Date: 2024-09-27 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00026386
PETER BURGESS
DRAFT CURRICULUM VITAE ... MARCH 2024
This is a draft of a new rethink of a CV to suit the current world order and my advanced years!
DRAFT CURRICULUM VITAE ... MARCH 2024
This is a draft of a new rethink of a CV to suit the current world order and my advanced years!
Original article:
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
I went up to Sidney Sussex in 1958 ... a rather long time ago. The good news was that it was a start to what I think of as lifelong learning ... something that keeps me somewhat more relevant than a lot of my age group!
My life has had four phases.
1. Formal education:
Blundell's School ... at the time an all-boys boarding school with a fine rugby team and shooting team!
In my year, I think we had a record number of boys who went on to either Oxford or Cambridge!
Sidney Sussex, Cambridge ... studied engineering and completed the basic tripos. Also studied economics and sat the Tripos Part II exams. Essential did what might be called a 'double major'
Management Training ... went through an industrial management training course with Davy United (DU) in Sheffield. DU is now defunct. I left DU when I realized how archaic most of its management processes were and how deeply in trouble the company was! The Managing Director of DU was a Cambridge training engineer , but his efforts were too little and too late to save the company. The Chief Accountant at DU advised me to get trained as a Chartered Accountant.
Chartered Accountancy ... I interviewed with about a dozen London based accounting firms in 1962 and accepted an offer to join Cooper Brothers & Co (CB&Co) as an Articled Clerk. Compared to all the other firms I had interviewed with, they seemed way more up-to-date and relevant than any of the other firms. They were in the process of merging with Lybrand Ross Bros and Montgomery in the USA to establish the international firm of Coopers and Lybrand (C&L). I qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1965.
2. Corporate Management Experience
During my time with CB&Co, I worked on a variety of special projects. I was articled to B.A. Maynard, the head of CB&Co's consultancy department where he used my combination of engineering, economics and accountancy to address some major assignments.
One of these was an assignment from the World Bank (WB) to check the project cost estimates for the proposed Kariba Dam to be built in Zambia in Africa. My analysis suggested that the WB cost estimates were about 50% of what they needed to be. I was grilled by CB&Co partners regarding my conclusions, and then listened in on a conversation between CB&Co partners and WB staff advising that in CB&Co's opinion the WB cost estimates were significantly wrong! The World Bank incorporated the CB&Co cost estimates, financed the project and I believe the dam was completed with only a nominal cost overrun!
In 1967 I migrated to North America. I had visited Canada and the United States during the summer vacations of 1960 and 11961 several years before and had learned something of relative pay and opportunities in North America relative to the UK and Europe of that time! My initial monthly pay in Canada and later in the USA was more than I could earn at that time in the UK in a year. I was an economic migrant!.
But the USA ... and to a lesser extent, Canada .... were much more comfortable at that time to giving significant responsibility to trained young people.
In Canada I worked for a consulting firm called H.A. Simons which designed and managed pulp and paper mill construction projects around the world and as a 'field accountant' had an oversight role on two major construction projects in Texas where Brown & Root (B&R) were the prime contractor. I implemented a unique project cost oversight methodology very early in these projects and as a result concluded that if B&R were to operate with their current staffing there would be a 100% cost overrun by the completion of the project.
My analysis was .subject to rigorous review by the Simons team before my analysis was given to B&R. The outcome was that B&R reduced its workers on the project from 1,500 to just 700 ... and at project completion the cost overrun was a quite acceptable 2%.
In 1968 I was offered a management position in a company called Aerosol Techniques Inc (ATI) in Milford, Connecticut. ATI was a pioneer in the Aerosol industry and since its founding a few years earlier had become financially very successful ... but it was 'out of control' and needed decision making discipline. I was recruited by ATI's CFO who just happened to be a UK trained Chartered Accountant and Harvard Business School (HBS) graduate!In 1970 I was recruited into Gulton Industries as the 'budget manager' ... a position created to give the corporate team some control over an essential major reorganization of the company as technology moved from the 1960s into the 1970s. Gulton was a major technology company success in the 1960s A major unit of the company was Gulton Microceramics which predated the silicon chip Its core competence was as
My first assignment was to bring some logic to its budgeting process so that it had some management utility. This was relatively easy and useful. Next up was to do something about an IBM computer that was expensive and worse than useless. In theory the computer did production planning and inventory control but in reality it did neither ... and worse, it really could not. Nobody liked the computer because it really got everything wrong! My first move was to give the computer something that was really easy! I had the computer programmed to run the fixed asset accounts for the company. The inventory accounts that the computer was failing to handle needed updating every few minutes which was impossible ... but fixed asset accounts hardly needed updating at all. Perhaps once a month, or maybe just once a quarter or once a year! Wow! Success. The computer could actually produce accurate fixed asset reports that were accurate at a push of a computer button!. But then to address the bigger problems of inventory control and production planning was still an open challenge.
There were a number of steps that we implemented. For inventory control we completely scrapped the 'locator' system which had no hope of ever keeping up with the movements in the warehouse and concentrated simply on the movements into and out of the warehouse ... to and from suppliers and customers and to and from the production lines. Some of this work was documented in 'case studies' used at the HBS