David Jenkins’ Weblog

Since WordPress apparently allows me the easy ability to show images in sets of 3 I’ll use it as a standard to tell you about myself.

I was born in South Africa, long before they used this flag though. I left at the age of 2 and first returned in the late 80s just before the end of apartheid. I have been back many times since and have enjoyed 2 awesome holidays. I grew up in Wales and therefore I am Welsh. That’s more of a geographic than a political statement but it does mean that I am not English and that Wales’ 2 recent grand slams have meant a lot to me. And finally my passport says that I am British which I am proud to accept. As Brit I am often critical of my country but recognise that in matters of nationality you can’t pick just the good bits, it’s a package, and there are enough good bits about the UK that I am proud to be British.

I’ve enjoyed a varied career with several companies but I guess 3 stand out as giving me the opportunities and experience which shaped me and my later life.

I joined Shell straight from university (after my abortive PhD) where I worked at Shell Centre (in the downstream building which is now a block of flats) in an operational research group in the computer centre. I spent most of my 4 years there working on LNG projects using mainframe computers and mechanical terminals which were state of the art in those days. It’s a measure of how the world has changed that I remember we had a capital authorisation for £1000 to buy a new desk top calculator; that was 1970. It was Shell which introduced me to foreign travel and I spent two long periods in Japan supporting contract negotiations. After Shell I moved to Mobil Oil (now part of Exxon Mobil) with which I worked first in New York and then Indonesia.

In 1976 I persuaded Dow Chemical in Hong Kong to take me on. I worked there for 3 years travelling over most of Asia and Australia and New Zealand before relocating to Dow Europe in Switzerland where I spent 13 splendid years visting just about every European country and moving from function to function before settling in marketing. I went about as far as I could with Dow before it became clear that I would have to move on again. I was head hunted by FMC to run its newly acquired flame retardants business in Trafford Park, Manchester. By contrast with my stay at Dow it was not a happy time and I was made redundant after just over 2 years.

Most people come out of redundancy better than when they went in and that was true of me. Linx Printing Technologies of St Ives near Cambridge offered me the position of Sales and Marketing Director and that gave me the chance to work for a much smaller company, to run a substantial department and to be a part of managing a global business. It was tremendous fun; I travelled wodely and developed contacts in the world of industrial printing which have stayed with me ever since. After 4 years at Linx I moved to one of its arch competitors, Willett International, but 2 years later found myself on the receiving end of an acquisition and was made redundant again.

That was 2003 and since then I’ve held an interim management position in Spain and worked on my own for a year (i2i-management.com) before joining Qi3 in 2005. Coincidentally I was elected a County Councillor in the same year and the combination of the two jobs pays the bills and keeps of the streets.

This will be continued!