Sir Alec Edward Reed,
CBE
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations,
and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...
,
FCMA,
FCIPD (born 16 February 1934)
[Alec Reed biodata](_blank)
, debretts.com; accessed 10 June 2014. is the founder of
Reed Executive Ltd, one of the UK's largest private businesses. Knighted for services to business and charity in 2011, Reed is a high-profile charity donor and organiser. His various charitable initiatives have given away over £233m,
mostly in support of women, addiction, overseas development, education and the arts. Reed has founded seven charities, several companies, two schools and is the author of four business books. His current job title at Reed is Founder at Large.
Early life
Reed was born in 1934 in
Hounslow,
Middlesex
Middlesex (; abbreviation: Middx) is a Historic counties of England, historic county in South East England, southeast England. Its area is almost entirely within the wider urbanised area of London and mostly within the Ceremonial counties of ...
.
[David Teather]
'Alec and James Reed: recruitment is just the job for father and son'
Guardian.co.uk, 3 June 2010; retrieved 10 July 2012. His father Leonard was a lithographic artist for the UK's
Ministry of Information during WWII, supervising the production of a number of government information posters, including the original version of the Ministry's "
Keep Calm and Carry On
''Keep Calm and Carry On'' was a motivational poster produced by the Government of the United Kingdom in 1939 in preparation for World War II. The poster was intended to raise the morale of the British public, threatened with widely predi ...
" poster. Reed's mother Nancy was a housewife and former employee of the Prudential Insurance firm. In his autobiography, Reed writes that his earliest memory is listening with his family to
Neville Chamberlain's 1939 speech
declaring war on Germany, a speech that so alarmed his parents that they fled London in a neighbour's car the same day, thinking invasion imminent, only to return "...before teatime" after concluding that nowhere in the country would be safe.
A child of
The Blitz
The Blitz was a German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom in 1940 and 1941, during the Second World War. The term was first used by the British press and originated from the term , the German word meaning 'lightning war'.
The Germa ...
, Reed has described his childhood as generally "secure", though he has also said that much of his early motivation came from feeling overshadowed by his older brother. Along with a milk round, Reed's first business venture was started alongside his brother while both were still children: the pair made and sold toy soldiers forged from lead that had been salvaged from local bombed-out houses.
Reed attended
Drayton Manor Grammar School Drayton may refer to:
People
* Drayton (surname)
Legal cases
* ''United States v. Drayton'', 536 U.S. 194 (2002)
Places Australia
*Drayton, Queensland, a locality in the Toowoomba Region
*Shire of Drayton, a former local government area in Queen ...
.
At the end of his first year his school report said: "Conduct very unsatisfactory. He is lazy, inattentive and exerts himself to prevent his neighbours from working. He could do much better if he were more ambitious". Reed failed his
11-Plus
The eleven-plus (11+) is a Test (assessment), standardized examination administered to some students in England and Northern Ireland in their last year of primary education, which governs admission to grammar schools and other secondary schools ...
exam; he left school aged 16 to work for a motor vehicle exporter in London's
Fenchurch Street
Fenchurch Street is a street in London linking Aldgate at its eastern end with Lombard Street and Gracechurch Street in the west. It is a well-known thoroughfare in the City of London financial district and is the site of many corporate office ...
, having also failed to get the grades to enter agricultural college and pursue his ambition of becoming a farmer. Reed's mother encouraged him to study a Chartered Secretary's course in the evenings during his day job at the exporters.
He was called up to
National Service
National service is the system of voluntary government service, usually military service. Conscription is mandatory national service. The term ''national service'' comes from the United Kingdom's National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1939.
The l ...
in 1952. He tried for a commission with the
Royal Engineers
The Corps of Royal Engineers, usually called the Royal Engineers (RE), and commonly known as the ''Sappers'', is a corps of the British Army. It provides military engineering and other technical support to the British Armed Forces and is heade ...
but was rejected after his Brigadier deemed him to be a "...muddled thinker". Reed left the army in 1954 to work as a trainee accountant for
Gillette
Gillette is an American brand of safety razors and other personal care products including shaving supplies, owned by the multi-national corporation Procter & Gamble (P&G).
Based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, it was owned by The Gil ...
in
Osterley, having passed his Chartered Secretary qualification the year before, at the third attempt.
Keen to be self-employed, Reed pursued a number of sideline businesses while still at Gillette, including making his own brand of aftershave that he brewed in his mother's kitchen and sold door-to-door. Reed also began working evenings and weekends in an estate agency in Hounslow, again while still at Gillette. The agency’s premises was split into two businesses, with one side selling property and the other side selling carpets. Noticing that the carpet business was struggling, Reed approached the owner (who was the father of Reed's then-girlfriend) and offered to rent the carpet portion of the premises for his fledgling employment agency, funding the launch with £75 taken from his Gillette pension fund. On 7 May 1960, the 26-year-old Reed opened the first branch of Reed Employment. It went on to become one of Britain's largest privately owned businesses, with 441 business units in 163 locations worldwide, employing over 3,000 people.
Career at Reed
![First branch of Reed Employment](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/First_branch_of_Reed_Employment.jpg)
Reed has held the positions of
Chief Executive,
Executive Chairman
The chairperson, also chairman, chairwoman or chair, is the presiding officer of an organized group such as a board, committee, or deliberative assembly. The person holding the office, who is typically elected or appointed by members of the grou ...
,
non-executive Chairman
The chairperson, also chairman, chairwoman or chair, is the presiding officer of an organized group such as a board, committee, or deliberative assembly. The person holding the office, who is typically elected or appointed by members of the group ...
and Founder at Large during his career at the Reed group of companies. In 1997 he stepped down as chief executive to become chairman, handing control of the company to his son
James
James is a common English language surname and given name:
*James (name), the typically masculine first name James
* James (surname), various people with the last name James
James or James City may also refer to:
People
* King James (disambiguat ...
; to mark the handover, Reed presented his son with a conductor's baton in a glass case. Reed became non-executive chairman in 2000 and Founder at Large in 2004, a position he still holds and which he assumed after his son James succeeded him as chairman in the same year.
Reed remains a significant minority shareholder, through both his personal holding and that of the Reed Foundation, to which he donated 18% of all shares in the company.
Other business ventures
In 1970, Reed founded Inter-Company Comparisons, now ICC PLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of a Swedish business group. In 1974, he also founded Medicare Limited, a 50-branch drug store with 500 employees, now part of
Superdrug
Superdrug Stores plc (trading as Superdrug) is a health and beauty retailer in the United Kingdom, and the second largest behind Boots UK. The company is owned by A.S. Watson (Health & Beauty UK) Ltd which is part of the A.S. Watson Group. It ...
. Reed would later write that he started Medicare simply to smooth out the cash flow performance of his then-publicly quoted companies. He is a noted critic of the administrative burden of running public companies, and has compared his experience of running the Reed group as a public company to being an "...unpaid greyhound on a racetrack called the stock market". He would later blame the stress of running Medicare for his diagnosis of colon cancer; the business was sold as part of his recuperation, at his wife's insistence.
From 1985 to 1989 Reed was the honorary chairman and chief exec of Andrews and Partners Estate Agency. He took the business from a loss of £297,000 in 1985 to profits of just over £1m in 1986. The profits were used to buy out the existing shareholders and transfer ownership to three Christian charities. He writes in his autobiography that "Most of the non-executive directors were also devout Christians who prayed before every meeting. Despite this, I found them extremely difficult to deal with in subsequent negotiations...that episode may have been the beginning of my disillusionment with Christianity".
Philanthropy
Reed has described encouraging philanthropy as his “…main mission now".
He is the founder of seven charities, including
Womankind Worldwide,
Ethiopiaid, Reed Restart at Holloway Prison, Women at Risk, and the Alec Reed Academy. In 1985, he established The Reed Foundation, a charitable foundation that provides much of the seed funding for his charity work. In 2007 he launched TheBigGive.co.uk, now one of the UK's foremost charitable giving sites.
The Reed Foundation
The Reed Foundation is the main vehicle for Reed’s philanthropic activities. It was founded in 1985 with Reed's £5m entire personal proceeds from the £20m sale of Medicare. The Foundation owns 18% of Reed Group, hence Reed’s remark that the firm’s employees "work one day a week for charity". As of 2012 it reported total funds of £13.91m. Reed is one of four Foundation
trustees, along with his three children.
The Foundation has financed numerous charitable initiatives, including:
The Big Give
Founded in 2007, TheBigGive.org.uk is a non-profit, charitable website which enables donors to find and support charity projects in their field of interest. Reed has referred to it as “…a Wikipedia for big givers" and "his biggest success". It reports raising in excess of £233m for charities and supporting 9500 ongoing charity projects.
The site now hosts £1.3bn worth of projects in need of funding.
The Big Give inverts the traditional model of charity funding in which donors are contacted by charities, to a model in which donors effectively "compare and shop" for charity projects, and then have their donations matched by other donors. Reed founded the site in response to receiving an unmanageable number of appeals from charities seeking donations from high-profile philanthropists. The project was designed to encourage wealthy philanthropists potentially seeking to make donations between £100,000 and £10m. Having attracted few donors at that level, Reed switched to a match funding model, in which he put up £1m and requested other donors to match him; reportedly the site’s users matched Reed’s £1m within 45 minutes of it going live. The site now makes use of "challenge matching", in which donors effectively compete to be the first to kickstart a given charity project.
In addition to projects uploaded by charities, the site also runs emergency appeals (such as for victims of the 2014 Philippines hurricane and the 2013 Syrian refugee crisis, and an annual Christmas Challenge), in which Reed’s funds (and those of external foundations) are joined with pledges from charities' own major donors, in order to double online donations made by the public. The 2021 Christmas Challenge raised £24.1m for 928 charities.
The Big Give also helps charities to find trustees and runs educational programmes in schools in order to raise children’s awareness of philanthropic giving.
In forming The Big Give, Reed created an advisory Board of Philanthropists including
Lord Bell
Timothy John Leigh Bell, Baron Bell (18 October 1941 – 25 August 2019), was a British advertising and public relations executive, best known for his advisory role in Margaret Thatcher's three successful general election campaigns and his co ...
,
Lord Gavron CBE,
Lord Haskins,
Sir Adrian Cadbury
Sir George Adrian Hayhurst Cadbury, (15 April 1929 – 3 September 2015) was an English businessman who served as the chairman of Cadbury and Cadbury Schweppes for 24 years. He was also a British Olympic rower. Cadbury was a pioneer in raising ...
,
Sir Charles Dunstone
Sir Charles William Dunstone (born 21 November 1964) is the British co-founder and former chairman of mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse, former chairman of multinational electrical and telecommunications retailer and services company Dix ...
,
Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho,
Jon Snow and
Michael Spencer
Michael Alan Spencer, Baron Spencer of Alresford (born 30 May 1955), sometimes known as "Spens", is a British billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is the founder of NEX Group, a UK-based business focused on electronic markets and post- ...
.
Ethiopiaid
Ethiopiaid works with local community partners in
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
to alleviate poverty, support the elderly, empower women and girls, help children with disabilities and increase access to health care and education. Reed founded the charity with a £1m donation in 1989, having visited the Ethiopian capital in 1987 on a fact-finding tour organised and accompanied by Jembra Teferra, a relative of
Haile Selassie
Haile Selassie I ( gez, ቀዳማዊ ኀይለ ሥላሴ, Qädamawi Häylä Səllasé, ; born Tafari Makonnen; 23 July 189227 August 1975) was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. He rose to power as Regent Plenipotentiary of Ethiopia (' ...
and wife of a former mayor of the city. Reed had initially planned on promoting entrepreneurship in the area, but upon arrival was struck by Addis Ababa’s poor public sanitation, especially in the "kebeles" (poor urban neighbourhoods). Reed subsequently underwrote a two-year project to develop the kebeles, and arranged pledges for additional financial assistance from
Water Aid,
Help the Aged
Help the Aged was a United Kingdom based international charity founded in 1961 by Cecil Jackson-Cole and Hugh Faulkner to help disadvantaged older people who were affected by poverty, isolation and neglect. It merged with Age Concern in 2009 to f ...
and
Band Aid. Ethiopiaid has gone on to donate £28m in funding and match-funding. The charity now partners with around 14 local Ethiopian organisations, providing around £2m in donations.
One of Ethiopiaid's best-known and longest-standing partners is the
Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital
Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, also known as AAFH and Hamlin Fistula Hospital, is a health care hospital based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Its regional Hamlin Fistula centres provide care for women who suffer from incontinence, physical impairment, ...
, which helps to treat Ethiopian women marginalised by the social and medical complications arising from post-birth
fistula. Ethiopiaid also funds reconstructive operations for sufferers of facial disfiguration caused by
noma
Noma, NoMa, or NOMA may refer to:
Places
* NoMa, the area North of Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., US
** NoMa–Gallaudet U station, on Washington Metro
* Noma, Florida, US
* NOMA, Manchester, a redevelopment in England
* Noma Distr ...
(a facially disfiguring disease caused by malnutrition and poor sanitation), animal bites and tumours.
Womankind Worldwide
As with Ethiopiaid, Womankind Worldwide was set up with a £1m donation from Reed in 1989. The charity supports women suffering from abuse, neglect and illness; it also educates against
female circumcision and
child marriage. Patrons include
Kate Adie,
Sandi Toksvig and
Lady Helena Kennedy QC. In 2006 WomanKind Worldwide was merged with Women at Risk, a UK charity founded by Reed in 1997 which works in support of women suffering physical and mental abuse. Women at Risk generated over £1million for beneficiaries, including female survivors of
acid attacks
An acid attack, also called acid throwing, vitriol attack, or vitriolage, is a form of violent assault involving the act of throwing acid or a similarly corrosive substance onto the body of another "with the intention to disfigure, maim, tortu ...
. the charity work with more than 40 partner organisations in 15 countries and claims to have reached millions of women and their families worldwide.
Reed Restart
Founded in
HMP Holloway
HM Prison Holloway was a closed category prison for adult women and young offenders in Holloway, London, England, operated by His Majesty's Prison Service. It was the largest women's prison in western Europe, until its closure in 2016.
Histor ...
in 1993, Reed Restart was a not-for-profit charity dedicated the rehabilitation and assistance of women prisoners, helping them to become more employable on release. The pilot scheme at HMP Holloway was extended to provincial gaols, including Eastwood Park Women’s Prison.
The Alec Reed Academy
This 4-18 coeducational establishment in
Northolt, England was one of the first academies to be created under the
Learning and Skills Act 2000. It is composed of the former
Compton High School
Compton High School is a high school in Compton, California, United States, part of the Compton Unified School District.
History
The school opened in 1896 as Compton Union High School and was later re-established as Compton Senior High School in ...
and Northholt Primary School. Both areas are close to Reed’s childhood home in
Hounslow, and to his former school, Drayton Manor Grammar. Reed’s involvement with the academy began in November 2001, when he sponsored Compton High School.
In 2012 the West London Academy was renamed The
Alec Reed Academy
Alec Reed Academy is a mixed all-through school and sixth form located in the Northolt area of the London Borough of Ealing, England. The school operates nursery, primary, secondary and sixth form departments for pupils aged 3 to 19.
Its prede ...
, in honour of its sponsor. The school has a sports and enterprise specialism. Its catchment area has a high percentage of Indian, Pakistani and Polish families; 52% of pupils do not speak English as a first language. 80% of its pupils achieve Level 4 or above in reading, writing and maths.
A 2010
Ofsted
The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted) is a Non-ministerial government department, non-ministerial department of Government of the United Kingdom, His Majesty's government, reporting to Parliament of the U ...
inspection saw the school rated as "Good"; Ofsted’s 2014 inspection, which was marked under Oftsed’s revised scoring regime, saw the school listed as "requiring improvement". The 2014 report noted that “…senior managers and leaders have accurately identified the areas of the academy requiring further improvement. Their actions are beginning to have an impact on improving teaching and raising standards"
Reed has spoken of the "tremendous freedom" he was given to shape the academy’s approach, noting that he decided the school’s aims and ethos, chose its headmaster and commissioned the design of its buildings, from
Foster & Partners
Foster + Partners is a British architectural, engineering, and integrated design practice founded in 1967 as Foster Associates by Norman Foster. It is the largest architectural firm in the UK with over 1,500 employees in 13 studios worldwide.
...
. Reed contributed £2m of the £40m required to launch the academy. He has also described his involvement as “…an interesting lesson in what happens when private-sector culture meets state-funded culture". He writes of incurring criticism for his ideas on education, notably his view that the school did not need a significant library in the internet age, nor should it teach foreign languages, owing to the multilingual composition of the school's intake and the primacy of the English language in global business.
Other philanthropic projects
Reed is the founder of a number of not-for-profit initiatives prior to the Reed Foundation, including the Reed Business School and Addicts Rehabilitation:
Reed Business School
![Frontal view of Reed Business School](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Frontal_view_of_Reed_Business_School.jpg)
Reed Business School is a not-for-profit residential and day accountancy college specialising in qualifications
ACCA,
CIMA,
ICAEW and more recently AAT. The school is based in Reed’s former home, a 15th Century
Jacobean manor house
A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were held the lord's manorial courts, communal meals w ...
in
Little Compton, England. The house was purchased with the proceeds of the Reed Group’s stockmarket flotation in 1971, after which Reed donated the house to the Reed Charity. It opened in 1972 as The Reed College of Accountancy, changing its name to Reed Business School after the formation of the Reed Educational Trust in 1980. The school’s trading profits are donated to the Trust and distributed to numerous educational charities.
Addicts Rehabilitation
Reed’s first charity was set up in the 1970s to help the recovery and rehabilitation of drug addicts. In a 2011 interview with CIMAGlobal.com, Reed said
"About ten years after we started Reed, the company had become big enough to be made public. I was based in Bond Street and at about that time the Observer newspaper ran a series of articles about people who were having difficult lives. They invited potential volunteers to contact charity organisations, and because I was in Bond Street, I went to work with a drug addiction charity in Covent Garden. Then people began to find out that I was an employment agent and they were all after me to help them get jobs. A lot of them weren't job ready, though, so we started an employment agency for drug addicts RC – Addicts Rehabilitation Charity Our best support came from small and medium sized companies, where the manager really owned the company and could make the decision – 'yes, I can give this guy a chance.' The big companies were more bureaucratic and weren't able to do that so readily"
In the 1970s Reed bought Keveral Farm in Cornwall where addicts could spend time in recovery. From 1989 to 1992, Reed served on
Oxfam
Oxfam is a British-founded confederation of 21 independent charitable organizations focusing on the alleviation of global poverty, founded in 1942 and led by Oxfam International.
History
Founded at 17 Broad Street, Oxford, as the Oxford Co ...
's fundraising committee.
Reed described his approach to philanthropy in a 2013 interview with Coutts:
"I believe it’s better for donors to separate the decision about how much money to spend on charitable giving, from the act of giving to charity. By deciding how much you want to give away and ring-fencing it in a foundation, you can elevate the satisfaction you get from giving and make it easier to make the gift. Once you’ve done that, you can continue your research and decide which good causes you wish to support. I call this 'Disneyland Giving': theme park visitors pay once at the gate and are then free to enjoy the rides. I'm still enjoying giving away money I 'spent' on charity 20 years ago."
Reed has also personally supported a range of smaller UK charities, such as The Passage (homelessness) and The Branch Trust (deprived families).
In 2022 he launched Reed Innovation Scholarships, providing financial support to undergraduate students at Royal Holloway, University of London. The scholarship rewards and encourages creative problem-solving.
Reed is currently serving as an Enterprise Fellow for
The Prince's Trust.
Awards and honours
* Made a
Knight Batchelor
The title of Knight Bachelor is the basic rank granted to a man who has been knighted by the monarch but not inducted as a member of one of the organised orders of chivalry; it is a part of the British honours system. Knights Bachelor are the ...
for services to business and charity in the
2011 New Year Honours
The New Year Honours 2011 were announced on 31 December 2010 in the United Kingdom,United Kingdom: New Zealand,New Zealand"New Year Honours 2011"(14 January 2011) 2 ''New Zealand Gazette'' 55. The Cook IslandsThe Cook Islands: Grenada,Grenada: ...
.
* Invested as a
Commander of the Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations,
and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...
(CBE) for charitable services in the
1994 New Year Honours
The New Year Honours 1994 were appointments by most of the sixteen Commonwealth realms of Queen Elizabeth II to various orders and honours to reward and highlight good works by citizens of those countries, and honorary ones to citizens of other c ...
.
* A Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (FCMA; awarded its outstanding contribution to business performance award.
* Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (FCIPD).
* Fellow of the Beacon Charitable Trust, an Honorary Fellow of Royal Holloway, University of London and an Honorary Doctor of The Open University.
* Professor of Enterprise and Innovation at Royal Holloway until 2001; visiting Professor to London Guildhall University, which merged with the University of North London to become London Metropolitan University in 2002, where he also has an Honorary Doctorate; an Honorary Professor of Warwick University.
* Awarded a Beacon Fellowship and overall winner of the 2010 Beacon Prize.
* Recruitment International's Hall of Fame, inducted 2011.
Arts patronage
![Nicehat](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Nicehat.jpg)
Reed credits his wife Adrianne as being responsible for his interest in the arts.
He is a
ballet
Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of ...
enthusiast and a noted donor to the
Royal Ballet. He also reports donating £100,000 to the
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House (ROH) is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply Covent Garden, after a previous use of the site. It is the home of The Royal Op ...
.
Reed also invested in noted English choreographer
Matthew Bourne
Sir Matthew Christopher Bourne (born 13 January 1960) is an English choreographer whose work includes contemporary dance and dance theatre.
Choreographer
In 2007, Bourne contemplated a gay version of ''Romeo and Juliet''. Despite the succ ...
's original ballets ''
Dorian Gray'' and ''Cinderella'', with profits on the former production enabling a large investment in the latter.
Bourne's ''Cinderella'' is notable for setting the classic story during World War II and transforming the prince of the traditional fairy tale into an injured RAF pilot. The ballet played to full houses at
Sadler's Wells Theatre
Sadler's Wells Theatre is a performing arts venue in Clerkenwell, London, England located on Rosebery Avenue next to New River Head. The present-day theatre is the sixth on the site since 1683. It consists of two performance spaces: a 1,500-seat ...
. Reed has described Bourne as "a creative genius".
In his autobiography Reed expresses interest in moving
The Royal Ballet
The Royal Ballet is a British internationally renowned classical ballet company, based at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, England. The largest of the five major ballet companies in Great Britain, the Royal Ballet was founded in ...
from its current home at the Royal Opera House to the
London Coliseum, though he calls this ambition "probably a pipe dream".
Reed is an amateur painter, with a focus on portraits. He wrote that painting "...particularly helped me get through chemotherapy after my second run-in with cancer".
He studied with portrait painter Ken Payne and at the
Heatherley School of Fine Art. Reed won a national prize for those over sixty years old for his self-portrai
Nice Hat in which he is portrayed wearing a trilby.
Teaching
Reed became a member of the governing council of
Royal Holloway, University of London
Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), formally incorporated as Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, is a public research university and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It has six schools, 21 academic departm ...
, in 1979, subsequently becoming the chairman of the college's finance committee.
After the formation of the Royal Holloway School of Management in 1990, Reed recruited high-profile guest speakers and donated to the library. He also taught an interactive entrepreneurship course for undergraduates at the school called LIES (Leadership, Innovation and Enterprise Studies).
Reed made his students turn up on time "...to introduce them to the basics of business life"; latecomers were fined £1, paid into a fund which purchased confectionery for the class.
In 1999 Reed was asked by Tony Blair to investigate a decline in teacher training enrolment.
Publications
Reed is the author of several books, including:
* ''Returning to Work'' (1989), published by Kogan Page:
* ''Innovation in Human Resource Management'' (2001), published by CIPD:
* ''Capitalism is Dead: Peoplism Rules'' (2002), published by McGraw-Hill:
* ''I Love Mondays – Autobiography'' (2012), published by Profile Books;
Personal life
Reed is married with three children and 11 grandchildren.
He and his wife live in a two-bedroom house in
Kensington
Kensington is a district in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in the West End of London, West of Central London.
The district's commercial heart is Kensington High Street, running on an east–west axis. The north-east is taken up b ...
and a converted cottage in
Little Compton,
Warwickshire
Warwickshire (; abbreviated Warks) is a county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, and the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon an ...
.
Debrett's lists his interests as family,
portrait painting
Portrait Painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to represent a specific human subject. The term 'portrait painting' can also describe the actual painted portrait. Portraitists may create their work by commission, for public and pr ...
,
theatre
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perform ...
,
cinema,
tennis
Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent ( singles) or between two teams of two players each ( doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball ...
,
riding,
ballet
Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of ...
and
bridge
A bridge is a structure built to span a physical obstacle (such as a body of water, valley, road, or rail) without blocking the way underneath. It is constructed for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle, which is usually somethi ...
. He has a lifelong interest in farming and equestrianism, having joined the
Young Farmers aged 14. In 2009 he purchased at auction nine lots of land comprising 1600 acres of the estate of
Kiddington Hall
Kiddington Hall is a large Grade II listed manor house located in Kiddington, near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England.
History
Kiddington Hall was built in 1673, and in the 18th century "Capability" Brown laid out the gardens.
The Reverend Thomas ...
in the Cotswolds, Oxfordshire; Reed has written of plans to turn the land into a residential equestrian estate.
Reed has said that his early charity work was informed by his conversion to Christianity in his 20s. He is now an
atheist
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no ...
and a member of
Humanists UK
Humanists UK, known from 1967 until May 2017 as the British Humanist Association (BHA), is a charitable organisation which promotes secular humanism and aims to represent "people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious be ...
.
The Reed Foundation does not fund religious organisations.
He has twice recovered from cancer, after receiving a diagnosis of colon cancer in 1986 and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2003. The latter left a significant scar on his forehead, which he refers to as his "Mail On Sunday headline", after being in dispute with the newspaper at the time of his diagnosis.
When asked how he would like to be remembered, Reed said:
"I hope people will remember me as both entrepreneurial and lucky - someone who laughed a lot and attempted to improve the lives of others. I do not just mean the poor in Africa...I also mean those rich people suffering from financial obesity. I hope I have been able to direct their giving in a more fulfilling way and to introduce them to charities with which they feel a strong bond but which they might never have encountered were it not for The Big Give... Above all, I hope they will think of me as an ideas man."
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reed, Alec
1934 births
20th-century English businesspeople
British business writers
British philanthropists
Businesspeople awarded knighthoods
Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
English humanists
Founders of charities
Knights Bachelor
Living people
People from Hounslow
People educated at Drayton Manor High School
English autobiographers