Oliver Sparrow

Oliver Sparrow

...is the Director of the Challenge! Network. He is the author of many publications, including five books. He has written or edited much of this Forum. He is known for his groundbreaking presentations, which are given to audiences totaling well over ten thousand people in the course of a year. He has substantial broadcast experience. Oliver is a director, board advisor or non-executive director of a number of companies. He is also director of a charity called the Leadership Capacity Trust. He serves as a member of number of UK government projects. He was a commissioner on the World Commission on Globalization. He is senior fellow at the St Andrews Management Institute. Oliver spent the bulk of his career in Shell, chiefly in strategic planning, corporate renewal and venture capital. Country assessments - their stability, their weaknesses and potential - were and remain a central aspect of this activity.

Many of these projects have had a technical focus, and have usually been ahead of the field: for example, exploring electronic home shopping in 1983 (which involved the team inventing something close to today's Internet), nation-scale energy management, power generation based on novel technologies, such as biomass energy, ocean thermal power, 'hot wet rock' geothermal and the like.

Current assignments increasingly involve service to organisations which became overly-streamlined during the downsizing wave. Many now find that they have lost the capacity to deliver oversight and innovation. Their focus narrows to endless and often negligible improvements in current activities, losing sight of how their operating environment is changing and, most of all, how it may change discontinuously as a result of technical, regulatory or organisational innovation. Resources are directed almost entirely towards established activities, and returns to these reflect the commoditisation of these.

Others try to buy their new ideas from third parties or by acquisition. This is, however, the one true core activity which it is not possible to buy in the marketplace. If the firm's management is astonished by the outcome of a short campaign by consultants, then this is a reflection upon them and not the consultancy. Equally, large companies have often tried to create the equivalent capability by 'filter feeding' on small. innovative companies; but these have often proved indigestible and, where digested, of limited nutritive value. Renewal is, however, hard work and a central activity on which management attention should be focused. Outsiders can help managers learn how to do this, but they cannot think on their behalf.

One unexpected application of the skills which are needed to re-install these capabilities has been conflict resolution, notably where the parties have lost sight of what they are fighting to achieve. A number of projects have, therefore, focused on finding a common set of values and aspirations around which negotiations can proceed.

Oliver has lived and worked in a considerable number of countries, predominantly in the Pacific, Asia and Latin America. He was born in the Bahamas and brought up in Africa. He was educated at Oxford, with a science and economics background which has since expanded into many fields. He enjoys exploring wild parts of the world for orchids, particularly the Himalayas.

Oliver owns and chairs a company which makes computer-based travel guides. That is, we take a country such as Nepal or Perú and construct an intricate description of it. Customers buy a disk, and then roam the country at will. Joint ventures with local organisations take the many queries that this generates and offer them specialist travel services.