This exclusive interview with Will Butler-Adams was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.
AI, robotics and digital systems are changing how manufacturers work. Their value depends on what customers need, whether employees have room to learn and whether leaders are prepared to hear uncomfortable truths.
William Butler-Adams OBE is Group CEO of Brompton Bicycle and a Chartered Mechanical Engineer. He joined Brompton in 2002 and became CEO in 2008, leading its growth from £2 million in turnover and 27 employees to an estimated £130 million and more than 800 staff.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2024 and received an OBE for services to manufacturing. Read his Royal Academy of Engineering profile.
In this exclusive interview with the Inspirational Leadership Speakers Agency, William explains why humility matters in leadership, why box-ticking courses fail to develop people and how manufacturers can find the right mix of AI, robotics and skilled human work.
Question 1: What does credible leadership look like in engineering and business?
Will Butler-Adams: “We see this coming out of the great United States of America leadership, and you see it in The Apprentice, where it’s about, “You’re fired,” “I know best,” “I’m the big guy” and “I got to be a really nasty person to succeed.” To me, that is everything that is wrong about leadership.
“Leadership should be about self-sacrifice, leading by example and serving others. It should be true leadership, where you earn respect through what you are doing and people can rely on you to support them, to give them space to be honest and to share challenges.
“If you’re Mr Perfect and you’re wandering around shouting at people, no one else is going to tell you the truth. That’s very dangerous in business. You need to recruit people better than you and give them the space to flourish.
“You need to be humble. You need modesty. You need drive and ambition, but not by shouting from the rooftops.”
Question 2: Why do workplace training programmes often fail to create a genuine learning culture?
Will Butler-Adams: “Governments time and time again are encouraging us. We’ve got the apprenticeship levy. We have endless things that float in to train your staff. Training needs to be bottom up, not top down.
“If you’re training people to tick boxes and you send them off to yet another two-day course, where they sit there and fill in a questionnaire at the end and wonder why they ever bothered, that might look good on their CV. It might even look good for the company. You’ve done all this training, but what is it all for?
“You’re much better to set your team really challenging objectives, pushing them outside their comfort zone. Then they come to you and say, “Listen, if you want me to deliver that, I need skills, I need to learn, I need to understand.”
“That might not just be training. It might be mentoring. It might be going and visiting another company that’s doing a better job than us. How do we learn from them?
“Training is much more than just a course. It’s about learning, networking, becoming more confident and having an understanding of where to reach when you need to find new answers. It is very important, but just having training in the organisation isn’t enough.”
Question 3: How should manufacturers balance AI, robotics and skilled human work?
Will Butler-Adams: “We’ve got AI, robots and humans.
“Like most things, if I look at my house, I have some piece of furniture that belonged to my great-grandmother. Like a city, you have some buildings that are 600 years old and you have the latest architecture from Thomas Heatherwick. Mix matters.
“We need to be careful that we don’t think AI is going to be the silver bullet and everything’s going to be AI, or robots are going to do everything, or you’re not allowed to use digital and it has to all be handmade.
“It’s about finding the very best of everything out there to deliver the best value to the customer. We use all of it. We use some skills that are highly skilled, take a lot of training, a lot of apprenticeship, and other things like robots, AI and digital.
“Finding the mix that fits your organisation and not being afraid to go for the thing that delivers the most value to the customer: that has to be the absolute key. When you understand what your customer values, then you can deliver the right mix.”
Question 4: What do organisations gain when people feel able to speak honestly and pursue greater ambition?
Will Butler-Adams: “I think we need to remember life is short. Too many people are too afraid to say what they think. They are turning up to work, doing their job, and they finish work.
“We’re going to be dead soon. We’ve got stuff we can contribute and we need to be heard.
“If people have the confidence to go out and be more honest, more driven and more ambitious, even if they decide, “The job I’m in sucks and I’m going to go and do something completely different,” great. That’s better for the business and that’s better for them.
“We don’t have time. We need to move faster. We need to be more ambitious and we need to tell people honestly what we really think, and we’ll get there faster.”
