Of the many tributes to Sir Howard Bernstein, one of the best that captured his unmatched contribution to Manchester’s built environment came at MIPIM. In a powerful, personal address to more than 200 people crammed into the Manchester stand, Bruntwood chief executive Chris Oglesby paid tribute to a brilliant, hard-working and unreasonable visionary.
“Manchester has been coming to MIPIM for 18 years and its progress as a city in many ways can be correlated to its impact here, and while there are hundreds of us that make up the supporting cast, we are under no illusions who is responsible for this incredible journey.
It is so wonderful that in this, Howard’s last year as CEO, the team have kicked on in such a spectacular fashion with the new pavilion. This highlights Howard’s strengths so well and, just as importantly, his understanding of his blind spots and where to get the very best out of others. So you can see his brilliant strategic brain all over the fantastic programmme – he really does sweat the detail with Claire Hewitson, commercial director at Marketing Manchester, but equally he has been nowhere near the fit-out of the stand. That has been left to the immaculate team that he has surrounded himself with at Marketing Manchester – although the sky blue colour of the upholstery can’t have been an accident.
While he may not have been directly responsible for the design, he has absolutely been clear about the scale of ambition and unswerving support for the team in delivering this.
The parallels are there to be seen with the Manchester International Festival, which has added so much to our delegation here. I think Howard’s record was Bjork, where he bailed out after 13 minutes! However, once again, despite being a cultural philistine, it is his vision and unswerving commitment to the strategy that sits behind MIF being the world’s leading arts festival, which in turn has repositioned the city so effectively. It would have been so easy to have dumbed it down and taken a more populist approach.
There are many more besides, but there are three things that I typically highlight as being Howard’s key strengths.
The first is his incredible vision and unswerving commitment to it when so often there may be an easier alternative. Like any great entrepreneur, he has the ability to see a great vision in what is often only a tiny chink of initial information.
It was funny to get the view of two leaders that Howard has worked with at Manchester City Council at his recent leaving dinner. Richard Leese talked glowingly about Howard’s great strategic brain, and then Graham Stringer, who spoke later, said Richard was confusing a strategic brain for one driven by completely unreasonable optimism.
To a certain extent one leads to another, however the important distinction for me is the fact that though the world is full of unreasonably optimistic leaders, there are only a few that can get people to run through walls for them. This is what Howard has done with what must be thousands of people that he has touched in his 46 years at Manchester City Council.
Which brings me onto the second of Howard’s great strengths: his ability to create a culture of collaboration. More than anything, this for me will be Howard’s greatest legacy and, when people liken his departure to that of Sir Alex Ferguson, it is the thing that gives me most hope.
Again, nowhere is this better illustrated than in our industry and at MIPIM in particular. Looking forward, it is going to be essential that for the health of Manchester and MIPIM that the partnership steps up this collaboration through the period of transition.
Our first experience at Bruntwood of this was when we agreed to sponsor the Commonwealth Games. It was 2000. I had taken over as CEO of Bruntwood the year before and went to see Howard to discuss sponsorship. He did a complete job on me and I came away having agreed to put £1m into sponsorship which, at that time, was a year’s profit. I fretted over how I was going to tell my father, who was at that stage chair and majority shareholder. What I didn’t know is that he was equally fretting, having stepped down from the business. He had also been to Howard and agreed to do the same thing without discussing it with me.
The Games was an incredible experience for all of us and it catapulted Bruntwood into this wonderfully rewarding world of Manchester partnerships. Up until then we had been operating in the city for 20 years and had been very successful, but since then it has been so much more rewarding.
Sure, it would be easier at times to just get on with it ourselves and we occasionally see the frustration of people new to the city. But it has been this collaborative approach that has been at the heart of everything that has been so successful in the city. It has been Howard’s unswerving and, at times, apparently unreasonable commitment to this that has ensured the best has prevailed: the city centre post bomb, New East Manchester, Hulme, Piccadilly Partnership, Spinningfields and Corridor Manchester to name but a few. Each in their own way are seen as world-class exemplars.
But going back to that point about people running through brick walls. Dan Pink, a world leader on the theory behind the motivation of people, argues persuasively that it is not money that motivates people once they have a basic standard of living, but rather three things: autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose.
What Howard has gifted so many of us with through his vision and collaborative approach is a clear sense of purpose beyond the pound notes of the appraisal. The beauty is that this focus on the higher purpose in turn has, of course, delivered huge long-term financial success for the city and our industry.
The other element in getting people to run through brick walls for you as a leader is the preparedness to lead by example, and there isn’t anyone who does this in quite the way that Howard does.
He has an unparalleled work ethic. I am incredibly fortunate to have had two business mentors in my life and any of you who know me know who the other one is. Like Howard, he is tough and at times uncompromising, but I and everyone else that has worked with him would do anything for him.
I always find it uplifting walking into the town hall for a meeting with him in room 212. This is not a feeling that I always gets walking into every town hall in the country, quite the contrary in many cases. As a result Howard has been responsible for so much of my own personal motivation, pushing me that bit harder for a better strategic output, that bit more quality in a scheme or stiffening my resolve to remain true to the bigger picture.
Of course, there is so much more to the Manchester story than just Howard, but I know that I am speaking for most here today when I say that through this period of transition we all feel a personal level of obligation to him and the city to ensure that we do our bit to ensure that his legacy of strategy, collaboration and sheer hard work lives on and is embedded in everything that we do.
I know it may be a bit corny, but the motto under the Manchester crest is Cocilio et Labore – roughly translated, it means “through wisdom and hard work”. If anyone is the modern personification of this it is Howard, and the city, our industry, our businesses and all of us individually are all the better for it and will be eternally grateful to him.”
Read more about Sir Howard Bernstein’s legacy, including his “exit interview” with EG >>
