Digby Jones

Why organisations work with Digby Jones

• He has sat in both chairs that most business audiences only see from outside: head of the CBI and Minister of State for Trade. Very few speakers can tell a boardroom what the other side of the table is actually thinking.
• As Trade Minister he made 45 overseas visits to 31 countries in 15 months. That is a working map of how UK plc sells itself abroad, not a theory about it.
• His two Wiley books, Fixing Britain (2011) and Fixing Business (2017), set out a consistent argument about competitiveness, skills and responsible profit that still frames how he talks to boards today.
• He is a crossbencher by choice and a non-aligned voice in public life. For audiences tired of partisan framing, that independence is the point.
• The New Troubleshooter, his 2014 BBC Two series, put him inside three real British SMEs to diagnose and fix them on camera. It is a rare speaker credential: public evidence of how he actually thinks through a business problem.

Biography highlights

• Director General of the Confederation of British Industry, 2000 to 2006.
• Minister of State for Trade and Investment, 2007 to 2008, jointly in BERR and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
• Life peer as Baron Jones of Birmingham, 2007; crossbencher in the House of Lords until retirement in 2020.
• Knight Bachelor, 2005 New Year Honours, for services to Business.
• Author of Fixing Britain (Wiley, 2011) and Fixing Business (Wiley, 2017); Fixing Britain shortlisted for the 2012 CMI Management Book of the Year.
• Presenter of BBC Two’s Digby Jones: The New Troubleshooter, 2014.
• Senior Partner at Edge & Ellison, Birmingham, 1995 to 1998, after two decades as a corporate lawyer in the West Midlands.

Biography

The CBI is where British business tells the government what it needs. The Department for Business is where the government tells British business what it is prepared to do. Digby Jones has run the first and served in the second. That combined vantage is what a boardroom is buying when it brings him in.

He was Director General of the CBI from 2000 to 2006, then accepted an invitation from Gordon Brown to serve as Minister of State for Trade and Investment from 2007 to 2008, joining the Lords as a crossbencher to take the post. In 15 months he made 45 overseas visits to 31 countries, pitching the UK as a place to invest and British firms as firms to buy from. He sat as a non-aligned peer until retiring from the Lords in 2020.

The two books are where his argument lives. Fixing Britain (Wiley, 2011), shortlisted for the 2012 CMI Management Book of the Year, is a working plan for national competitiveness: skills, infrastructure, a functioning relationship between Whitehall and the wealth creators. Fixing Business (Wiley, 2017) extends the argument into how profitable companies can justify themselves to the societies they operate in. The thesis is consistent and it is his own.

Before politics, he spent twenty years at Edge & Ellison in Birmingham, becoming senior partner, brokering deals for mid-market companies in a region that lives or dies by manufacturing. That is the register he still speaks in. On the BBC Two series The New Troubleshooter in 2014 he spent three episodes inside three British SMEs, arguing with owners and staff about pricing, exports and focus. A senior audience watching him work sees the same person they will meet on stage: direct, specific, unafraid to name the problem.

Key speaking topics

• UK competitiveness and the business-government relationship
• Trade, exports and inward investment
• British economic policy and the view from Westminster
• Skills, productivity and the domestic labour market
• Responsible business and the case for profit
• Leadership from the employers’ side of the table

Ideal for

• Board and executive committee offsites debating UK exposure, investment or political risk
• CEO and CFO audiences at trade associations, industry bodies and chambers of commerce
• Senior audiences at professional services and financial firms briefing clients on the UK economy
• After-dinner and conference keynotes where a non-partisan senior voice on British business is the draw

Audience outcomes

• A candid read on where the UK economy and UK business policy actually stand, from someone who has worked both sides
• A clearer view of what government decisions mean for investment, exports and hiring
• A sharper argument for why skills and productivity remain the binding constraint on British growth
• A usable sense of how to talk about profit, responsibility and national interest in the same sentence
• Direct answers in Q&A: a working conversation with a senior practitioner, not a rehearsed set piece