Spygun has been Vice-president and Head of Broker Division for a very large (sometimes the biggest) international bank as well as Head of Management Development for the same company.
He has also been Training Director of Legal & General, Agency Director at Crown Financial Management and occasional non-executive director to a number of UK companies. He was a consultant to one of the UK’s major political parties for whom he delivers Presentation Skills training.
He is a corporate assessment and development specialist and a licensed psychometric examiner. He has designed written and completed numerous management assessments plus financial services, management, sales, selling-skills and presentation courses. As a company consultant he has advised many businesses on the recruitment and deployment of senior staff as well as corporate change. He specialises in Risk Management, Management Audit and Corporate Structuring.
He has trained, coached and advised senior corporate staff all over the world and is currently a director of a PR and Corporate Development company as well as a commercial brokerage.
His management experience ranges from senior management to director-level with both profit-centre and bottom-line responsibility. This has included a spell as Chief Executive of an international brokerage based in the Middle East and director of an international company based in France.
He writes on management, financial, sales, and general business topics for several management and corporate magazines and is a political blogger.
He is an active member of the National Union of Journalists.
Spygun began his career researching into driver behaviour and testing cars at the Department of Transport’s Road Research Laboratory followed by several years in banking plus some years in the French yachting industry before his career in management training and the financial services industry.
His heroes are the Romans, Richard Dawkins, the Simpsons, Brian Reade, Will Self, Ivan Turgenev and occasionally Jeremy Clarkson (when he is not being a knob).
He dislikes stupid people, bad teaching, call-centres, accountancy and the British acceptance of bad food and overpriced wine. But what he campaigns against more than anything is the unnecessary over-complication of the financial industry (and its language) by the mind-numbing bureaucracy spawned by successive Financial Services Acts.
He also has a rabid dislike for management jive-talk, although he does realise that his views need some approximate reasoning for any real-time probabilistic processes. He is willing to get some communal thought-showers going but he hopes that he has left the first vapour trail in the blue-sky scenario – otherwise he feels that he will have to eat his own dog-food . In any event, he is willing to leave any idea in the car park with the engine running in case there is a need to do some deep-diving on the concepts and maybe to burn some flip-chart. AIN any event, he is willing tothough he does agree that this view does need some approximate
Favourite saying: The Romans did not build their empire by having meetings and claiming expenses. They did it by killing everyone who stood in their way.
Finally – the meek shall NOT inherit the earth. That was an unfounded rumour circulated by the meek.
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