The 18th BMAC awards were co-hosted this year by Haymarket chairman Rupert Heseltine and MT editor Matthew Gwyther, and Anglo-Dutch Marmite to shampoo giant Unilever carried off the coveted pewter star for the overall award of Britain’s Most Admired Company, 2010. Unilever was a first-time winner this year despite having been a top six finisher on no fewer than nine previous occasions. Keith Weed, Unilever's chief marketing and communication officer (in the picture above), who was there to collect the gong, also picked up the criteria award for the company's ability to attract, retain & develop top talent.
Second place went to Serco, the outsourcing specialist whose rise from relative obscurity to the leader of its industry has been little short of remarkable. CEO Chris Hyman collected the award, along with the award for quality of management, a fitting tribute to Hyman and his team’s achievement in masterminding Serco’s growth both in financial clout and industry standing.
In third place was Shell, a former winner which made a welcome and well-deserved return to the top five this year. Special mention should also be made of the John Lewis Partnership, featuring for the first time this year due to a change in the eligibility criteria for Most Admired which now allows selected privately and employee owned businesses to compete against their listed oppos.
The guest speaker at the ceremony, Lord Young (who until his unceremonious dismissal a couple of weeks ago, was David Cameron’s special adviser on health & safety), made some thoughtful and well-received remarks on the subject of corporate governance. Why, wondered Young (who has extensive board experience on both sides of the Atlantic), should boards consist increasingly of ‘independent’ non-executive directors whose knowledge of the business is often insufficient for the task in hand? Or, as he put it, ‘Who cannot be appointed unless they know almost nothing about the business?’
