Overview

Sir Nigel Rudd is one of the leading businessmen of his generation. Over the past four decades, he has headed a host of major British companies across a range of different industries, piling up experience that is second to none. From his modest upbringing in Derby to the commanding heights of UK plc, Rudd recounts his journey with all the unusual forthrightness and penetrating insight that are his hallmarks. He takes the reader inside the boardrooms as personal and corporate destinies are being settled, against the background of momentous events from the Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s to the financial and Covid crises of this century. Rudd has seen it all and done most of it. This is his story: riveting, panoramic and definitive.

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9781839014635

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"""I was CEO of three large public companies, so I’ve had many chairmen over the years. Out of all those chairmen, Nigel Rudd was by far the best. He was incomparable. He’s very courageous, ready to take tough and even risky decisions; he has phenomenal business nous; he’s always there when you need him and never there when you don’t"" - Paolo Scaroni, chairman of AC Milan and formerly chief executive of Enel and Pilkington; ""Nigel has never run away from or been afraid of going into a difficult situation. And in most of those situations, he has turned a sow’s ear into a silk purse and extracted the value for it. After he hired me as Boots’ CEO, he told me his Three Rules of Chairmanship: ‘1. I run the Board, you run the Company; 2. Bad news travels fast – good news can wait; 3. I’ll back you until I sack you.’ I said: ‘Whoa – I’m not starting until tomorrow!"" - Richard Baker, formerly chief executive of Alliance Boots and chairman of Whitbread; ""My father fought in the Army against the Communists in Malaysia. In the jungle, our native trackers would suddenly tell the soldiers to lie down and very soon a group of enemy fighters would pass by. ‘How do you know that’s going to happen?’, my father asked a tracker, and the man replied: ‘Because in the jungle, you know something is wrong when the birds stop singing.’ Nigel knows what it means in business when the birds stop singing” - Luke Meynell, consultant at Russell Reynolds Associates"

I was CEO of three large public companies, so I've had many chairmen over the years. Out of all those chairmen, Nigel Rudd was by far the best. He was incomparable. He's very courageous, ready to take tough and even risky decisions; he has phenomenal business nous; he's always there when you need him and never there when you don't - Paolo Scaroni, chairman of AC Milan and formerly chief executive of Enel and Pilkington; Nigel has never run away from or been afraid of going into a difficult situation. And in most of those situations, he has turned a sow's ear into a silk purse and extracted the value for it. After he hired me as Boots' CEO, he told me his Three Rules of Chairmanship: '1. I run the Board, you run the Company; 2. Bad news travels fast - good news can wait; 3. I'll back you until I sack you.' I said: 'Whoa - I'm not starting until tomorrow! - Richard Baker, formerly chief executive of Alliance Boots and chairman of Whitbread; My father fought in the Army against the Communists in Malaysia. In the jungle, our native trackers would suddenly tell the soldiers to lie down and very soon a group of enemy fighters would pass by. 'How do you know that's going to happen?', my father asked a tracker, and the man replied: 'Because in the jungle, you know something is wrong when the birds stop singing.' Nigel knows what it means in business when the birds stop singing - Luke Meynell, consultant at Russell Reynolds Associates

Author Information

SIR NIGEL RUDD was born on New Year's Eve 1946 in Derby and educated at Bemrose Grammar School in the city. He was the youngest person in England to qualify as a Chartered Accountant. In 1982, he co-founded Williams Holdings with Brian McGowan and they built it into one of the UK's top 100 companies. He was knighted in 1996 for services to business. From the mid-1990s, he became chairman of a succession of major groups including Pilkington, Boots and Heathrow. He was a director of Barclays Bank for 13 years with five as deputy chairman, a period which covered the financial crisis and its immediate aftermath. In 2010, he became the first chairman of the Business Growth Fund, which has helped finance the development of thousands of small British firms. He is currently chairman of Meggitt and Sappi. ANDREW LORENZ is the author/co-author of numerous books on British and international business including BZW: the first 10 years; End of the Road - BMW and Rover; and GKN: the making of a business. He is a regular contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He was business editor of The Sunday Times during the 1990s and Business Journalist of the Year in 2000. From 2006 to 2020 he was chairman of the UK Financial Communications arm of FTI Consulting.

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