When Centrica announced the appointment of its new corporate
affairs director Charles Naylor last week, it made much of the fact that
he has spent the past 11 years in the energy industry. While it
mentioned his Cambridge degree and his MBA, Centrica’s press release
left a nine-year gap in 42-year-old Naylor’s CV. ’The only reason
there’s a blank is because I did something completely different. I was
an opera singer, so it wasn’t completely relevant for the CV for the
Centrica press release,’ Naylor says without batting an eyelid.
After four years at the Royal Academy of Music, Naylor joined the Vienna
State Opera before returning to the UK and freelancing for opera
companies, including Glyndebourne.
Explaining his decision to move out of professional singing and into
business, he says: ’The arts is like a religion: it’s the sort of thing
that, if you love it so much it’s the only thing you want to do, you
should do it. But if you can conceive of doing something else, you
should probably do something else. And I started doing something else
and I really enjoyed it. I still sing as an amateur and get as much
pleasure from that as I did singing professionally.’
Coming into communications from so far outside the usual PR spectrum
means that Naylor has kept an outsider’s view on what he does for a
living.
This has no doubt been spurred by his diverse experiences since quitting
professional opera, which have included advising forecourt shop managers
on where best to place their chocolate bars when he worked as a
franchise manager for Shell.
He says: ’Whenever you’re looking at a piece of communication you’re
thinking ’what will that person outside our business think’ and that’s
terribly important. It’s very easy to get wrapped up in the jargon and
forget that the language you speak has to be understood by people who
don’t understand the business.’
Talking to Naylor, it is clear that he has applied more thought than
most to corporate communications as a discipline. He sees his role as
bringing the different strands which make up an organisation together,
thus promoting a better understanding of the entity from the
outside.
Coming from outside the PR industry may explain his relatively cerebral
take on PR, as may the fact that, while at Shell, he completed an
MBA.
Those who have come into contact with Naylor professionally describe him
as bright. This, combined with his calm and commonsense approach to life
will no doubt ensure he will get to grips with communicating to a
payroll 15 times larger than that of his current employer Amerada Hess
and millions, rather than hundreds of thousands, of customers when he
joins Centrica.
The flipside of Naylor’s quiet intelligence and poise is his
self-effacing nature. ’He’s not a self-publicist. He’s not antisocial,
but he’s not in your face,’ says Neville Wells, who freelanced at
Amerada Hess until last June and is now corporate affairs project
manager at the Boots Company.
While a PR man not blowing his own trumpet has novelty value, it means
that, when it comes to dealing with the press, Naylor may find the
media-hitting required at Centrica harder to get used to. The sight of a
tape-recorder certainly makes him clam up and utter single-sentence
answers.
The minute the machine is put away, he switches back to what must be his
usual engaging and chatty self. ’Sometimes I don’t listen, but that’s
probably because I talk too much,’ he offers, slightly nervously.
Still, talking may not come as easily as singing, something which still
occupies what free time he has between the office, working out at the
gym and his marriage - his wife is expecting their first baby in
April.
Wells says: ’Charles is great. He practises singing in the office, so
going down the corridor you’ll get this very melodious voice coming out
with an aria. It’s refreshing. He’s not your typical suit.’
HIGHLIGHTS
1982
Junior principal baritone, Vienna State Opera
1987
Franchise manager, Shell UK
1991
Advertising and PR manager, Shell UK
1992
Corporate affairs head, Amerada Hess
1998
Corporate affairs director, Centrica
