You would have thought it was a full-time job running Sunderland football club (relegation zone and this week dumped out of the Worthington Cup.) You’d have thought chairing the Learning and Skills Council - budget pound;7 billion - would take up a considerable amount of time, too.
Yet Bryan Sanderson, who does both, has added to this list chair of Standard Chartered, the emerging-markets bank. He will spend three days a week on his new job - much of it travelling abroad. The bank has a turnover of pound;4bn, 600,000 employees in India and a major presence in the Far East.
This triplet of posts is joined on the Sanderson CV by the chair of Bupa, non-executive director of hotels group Six Continents (who own Bass Breweries) and vice-chair at the London School of Economics. Surely there is a New Year’s “gong“on the way.
Mr Sanderson said: “I would like to reconfirm my commitment to the LSC and clarify that my chairmanship of Standard Chartered Bank does not start for another six months.
“I will be relinquishing several of my private-sector commitments, including that with Six Continents, in order to devote as much time as possible to Learning and Skills Council business.”
But doubling up is not uncommon in the world of football bigwigs. You’d have thought running Manchester United (through to the next round of the Worthington Cup) was a job enough on its own. But Roy Gardner will combine it with heading a new Modern Apprenticeships task force.
