The chief executive of Rolls-Royce Holdings (RR.) has conceded the engineering group is “not necessarily the most benign environment” for female staff as it pushes to become diverse. Warren East made the comments in an interview in which he also admitted that at 57 he felt young within the FTSE 100 company. The chief executive of Rolls-Royce has conceded the engineering group is “not necessarily the most benign environment” for female staff as it pushes to become diverse. Attracting and retaining a new generation of diverse talent has become a key area of focus for Rolls and Britain’s manufacturing sector in general. Yesterday was International Women in Engineering Day — set up by the UK-based Women’s Engineering Society to promote diversity and now a worldwide movement thanks to backing from the government and Unesco. Speaking at the Paris Air Show last week Mr East said that Rolls-Royce had “an age demographic that’s like . . . I do feel young, I don’t feel old”. He added: “It’s not necessarily the most benign of environments if you’re a woman engineer. It just hasn’t been, historically. We recognise that the inclusion bit is just as important as the diversity bit and so we work hard on that.”
Luke Miels’ strong medicine paying off for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). When Luke Miels was poached from Astrazeneca two years ago to lead the pharmaceuticals division of Glaxosmithkline, his defection triggered a bitter legal dispute between Britain’s biggest drugs companies. Mr Miels, Astrazeneca’s head of Europe, was a protégé of Pascal Soriot, its chief executive, and his controversial departure came at a crucial period for the rival businesses. When he arrived at his new job, Mr Miels found a drugs business that was too inward-looking and bureaucratic, with a “conservative” culture. “We are not doing research in a vacuum,” he said. “You need to be looking outside the company. You need to be looking how your programme is advancing relative to the other alternatives that may be out there. And so we’ve made the company culturally more outward-looking.” The turnaround is centred on streamlining the division in an attempt to produce fewer but bigger bestselling drugs. “There were a lot of programmes,” Mr Miels said. “There wasn’t a lot of prioritisation within that, so you had a lot of programmes moving ahead. The challenge is that even if you have a really good programme, if it moves too slowly another company [with] a more concentrated effort could surpass you.”
