Crisis, What Crisis?

'Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.’ These words from our own Stephen Hawking (1965), writ large on the wall, welcome visitors to the Cannon Place HQ of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).

Intelligence is the most striking characteristic of the CBI’s Director-General, Dame Carolyn Fairbairn (1980), an Honorary Fellow of Caius and the first Caian to become a Dame (in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours). At a time of ‘post-truth populism’, when many have lost faith in political leaders and institutions, there is an urgent need for intelligent, informed opinion, calmly and rationally expressed. In the current maelstrom of British politics, Carolyn’s cool intelligence shines like a beacon in the fog.

On the way to a double First in Economics, her incisive analytical skills were honed by her Director of Studies, Iain Macpherson (1959).

‘The real difference about the supervision system is that you are writing your essay in the knowledge that you are going to be debating it face to face with somebody who is going to be challenging, critical and usually constructive, but notalways. It means you produce a different kind of work. You have to make it lively and original. If you know you’re going to read it aloud, you write it in quite a different way.

‘If ever I produced something ho-hum, Iain would say “How long did you spend on this, Carolyn?” and I had that feeling of somebody you respect saying, “Actually, you can do better than this.” That is very, very interesting training, because a lot of what I’ve had to do in my career has been about communicating persuasively, interestingly and concisely, and I learned that at Cambridge. I really did.’

Carolyn joined the CBI as its first female Director-General in 2015. The CBI is by far the biggest business organisation in the UK, with a staff of 250, speaking for 190,000 businesses. It is sometimes called a lobby group, but Carolyn doesn’t see it that way: ‘I see us as working in partnership with government to forge a business environment that enables us to create good jobs, spread prosperity and change lives. That's what attracted me to the role. We’re quite small – but we punch quite big.’

The CBI campaigned strongly for Remain, but since the Referendum they have focussed on getting the best possible deal. Carolyn doesn’t believe it is the CBI’s role to argue for a second Referendum, ‘but if there is one, we will participate and inform it. Our job is to make sure the politicians of our age have the best possible information, to make decisions in the best interests of the country. It’s also about the relationship of trust that business has with society. We take that very seriously. All institutions have, I think, faced something of a crisis of trust. We’ve been seeking to rebuild that, very much trying to support the skill-building of our economy. And we are great fans of our university system.’

An issue beside which the shenanigans of Brexit pale into insignificance is the climate emergency. If the worldwide environmental catastrophe unfolds as many scientists foretell, it won’t matter whether the UK is in the EU or not. The CBI has taken a strongly proactive position on the proposal, supported by Theresa May’s government, to reduce the UK’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2050.

‘We’ve played already a very, significant role. We strongly support the net zero target. Indeed, we were one of the first to propose it. We wrote to the Prime Minister, prior to her announcement, in support of the 2050 goal, with many of our members signing up to this. The challenge now is how we deliver it, because net zero by 2050 is an aggressive objective. We are calling for a cross-party, cross business-and-government commission, now, to work out the milestones and the delivery path, to be able to get there.’

The course has been set. Now, careful navigation is needed: ‘One of the great strengths we have in the UK is that we are such innovators, because we have such a strong university base. So, if Ilook at what UK business is doing in terms of renewables, in terms of battery technology for electric cars, we are world leaders. Our ambition at the CBI is that the UK isn't just world-leading in terms of the transformation we have in our country, but we’re also helping to lead the transformation globally through our innovation.’

Carolyn comes from a family of can-do, high achievers. Her grandfather, Lord (Charles) Hill, was Chair of the BBC when she was at Caius. Her father, David Fairbairn (1954) was President of the Cambridge Union and took his young family to New York to set up the first American distribution centre for Guinness. Her sister, Heather Kleeman (1984) and Heather’s son, Sam Kleeman (2012) continued the family tradition.

Carolyn spent her first year at Caius in Tree Court, over the Porters’ Lodge. Michael Prichard (1950) was on the ground floor, ‘keeping watch over the young women of “Q” staircase, lest there was any bad behaviour! It’s wonderful that he’s still there. He was my tutor, and I have incredibly fond memories of him.’

She joined the second year of women at Caius. ‘I look back to those days and think how far women have come. We have women leading our companies, government departments, the Metropolitan Police, the TUC. But there is a long way still to go’. Carolyn has made supporting women in business one of her top priorities while at the CBI.

She planned to change to Law after her first year, but Iain Macpherson made Economics too enticing. ‘He gave such an amazing perspective on economic history. I think he was the person who inspired me to be a proper economist. We were caught up in the battle between Keynes, Hayek and Friedman. It was a real battle of ideas.’

Outside studies, Carolyn wrote for student newspapers, was Social Secretary for the Caius JCR and rowed with three friends, forming the Max Factor IV and winning sponsorship from the company. ‘We didn’t do particularly well, but we looked quite good!’

Since Caius, her life has gone from success to success, but also from crisis to crisis. It’s uncanny, she says, how often an organisation she has joined has been plunged into unexpected chaos, but she views each crisis as a learning opportunity: ‘and one of the things you learn is that you always get second chances at things, and not to be too downhearted when things go wrong.’

She ‘mucked it up completely’ when she tried for a General Traineeship at the BBC, where she hoped to follow her grandfather. In the running order for an imaginary news bulletin, she put the kidnapping of Shergar (a racehorse), higher than the announcement of a General Election, and failed the test.

Instead, she did a Master’s in International Relations in the USA, which led to an internship at the IMF and a job with the World Bank. Two years on the Finance pages of The Economist followed, then she took an MBA at INSEAD, where she met her husband, Canadian entrepreneur, Peter Chittick. She says they are ‘entirely different and complementary’. For the past 20 years they have lived in Winchester where they brought up their three children: Emily, Anna and Tom, all now in their 20s.

After six years as a management consultant at McKinsey Group, John Major’s team invited her to work at Number 10, which was ‘a remarkable two years. That was the last very serious Eurosceptic challenge within the Conservative Party, with many of the same people leading it – and it was an extraordinary thing to be at the centre of that, and to see how differently it was handled from how the same challenge has been handled, twenty years later.’

The digital revolution ‘hit media first’. As Strategy Director at the BBC, Carolyn tried to get the organisation to adapt to the rapidly changing conditions. She launched Freeview and funded the first prototype of iPlayer, but a major crisis arose, and the Hutton Report forced both Director-General, Greg Dyke, and Chair, Gavyn Davies, to resign.

Carolyn stayed and led the BBC’s Charter Review but then took a late gap year: she, Peter and their children, then aged 10, 8 and 6, travelled all around Southeast Asia and Africa. She returned to join Michael Grade at ITV, where the world financial crisis caused drastic falls in advertising revenues. Grade had seen it coming and asked Carolyn to prepare a plan: ‘I think we saved ITV. We took 25% out of the cost base within six months and set the organisation on a path to become more content-producers than broadcasters, getting the balance right.’

While at ITV, she joined the board of the FSA, just before the Northern Rock collapse, when there was a run on the bank. Once again, Carolyn was at the heart of crisis management, later joining the board of Lloyds Bank, where she would have stayed but for the irresistible temptation of her current role at the CBI.

With copious experience of leadership under pressure, Carolyn will need all her skills to muster support for the goal of zero emissions by 2050, but she will certainly give it her best shot. Iain Macpherson would expect nothing less.