Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Sir Peter Bonfield

Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen.  It is a great honour, a real privilege and actually good fun to be with you here today because obviously this great University is well known internationally, as well as in the United Kingdom and, as you heard from my citation, I take a lot of interest in international activities.

It has been said before that I have been through some interesting times from a management point of view and I do have some tough jobs to do. But actually it is quite tough to sit here and have all that read about you !  I suppose some of it may be true, although I think some of it may be gilding the lily a little bit.  I don’t think I have done all those things - it doesn’t feel like it anyway -  I don’t feel old enough.  But anyway, I think that I have had a great opportunity in life, a great opportunity to be involved with young people and people just graduating in many parts of the world.  I have had the great opportunity to live and operate in the United States, which was a very interesting learning experience - because at the time, the company was growing so fast you had to be a real idiot if you didn’t succeed in that type of environment. 

I also had the opportunity to work in Japan - I had an office in Tokyo for seven years and that was an interesting part of my life as well.  So I have always encouraged anybody who has worked for me, any of the new graduates coming into any of the operations that I have worked in, to take a few risks, move internationally and obviously enjoy life,  but also work hard.  Certainly, from when I just about scraped through my 11-plus, I have found that the harder I work, the luckier I got.  So maybe that has some sort of correlation.  Now I think the other thing about a great University like Essex is it is a situation which is evolving and changing.  Clearly, this University has been developed since I was around. It is really a mixture of old and new, a relatively new University, established in my lifetime, but in a town which is probably one of the oldest in Europe.  So you are used to change as well. 

I have been through a lot of changes in different phases of my life . When I left University  - I was actually a bit surprised even to get into a University - I studied at Loughborough -  I had this inkling in my head that I wanted to go and live and work in the United States.  That was where the opportunity was, certainly in Electronics at the time.  I moved lock, stock and barrel immediately to the United States and I was taking quite a lot of risks.  Because at that time it was relatively unusual to move, to operate in a different country.  I was relatively young and I got into this business called the semi-conductor business.  But actually it was a good learning experience because the roller-coaster ride that I am currently on in BT, we used to repeat that sort of every year in the semi-conductor business.  It really was an up and down business, you had boom and bust, feast and famine.  But it taught me a lot, it taught me a lot about management, it taught me a lot about engineering and science and it taught me a lot about international aspects of life as well. 

Then I moved into the computer business which I thought was going to be more stable than the semi-conductor business. Of course I was dead wrong there as well.  Then I thought,  if I move into the telecoms business, the telecoms business clearly could not move as fast or up and down as much, as the semi-conductor business or the computer business.  Well I was wrong again! 

So I guess I have always got myself into situations where there is enormous and rapid change and I have always decided to stay in the technology business;  that is where my roots are, have been and will continue to be.  Of course in my business, the technology business, change is unbelievable, and it is unbelievably fast and is actually accelerating.  Its quite interesting to see what has happened in some of the things that we now take for granted.  We have just established the new Museum on the NET.  We have a very, very large museum in BT of all of the early telephone equipment - because a lot of it was developed here in the United Kingdom. We have put it all on the internet - so there is now a virtual museum across the United Kingdom and into the United States as well.  I was just looking through some of this information for some anecdotal stories about when the telephone first started.  The Head of the General Post Office at the time was looking at it and was told that the telephone system was starting to take off in the United States, and he said he didn’t think it would really apply very much here because we had more messenger boys here than they did in the US. He got that a bit wrong! So, a major shift in technology and everybody got it wrong for many years.

The internet protocol, we are all obviously completely familiar with the internet protocol and the internet itself.  Not many people realise it was actually developed in 1973, in the United States for a military system as a back-up in case somebody dropped a nuclear bomb on the telephone system.  For many years, it was just a protocol, internet protocol, IP protocol - anybody in the engineering industry used to know about IP and it didn’t really take off at all until a very bright guy, another English person developed the World Wide Web (WWW).  His name was Tim Berners-Lee and this great University had the great courage, foresight and sense to award Tim an Honorary Degree here in 1998.  Because Tim discovered the World Wide Web, it was developed by him, he didn’t patent it, didn’t exploit it, didn’t make himself rich. But  it has brought a total change to all of our lives.  That happened almost  by accident, and in a relatively short period of time.

So I think it is interesting to watch changes and how fast things change – we heard earlier about mobile phones taking off.  Nobody realised that nearly 90% of the population would own a mobile phone by now.  We also put a little cunning idea on some of the mobile phones whereby data could be sent over the network, primarily for engineering use and then of course all you smart people decided that this was data messaging. Now SMS messaging is the fastest growing part of our whole industry.  Again, we didn’t anticipate the speed of change.

I think in all of these aspects: the introduction of television, the introduction of the internet, the introduction of mobile phones, the penetration rates or the speed of change, the time that it takes to get  50% penetration of the population,  is compressing.  The newer internet technologies can now reach 50% of the population in less than 18 months.  It took 50 years to get to that level with television.

So massive change is going on.  I’ve had the great fortune, some say misfortune, to be through all of these changes in industry.  It’s been an interesting time.  I have to say that managing in good times is easy, and managing in tough times is actually tough.  I suppose that one of the things that has always been beaten into me from a very early age, and certainly at my University, is that you have got to stick at things and you’ve got to take things through tough times as well as easy times;  and just because things are easy it doesn’t mean to say that you are a good manager -  because you can’t actually test yourself until you are in tough times.

One final point, I’d just like to leave with you.  A lot of people are now saying that the dot. com era is dead and therefore entrepreneurism is dead. There is no new way now to make a fortune quickly - in all aspects of business, not only in engineering, because a lot of the dot. com start-ups were not done by engineers.  Is it all over?  My short answer is “no, not a bit.” We are in a situation over the next year or two maybe,  where it is actually going to be quite difficult to set up businesses, but you entrepreneurs out there don’t give up.  This is still a fascinating way to move into business.  You have to take some risks,  but I think it is absolutely clear that if you don’t take risks in life you don’t achieve to the best of your ability - in whatever way you decide to measure achievement.

I have just one final thought about leaving this University.  I would echo the Chancellor’s statement earlier.  This is a time to make sure that you do keep your links with your colleagues, it’s also a time to celebrate, but it’s also a time of amazing change.  You are now going to go into a completely different phase of life. You have earned your degrees and I clearly did not earn mine.  It was just given to me as a great gift.  But having said that, I am still honoured to join your ranks,  whether I had to work as hard for my degree as you did for yours.  So thank you for welcoming me today.  Thank you.