated issues to deal with. And also when we restructured the partner annuities, and I can certainly remember a big partner meeting where the partners simply couldn’t get comfortable on an issue, and it needed the senior partner to come out.

It was being handled by the then managing partner, who was super bright, but it did need the senior partner to give that sort of stamp, and I think partners wanted to understand the judgments we’d made, but also understand the intellectual underpinning. So I don’t think there’s a right answer or a wrong answer, but I think if you had a board which didn’t have sufficient intellectual heft on it, then I think you’re probably going to struggle and if everything was sort of seat of the pants, you’re going to struggle as well. 

Lawrie: I was gonna move on to, you know, large organisations becoming too complex to lead effectively, which I think may also say something about the quality of the leadership. And I was listening to the radio a day or so ago when the headline from somebody was, look at BP, which has had three chairmen, three CEOs in three years, which obviously says something about the complexity of an organisation as big as that, and the complexity of making it work around the leadership table, the boardroom table

or the chief executive’s table, for that matter, or the join between the two. Any thoughts about this sort of size thing, John? It’s not an easy question to answer, but … 

John Berriman: Well I suppose the ultimate in size would be, be government. And I remember when Gus O’Donnell was head of the civil service and hearing him speak at a PwC conference actually, and he was saying, you know, people are very quick to, you know, criticise the civil service for things that don’t work well. He said, “But just remember,” he said, “there won’t be a corporate in the world that is having to serve every single member of the community.” And he said, you know, “When we’re bringing in a new policy or a new approach on a particular issue, you know, it’s got to be something that everyone in the room, in this case, a series of professional services people can handle.

But more importantly, the person who’s got a day job and then washes dishes in a restaurant in the evening. And, you know, if we’re gonna make something delivered technologically, then, you know, how are we gonna make sure that everybody can access it?” I thought that was a very powerful statement, and in some ways made me a bit more sympathetic to some of the shortcomings you see, you know, at a governmental level.

BP would be the obvious, you know, huge example of a corporate that is massive. I have to say, I spent a week or so at BP many, many years ago, having a look at and advising them on their internal audit function and the thing that struck me, and in fact I took some learning lessons from it when I was CEO at PwC.

They used to recycle some of their very top oil and gas measurement people through internal audit, and they would then travel the world, and essentially through that they’d be making sure that people all around the world knew how to do things, you know, best in class. I thought that was very powerful.

And funnily enough, you know, one of the things I did was to set up a small office that helped me on, when we were doing the restructuring and transforming of PwC, and I cycled people in from each of my functional areas so they could get experience and then move things around.

So I think smart organisations do that, I’m sure. Whether it gets too complicated, I guess, you know, the key issue then is have you got the right leadership all around? Because it’s not then a question of the chief exec. It’s a question of all of the people leading all of the battalions, and the extent to which they sort of liaise with each other.

And, you know, if I go back to my government example, they tend to work within their own stovepipes. And it’s just so huge that getting that sort of cross-fertilisation doesn’t really seem to work. Certainly in my experience it doesn’t. I have no idea whether it does or it doesn’t in BP.

Whether the board issues are symptomatic of something different, I’m not sure. I sense that, you know, as the world sort of suddenly became very bearish on fossil fuel organisations, some really big strategic decisions had to be taken. And if you’ve spent your life drilling for oil and then you try and turn yourself to become more sustainable, you’re not gonna bring everyone with you.

It’s just not gonna work. 

Lawrie: So John, a hell of a journey that you’ve had, and I wonder, you know, what you might have discovered about yourself in the sort of scale leadership positions that you’ve had. What would those things be? 

John Berriman: Having done the operational role in the audit practice, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the firm’s operations, and then I became the firm CEO sorry I mean COO, wishful thinking COO, and just immediately realised there was just another whole scale of stuff out there, you know. A lot of learning. A lot of learning. I realised just how important it was in that senior position that you spent your time, or I spent my time focusing on the big, complicated issues.

Coming into the office, there might be a dozen things that need doing, and the tendency would be to do the seven or eight quite straightforward things because you feel comfortable, and you can take them off the list. The trouble is, you’ve reached the end of the day, and you’ve still got five really difficult things to do.

And I remember chatting to you about this many, many years ago, and you making the point, you know, if you’re in a senior position, you’ve got all these people working for you, so there’s thousands of hours of time that can be spent, you know, delivering the objectives of the operational construct.

Just make sure that you’re focused on doing the right things. I was surprised … I mean, my remit was, was finance, tax, treasury, transaction processing centres, which we were in the process of building for finance and HR. It was risk management, it was compliance, it was technology, it was property, you know, little office, my sort of project office I set up. So it was pretty broad. I mean, I had to make some difficult decisions because I couldn’t have all those people reporting to me. Initially they were, but then when I wanted to restructure it, of course people get unhappy because they’re no longer reporting to the COO.

So, I probably learnt an extra level of resilience when I was on the board. One thing I definitely learnt was that trying to convince colleagues through logic was not always gonna work when the colleague themselves were wired emotionally. And I particularly remember a board away day where one of my board colleagues who I got on very well with personally, but I just could not get him onto the page I wanted on some operational stuff and afterwards, the senior partner and I had a quiet chat, and he said, he said, “John, you’re absolutely right”, but he said, “You’re not gonna get there unless you can engage emotionally with the particular board member.” I thought that was … I mean, I’m sure it’s not radical news to anyone listening to this, but it helped me, and it helped me then think about different ways in which to engage, you know, the people I was working with.

And I think as I mentioned briefly earlier on, I think then the skills that I developed, particularly sitting around the board table, very much working on the basis that, you know, listening was more important than seeking to contribute on every issue, and contributing on the issues you’ve really got a strong view on rather than, you know, being the next person who has to say the same thing as the previous person.

And we had some pretty good rules. We said no violent agreements with each other in the sense that don’t waste board time doing that. Also, I brought in something that I’d seen at BT, which was board papers couldn’t be longer than three pages. You could provide backing information, but the board wasn’t required to have read that.

So that we could actually get on focusing at a more strategic level and not getting sucked into the operational detail, which I think some boards can do. 

So I think some of those, you know, again, just trying to apply learnings that I’d seen in other places. Undoubtedly, you know, I did the job for six years.

It was probably enough. I mean, I think six years of going in every day and worrying about the things I said I worried about made it a good time to move on and go back into the client domain again. 

Lawrie: I think you learn a lot round the boardroom table. 

John Berriman: Mm-hmm. 

Lawrie: I can vividly remember doing a two-hour viva in front of the firm’s Global board.

You earn your spurs when you’re in that position, I can assure you, and you’d know that well. As we draw towards our close, John, you’ve done a massive amount in the nonprofit world, in some wonderful organisations. But what’s harder in the nonprofit world? Because it can’t be a cakewalk.

John Berriman: No, it’s not. And, I mean, the reason I got involved with MacIntyre was, as I mentioned, my brother has Down Syndrome, and my father was involved in setting up a small charity, MacIntyre, which had eight, Initially in 1970, there were eight children, at MacIntyre. And today MacIntyre’s probably the fourth-largest service provider of its kind.

And as you mentioned, it actually looks after adults and children, not just children. And I set up MacIntyre Academies as a second, charity, and that’s now got 200 young autistic children across five academies in the Midlands. So my involvement with MacIntyre, if you like, was deeply personal. I was a trustee for 38 years and chair for 20 years.

And I kept saying to my trustees, “Just boot me out when you’ve, you’ve had enough of me,” because it was sort of going … You know, people would say that that’s too long. And eventually I said, “I’m going, because you really need to have a new chair.” And obviously Chatham House was also a charity.

The common thing is money. It’s always money, getting money for I don’t know, getting money for a project in Chatham House, might be looking at fossil fuels or what have you, is generally not difficult. Getting money in MacIntyre for providing- quality service is not difficult.

Getting money to actually run the organisation is a nightmare, because people don’t want to do that. But if you want the organisation run well, you need money. So everything leads from funding. The other issue is people. And I’m not so much thinking here of Chatham House, but for MacIntyre to get the people it needs, it’s gotta pay the money that it generally doesn’t always have.

And so you’re quite reliant on external help, and I think that’s where trustees have a really important role to play in terms of both themselves personally and also the organisations they work with. You know, providing help and support to the charity. Because, you know, MacIntyre couldn’t go out and pay a typical rate for an HR professional, for a technology professional.

So I mean, I think it’s no surprise that most people get involved with charities because there’s a personal passion or a connection that gets them there. Having said that, I started at age 29 when my dad brought me on the board and I would say I was a very much better partner in PwC for my charitable experience.

You know, for absolutely certain. 

Lawrie: Terrific. And I, and I can vouch for that because I was on the board of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust for 10 years and chaired it for eight. And it’s, it’s tough. You learn an awful lot of stuff there, particularly about just keeping the money side above the waves, shall we say.

John Berriman: Absolutely. 

Lawrie: So, John, as we finish, Two things. We always finish this way, your pet hate and your secret passion 

John Berriman: Well, my pet hate, I suddenly realise as I get older and older, my pet hates get more and more. My pet hate really came home to me last year after my father died and I did his executorship, and it’s the inability to speak to someone when you’ve telephoned an organisation with a query – I mean, it’s not just when you’re dealing with death, but that adds to the stress levels. But you know, nowadays you just get shunted through endless, endless, press one, press two, wait here, and you wait forever and you can never get a hold of people. That without any doubt is my pet hate.

But on the positive side, I have two secret passions. One I don’t do anymore, but you referenced earlier the water skiing. I’m a very regular visitor to Mauritius, and I used to water ski about three times a day, and my wife would never see me on holiday. I adored it. But I’ve stopped doing that because my arthritis has made it just too tricky.

But my other is Pink Floyd, which I just adore the music of Pink Floyd and I go to see the tribute bands. There are two in particular, Brit Floyd and Aussie Floyd. And I’m taking my godson, who’s a next generation Floyd fan to the next one in November. And I just think the music’s fantastic.

And I know the tribute bands are good because when Dave Gilmour, the guitarist, turned 60, he actually hired one of the tribute bands to come and play at his birthday because he said, “I’ve never heard Floyd play.” So yeah, that would be, that would be my secret passion. 

Lawrie: Marvellous. Well, John, you have pretty well the ultimate busy life still in all sorts of ways.

So on behalf of Leadership Listening, I’m really grateful for your time this morning. If listeners and viewers want to email us, then once again you can do that through the email at podcast@leadershiplistening.com. But John, for now, thank you so much for this morning’s conversation. Been really good. Thank you.