Productivity is an output, not an input

The rich and varied career of Andrew Moss has led him from the NHS to Clarks Shoes to BP and into the automotive and aerospace industry. With such an abundance of experience under his belt, Andrew is an important addition to the Be the Business board of fellows.

Andrew dabbled with the world of rock music, but a stint as an NHS management trainee awoke a new passion in him: employee engagement and organisation design. It was new-found interest that would shape the rest of his career.

From the NHS, Andrew moved to running factories for Clarks Shoes, before making the switch to BP as an organisation & development and industrial relations specialist.

“It was a period of major industrial relations turmoil,” he said, “with major organisation redesign and an extensive period benchmarking organisation structures and efficiency.”

In 1994, Andrew joined British multinational automotive and aerospace components business GKN as HR Director for various parts of its aerospace and helicopter business.

During this period, Andrew was seconded to the Ministry of Defence for the creation of a new Defence Procurement Agency. It was a busy time, as Andrew was also overseeing a period of extensive growth for the company through a number of international acquisitions.

In a career spanning over 25 years at GKN, Andrew led group-wide leadership and organisation development activities and employment policy, working with major academic institutions globally. Ten years of his tenure was spent as HR director for the global automotive division.

His final five years with the company saw Andrew living in Shanghai as President of GKN China. While there, he was a director of the China Britain Business Council and the chair of the Shanghai Advanced Engineering and Manufacturing Group of the British Chamber. He also worked on a FCO programme helping develop and mentor Chinese female entrepreneurs.

“Going to China was probably the only career move I ever actively planned,” he said. “I love the culture, I love the people, I loved the business, and it was a great opportunity for my wife to come out and experience it as well.”

“There was a huge amount of autonomy being out there – I did a lot of work around strategy, acquiring small businesses, integrating them into the wider organisation. It was a great experience.”

Joining Be the Business

Following his retirement from GKN, and with his anticipated consultancy work with China on hiatus because of COVID, Andrew was nudged towards the becoming a Be the Business fellow by Veronica Hope Hailey, who he has known for more than 20 years.

“I teach on one of the master’s programmes at the University of Bath,” he explained, “and I’m on the advisory board of the business school. In typical Veronica style, she introduced me to the fdellowship by sending me an email that said, ‘Contact this guy, Nigel’, without telling me why.”

“What attracted me,” he said, “is that I like to help organisations, teams and people to optimise themselves.”

“Having done a lot of work with small- to medium-sized enterprises in terms of buying them or partnering with them and bringing them into the organisation, I know that there’s an enormous amount of help they can be given.”

One thing he passionately believes is that productivity is an output not an input. “So that’s everything around the culture of the organisation, the people you have and their levels of engagement, the clarity of your thinking in terms of your strategy and why being where you are today is not where you want to be tomorrow,” he said.

“I don’t think organisations spend long enough – or in a structured enough way – thinking about that. So there’s the possibility of wasted effort.”

In terms of his contribution to Be the Business, he has a lot of energy for building high-performing teams and developing clear and well-communicated strategies within a business.

“I have a belief that business moves too quickly to deploying tool kits and processes rather than having a clear and persuasive understanding of why the status quo is their biggest obstacle to achieving sustainable change,” he said.

“There’s a very simple formula, devised by a guy named Eric Abrahamson at the Columbia Business School. For me, it.s the most important thing about change management,” said Andrew.

“Abrahamson said that sustainable change is the product of three things: the first is a vision; the second is a process, which covers how you’re going to get there; and the third is about having dissatisfaction with where you are now, and how you sell that dissatisfaction. If any of these are a zero then sustainable change just doesn’t happen”

If the imperative for change doesn’t run through the whole organisation, Andrew explains, then it will probably fail.

As well as his long career with GKN, Andrew has been athe director of the Chinese Britain Business Council, the chair of the Shanghai Advanced Engineering and Manufacturing Group of the British Chamber, and he sits on the Bath School of management advisory board. He also advocates for diversity in business and mentors several female entrepreneurs.

Quick-fire questions

What would be your rallying cry to British businesses?

I think one of the one of the key things that I’ve learned is that you need to be able to understand what it is that drives people, and whether that’s compatible with where the organisation wants to go. You need the leanest, most directionally-focused team that you possibly can, and diversity is incredibly important in this because you need to find a way of injecting different ways of thinking.

Who is or who was your business inspiration?

There is no one person, but I’ve had a number of inspirational bosses. The thing that was a common feature of them all is that they all always sought to recruit the best possible people into their team, and they showed an interest in them.

Do you have a personal productivity tip?

Engagement. If you have a diverse and engaged workforce, you can improve productivity by upwards of 20 per cent. As to how you engage people, that’s the challenge. It’s all about discretionary energy – how do you get people to dispense discretionary energy into the business?

What trends and changes should business owners be on the lookout for?

My advice would not be ‘these are the things that you should look out for’; my advice would be that you should be looking out for things by actively benchmarking the space that you’re in. What are going to be the disruptors?

What was the best piece of business advice you were ever given?

One of the key learnings was, if you don’t know, don’t pretend to know. As you grow your career, nobody wants to be seen to be fallible – but actually admitting you don’t know something and then going away and finding out is the best approach in terms of your own personal development.

If you had taken a completely different career path, what would you like to have been?

Well, I’ve dabbled in music, and I’m a painter. I’m tempted to say an academic, but I’m kind of more hands-on than that so I think I’d probably have been a teacher.