NEVER trust anywhere that feels like an Oxbridge college. Lord Bhattacharyya, halfway down a gothic corridor in the House of Lords, laughs at my joke a little nervously.
“We are nearly there,” he says, as we try to find an empty interview room. Up the stairs, in the lift, down yet another thickly carpeted corridor, pungent with the scent of beeswax. It’s like being in a finely polished maze.
Bhattacharyya, one of the most influential Asian businessmen in Britain, has been padding down the corridors of power for years, both as a government adviser and as founder of the renowned Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), the industrial research and training consultancy, part of Warwick University, that turns over £105m a year.
But it took him until 2004 to reach the House of Lords, a move that surprised some who believed Indian-born Bhattacharyya preferred working just outside the establishment. A Labour party supporter, but consultant to Conservative governments, too, he has in the past railed against academic and civil-service snobbery, and its dislike of industry. He also made a point of setting up WMG at red-brick Warwick, not anywhere stuffier.
So no doubts about taking the ermine? “No, no,” he says, as we finally lay claim to a room little bigger than a broom cupboard. “This is a wonderful place, so much expertise.”
Being unpredictable is the point of Bhattacharyya. Independently wealthy from family investments, and globally well connected through WMG, he delights in following his own path. His elevation to the peerage, for example, was greeted with press suspicion — linking the honour to an alleged £1m of donations to Labour — but he shrugs it off.
“I love the party and want them to stay in power, and any thing I can do, I will do,” he says. He also makes it plain he hasn’t entered the Lords to loll around. Spanning the gap between academics, politicians and businessmen, he is still Labour’s favourite industrial fixer.
Last year he helped bring the Indian conglomerate Tata to the Midlands — it announced in November it will set up an engineering design centre to soak up car manufacturing expertise.
This year he promises a new £50m digital-research centre at Warwick. He is talking to Dassault Systemes, IBM, Intel and Microsoft, and expects the centre to focus partly on NHS- related work, a new growth area for WMG.
The site is likely to follow the template of Warwick’s £70m automotive-research centre, which already brings together manufacturers, suppliers and government aid in various projects. At 65, Professor Bhattacharyya is not taking it easy.
You can tell that from listening to him. He barely draws breath. Short, round and wide-eyed, like a dark version of Yoda from Star Wars, Bhattacharyya intermingles acute analysis of Britain’s manufacturing malaise with occasional name-dropping and some endearingly immodest self-promotion.
“I was very proud when India recently awarded me...” starts a typical gambit, but you forgive him everything because he is so irrepressibly likeable.
That drive and charm make him a hard man to refuse, and his initiative in setting up WMG in 1980 — at a time when universities were frosty to business, and manufacturers were desperate for help in retraining managers for the new global economy — has proved prescient.
“He’s a good persuader, and very good at making the right connections with the right people,” says Tony Smith, finance director of Ford’s Premier Automotive Group, which backs WMG’s automotive-research centre. “He is also an effective politician in the best sense of the word.”
Those political links were highlighted when Bhattacharyya’s Warwick site hosted the pre-election summit between Labour’s top team and the trade unions in 2004. WMG’s increasing presence in the public sector — working with Network Rail and the NHS — strengthens the bond.
But hang on, Bhattacharyya also says he hates management consultants. Isn’t that what WMG is doing in the NHS? “No, no, no,” he says. “We decided when we learnt about manufacturing that the principles were similar in managing anything. One of our greatest strengths has been understanding competitiveness and improving the utilisation of resources. It is the same thing in the NHS, how to get the best out of what’s involved and what technical tools one would use to improve performance.”
Cracking the NHS is no tougher a task than WMG’s original aim: helping to revitalise British manufacturers after the 1970s. Rover, Rolls-Royce, BAE and more all sent managers through WMG at a time when British firms looked like being swamped from overseas.
“One of the big difficulties traditional companies had was how to get the management expertise to do something different,” says Sir Roy McNulty, former chairman of aviation firm Short Brothers, which used WMG. Bhattacharyya’s training courses coached a pool of young managers who went on to run many big firms. Simple MBAs, adds McNulty, were just too divorced from reality.
Bhattacharyya’s success ensured his early take-up by government. He has built on that to expand WMG’s influence. While still operating under the loose control of Warwick University, WMG now runs research and trains graduates for businesses around the world.
Attempts by Cambridge University to build something similar in a joint venture with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced six years ago, are brushed aside by Bhattacharyya. How are they doing? “You tell me,” he says.
Where Bhattacharyya has beaten Oxbridge is in getting to bosses and politicians where it counts. WMG is now doing an increasing amount of work in India and China, and he wants British companies to wake up to the possibilities there.
“We think of India as curries, beer, Bollywood and call centres, but the majority don’t understand the rate at which things are changing. Growth is 7% despite all the regulatory hurdles and infrastructure problems, same in China. Once the infrastructure develops, the growth will be double digit and we need to know how to exploit that.”
WMG will be on hand to help, of course, and Bhattacharyya, the eldest son of a wealthy Brahmin diplomat but educated at Jesuit school and now married to an Irish Catholic, is good at bridging the gaps. Since arriving in England 30 years ago as a trainee at Lucas — his father was a friend of the chairman — he has become British first, Indian second, although he admits it’s a bit of a fudge.
“I support England in the Test matches,” laughs Bhattacharyya, “except when they are playing India.”
Now he lives in the magnificent Victorian mansion built for Lucas’s founder, Joseph Lucas, in Moseley, Birmingham. Lovingly restored by Bhattacharyya, it is stuffed full of his collection of Victorian and Indian art. He also has a flat in London and another home in Calcutta, and cites Michelin-starred Le Gavroche, where he is a regular, as his favourite eaterie.
All this is not bought on an academic’s salary. “My family just has investments,” he smiles, “some over here, some over there. I leave it to advisers, it’s all in trusts.”
That, he admits, has enabled him to take risks others in academia and industry would avoid. But mostly, putting things together is in his nature.
Later, sitting in the peers’ guest-room bar over a beer, he runs through the Asian businessmen I should interview. Then the British bosses. Then the politicians. All the while he is chewing nuts in between sentences. His appetites — for contacts, for work, for food — are insatiable. And that, you would guess, is what keeps him going.
Vital statistics
Born: June 6, 1940
Marital status: married, with three daughters
School: St Joseph’s, Bangalore
University: Indian Institute of Technology
First job: trainee at Lucas
Income: £150,000 salary plus private wealth
Homes: Moseley, near Birmingham, London’s Marylebone, and Calcutta
Car: silver Range Rover
Favourite music: jazz
Author: John Le Carré
Favourite film: The Bridge on the River Kwai
Favourite gadget: £15,000 home cinema system
Interests: collecting art
Lord Bhattacharyya's working day
THE Warwick Manufacturing Group founder gets up at 5.30am at his mansion in Moseley, Birmingham. “I spend three-quarters of an hour on the phone with my people in the Far East,” says Lord Bhattacharyya. “Then twice a week I have physio and a massage in my gym.”
After shower and breakfast — “I’d like a full English but my wife won’t allow it” — he is driven to Warwick University by his chauffeur. He arrives at 9.30am and often goes straight into meetings. “I concentrate on making sure everyone delivers, that research is rigorous, and that the business side is going well.”
At 3pm he will often leave for London and the House of Lords. He keeps a flat in Marylebone where he can stay overnight, and often entertains contacts at his favourite restaurant, Le Gavroche.
Working space
LORD BHATTACHARYYA works from a second-floor office in a new glass-and-steel block at Warwick Manufacturing Group’s base on the Warwick University campus.
His room is furnished with desk, meeting table and chairs. It is decorated with Indian art and a collection of business books. A display cabinet shows the medals and awards he has received over a long career. Two secretaries sit outside.
“I am very fortunate,” says Bhattacharyya. “We started with one room, a table and a chair. Now there are 500 people here — and many who are part of the companies we deal with, everything from defence and logistics to Network Rail and Tata. Then there are the people who have gone through here to be a success in Africa and India and China. That gives me satisfaction.”
