User:Mrtgrady/David Pitt-Watson

David Pitt-Watson is an entrepreneur, author, lecturer, business consultant and philanthropist. Currently holds position of Consultant with Deloitte Consulting and Senior Advisor with Hermes Fund Managers. David is also a trustee with several organisations and advises civil servants and senior Labour Party politicians on issues of industrial policy and organisation.

Early life
Born in 1956 in Aberdeen, Scotland, David is the son of the Reverend Professor Ian Pitt-Watson (deceased 1995) and Helen Pitt-Watson. David has two sisters, Margaret and Rosemary.

Education
David was educated at Bearsden Academy and Aberdeen Grammar School and then at the Queen's College at Oxford University where he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He went on to win a scholarship from the Rotary Foundation to Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he graduated with an MA and MBA in 1980.

Family
David is married to Ursula Barnes, has three children and lives in London.

Career
After short periods of work at 3i and McKinsey David co-founded and was ultimately Managing Director of Braxton Associates Limited. Worked for company for 17 years during which he was appointed Managing Director of the company. Braxton Associates would later be bought by Deloitte and become Deloitte Consulting, one of the largest strategy consultancies in Europe.

He left that position in 1997, to become Assistant General Secretary of the Labour Party, a post he held for two years before joining Hermes Fund Managers as commercial director of their newly formed shareholder activist funds.

These funds, known as the Focus Funds, grew to be the largest of their kind in Europe. David became head of the funds and a director of Hermes in 2004, where he established Hermes Equity Ownership Service, a service to pension funds which aims to ensure that shares they own are used to promote good management practice and sustainable investment returns. HEOS currently advises on over £50bn worth of assets. The Focus Funds and HEOS established Hermes as a global leader in the field of Responsible Investment. Hermes interventions in companies have sometimes been controversial, but in general, Hermes has sought to keep its interventions private.

For over twenty years he has advised Labour politicians on issues of industrial policy and organisation, including Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He has also advised civil servants.

In April 2008 as appointed to General Secretary of the Labour Party but resigned before taking up the post owing to conditions for his acceptance not being met prior to him starting in the role.

Author
David is the author of "The Hermes Principles", an explanation of the basis for Hermes interventions in underperforming companies.

He also co-authored "The New Capitalists" with Stephen Davis and Jon Lukomnik, which describes the effect of active pension fund investment on business behaviour was published in November 2006 by Harvard Business School Press.

Together with these publications David has been a regular contributor of press articles to British newspapers such as the Financial Times and The Observer.<ref name="PressArticles"Jounalisted.com entry - journalisted.com

Charitable work and Public Service
He is a non-executive director of Oxford Analytica, a trustee of the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Speakers' Corner Trust which he also currently Chairs. He has also lectured at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (The RSA) where he leads the Tomorrow's Investor programme.

David was a member of the Literacy Task Force, which devised the successful programme to improve literacy in UK schools, from 1995 to 1996.

In the past Pitt Watson has served on Labour’s Finance and Industry Group and was also a Labour Party councillor on Westminster City Council from 1986 to 1990.

Academic appointment
David Pitt-Watson was a Visiting Professor of Strategic Management at Cranfield University School of Management from 1990 to 1996.