Sir Michael Bibby – Bibby Line Group

If your name has been above the door of the business for 200 years, and you are the sixth generation to run the company, the priority is to have something to hand on to the seventh generation.
Sir Michael Bibby, Bt. became group managing director at 36, having joined the firm eight years earlier when his father, Sir Derek, retired from the board. ‘Had I joined while he was still in charge we would have argued, and he, being the boss, would always have won,’ he says.
Bibby now heads a business which, for 150 years, survived the vicious peaks and troughs of the shipping industry until the global economic changes of the 1970s and 1980s threatened to overwhelm the company altogether. Bibby Line diversified into distribution and financial services – the big risk then was not in moving into new markets, but in avoiding change. The two new divisions thrived, though not without hiccups, and Michael Bibby is now extending the group’s portfolio further still.
‘I associate risk with reward, not with failure. It’s not a negative concept, but the way to generate wealth – as long as you can find the way to manage and control the risk. The higher the risk, the higher the returns must be to justify it. Does the story makes sense? Is the market there? Can the people deliver? Is there a corporate fit? If not, there’ll be conflict and violence.........