the autumn of 1998 more than 200 officials from the Department of Education were treated to a lecture from de Bono on his ‘Six Thinking Hats system’ of decision-making. The idea, he explained, was that civil servants should put on a red hat when they wanted to talk about hunches and instincts, a yellow hat if they were listing the advantages of a project, a black hat while playing devil’s advocate, and so on. ‘Without wishing to boast,’ he added, ‘this is the first new way of thinking to be developed for 2,400 years since the days of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.’ In similarly unboastful fashion, de Bono often says that he invented ‘lateral thinking’ – which is like claiming to have invented poetry, or humour, or grief – and takes pride in having devised a system of ‘water logic’. Here is an example of water logic in action: ‘How often does someone who is using a traditional wet razor stop to consider whether instead of moving the razor it might be easier to keep the razor still and to move the head instead? In fact it is rather better. But no one does try it because there is “no problem to fix”.’ If his pupils in Whitehall tried this shaving technique they would soon discover why it hasn’t caught on: the result looks like an out-take from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So far as can be discovered, the education department has yet to order those coloured hats, but no doubt it benefited from his other creative insights: ‘You can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper’; ‘With a problem, you look for a solution’; ‘A bird is different from an aeroplane, although both fly through the air.’
Who could disagree? Gurus are safe enough while peddling ancient clichés disguised as revolutionary new strategies. It is when they seek out instances of this wisdom in action that they come a cropper: the entrepreneur-as-hero often turns out to be merely human after all. In his 1985 book Tactics: The Art and Science of Success, Edward de Bono offered the lessons that might be learned from a number of people who ‘would generally be regarded as “successful” ’. After studying these inspiring examples, ‘the reader should say, “Why not me?”’ The millionaires he extolled included US hotelier Harry Helmsley, later convicted of massive tax evasion, and Robert Maxwell, subsequently exposed as one of the most outrageous fraudsters in British history.
One of the Thatcherites’ most frequently repeated injunctions in the 1980s was that until Britain learned to love wealth-creators it was doomed to economic decline. As the Tory minister Lord Young said in 1987 while presenting the Guardian’s, Young Businessman of the Year Award, there is a ‘strong anti-business, anti-entrepreneurial streak’ in British society. (Not that it deterred his lordship: soon afterwards he left the Cabinet for the lusher pastures of the chairman’s office at Cable & Wireless.) Jonathan Aitken, another wealthy Conservative, made the same point twenty years earlier in his book The Young Meteors. ‘One reason why we are so ill-equipped on any level to compete in manufacturing fields’, he argued, ‘is that as a nation we are only just beginning to regard profit-making through manufacturing as respectable.’ To conquer this lingering prejudice, he drew attention to some thoroughly respectable entrepreneurs – such as Gerald Ronson, aged twenty-seven, ‘one of Britain’s youngest self-made property millionaires’, and Jim Slater, the ‘brilliantly successful’ founder of Slater-Walker. Slater-Walker later performed so brilliantly that it had to be bailed out by the Bank of England, and Jim Slater was found guilty of fifteen offences under the Companies Act. Gerald Ronson, not to be outdone, served a term in Ford open prison for his participation in an illegal share-ramping operation. The catalogue of woe was completed in June 1999 when Jonathan Aitken himself, who had served as a Cabinet minister until 1995, was jailed for perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Hence the traditional British resistance to the allegedly aphrodisiac qualities of tycoons: we can’t help suspecting that they wear their socks in bed and snore all night. Even those politicians and pundits who approve in principle of capitalist self-enrichment will often join the chorus of insults directed against ‘fat cats’ who put the theory into practice, and the few attempts to idolise business chieftains have invariably ended in embarrassment. Consider the fate of the London-based American author Jeffrey Robinson, who has tried for years to persuade his adopted country that cigar-chomping magnates are sexy. In 1985, the high noon of Thatcherism, he published The Risk Takers, a collection of conversations with British businessmen who ‘turn me on’. Gerald Ronson once again paraded himself for our titillation (‘a man with a proven knack for making money’), as did Robert Maxwell. ‘He is’, Robinson announced, ‘a survivor.’ Yet another pinstriped pin-up was Asil Nadir, whose fruit-packing company Polly Peck had long been a favourite of awestruck stockbrokers. Nadir complained to his sympathetic interviewer that ‘in this country there are people who believe it’s a sin to be successful’.
In 1990, with his promiscuous ardour apparently undiminished, Robinson produced The Risk Takers Five Years On, in which he boasted that some of his original interviewees, including Robert Maxwell and Asil Nadir, had ‘gone from strength to strength’. Maxwell, he predicted, would eventually retire, covered in glory, leaving his sons Kevin and Ian with the exciting challenge of ‘keeping dad’s ship afloat’. Well, at least the buoyancy metaphor was accurate: Maxwell’s corpse was found floating off the coast of Spain on 5 November 1991, after a fall from his yacht.
For his revised edition, Robinson added several chapters on ‘big players’ he had missed the first time around – among them Gerald Ratner, ‘the world’s largest jeweller’, and Michael Smurfit, an ‘indisputable success’. Once more, alas, the demon lovers turned out to be all mouth and no trousers. With the subsequent admission that one of his products was ‘crap’, Ratner managed to transform his firm’s annual profit of £112 million into a loss of £122 million and was forced to quit. Smurfit resigned as chairman of Irish Telecom only a few weeks after Robinson’s book appeared, when it was revealed that he had bought a new corporate HQ without informing his fellow-directors, and that he was a shareholder in a company which had previously owned the property. At the same time, he invested heavily in the Brent Walker group – which duly went belly-up, taking £10 million of his money with it.
What of the Guardian’s own small endeavour to burnish the image of go-getters, the Young Businessman of the Year competition? At the 1987 ceremony, where Lord Young advised that ‘people should look up to successful businessmen in the same way that they look up to successful sportsmen and successful pop stars’, the winner was John Ashcroft of Coloroll, who repeated the leitmotif in his acceptance speech. ‘We live in an age which applauds the millionaire McCartneys and Simon Le Bons and is now beginning to accept the large salaried superstar creations of the manufacturing sector. Long may it continue.’ Within three years, Coloroll had collapsed, crushed by £400 million of debts. The dashing Mr Ashcroft then started up a chain of shops; by 1993, it too was in the hands of the receivers.
The Guardian’s annual mating ritual with ‘business success’ only served to confirm the old proverb: post coitum omne animal triste est. The 1988 prize went to John Gunn of British & Commonwealth Holdings; two years later B&C crashed with £1 billion in liabilities. Richard Brewster, chief executive of the packaging group David S. Smith (Holdings), took the palm in 1990, praised by the judges for his ‘management skills in rebuilding an important British industry’. By 1991, he had gone –‘hounded’, as one City commentator cruelly observed, ‘by the curse of having been nominated Guardian Young Businessman of the Year’. The award itself, like so many of its winners, conked out soon afterwards.
Typical British defeatism, some might say: a true professional would heed Victor Kiam’s wise words and ‘turn those negatives into positives!’ In 1987, five years after Tom Peters initiated the craze for management blockbusters with In Search of Excellence, most of the US firms he had marked as ‘excellent’ were in steep decline. The cover of Business Week magazine, which first noticed his remarkable inability to pick winners, carried the single word ‘Oops!’ Worse still, a comparative study in the Financial Analysts’ Journal found that whereas stocks in two-thirds of Peters’s model corporations had underperformed Standard & Poor’s 500 index, those in thirty-nine companies which were reckoned abysmal by Peters’s six ‘measures of excellence’ had actually outperformed the market over the same five-year period.
Was Peters abashed? Of