Christopher Saunders: In Memorium

From this morning’s email:

“Dear Amar,

I wanted to let you know the sad news that my father, Christopher Saunders, died last week. He was at home and the end was peaceful and without pain. I know he valued enormously his friendship and association with you, and was delighted that you included his sister, Cicely, in your work.”  

With sorrowfully increasing frequency I am serving as press agent for the Grim Reaper.

Yet Chris’s life demands celebrating just as much as his passing warrants mourning.

His energy, enthusiasm, and optimism were boundless. He was rowing on the River Cam last year, aged ninety-seven!

Born in 1928, and after reading Chemistry at Oxford (a good Second he’d proudly say) he graduated as a Baker Scholar from HBS in 1950. In the early 1960s he worked at McKinsey’s, London, shortly after the firm opened its first office outside the US there.

Yet heart and heritage were in entrepreneurship, not management consulting.

His self-made grandfather had built a chain of photo studios in Victorian England but left little for his seventeen children from two wives. Chris’s father, orphaned at age one, began working in real estate firm after finishing school and went on to build the firm into one of the top-3 in the UK. Chris himself grew up well-to-do but without any disdain for business.

After HBS and a job at a pioneering chemical company, Chris started a business building and operating industrial high vacuum plants. He returned to this business after his stint and McKinsey and eventually sold it to a public company. Then more startups, hands on angel investing, and in 1998 organized the first Cambridge Enterprise Conference. (I spoke at the 2007 one).

But he was proudest of his sister Dame Cicely Saunder, founder of the modern hospice movement and to whom he served as adviser. And in 2021 I wrote an HBS case study “Dame Cicely Saunders and the Modern Hospice Movement: A Brother’s View.” I hope to teach it for as long as I can. RIP Chris!