This is the BBC.

Hello and welcome to the bottom line, the first in our spring summer season, and we're starting with a special programme today.

Business and its place in society is an unusually prominent issue right now.

Executive pay, tax avoidance, employment security and zero hours contracts on all these

political opinion has shifted. All the main parties are now on the side of the worker.

There's a feeling that shareholder driven capitalism has gone too far. So we wanted to stand back

and take a look at how business has evolved and where it's got to.

We ventured out of the studio to the Royal Academy of Engineering in London.

We have an invited audience and just one guest, the former chief executive of BP Lord Brown.

Lord Brown has worked in business across six different decades.

That makes him sound older than he is.

He has experience of a great deal of change in the corporate world,

and he has an interesting story to tell.

And it is almost exactly 10 years since Lord Brown stepped down

as chief executive of BP in difficult personal circumstances.

In his 12 years stint on the top there, though,

he was lauded as the best chief executive in Britain.

Since he stepped down, the company has stumbled,

and we will discuss all that and what it tells us about business in Britain,

and we'll do all of that in the next hour.

So please welcome my guest today, Lord John Brown.

Lord Brown, I thought we could just start comparing business now

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