A director who was told she would never get into Cambridge, the chair of a hospital foundation board, a diversity campaigner and a board member at the heart of efforts for a Covid vaccine are among the winners of this year’s Sunday Times NED Awards.
This year’s Dame Helen Alexander NED to Watch Award went to Funmi Adegoke, a non-executive with Melrose, the industrial turnaround group, where she has served on the board since 2020.
It was Adegoke’s teacher who told her Cambridge was out of reach because she is black and female. “I was so distraught. And then I got really annoyed,” Adegoke told The Sunday Times. In the end she got a law degree at Cambridge and became a barrister. She worked for BP for ten years before embarking on a non-executive career. Judges praised Adegoke for her ethical standards and supporting the management team.
This is the 16th year of the NED Awards, which are run by The Sunday Times and Peel Hunt, with Board Agenda as a partner and supporter. Short forms are submitted for entrants before a board member is asked to write a long-form nomination. They are then passed to academics at Cranfield and Henley business schools to draw up a shortlist for judges to consider.
Another winner this year is Wol Kolade, former chair of the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation, who moved the charity from raising funds for equipment to helping develop national healthcare projects. Kolade, managing partner in a private equity firm, has a £1bn endowment to work with at the trust.
“£1bn is a huge amount of money for one area so my idea was to leverage our money to work for the whole country, using Lambeth and Southwark as a kind of Petri dish,” he told The Sunday Times.
Judges highlighted Kolade’s record of “transformational change”.
‘Balance challenge and support’
Perhaps the biggest name among this year’s NED Awards winners, however, was Sir Philip Hampton, who scooped the Lifetime Achievement Award. Hampton was formerly on the board of RMC and Sainsbury’s, where he was chair, as well as Royal Bank of Scotland and GlaxoSmithKline.
He is currently best known for being one the founders of the Hampton-Alexander Review (with Dame Helen Alexander) which took a groundbreaking look at the progress of women in UK boardrooms and set tough gender diversity targets.
The key to being a good non-executive, he told The Sunday Times, is to “balance challenge and support”.
Another winner was Sir Hossein Yassaie, chair of the tech firm Ultraleap and winner of the non-executive at Private Equity Backed venture award. Yassaie is former chief executive of Imagination Technologies and considered one of the most high-profile figures in the UK’s semi-conductor industry.
Investors are important, Yassaie told The Sunday Times, but being involved in board governance is “really important”.
The FTSE AIM non-executive award went to Ross Graham, chair of Keywords Studios, a video games services company. Graham is a former accountant and finance chief with Misys, which he helped become a FTSE 100 company. He has also served as a non-executive with Wolfson Microelectronics. Graham says he doesn’t mind tough talking in the boardroom. “I’ve always believed in constructive dissension.”
Dr Roch Doliveux took the FTSE All-Share award for his work chairing Oxford Biomedica, one of the companies in the consortium that developed the Oxford Covid vaccine. Doliveux said that non-executives should be “driven and passionate” and that Oxford Biomedica had given him an opportunity to “do good for society”.
‘A values and value-driven decision’
Helge Lund, chair of energy giant BP, took the prize for FTSE 100 non-executive. Lund, along with BP’s CEO Bernard Looney, was behind the decision for the company to part ways with Rosneft, the Russian oil company, when Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine.
Lund told The Sunday Times it was a “values and value-driven decision”. He was praised by judges for an “open and inclusive” approach and “pivotal role” in the company’s development.
Paul Drechsler, chair of the judging panel, praised the winners and the quality of this year’s nominations for awards. “I was keen to see that we got more diversity in the results and I’m delighted that we got some outstanding winners,” he said.