Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Chief executive of BP who built it into a global oil giant, having spent his entire career there.
On the island
Eight records
I picked this because it reminds me of widely Latin America and South America. I did a lot of business in Colombia. I visited whole parts of this region. And besides, I think on a desert island which is bound to be probably tropical, this is a good way of evoking the themes of the tropics, at least a certain part of the tropics, and probably standing there and smoking a good cigar.
Così fan tutteFavourite
Montserrat Caballé, Janet Baker, Ileana Cotrubaș & Richard Van Allan
This is the first opera that I ever heard. I was taken by my parents to it and told this is meant to be funny. I must say I didn't find it so when I was very young. Now I find it a wonderful piece of Mozart's creativity, and it's a piece which I really love and I'd always want to have with me.
This very much reminds me of my mother. It also reminds me of a time when I took a house in Italy which turned out to be right next door to Puccini's birthplace. And it turned out that in the library of this house there were a few manuscripts, few scores, which were Toscanini's scores of Puccini with all sorts of scribblings on.
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
Well record number four is the record that would remind me of my home, which is England.
Well record number five is about New York which I eventually got to after having spent a couple of years in Alaska and I lived in Greenwich Village and it was around the corner from Bleecker Street and I used to go to the cafes in Bleecker Street and hear people perform, people like Jackson Brown and Bob Dylan and so forth.
Dana Kroll is one of the great exponents of jazz in my mind, a wonderful singer. And this will remind me of the great experience of seeing her in the Royal Albert Hall, where she made this enormous cavernous place feel like a small cafe.
Anna Netrebko & Rolando Villazón
In the end, this will remind me of my small home in Venice, in a place which is a great place to be. It has a wonderful past, but actually it still teaches us lessons about the future, about how empires can go wrong if they lose the plot.
Beim Schlafengehen (from Four Last Songs)
It is a setting of a poem by Hermann Hesse, a great piece, which talks about the soul moving away from the body and seeing everything around it. I think it's a wonderful piece of music sung by a great singer, René Fleming.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:44It's pretty unusual, though, these days, John, to spend one's whole working lifetime with one company. Was that a conscious decision?
No, it wasn't a conscious decision. I almost started by accident because I took a sabbatical from Cambridge and decided to go and work, under pressure from my father, who asked me a question which was very simple, If you haven't tried working, how do you know you don't like it? … So I got a job with BP for a year to go to America. And I liked it so much I stayed another year and then another year, and then I gave up the idea of going back to Cambridge.
Presenter asks
2:52When you decided, having got a first class degree, to go into commerce, into business, not into academe, you must have suffered because they would have been very sniffy about that in Cambridge, wouldn't they?
Indeed, it was almost the source of slight ridicule from some of the people who taught me, and I remember the vivid experience of being stopped in the street by a professor of mine, who introduced me to some of his friends, and said, This is Brown he's going to be a captain of industry. Isn't that funny?
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
A. P. Wavell
because I read poetry very often before I go to sleep. Uh I'd pick uh pieces by TS Eliot, James Elroy, Flecker, to name but two. So I'll probably pick Wavell's Other Men's Flowers. I think it's a really good anthology by a really great man.
The luxury
a lifetime supply of great cigars
I'd probably take a lifetime supply of great cigars, and probably have one a day, as the sunset was happening, and I could listen to some of this music probably Chan Chan.
We mentioned your father, Lord Browne, who was a British Army officer in the war. He met your mother in Berlin just after the end of the war. What were the circumstances?
My mother was liberated from Auschwitz, which she was taken to when the Germans went into Hungary and Romania, my grandmother being a Jewish from Vienna. So my mother spent about eighteen months in in Auschwitz and and managed to survive, one of the few members of her family who were not murdered. … some people did and some people didn't, and and I never really understood, frankly, the details.
Presenter asks
18:43How big a decision was that for you [to embrace the green argument in 1997]?
It was a very big decision for me and and for the company as well, because it it's a question of facing almost your worst fear. You know, what what are we doing as a company? And there were the twin forces. On the one hand, we were really needed. People need energy, but on the other hand the evidence was increasingly mounting that the emission of carbon into the atmosphere could warm up the world with unknown and probably disastrous consequences.
Presenter asks
21:53Can you really build a significant business in alternative and renewable energy and take care of all that pension fund money we're talking about?
BP is always made of pieces, and the real question is whether the pieces are material enough to contribute to the whole. So the answer is you can't substitute BP with alternative energy. Indeed, the world will not substitute the sources of energy, substitute oil and gas, buy alternative energy in any conceivable time period. … But I see no reason why it can't be at least 5% of BP in 10 years' time. Maybe 10%.
“I do think it's very important to be grounded in the basics of any business you're in, because there is no substitute from having in your mind a view of what actually is going on, not a piece of paper, not a pile of numbers, but actually people solving problems, and then it allows you, I think, to better understand what they're telling you.”
“I always think writing longhand has a degree of difficulty which makes you economical with words.”
“I remember to this day she said, It's just a museum it doesn't smell, and there's no noise. And that, I think, is a really remarkable point to remember about things. Unnecessary preoccupation with the past is probably a dangerous thing.”