He succeeded, and in 1977 – in the middle of an 11-week strike – became Unipart’s managing director. Here he applied his anti-militant plan, taking the unions on in a way no other BL division dared “It was not an exercise in macho,” he says. When Egan moved to BL he decided to follow, joining the parts division, Unipart.It was 1974, BL was in a mess, and Neill soon discovered why. He followed another work-minimising plan, but his tutors tumbled it and failed him He had to retake all 13 exams Despite this, he worked up a thesis that would prove useful. “I worked out how how to run an after-market strategy,” he says.General Motors had paid for him to take his MBA, and he followed another GM trainee, John Egan, into an informal training programme.
At 25 he was the youngest executive in GM Overseas, but calculated that he was still 16 layers from the top; the highest non-American was at level eight. At one rough meeting, he isolated them by identifying Militant members by name. “That stood me in good stead at British Leyland,” he said.His professor persuaded him to stay on for an MBA. Combined, these gave him his first management experience: the exchange programme taught him about organisation while the union gave him a taste of militants. His plan was to work hard for a year, then diversify.While other students were diversifying into drugs and political protest, Neill joined the Conservative Association (“I’ve hardly moved my position on the political spectrum”) and ended up as president of the students’ union.
He also revived an exchange programme for economics students. Throughout his life, he has worked out strategies and stuck to them. He headed for Strathclyde University, which ran one of the few business courses. He had decided when he was 12 that he wanted to be a businessman: “I wanted to make enough money to control my life.” In South Africa, that was a respectable ambition; in Britain it was not, but Neill was not the sort to change his mind. He had relatives in Scotland, so the family decamped to Edinburgh.Mr Neill had sufficient capital to support his family modestly, and John went to Herriot’s, the public school.
Neill does not believe that concentration on the single measure of profit is any way to run a whelk stall.He was born 49 years ago in Johannesburg, where his father was a director of a building company. Bond-holders rightly worry far more about the ratio of government debt to national income, than they do about debt to assets.However, although creditors need not trouble themselves about the current level of government net wealth, citizens should be deeply concerned about the direction and extent of the change in net wealth. Expect some kind of forced savings scheme (or at least a very strongly encouraged one) for individuals. And while most employees admire him, former managers have complained that he is autocratic and obsessed with control.
