Anthropology Beyond the Academy Seminar with Simon Patterson

Most governance frameworks treat boards as rational oversight mechanisms, control systems designed to align incentives and hold management to account. This talk argues that what boards actually do is generally something different, and that Social Anthropology offers a more useful account of it than anything taught in business school, drawing on twenty years of board experience across some of the world's largest and most complex organisations, including Dell Technologies, Tesco, and the Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Bio

Simon Patterson is Co-Head of Europe and a member of the technology investment firm Silver Lake's global leadership team, overseeing an investment portfolio of major global technology businesses worth in aggregate $1 trillion. He played key roles in investments such as Dell, contributing to some of the most significant global technology transactions of recent decades.

He has over two decades of board experience across large cap global companies, public institutions, and non-profits, including Dell, Tesco, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Foundation of The Prince and Princess of Wales, New Zealand Rugby, and Chatham House. His work spans innovation, organisational transformation, technology change, and risk management in complex, high-stakes settings.

He holds an MBA from Stanford University, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar, and a BA and MA from King's College, Cambridge, where he was a College Scholar and elected a Fellow in 2025.