His bucket list adventure took him to the Amazon, Lake Titicaca and high in the Andes on the 26-mile Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. It was while trekking the gruelling high-altitude trail that David Goodman (MBA 1986) found the perfect backdrop for a Peruvian plane selfie.
“Having received my little blue Cranfield plane, I thought that would pack easily into my luggage and I would take it with me as I would be somewhere exotic. I actually took another photo at the Iguazu Falls, but it didn’t look as good as the Machu Picchu photo; that one the sun was in the right place and it was a nice photo.”
We thought so too. David’s picture from Machu Picchu scooped our #CranfieldSoM50 plane selfie competition to mark the School of Management’s 50th anniversary. Thanks to everyone who entered; we received a fantastic array of entries from alumni around the world and we loved seeing where life has taken you post-Cranfield.
Based in Sydney, Australia, David is no stranger to feats of endurance, having climbed Kilimanjaro in his twenties, though Machu Picchu was no walk in the park. At between 3,500 and 4,100 metres above sea level, just walking at altitude was hard-going.
“It was a good, fun thing to do, and Machu Picchu was definitely worth the visit. I had a great tour, but somehow, for once, the journey was more rewarding than the destination.”
Life was very different back in the mid-1980s. David was working in banking, a sector he had joined after his undergraduate degree. Six years in and he had a change of heart, feeling that he was not adding to society, describing it as “lubricating the cogs of industry, but I’m not part of industry.” He wanted to create things. A colleague had started the Cranfield MBA the previous year, before going into a different industry, and this inspired David to apply. “I saw the Cranfield MBA as a catalyst to make a step-change, which is what I did.”
Given his background, David opted for a lot of the finance options because they were “comparatively easy” but found a lot of the programme hard-going, particularly the notorious WAC weekends. “They didn’t teach things like golf and wine appreciation, which I think should be part of any MBA!”
After Cranfield, David applied for jobs in industry and got a job in the treasury for construction firm, Balfour Beatty and progressed to the role of group treasurer doing project finance for large schemes including the Sheffield Supertram and Barking Power Station. And then came the turning point.
“The Chief Executive said to me: ‘You’re young and married with young children. I’d like you to go to Australia and be our man on the ground at our Australian subsidiary’,” explained David. He had already been travelling out there twice a year to visit Balfour Beatty’s subsidiary and, with two young children, it was the perfect time to go. Three years later, they brought him back to the UK to tempt him with another opportunity, but the big blue skies and 30-degree heat of Sydney versus the cold and sleet of November London were too much of a draw. The lifestyle was great, especially for his children.
Back in Sydney, David found a new role – “a very MBA type of job” – as a strategic planning manager and was on the board. He then was asked to run the failing mining division as General Manager, which he turned around and sold on, before becoming finance director at another UK-owned construction company, where he remained for ten years. By this point, he had turned 50.
“In Australia, people don’t want 50-year-old finance directors; they want 40-year-olds. Ask a 40-year-old financial director what he wants to do and they’ll say ‘in five years, I want to be MD’. Ask the same question of a 50-year-old and they would want to stay a finance director,” David said.
He moved to Brisbane for a new finance and commercial role and spent five years with them before the company merged and his role was made redundant. He returned to Sydney and retired.
The pace shows no sign of abating in retirement. David is now consulting with one of his old firms and lectures on corporate governance at Australian National University four times a year. He is an active cricket umpire and President of the Sydney Shires Cricket Umpires Association and, a theatre fan, was recently elected to the board of a theatre company in Sydney. After becoming a grandfather in 2016, he visits his daughter in Adelaide every few months and is still in touch with friends from his Cranfield days.
And travel remains firmly in his plans, having taken over 50 flights in 2017 – a fitting recipient of our 50th anniversary plane selfie competition.