craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

Last Monday we hosted a guest speaker at the Saïd business school who, given the size of his enterprise and the historic disaster it was recently involved in, was undoubtedly the most important and topical European business leader that could possibly be brought in: BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg.

It was exciting to hear what he had to say—because of the unique and high-profile challenges he has faced in his short time at BP, to be sure, but not only because of that. Certainly it was interesting to hear him talk about the spill and give his analysis into what BP might have done differently or better, and what steps he sees as necessary going forward.

But also, it was just interesting to hear his own story, since before becoming Chairman of BP he was CEO of Ericsson, the mobile phone company, and before that he had held other CEO and management positions, going back to an initial formation as an engineer. Obviously, for me as an engineer, hearing about those intermediate steps was quite interesting!

So the talk was interesting, as was the Q&A, but the very fact that we had it cemented for me one of the major advantages one has in coming to the Saïd Business School as opposed to other major European MBA programmes. I very much doubt that Carl-Henric Svanberg would give a talk at any other 'prestigious' business school such as INSEAD, LBS, or HEC (maybe he has done, but even if so, I am just making a general point here!): these schools exist as independent entities, and so do not have that major benefit of being associated with a larger, multi-disciplinary university, let alone a preeminent one like Oxford University. In point of fact, Svanberg's daughter herself attended Oxford, and that connexion, coupled of course with the university's unparalleled reputation, were doubtless key factors in getting him to come spend time with us.

I thought it was a beautiful illustration of how the business school brings benefits to the university, while the university at the same time gives a lot of added benefits to the business school.