Group CIO without an IT background: North Sea driller, president of the Baku operation, hilarious, and the best guide to BP a vendor ever had
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
John Leggate was Consilient's main executive sponsor at BP — Group CIO, by the unusual route: no IT background at all, but a career up the upstream side, drilling in the North Sea early on, then running BP's Caspian development from Baku as president of the Azerbaijan International Operating Company until the year before Jonathan Hare met him. His current biography at Dial Partners confirms the arc exactly as Hare recalled it: twenty-five-plus years at BP, AIOC presidency in Baku, Group CIO leading the corporation's digital transformation. He is a CBE and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and today chairs the Gresham House Energy Storage Fund.
What he gave Hare was the map: how BP's executive culture actually worked, how to navigate it, and who to get to know — delivered hilariously, over drink, with stories. And one perfect coincidence: their shared love of James Bond, whose then-current film had a BMW Z8 sawn in half in the Caspian oil fields off Baku — where Leggate had lived until the previous year, running the real operation the film was set against. Hare had just ordered the same car. That story is its own page.
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A fellow Scot — one late-arriving branch of Hare's family came from Scotland to America in the late 1700s — Leggate and Hare ranged over how the Scottish Enlightenment's philosophers shaped the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and American patent law. Hare's suspicion, recorded with its own grade of confidence: the Scots, having rebelled against their English overlords regularly, were quietly rooting for their American cousins. The dictation's parenthesis on this never closes, which the source record preserves.
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A $10m lead investment in crowdsourced solutions — in 2001
Open →the relationship handed toVP of Marketing & Software Alliances at Consilient; negotiated the BP safety-incident deal in London, September 2000. Her LinkedIn still lists BP as the marquee account.
Open →the Baku coincidence behindBond's car, sawn in half off Baku in the film; first seen near Trafalgar Square; lost at Sunnyvale BMW to the one buyer the story couldn't top
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
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