Jon Bradbury
Partner
I studied at Manchester University, leaving with two first class degrees in Engineering. My course included a great exchange year in Lille, France, although the French girlfriend experience probably left more of a mark than any of the course work. Having secured a job with Andersen Consulting, I deferred entry for a year and went travelling - to nowhere that spoke French. I started work in 1994, and spent four years in Financial Services (mostly working with trading and surveillance systems at the London Stock Exchange) followed by seven years in Energy & Utilities working with pioneering mobile and wireless solutions for work and asset management. In 2000, I had a second sabbatical year overseas working as a voluntary teacher in Bolivia and travelling round South America.
I joined Berkeley in the autumn of 2005, simply because I liked everyone I met there; they seemed to care about the things that mattered and enjoyed themselves; and they focused on doing "proper" consulting work in an era when most of the big firms just seemed intent on selling ever larger, soul-destroying outsourcing deals! I also wanted to get away from the ruthless commercial pressures on aspiring Partners in a large firm, that can distract from simply ‘doing the right thing’ in terms of great client work.
Since joining Berkeley, I first spent a year at BP running a global project in oil trading, and then moved to Unilever in a two-year role running their global SAP finance transformation programme involving over 100 countries. I went on to spend most of the next six years at Unilever in a number of varied programme director and governance roles: from helping them transform their IT organisation from CIO down; to supporting mobilisation of a large-scale, pan-Americas supply chain programme; to reviewing distributor management programmes in South East Asia (there’s nothing like a field trip to an ice cream distributor in rural Indonesia to keep work interesting!). The most significant role was probably spending over a year helping to mobilise and then run Unilever’s first truly global business intelligence, analytics and Big Data programme.
I now enjoy a really interesting range of work across a portfolio of global consumer goods, retail and media clients including Unilever, Associated British Foods, Primark, Brambles, Dentsu, News Corp and Dow Jones. I specialise in leading and assuring major transformational change, particularly in the areas of IT strategy & IT transformation; finance transformation; analytics & big data; shared services transformation; and technology infrastructure / Cloud transformation. I like being embedded as part of the client's team (rather than an "us and them" client/consultant relationship) - you can really see how the work you are doing brings tangible impacts and business benefits. I’ve been a Partner at Berkeley since July 2008, and I haven't looked back since.
Outside work, my family (wife and two daughters) keeps me busy. I love music, both singing (I sing in choirs and lead one of my own… and once persuaded a group of my fellow Partners to form a male barbershop group!) and playing (my poor guitar playing didn’t stop me joining the Berkeley Band to play a gig at the 100 Club on Oxford Street a few years back). As an ex-engineer, I also love machines and have owned an eclectic mix of transport from a Triumph motorcycle, to a BMW electric car, to a Lotus sports car. As a family, we entertain and eat out more than we should, and we still love to travel, get out into the wilds and explore new places whenever we can – as a result, our daughters are now starting to turn into keen backpackers themselves! The place you're least likely to ever bump into me - just in case that's a concern - is the gym.
