As part of our Fireside Talk series, join Sir Anthony Seldon in conversation with Lord John Browne as they discuss his career running BP and beyond.
Lord Browne was born in 1948. He holds degrees in Natural Sciences from Cambridge and an MS in Business from Stanford.
He joined BP in 1966 as a university apprentice, between 1969 and 1983 had a variety of exploration and production posts in North America and the UK, and in 1984 became Group Treasurer and Chief Executive of BP Finance International. He held senior roles during the BP/Standard and BP/Amoco mergers in 1987 and 1998 and was appointed Group Chief Executive in 1995. He left in 2007.
He is Executive Chairman of L1 Energy and co-Chairman of Wintershall Dea, Europe’s largest independent oil and gas company. He is Chairman of Huawei U
K, Stanhope Capital, and Windward. He sits on the boards of IHS Markit and SparkCognition, and is a member of the advisory boards of Edelman, Schillings and the big data technology companies Afiniti and Kayrros.
Lord Browne was voted Most Admired CEO by Management Today every year between 1999 and 2002, was knighted in 1998 and made a life peer in 2001.
He was Chairman of the Trustees of the Tate Galleries from 2009 to 2017. He is currently Chairman of the board of the Donmar Warehouse, Chairman of the Courtauld Institute of Art and a Trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust. He is a member or Chairman of the boards of a number of other organisations, including the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford.
He is Chairman of the Francis Crick Institute, a Fellow and past President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, and an Honorary Fellow of a number of institutions.
He was the UK Government’s Lead Non-Executive Board Member from 2010 to 2015, and chaired the committee that authored the Browne Report, an independent review of higher education published in 2010.
In 1999, The Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him the Prince Philip Medal for his outstanding contribution to engineering. He has also been awarded Honorary Doctorates from a number of leading universities, is an Honorary Fellow of John’s, Cambridge, and is a Senior Member of St Antony’s College, Oxford.
His interests are 16th- to 18th-century illustrated Italian books; pre-Colombian art; contemporary art; music; opera and the theatre; and Venice.
Lord Browne is the author of Beyond Business, Seven Elements that Changed the World, The Glass Closet: Why Coming Out is Good Business and the Sunday Times bestseller Connect: How Companies Succeed by Engaging Radically with Society. His fifth book – Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilisation – was published in May 2019.