Lord John Browne

Lord John Browne. I still cannot beleive the fact that I actually saw his speech. I had watched the interview of this great gentleman in the BBC, CNN, and Charlie Rose and today, I was watching him giving speech right in front my eye.

This afternoon, I decided to attend the MIT Sloan school of Management “Innovative Leader” series. The purpose of this series is to bring the most visible and successful global leaders to share their business experiences.

Lord John Browne of Madingley is the group CEO of the BP, British Petroleum. He is also a director of Intel and Goldman Sachs. He holds a degree from Cambridge, Oxford and Stanford and was voted “ Most Admired CEO” by Management Today.

The lecture was about the “ The Purpose of Business.”

What I really liked is when he said, “Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when anyone tries to run business solely for profit, then also the business must die for it no longer has a reason to exist.”

He also outlined the great oil-digging plan in :

-Turkey
-Azerbaijan
-Georgia

This plan had been going on for past 16 years and will so take place in the next two years. This also reminded me of the movie “ SYRIANA.”

Listening to his speech, I realized how one has to be patient in-terms of growing the business. You have to make a long term plan of not only immediate future but future of "next 10 –20" years.

Yup! Lot can happen, but we need to go one if you want to strive the best.

Business above all is about optimism. That’s the basis for investment. A belief that the future can be better than the past

I am sure he must be in his mid 70's but he still had that power and suavness is his voice that sucessfully conquered the attention of the entire audience, I being one of them.

In conclusion, despite the rainy weather, I am so glad that I went to attend this lecture series of such a great Leader!