A vision in lilac driving a world-class business

Rupert Steiner meets Bupa chief Val Gooding, one of Britain’s most successful female bosses

A silhouette of a faceless giant hangs on Bupa’s atrium wall. The piece is bisected and has vaguely medical undertones, appropriate for the corporate offices of a private healthcare group. But the parallels do not stop there. Bupa has another almost anonymous giant in Val Gooding, its 56-year-old chief executive. She is Britain’s second most powerful female boss, but with very little of the profile many of her male counterparts court and enjoy.

Over the past ten years Gooding has turned Bupa around, grown its market share, produced record results and built the business into a rare world brand. Bupa is now the size of a FTSE–100 company, with 44,000 staff and a turnover of £3.8 billion. It runs care homes, private hospitals, children’s nurseries and occupational health and screening centres. What makes these achievements so remarkable is that Bupa does not have the usual driving forces of a public company. It is set up as a provident institution, with no shareholders or conventional profit motive, yet Gooding still manages to harness her management into a strategy that obviously works.

It is a strategy that has global dimensions: later this year Gooding will reveal that Bupa is going to China to explore the demand for private healthcare among the burgeoning middle class there. She is sending a team to Beijing ‘to talk to as many people as possible and see what entry opportunities there could be’.

Despite her success, Gooding has always shunned publicity. This is only her second interview in ten years and she has sacrificed just half an hour to race through her career history with me. The clock ticking, I find myself in an anteroom to her ninth-floor Bloomsbury office: an immaculate vision in lilac, she is pacing her room, mobile phone clamped to her ear, finishing a conversation.