How should the lives of business tycoons be judged — by their personal wealth, by the size of the companies they created, or by how long their business survives after their death? If the last of these criteria is chosen, then the record of recent British business leaders is not impressive.
A good many of the men and women who figure in this collection of business obituaries — mainly covering people who died in the last ten years — were shooting stars; they had brief moments of glory but no staying power. Freddie Laker pioneered low-cost air travel; Joe Hyman saw how polyester and other new fibres would transform the textile industry; but the careers of both men ended in disappointment. Some of the great empires built up in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Courtaulds under Frank Kearton or the General Electric Company under Arnold Weinstock, no longer exist.
Perhaps this is Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction at work, and we should be quite relaxed about it.
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