Corporate or consultant?

I’ve been so lucky never to be out of work. Indeed I’ve only ever felt the need to look for work twice and failed both times. Although my first job and cornerstone to my career was the Ford Motor Company, originally I actually wanted to work at GM. I had ambitions to study at the ArtCenter design college in Pasadena, California, and then move on to work at General Motors in Detroit. Despite its rather tarnished reputation in those days, I wanted Detroit to be the centre of my future world. To quote John Lennon, life is what happens while you’re busy making plans.

But an interview with legendary designer and then Vauxhall design director Wayne Cherry called a halt to all that, only offering an endorsement for ArtCenter and no actual job, although he was most gracious. On the other hand, Ford had just offered me a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London to study automotive design.

So spool forward a couple of years to 1979 and join me in the canteen at the Ford R&D centre at Dunton, Essex, looking over the grey skies of Basildon and wondering: is this what I really want? My life in the corporate world had commenced and I can’t say I was overly enthralled. Even so I stayed 11 years at Ford and learned much. Corporations have certain traits: you feel this foreboding sense of appearing to do the right thing rather than what you feel is right. Or at least I did. It was all about process and it was all about the institution, something I’d rebelled against since school days.