Past Featured Chairmen

Perhaps it takes a man with a First in Greats to understand the sweep of history and to make some of the historic decisions that Nicholas Barber has made in a career that has spanned 40 years and covered a large tranche of the world's surface.

Barber is currently Chairman of Bolero, a web-based platform enabling paperless trading between buyers, sellers, and their logistics service and bank partners, but he started his career in the world of shipping.

Leaving Wadham College, Oxford in the early 1960s he joined Ocean Line, a shipping company founded in the days of steam.

Barber was to spend most of his professional life with the company, that through a series of acquisitions and mergers, eventually was to become the Exel group, probably the world's foremost SCM and logistics enterprise.

After working for Ocean's Blue Funnel in Liverpool, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong he moved to London to help lead the integration
of newly acquired Wm Cory. In 1973 he became Managing Director of Cory Distribution.

This was in the days long before 'Supply Chain Management' 'It wasn't even called logistics in those days, it was called 'warehousing and
distribution',' says Barber.

In 1979 after three years as a Divisional Director with the National Enterprise Board, he returned to Liverpool to become head of
Ocean's liner shipping division.

There were two technological developments that transformed the shipping industry and as a result fuelled the massive leaps in
industrial performance that the end of the last century witnessed. And Barber was there for both.

The first of these was containerization - the introduction of the shipping container saw a massive increase in the capacity of a single
vessel, reducing costs and greatly increasing the operating efficiency of ships and ports. The second was computerisation. And he
finds his current involvement with Bolero one of the most exciting stages of his career.

Even so there's a great temptation to persuade ourselves how sophisticated we are now, but not everything is new.'

'One of the many contracts we had was with J Sainsbury. They had a system that was able to start generating orders after their shops
closed at around 6pm. We were processing and delivering orders from about 11pm through the early hours so that the goods were in the shops by the time they opened the next morning.'

Barber worked his way up the management chain eventually becoming Group Chief Executive in 1986, a position he was to hold for eight
years.

But the world of shipping in 1986 was a very different one to that the young Barber had entered. The economics of shipping, with a
market constantly undercut by cheaper overseas labour, and with enormous amounts of capital tied up in the ships, meant the company
struggled to make adequate profits. 'Returns were declining and were highly cyclical.'

For Barber it was clear that unless the company made radical changes it was likely to be eclipsed, either by the private owners
from Norway and Greece, or by the low-cost areas like Taiwan and Korea. The market was consolidating but overturning more than a
century of tradition was not something to be undertaken lightly. 'I sold off 80 per cent of the balance sheet I inherited and re-invested
in freight management and contract distribution,' shifting the company from its core business of shipping, to the New World of supply chain management.

'This sort of thing was unpopular with the seafarers,' he says in a masterfully understated way. But the seafarers loss was the shareholders and company's gain. 'In supply chain management we were getting returns well into double figures.'

Having set the company up for a prosperous future, Barber decided it was time to go. He had had a tough, highly successful eight years,
had repositioned the company and transformed the balance sheet. It was time to move on.

What followed was an equally successful career on the boards of many organisations, both in the public sector, and in the private. He
has served on several boards including Royal Insurance (Deputy Chairman), Costain, Albright & Wilson, Orion Publishing (Chairman),
Bristol & West (Deputy Chairman), and is currently with Bolero (Chairman) Fidelity Japanese Values and The Maersk Co.

He has also served as a Governor of London Business School and Trustee of the British Museum and Chairman of the British Museum
Friends - a dynamic fund raising body for the Museum. He is currently Chairman of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum and a member of Columbia Business School's Board of Overseers.

With such a broad sweep of organisations from across industry and the public sector, Barber has served on and run a wide range of
boards. But whatever the sector, whatever the industry, there are some immutable constants.

'The first requirement for a Chairman is to build trust in the boardroom. The key to that is to listen; to listen to his board and
to listen to his CEO. A prime role is to hold up a mirror to the CEO - to challenge him and to mentor him. That is best achieved by asking
questions, not by 'tell and sell'.

'In my executive days the best Chairmen I worked with were those who kept 'throwing pebbles' - they would get me to do the talking
through the problem, asking questions, steering one through the issues. What you would find yourself doing, almost unknowingly, was
talking through all the angles until the right decision emerged almost from the conversation. Then he would say 'Well I think you have got your mind round that'.

'A good Chairman needs also to build the confidence of the rest of the board, and that means listening to them as well. I have served on
boards where the Chairman would call a meeting of the non-execs, ask us for our views and then pay no attention to them.'

A lot of Barber's work has been outside the commercial sector - an area where Barber feels that commercial management can bring a lot of good practice, as long as it is handled carefully.

'When I was on the board at LBS there was one very senior captain of industry who thought it outrageous that there was no proper
appraisal of the staff as would be expected in almost any commercial organisation. But the reality is that academics don't readily work
like that, and trying to force them to would have been completely wrong. It comes back to listening and working with the grain of the
institution to reach the right answers.'

For his work for heritage Barber was made a CBE in 2004, but one suspects that the greater honour was bestowed on him by the British
Museum. For while Commanders of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire are not exactly two-a-penny, who among us can say that they have the singular distinction of having, as a reward for their services to the British Museum, a rare First Century Roman fluorspar
cup named after them.

Ben Rooney is a freelance business journalist. Ben can be contacted at ben@benrooney.com