Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Sir Peter Bonfield
Oration given on 12 July 2001
Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that the degree
of Doctor of the University be conferred upon Sir Peter Bonfield.
The world is shrinking. That is to say, the effort needed to
communicate with distant friends is getting less and less. The advent of
cheap mobile 'phones has changed the pattern of people's everyday lives and
loves – perhaps changed them to a greater extent than even the arrival of the
personal computer. And yet these two inventions, the mobile 'phone and the
computer, are related because the need to build more powerful, yet more compact,
computers was the original driving force behind the whole of the
micro-electronics industry. Semiconductor integrated circuits, or
micro-chips, are the life blood not only of mobile 'phones but of information
technology as a whole. Sir Peter Bonfield has been close to the heart of
the micro-electronics industry for all of his working life.
Today, Sir Peter is the Chief Executive of BT and thus, if recent press
coverage is to be believed, at the head of the company that everybody loves to
hate. This is unfair. Sir Peter has guided – and is guiding a world-class
British company through the stormy seas of rapid technological change.
When he took over BT as Chief Executive in 1996, he famously said: "Fasten your
seat belts; we're in for a roller-coaster ride". Many a shining new IT
company has since been swamped by the roller-coaster waves of technological
turbulence. However, few can doubt that BT will survive – albeit without
some of the top-hamper that encumbered it in 1996.
Sir Peter is very well-qualified to understand technological change.
His father worked for a firm which manufactured punched-card tabulating
machinery – the forerunners of office data processing systems – and had been an
engineer at Bletchley Park during the war. Sir Peter graduated in 1966
from Loughborough Institute of Technology with an honours degree in Engineering
and, having been advised by his father that America was the centre of electronic
innovation, Sir Peter joined the semiconductor company Texas Instruments Inc.
Those unfamiliar with digital design might imagine that Texas Instruments
produced gauges for measuring the thickness of beef steaks. Any
postgraduate working in Computer Science or Electronic Systems will quickly tell
you that Texas Instruments is into chips, not steaks. In the 1970s and 80s
the company was the Intel of its day, providing the basic components for digital
design world-wide, and the thick yellow Texas Handbook was every electronic
designer's bible.
Thus Sir Peter, at the age of 23, found himself living in Dallas, owning a
swimming pool and driving a Mustang Convertible. At that time, Texas
Instruments was growing at about 50 percent per annum. Sir Peter has
recalled that during this time he learned "to operate internationally and take
risks" in a management environment that allowed young engineers to rise rapidly.
Sir Peter became a Divisional Director in 1974.
When Rob Wilmott, his boss at Texas Instruments, was recruited in 1981 to run
ICL, he took Sir Peter with him to become ICL's Group Marketing Director. Sir
Peter thus began a 15-year relationship with the UK's main computer company – a
relationship which he actually continued, as a Board member, until 18 months
ago.
Sir Peter brought to ICL his own brand of unsentimental hard work.
Within ICL, he became Managing Director in 1984. In 1985 he became
Chairman and Chief Executive, following the resignation of Wilmott. This
was a time of financial crisis for ICL and its partner STC, and it was in no
small measure due to Sir Peter’s efforts that the group returned to
profitability within 18 months. There followed a period of intense international
expansion for ICL. Sir Peter took, and still takes, a special interest in
commercial relations with Japan. ICL's arrangements with Fujitsu marked a
beneficial turning-point in ICL's product development.
During one particularly difficult period for ICL, Sir Peter had to declare a
lot of redundancies and close one or two ICL factories. He reported to the
Board that he had conducted negotiations with the unions in such a way that
disruptive actions would be minimised. However, he had reckoned without
his mother! Sir Peter said that on the morning that the closures were
announced his mother rang him and told him in no uncertain terms that he could
not close ICL's Letchworth Number Three factory because, she reminded him, it
was his father's old factory: his father had been a shop floor foreman.
Sir Peter became Chief Executive of BT on 2 January 1996. BT is his
toughest assignment yet. At BT, he is exposed as never before: it is, he says,
like management in a goldfish bowl. In his five years at BT, Sir Peter has
seen annual turn-over double, from £14 billion to £29 billion, whilst the
company's pay-roll has remained approximately level at 135,000 people.
Sir Peter's 15-year period with ICL had been one of intense activity,
characterised by 14-hour days, six or seven days per week and this kind of
pressure continues at BT. Colleagues say that he is a rational manager who
never loses his temper. He is known as a skilful politician who prefers to
agree things on a one-to-one basis. He is a listener. He is highly
thought of by research and development staff, who recognise that he understands
the underlying technology as well or better than they do.
This is because Sir Peter is, at heart, an Engineer. Engineering is
about creating things. Sir Peter has the Engineer's robust optimism in the
face of the perversity of inanimate objects – or, one might be tempted to say,
in the face of the perversity of financial journalists and Oftel (here I use the
dictionary definition of perverse, namely: 'different from what is reasonable or
required').
Sir Peter Bonfield was awarded the CBE in 1989 and a Knighthood in
1996. Amongst other accolades, he has been elected a Fellow of the Royal
Academy of Engineering; of the Institution of Electrical Engineers; and of the
British Computer Society. In 1996, he was awarded the Institute of Management's
Gold Medal. For someone who, by his own admission, 'scraped through the
11-plus exam' as a boy, all this is not bad.
If the wealth of this country depends upon our response to Information
Technology, then it is indeed fitting that today we seek to honour an
outstanding Industrialist who has taken a leading role in two world-class IT
companies.
Chancellor, I present to you Peter Leahy Bonfield.
Orator: Professor Simon Lavington