Tycoons of our times

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.

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Samuel Gregg

The welcome fall of Klaus Schwab

Perhaps this is Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction at work, and we should be quite relaxed about it. Another possibility is that the British find it hard to turn small companies into large and durable ones.

There are, it is true, some exceptions, and one of the virtues of this informative book is to highlight the achievements of lesser known business executives whose legacy does live on. One such is Raymond Brookes of GKN, an intuitive manager who loved patrolling the shop floors of his factories. Brookes transformed an old-established Midlands steelmaker into a leading supplier of components for the world motor industry, and it is still there. Another is Gerald Whent, a one-time sergeant in the Royal Horse Artillery who gave up the army to work in industry and later reached a senior position in Racal. When the Thatcher government opened up the mobile phone business to competition, Whent saw that owning a mobile network could be a lot more profitable than supplying it with equipment.