Lord John Browne on Engineering Thinking, Leading BP, Climate Risk, Negotiating Putin & Coming Out in Business | What We Don’t Know
Welcome to What We Don't Know with Matt Brittin & Hayaatun Sillem.
Matt Brittin is the former President at Google EMEA. After 18 years at one of the world's biggest companies, he stepped down, took a gap year, and recently became the Director General of the BBC.
Dr. Hayaatun Sillem spent a few years leading the Royal Academy of Engineering and was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
This is the show about better leadership in a truly chaotic world.
Across the series, episodes are joined a range of other leading figures, bringing different perspectives to each conversation.
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In this episode of What We Don’t Know, Hayaatun and Matt sit down with Lord John Browne.
He discusses how he describes himself as a businessman, author, and above all an engineer, explaining how engineering training shaped his systematic approach from writing to boardrooms and science.
He reflects on childhood habits of dismantling clocks, the importance of proper tools, and his early life at King’s School Ely and Cambridge, influenced by a soldier father and a Holocaust-survivor mother who stressed self-sufficiency and looking forward.
Browne recounts joining BP in 1966, learning about unions and refinery work, and formative engineering experience on Alaska’s North Slope, including early computer optimization work. He describes leadership lessons from Stanford Business School—purpose, inclusion, listening, and negotiation—and his path to becoming BP CEO in 1994, reorganizing BP around customer-oriented business units, and addressing climate risk through internal analysis, methane reduction, carbon pricing, and renewables.
He shares negotiation insights from dealings with leaders including Putin, Gaddafi, and others, then explains writing The Glass Closet after being outed in 2007 and arguing for workplace environments where people can be themselves, with safety and pragmatism.
00:00 Intro
01:38 Taking Things Apart
02:50 Joining BP in 1966
03:15 School and Rowing Days
05:06 Parents and Upbringing
07:41 Lessons From His Mother
09:22 Early BP Apprenticeship
11:41 Alaska and First Big Break
15:10 Stanford and Learning Leadership
19:50 Becoming BP CEO
24:18 Rebuilding BP and Climate Wakeup
28:51 Oil And Climate Reality
29:44 Speaking Up On Climate
31:10 Negotiating With Putin
35:39 Hard Lessons In Dealmaking
37:19 Writing The Glass Closet
39:09 Being Outed As CEO
44:05 Inclusion With Pragmatism
45:48 Resilience And Reinvention
50:25 Optimism And Future Tech
52:44 Speed Round And Farewell
Credits:
Producer: Sunny Winter
Producer: Thuy Dong
Producer: Jimmy McLoughlin OBE
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