John Browne (Lord Brown of Madingley) was born in Germany in 1948 and joined BP as a university apprentice in 1966. He was Group Chief Executive of BP from 1995 to 2007, where he built a reputation as a visionary leader and was regularly voted the most admired businessman by his peers. He was knighted in 1998 and made a life peer in 2001.
He is now a managing partner of Riverstone LLC, an international energy private equity firm, a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK), President of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Chairman of the Tate Gallery.