A View From The Top: Nina Bhatia, managing director of Centrica’s Hive

Bhatia came to Centrica in 2010 after an already impressive career spanning two decades at the prestigious consultancy McKinsey & Co. Now she’s changing the way we live our lives

Nina Bhatia is a believer in measuring progress against diversity (Getty/Hive)

Until fairly recently, a smart home was the exclusive terrain of millionaires, who could afford to rewire their whole houses and invest thousands of pounds in intelligent gadgets and devices.

Slowly, though, the connected-home revolution is gaining mass-market appeal. That’s partly thanks to technology becoming much more affordable, and partly because it can be achieved – for example – by simply changing a light bulb.

Combine this with an Amazon Echo and you can walk into your home, laden with shopping bags, say “lights on” and be able to see where you’re going. It might feel futuristic, but Nina Bhatia would probably disagree. “The future,” she says, “is already here”.

Bhatia, 52, is the managing director of Centrica Connected Homes, a sub-division of the multinational utility company Centrica, which owns British Gas, and is perhaps best known for its smart-home brand Hive.

Hive has come a long way from its rudimentary beginnings as a British Gas heating control, explains Bhatia. It’s no longer simply an energy product, but a technology brand competing in the same space – and working alongside – the likes of Google Home, Amazon Echo and Apple HomeKit.

I meet Bhatia in the Hive offices just off Oxford Street. The building has a large minimalist entrance, but the floors taken up by Hive have the more casual feel of a tech startup – open-plan, with splashes of bright colour. As gracefully as one possibly can with one leg in a cast, she shuffles into the room. She recently fractured her foot while taking one final holiday dip in the pool before catching a flight to Toronto.

She then hobbled around Canada and flew back to the UK where it “blew up like a balloon”, she tells me. When she eventually went to A&E, the doctor told her that she most definitely shouldn’t be walking on it.

That tells you a lot about Bhatia’s character. She fosters an impressive desire to get the most out of every experience and a steely determination to keep going no matter what. Hive’s very existence is arguably a result of this tenacity.

Bhatia came to Centrica in 2010 after an already-impressive career spanning two decades at the prestigious consultancy McKinsey & Company. She says that the company’s MD at the time took some convincing that she was ready to run a “real” business, but after several months, he put her in charge of drain and heating specialists, Dyno-rod.

“He took what he perceived as a risk on someone who had no operational experience,” says Bhatia, who gained a double first from Cambridge University and has an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

The new role took Bhatia from the polished offices of St James to the more-gritty world of plumbing. But, the real adjustment came from having to be the final decision-maker – and dealing with the consequences.

Not long after, Bhatia was asked to lead a so-called “hot house” – an exercise in figuring out what British Gas should be doing in the space of smart and connected products. The mother-of-two ran the project alongside her already-demanding job because she spotted an opportunity to do something different, she says.

Bhatia also spotted a gap in the market for linking smartphone technology to the home, and saw it as British Gas’s “right” to be in this space.

In 2012, Bhatia then set up a special projects team as a separate unit under British Gas and in 2013 it became Hive. She says that launching Hive required a whole new way of thinking because it was something completely different to what British Gas had been used to. It broadened the company’s range beyond simple energy-product offerings, to smart, high-tech ones that were new, not just to British Gas, but to the whole market.

In order to get the job done, Bhatia hired technicians and user-experience designers from the likes of Google and LoveFilm and she even employed an engineer from Nasa – who later told her that his work on a boiler algorithm was more interesting than his work at the space agency.

Two years ago the business expanded out from under British Gas to accommodate global ambition. It received £500m of investment from parent company Centrica and became known as Centrica Connected Home.

To date, Bhatia’s empire has installed 660,000 connected hubs, including 30,000 in North America, and has sold over one million connected-home products, such as smart light bulbs. True to her ambitious nature, she aims to increase this by a third by the end of 2017.

In terms of her management style, Bhatia believes in mentoring, but thinks it’s an over-used word. She thinks it works best when it’s a two-way relationship. A better term, perhaps, is sponsorship – where more senior members of the team take an active role in giving juniors more visibility and opportunity.

When it comes to diversity in the workplace, Bhatia is fully aware of gender discrimination. She is mindful of the appointments she makes, and a quarter of Centrica’s management team is now female. However, she also believes that when it comes to true diversity, we need to take the discussion out of the confines of the “gender arena” and include things such as “points of view” and “ways of thinking”.

In that sense, she’s particularly proud of Spectrum, Centrica’s LGBT network, created to increase visibility and “be an ally”. To bring about real change, however, she argues that it’s important to measure progress against diversity – in the same way other important business metrics are measured.

“We all know that when we have the data, when we’re watching and measuring things, that’s when we make progress.”

Bhatia’s passion for her job is palpable, but what’s she like when she leaves the office?

She explains that both her and her Iranian-Italian husband have very similar “migrant-leaving-everything-behind” backgrounds, so a strong work ethic is very much a part of their lives – and they instil this in their two daughters too.

The couple’s demanding careers can sometimes leave little time for relaxing, but they realise that their teenagers are at an important time in their lives and that downtime is therefore essential.

“You have to work harder to conserve your time, and sometimes I just actually want to stay home,” Bhatia says.

But she is fully appreciative of the fortunate position she is in, to have a job she loves and for her family to have the freedom of being able to do the things they enjoy: “We’re big travellers, we have family in Rome so we go there often. We read and watch movies in various languages, we eat nice food.”

Rather than pushing her daughters to make career decisions, Bhatia’s aim is for their education and experiences to be broad, so that they have choices when they’re older.

“The advice I give them is the advice I had. My parents would always say ‘people can take everything away from you, but they can’t take your education – and that’s the thing that’s most portable’.”