Past Featured Chairmen

It is an old cliché that some people have done enough to fill two lives, but in John Lowry's case, it just happens to be true. Anyone would have been proud to have had a CV that read like the first 25 years of Lowry's career. However, that 25 years at the heart of some of finest IT companies in Europe is found only on the last of four pages of his CV tells you that Lowry is not as most people.

The first three pages of his CV cover the last 15 years as one of the country's top turnaround experts. They tell one story - success; 'recovery of £10m loss to £2m profit in 18 months', 'four-fold increase year on year', 'halved losses from £20m to £10m'. Lowry is to turnarounds what Brian Lara is to cricket.

His speciality is rescuing failing or troubled companies, turning them around, and putting them right. To the rest of the world it looks like a dark art, to Lowry it is second nature. 'It's not rocket science,' he confesses. 'In fact if it starts to become rocket science, you are probably doing it wrong.'

But only to a man with the solid underpinning of a quarter of a century of success would the extraordinary seem normal.

Lowry stumbled into the computing industry from university in the early 60s, working on one of the world's first real-time process control systems, for the petrochemical industry. 'The total memory was a 6' high magnetic drum with 128K of 28 bit words and you had to input time critical instructions in binary using toggle switches on the front panel.'

It was bleeding-edge stuff and won Lowry and his team two Queen's awards. So when Ford wanted to computerise their design and testing processes, it knocked at Lowry's door. At 26 he became the youngest appointee to the Ford management roll.

Success breeds success and Lowry wasn't at Ford for long before, at only 28, he was presented with the opportunity to start up one of Europe's first software and service companies - ComShare. 'It was a fantastic opportunity,' says Lowry.' 28 years old, and there I was writing a business plan and raising finance for a start up decades before the private equity market took off in the UK and such activity became commonplace.' It was a taste of things to come.

But Lowry was all to aware of the holes in his background. 'I knew about computers and general business management. But when I stood up in front of the sales force and explained about products - competitive positioning, features, value propositions etc. - I knew that they were all thinking 'What does he know? When has he ever sold anything?'.

'In the 1970s if you wanted to learn how to be a salesman and you wanted to work with the best sales and marketing company in the world, there was only one place to go. IBM.'

After four years at IBM, ending up as IBM's national account manager for the Unilever Group of 50 companies, he was, not surprisingly, headhunted by Unilever to head up their computer services group. And when they were put up for sale a few years later he was headhunted by Thorn EMI, who were negotiating to buy part of the group.

By now Lowry was racing ahead. He was President of Thorn EMI software, his division was making annual revenue growth of 40% and profit was doubling year-on-year.

But a double family tragedy pulled Lowry up. He resigned from Thorn and put his career on hold. In the time off he decided he needed to work on something that was back at the bleeding edge again; the software equivalent of the CAD/CAM engineering systems he had worked on at Ford. And he found it in James Martin Associates- Computer Aided Software Engineering.

'They were one of the founders of the Information Engineering based CASE market. It was a great time. In 1986 we launched the first integrated CASE product and it took off. We did $12m of business in the first 12 months.'

But plenty of companies were very happy with the old way of doing things - ''Method One, Design One and Install One' had worked very well as a development environment for Andersen Consulting. So they were not too happy about the success we were having in some of their major customers.'

So they did what anyone else would do - headhunted Lowry and used him to build the Andersen Software business.

It is at this point in Lowry's CV that things change quite dramatically. 'I have a very old friend, an amazing guy, a self-made multi-millionaire many times over. I had lunch with him one day and he said 'I don't understand why you do what you do for one company at a time to make their shareholder's rich. You should do three or four at a time for yourself and make you and the people who work with you rich.'' Lowry had no answer.

He left Andersen and with introductions to VCs from his friend set out on his own, coming in to troubled companies and turning them round. There are three pages of them in his CV; some 24 companies in 15 years both here and in the US. Lowry is perhaps the only British CEO ever to have had his team marched out of his own office at gunpoint by a Californian sheriff - it's a long story with a happy ending (the company was kept out of Chapter 11, turned round and sold).

With such a harvest of experience behind him, 40 years and 33 companies, Lowry's advice on Boards is remarkably straightforward.

'You need balance. You need people who compliment one another's strengths and support one another's weaknesses.

'However, the most important asset a chairman has is trust. He must trust his directors and they must trust him. He must trust the CEO and have the CEO's trust in turn.'

And for someone with 13 chairmanship's to his name he understands more than most what makes for good CEOs. 'They must understand well all the aspects of the company. They must be calm under fire and not believe all the industry hype. They must also understand that they are 'primus inter pares'. A lot of CEOs, especially in the IT sector, are good at the 'primus' bit, but not the 'pares'. '

'When I was at Ford I reported to a Chief Engineer - he was only 32 - he taught me some great lessons. He said 'Don't be afraid to make mistakes. When you make a mistake I want to be the second person to know about it'. What he said next was so powerful. 'I want to be the second person to know so that *we* can learn from it together' - not you, but we. I found the idea that he could learn from my mistakes astonishing. Only in later years did I fully appreciate what he meant and how lucky I was to have him as a mentor. He went on to become Chairman of IVECO Ford. That is what I want in my boards. I want to be 'the second person to know' and I want them to be mutually supportive teams.'

He acknowledges the role of the non-exec but is critical of what he sees too often. 'The worst are those who read the board pack on the train journey to the meeting. When they get to the meeting they ask tiresome question about things that happened a month ago, instead of challenging the plans for the next six months or a year. They eat the lunch and then go. They might make two calls between meetings and for this they get £25k to £35k a year'.

'Good ones - and I have worked with many - are able to bring their experience to the table. They can act as mentors, working with directors who are going through a difficult time. They work for the company between meetings, and ask the difficult, searching questions in a constructive way. Those people earn their money.'

And then right at the very end of the interview, an interview that overran by an hour and a half, when asked about his personal life, Lowry casually tosses in 'I raced single seater motor cars and was in the England shooting team for Olympic Trap but you don't want to hear about that.' He represented his country and it isn't even on his CV.

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

John Lowry - bio
A life-long career in the IT, communications and related technology industries. Always involved in leading edge technology and/or in areas of significant change in the industry. Started as a technologist, winning Queen's Awards to Industry for technical innovation in real-time systems design and implementation. Progressed through project management, facilities planning, market and business development, marketing, sales, consulting and profit responsible general management to directorships of private and quoted companies in the USA and Europe. Worked for and trained by many of the world's premier companies, including General Electric Company, ICI, Ford Motor Company, IBM (including IBM President's Course at Harvard), Unilever, Thorn EMI, and Andersen Consulting (Accenture). Following this career with premier companies, 15 years of success in the start-up, turn-round, restructuring, and redirection or expansion of businesses in Europe and the USA acting as interim Chief Executive or Executive Chairman. Member of the Society of Turnaround Professionals. Record of recruiting and developing successful teams of senior managers and boards of directors in the USA and UK. Record of developing new product, service and business strategies for information technology providers and companies that have a core, strategic dependence on information technology, with turnovers from £2 million to £250 million.