I want to help people be a little bit happier
After top roles at John Lewis and in government, Lord Price is taking on his most ambitious challenge yet, he tells Peter Stanford
Once retired from the front line, our high-profile business chiefs tend to follow predictable paths: a bit of well-paid consultancy to “keep their hand in”, counterbalanced with membership of charitable boards; more time with the family and on the golf course; and the inevitable stab at their memoirs. But Mark Price’s “retirement” choices are arguably more ambitious than his career to date, and anything but conventional.
After a decade as managing director of Waitrose, part of a 33year stint at John Lewis that began in the lighting department of its Southampton store, Price stood down in 2016 while deputy chairman of the partnership, the company famously owned by its workers. He is fond enough of golf, he readily admits, and loves his handsome former Georgian rectory family home in a picture-postcard Dorset village, where we meet, but this 56-year-old isn’t planning to take things easy any time soon.
Quite the opposite. He is gearing up “to do something”, as he puts it, “for the country”. It is an unfashionable phrase, but then Price – who refers to himself with self-deprecation as “the chubby grocer” – is not a man overly worried about appearances. Step one of his campaign was, in 2016, to accept an invitation from David Cameron to join the government as business minister in the House of Lords, and apply his accumulated commercial wisdom to matters of state.
Since the EU referendum and the advent of Theresa May, Lord Price has been working under Liam Fox in the Department for International Trade, planning our post-brexit commercial future. But his part in that, which was all about ensuring a smooth transition from existing EU trade agreements with other countries to bespoke British ones, has now come to an end. His resignation was announced at the weekend.
“The British Civil Service has done a fantastic job,” he says. “There’s a lot more planning than is given credit for, mainly because it hasn’t been exposed yet, quite rightly.” He campaigned for Remain, but is a pragmatist. “We have to do the best job of orchestrating the movement away from the EU as an innovative trading nation. I believe we can turn that to our advantage.”
With continuing close ties to Europe? “We’ll always be part of
‘Do something that gives you pleasure. Find a job you love. Always be yourself ’
Europe. We have traded with Europe since Neolithic times, so I don’t think people will wear barriers. If they do happen, business will manage around them.”
With his ministerial service over, he is free to move on to stage two of his own plan, which kicks off in these pages today with the first of a weekly column, based on his new book, Workplace Fables: 145 True-life Stories. “I’ve been scribbling them down for the past 20-odd years,” he explains. Each tale recounts a real-life situation he experienced in his business career, how it panned out, and what lesson, or moral, can be learnt. No names? “I am never, ever going to say where they came from,” he insists, before adding: “But they are all true.”
The fables format is unusual, I suggest. “Yes, I think the last person who did it was Aesop.” Lord Price has a nice line in gentle humour: “You could say it is an art form awaiting a comeback, but I hope there are lessons in them to draw for everybody. I specifically didn’t call them ‘business’ fables, so that people in every workplace could read them and hopefully find a resonance.”
Does he have a favourite? “I am more drawn to the more reflective ones later on in the book about running a business – things like ‘you can’t please everyone’, and ‘you can only grow as fast as the slowest person in the workplace’ – but the reason there are 145 in the book is that I think they all have something to say.”
He is clearly itching, though, to explain how the fables fit into that bigger picture of “doing something for the country”. But before he does, what about the arresting final line in one fable: “all business and life is about selling”? It’s the inclusion of life that trips me up. What about family, community, faith, and love?
“Well, I think religion is about selling [although he was brought up in Crewe in Cheshire as the son of a Methodist preacher and lives in a rectory cheek-by-jowl with a church, he is no longer practising]. And I think love is about selling. You make a concerted effort to be the best that you can be and, in any relationship over time, you need to work at that. I think, is love not taking someone for granted? There is something about continuing to sell the best of who you are.”
He speaks with some authority on the subject, having been married for 26 years to Judith, a former journalist and government press officer, who turned down a move to work under Bernard Ingham in 10 Downing Street to raise their two daughters, Holly and Lily.
His answer also illustrates perfectly how his workplace observations are just as easily applied in all aspects of life. What advice does he give his daughters as they are growing up? “Do something that gives you pleasure. Find a job you love. Always be yourself because if you are being yourself, you’ll be happy wherever you are.”
It is that whole-person approach that underpins what he is now intent on achieving. As well as publishing Workplace Fables, he has set up a free-to-use website – engaging. works – with the twin aims of helping business thrive by creating happier, more engaged employees, and simultaneously helping individuals live happier lives at home and at work.
On it you can take a “happiness survey” in minutes or do a personality profiling test to find out if you are in the right job. And, as part of the package, it auto-completes a CV for you that links in with employers. “It is in five languages and available in 79 countries. That means three billion people can access it.” Facilitating happiness in the workplace is, of course, in his DNA because it is the stated founding principle of the John Lewis Partnership. “There are only two other places in the world where happiness is set as an objective in itself,” he points out. “One is the King of Bhutan, who wishes happiness on his people, and the second is the American constitution, when it speaks of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Happiness, of course, means different things to different people. For Lord Price it is, he says, first and foremost being with his family, talking about life over a good meal. But does his workaholic timetable leave much space for that?
He resists the definition: “In lots of eyes, I might be seen as a workaholic, but I am just one of those people who would rather be working than watching TV. When I sit down to write, I am enjoying myself. I am happy.”
Much has been made in recent years of the need for capitalism to show a softer face, to reach out to those who fear being “left behind” by globalisation and soaring executive pay. In that context, the John Lewis model of shared ownership, with a 1:75 maximum ratio between lowest and highest rates of pay, has been much discussed as a possible third way. Is that what underlies Lord Price’s new push?
“Yes,” he answers simply, and points to a book he published back in May, Fairness For All. (It came out while he was still a minister, and so he had to seek special permission to circumvent long-standing rules on ministers publishing books, which hasn’t been granted, he was told, since Winston Churchill was in office.) It is, he says, the companion volume to Workplace Fables,a different side of the same coin.
“It’s all about a fairer form of capitalism – inclusive capitalism. It’s more ideological than the fables, more about how business might and should operate in the context of the world.” To which end he quotes me the list in the book of the “six steps to workplace happiness”: reward and recognition; information sharing; empowerment; well-being; instilling pride; and job satisfaction.
“A lot of people are intrigued by the way John Lewis works, but business people tend to say, ‘we don’t want to give our company away to the workers, so we can’t replicate it’. But all the research shows that the companies with more engaged workforces are more profitable, more productive and more successful.”
Lord Price is unmistakably a man on a mission and the onset of the digital age is another pressing concern. “From driverless cars to e-commerce, and across all sectors, the world is being fundamentally changed by new technologies. The British Retail Consortium, for example, reckons there will be 900,000 fewer jobs in retail in four years’ time.”
That’s quite a figure. “Yes, and we have to decide whether we want to manage this as a revolution, like another industrial revolution, with all the disruption it brought, or as evolution. In my view, evolution is always better, so we have to start thinking long-term and changing.”
And by helping start the ball rolling with this latest initiative, he says, he hopes he can “help people be a little bit happier too.”
Amen to that.
‘Companies with more engaged workforces are more successful’