Profile of Bilderberg Secretary-General Martin Taylor

Management Today - 14/03/2002

 http://www.clickmt.com

After the famous bust-up at Barclays, he put his great future as a CEO behind him and, when not advising Gordon Brown or railing against the euro, does the portfolio rounds at WH Smith, Goldman Sachs and elsewhere. This brainy ascetic is as enigmatic as his CV

Martin Taylor looks a new man. Big smile, friendly handshake, chummy demeanour, strolling down the office tall and trim asking when I want to start, as if he has always been that kind of easy-going guy. He has on the dress-down gear to match his mood - open-neck knitted shirt, slacks, loafers, blue cord jacket slung over a chair.

Sorry? Is this the same young man-in-a-hurry who ran Barclays at the age of 41 and used to terrify many with his sombre suits and steelier intellect? Well, we're all a bit more relaxed now. Taylor, 49, has a portfolio career - non-exec chairman of WH Smith, adviser to Goldman Sachs, a clutch of directorships - and the change is clearly doing him good. He has also recently divorced and started a new family with someone rather younger than himself ... maybe it is more than just a change of office that has put a spring in his step.

I wish I'd had the opportunity to ask him, but at that stage I didn't know and Taylor wasn't about to tell me. He was seeing me on the hoof, anyway; he'd had to cancel the first appointment, had rung up later to apologise, said pop in tomorrow, he wasn't doing anything. The joys of portfolio flexibility.

If it's Friday, it must be Smith's. So there we are in his third-floor office in WH Smith's corporate HQ in London's Wigmore Street, informal as anything, small room, small desk, table, chairs, only the line of serious-looking books marching tirelessly across the windowsill giving a hint of personality.

Milk? Taylor pours my coffee and appears so genial that I am pinching myself. The last time we had met, at Barclays six years ago, he had been earnest, fast-talking, body tensed, crouched over my tape recorder, the sheer weight of running one of Britain's biggest firms seeming to bow him over. He had also shown signs of polite exasperation whenever I couldn't keep up. Everything was so complex, his intellectual rigour so sharp, his drive so unsparing that I found an hour in his company just made me feel a bit thick.

Taylor had started in journalism before moving into industry, and I had expected him to be more sympathetic. Others found him hard work too. As one of his former colleagues put it: 'Martin's great, but he is not the kind of guy you would go down the pub with.'

Then bang, three and a bit years ago, the golden boy suddenly walked from Barclays for reasons that have never quite been explained. Ructions over future strategy? Fallout with the chairman? Bored? Since then, Taylor, once hailed as the brightest young prospect in British management, has joined many other ex-CEOs in the portfolio routine, taking time off to advise Gordon Brown, sort out his family life and appear before the odd parliamentary select committee or two. He has also, perhaps unusually for a New Labour adviser, been an occasional campaigner against the euro, which he believes Britain would be mad to sign up to. Taylor, I suspect, is not loyal to any party line, simply to his intellect. Hence he is corruscating about matters he finds illogical, in a manner that many bosses would deem ill- advised.

That Friday, he was still recovering from the WH Smith AGM. Overall results at the retailer were fine - sales up to pounds 2.7 billion, stores worldwide now topping 1,500 - but there are blips in the US, with Smith's 600 outlets reporting a loss, and worries over long-term strategy. The shareholder response? Apathy, and, rather than being delighted, Taylor just looks peeved about it.

'Frankly, AGMs are a disaster. We had 30 shareholders coming, and we're pleased they came, but the average age was nearer 80 than 70. I mean, the meeting has no function. You could imagine it could have a function if the governance of the company was very bad, but ...'

He shrugs, his wide smile tightening into a grimace. His face is filling out with age but under the thinning flop of sandy hair, it still looks studiously boyish. Most chairmen, of course, are happy just to grin and bear shareholder apathy but that, it seems, is not in Taylor's make-up.

He says what he thinks and he thinks a lot. In a career that has spanned writing the Financial Times's Lex column as well as running Courtaulds Textiles and Barclays, it's probably got him in more trouble than people realise.

There is certainly a volatile restlessness about him that he is the first to acknowledge. It is the reason he cites for not becoming an academic despite sparkling academic success at school and university - 'Oh, I just can't sit still in libraries' - and is probably the reason he left journalism to work in industry. 'Actually, I was not that interested in news, really,' he says. And he wanted a change of scene. 'The thing that has driven me throughout my life is a fear of boredom.'

Is he easily bored? 'I was brought up to believe it is disgraceful to be bored, so it's almost the most shocking admission I could make to you, but the answer is yes. The great thing is that it makes you do things.'

It's why he loves his new portfolio career and why he was so determined, once he had left journalism, to rise fast up industry's greasy pole. Senior jobs are just more interesting. Oh, and he doesn't like being told what to do, either. 'I hate being told what to do, but unlike other people who hate being told what to do, I get no pleasure from telling other people what to do either.'

All of which makes you wonder how on earth Taylor became such an accomplished manager. He didn't want to do this, he didn't want to do that ... Like many able people, perhaps he just had too many choices. He grins. 'You might say my whole career has been doing things I am not, just a long series of impostures.'

Is it? 'Yes!' he laughs, and I can't really tell if he is serious, or not. I'd bet he got used to pretending from an early age. Born the eldest son of a Burnley accountant, he was packed away to boarding school aged eight just a week after his father died of a heart attack. Prodigiously clever, he was sent to Eton on a scholarship four years later, the only member of his family to attend the famous public school, and probably the only boy in Burnley. His younger brother, now a solicitor in the town, would tease him about being a posh southerner.

'Being a Burnley-born Old Etonian is rather strange,' muses Taylor, 'but then I tend not to categorise myself as an Old Etonian. All these things provide a certain amount of information but you can look at me through many lenses. I have been lots of different things.'

Ah. He describes his father's death as an 'enormously formative moment' in his life. 'I am not naturally very self-sufficient, but it made me more so.' It also, he says, made him both more sociable and more lonely. He was put up two years because of his academic prowess; by the time he was 10 he was working with 13-year- olds. Later, he was to use that prowess to take A-levels in Physics, Maths and Chemistry, switch to English at Oxford, hate that and flip to Oriental Studies and learn Chinese.

Those kind of fearless leaps were to continue through his business career. 'Maybe some of the terrors don't throw you so much because you have been through things that are so much worse,' he says, frowning. Why business? Part money - his family didn't have much - and part intellectual interest. He loves the complexity, although he is the first to acknowledge the pitfalls. 'Managers who are intellectually driven can be quite dangerous, of course, as they can pursue complexity for its own sake. And complexity is a terrible thing in business. The worst business I ever saw in my life was Barclays France in 1994, incredibly complex, structured to lose money in every way, but for the people who ran it, it was a source of endless fascination.'

He laughs. Barclays and Courtaulds, where he picked up 'the essentials of management', were diametric opposites. The textile firm was simple, unpretentious, easy to learn; the bank grand, complicated, full of flummery. When Taylor joined, Barclays had just posted its worst results for almost 300 years, a loss of pounds 244 million caused by bad loans and a recession squeeze. Within two years profits were back over pounds 2 billion and Taylor was being hailed as a management Wunderkind, even though he protested that much of the work had been done before he arrived. Three years after that, it ended in tears.

So what happened? Everyone knows he fell out with his chairman, Andrew Buxton - who also left abruptly - but why? Taylor sighs. 'We just disagreed so fundamentally on very important things ... It took me a long time to realise that what I thought I was there for was not what a lot of the board thought I was there for. I thought I was there to make the business more valuable, and they thought the job was to make the business more glorious. That is the pursuit that many banks did follow. I just wanted to make it a bloody good business. And for the first three years there was no trouble,' he adds, 'the two objectives were perfectly aligned.'

And then, when Taylor decided he wanted to break up BZW, Barclays' investment banking business, all hell broke loose. 'The board didn't want to think about it. I wanted us to get out of investment banking. The only way we could make a go of it would be to buy a huge investment bank, back our way into it - and that just clearly didn't make sense. But the board was attached to this fantasy of a UK champion. It was absurd, absolutely absurd.

'And BZW itself was dishonest in the way it presented its figures to the parent board. I got rid of it because it was a bad business and was never going to be a good business and we were going to have a problem if we kept pumping money into it. It just had to be addressed. The board was asked to address it on one occasion and refused to.'

It was, he says, a fundamental clash between the shareholder value model and the old-fashioned establishment model. Which to follow? 'In the end, as they would see it, I more or less took the law into my own hands. What we did was carve out what we wanted to get rid of and kept the rest to build a new business, Barclays Capital, which has been a huge success.'

But the leaks started, casting doubts about his judgment, and the atmosphere soured. The real problem, he says, was that he just didn't think that the non-execs - including, in 1998, David Arculus Ó=è.