Tonight millions of viewers will settle down for the dénouement of what has
become one of the most successful television series in recent years. Its
unlikely subject is the hitherto dull, dry world of business and its hero is
Sir Alan Sugar, who has achieved the unthinkable and made cost control and
just-in-time management respectable conversation in the pub.
This is despite the fact that SirAlan’s behaviour in the programme is the
opposite of almost every successful businessman in the country. Name any big
player of the moment – Terry Leahy of Tesco, John Varley of Barclays, Peter
Erskine of O2 – and put them alongside Sir Alan: what stands out is that his
style is different from theirs in almost every way.
He is aggressive, domineering and brash where they are calm, consensual and
low key. In addition, they all run massively successful businesses: Amstrad
is, at best, an almost-ran.
The measure of his success has been as an ambassador for business. Corporate
Britain should celebrate him for breathing life into the office – but no one
who hopes to have a successful business career should emulate his management
style on The Apprentice. It is a throwback, a relic not so much of a bygone
era in British business as an imaginary one. These days you are about as
likely to find a Newton’s Cradle of swinging steel balls on the desk of a
really successful chief executive as you are to find someone like Sugar
behind it.
And his company, the Amstrad Corporation, is the embodiment of the serial
disappointment of Britain’s high-tech industries. It was a business that in
the late 1980s boasted a quarter of the European personal computer market
and seemed poised to put a PC in every home (there was one in mine: the
Amstrad PCW 8512). Instead, it underinvested in research and development, it
struggled to keep pace with innovation and, when it stumbled in the early
1990s with the launch of the overpriced and underperforming Amstrad Pen-Pad
and then took a tilt at the games market with the GX 4000 – an 8-bit machine
that was promptly outgunned by the 16-bit Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo
– it failed the cardinal test of entrepreneurship: stamina.
It succumbed to the competition and scampered off, abandoning the computer
business to try to find quick wins by investing in other businesses
elsewhere.
In 2000 Sir Alan launched the equivalent of a Fisher Price toy for the
technologically challenged modern adult: the e-mailer, a stripped down phone
and text messaging machine.
It was a failure, because it grossly, even patronisingly, underestimated the
general public. It turned out that the mass market – the “truck driver and
his wife” whom Sir Alan claims to understand – wanted as much functionality
from their phones as “advertising tossers”.
The company he ran was once valued at £1.2 billion. Today it is broken in two,
each one estimated to be worth little over £100 million. His one truly
popular product – The Apprentice – is not an invention of his own, but a
knock-off from the States: the original Apprenticewas fronted by the New
York property developer Donald Trump, who, funnily enough, is also a
boardroom throwback: just a much more successful one.
To be sure, Sir Alan Sugar is a terrifically wealthy man, ranked 84th in the
Sunday Times Rich List with assets of £790 million. The vast bulk of this –
about £780 million – is tied up in property investments. The boy who left
school at 16 and started out selling car aerials was knighted in 2000 for
services to business. For all his mannered misanthropy, he is an enormously
generous donor to good causes such as Great Ormond Street Hospital and
Jewish Care. He has always been a politically engaged businessman, he is a
devoted family man and he remains one of Hackney’s most inspiring sons.
Also, let’s not get po-faced about this. The Apprentice is not real life, it’s
television. In fact, it’s a terrific show. The dialogue is hard to beat: Sir
Alan: “Tre, if you can’t see that you have cocked this up royal. . . ”
Tre: “I’ve cocked this up, but I don’t think I’ve cocked this up royal, as
such.”
Or Katie on the subject of Kristina: “I would relish taking Kristina down a
peg or two . . . she is sort of hunting alone as it were, but then snakes do
live alone and they live a solitary lifestyle. So it is completely
consistent with the sort of person she is.”
Anyone who cares about business should cheer the programme: it shows that life
does not end when you put on a shirt and tie. Archie Norman, who used to run
Asda, says: “It is not a thoughtful insight into business management or
business people. But so what? There are hardly any popular programmes on
entrepreneurship or business on television or radio. This is one of them. It
is captivating and draws people in to the idea that getting ahead in
business is something relatively normal people want to do.” The Apprentice’s
magic formula is that it finds the drama and comedy in business: a weekly
parade of shaky self-confidence and misplaced ambition.
There are, certainly, many businessmen who are much more successful than Sir
Alan, but do not have a fraction of his talent for television. Sir Terry
Leahy, the Tesco boss, really could teach the television-watching public a
thing or two about business, but, for all his extraordinary commercial
acumen, the measured, unflappable chief executive would have people
clamouring for a return of the test card. Willie Walsh, the British Airways
boss, has plenty to say about real issues of modern management – the unions,
the environment, the oil price, financial hedges and market liberalisaton –
but, frankly, he has enough troubles without the extra TV exposure.
And it does not matter that The Apprentice is a show about business set in the
1980s of a TV producer’s imagination, or that Sir Alan’s boardroom looks as
if it was designed by the makers of Blake’s 7, or that the modern manager is
about as likely to say “You’re fired!” as “Let’s do brunch!”.
The one point that is worth making is that Sir Alan as he appears on
television is a walking lesson in how not to do business.
Take, for example, the departure of Dr Sophie Kain.
Sophie: “I have a problem with selling something that I don’t think is worth
the money that it is being sold for.” Sir Alan: “This is the real world,
love. This is not your scientific protons and neutrons. This is what
retailers do, you know?” Never mind Sir Alan’s antiacademic bias and his
dismissal of precisely the kind of scientifically minded engineer that
Amstrad Corporation, not to mention the whole of British industry, so sorely
lacks: is he right that successful retailers sell products and value
propositions that even they don’t believe in? Didn’t Gerald Ratner give a
speech to the Institute of Directors in 1991, where he described one his
products as “total crap” and a pair of his earrings as “cheaper than an M&S
sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long”, only to see half a billion
pounds wiped off the value of his company?
Or consider Sir Alan’s televisual management style, the intimidation, the
fomenting of internal intrigues, the punishment of anything that smacks of
humanity or sensitivity.
When the John Lewis Partnership distilled its business ethos, it ended up with
six phrases: “Be honest, show respect, recognise others, work together, show
enterprise and achieve more.” As one prominent British retailer says: “I
think it’s a pretty vacuous programme: it doesn’t send the right message
about business, it’s all the old-style business where people are shouting
and screaming at each other.” And in the words of another prominent British
businessman: “It’s much too confrontational – it’s not like the real world.”
And the tasks that the show sets the teams each week: making sweets, selling
British bangers in France, appearing on a TV shopping channel. They are fun,
funny and a decent test of salesmanship, but they are about as useful in
running most parts of a modern company as a daily game of Su Doku would be
in setting up a hedge fund. Sir Alan’s lessons of modern management, it
seems, could be written on the back of a business card: control costs, mind
your margins, sell products. And yet, you can’t help feeling that there has
been more to Stuart Rose’s turnaround of Marks & Spencer than
that.
For anyone who cares about or works in a company, the fascination of business
is, in large part, the choices that people make in enormously complex and
competitive situations. The marketplace is a reality show, but one that
plays out quite slowly over time and in all kinds of arcane but decisive
details. Unlike the Hobbesian business world that the show seems to
represent, where little Caesars humiliate their underlings and hawk cheap
gear to turn a quick profit, the reality of business is that the office
today strives to be an ethical, considerate and thoughtful place.
Tonight, Kristina Grimes will win – she should not, but, odds on, she will.
The coveted six-figure salary and a year at Amstrad will be hers. That’s
showbusiness.
SIR ALAN: THE VERDICT
Archie Norman, former chairman, Asda
It is not a thoughtful insight into business management or business people.
But so what? There are hardly any popular programmes on entrepreneurships or
business on television or radio. This is one of them. It is captivating and
draws people into the idea that getting ahead in business is something
relatively normal that people want to do.
Richard Lambert, Director-General, CBI
Say what you like about reality TV shows like The Apprentice. At least it may
suggest to young people that business doesn’t have to be terminally boring.
David Wolfson, former chairman, GUS
If you had all the time in the world, politeness would be a better way to go.
But Sir Alan is dealing with start-up companies, a much riskier business.
He’s basically employing an interview technique where belligerence separates
those who can’t take the heat from those who can. If you crumble at the
first hurdle in such high-risk business you’re not going to be much use.
When I employ people their experience generally speaks for itself. But The
Apprentice’s employment strategy is really high-risk, as well as the
business they’re going into, so the aggressive approach might actually make
more sense.
Sir Gerry Robinson, former chairman, Allied Domecq and Granada
Business seems to be fashionable at the moment, and it makes great TV. Alan
Sugar is brilliant in it. He’s an awkward bastard at the same time, but
interesting. You can learn business, but that nous to seize opportunities is
a rare talent.
Do we learn anything about business by turning it into a reality show?
timesonline.co.uk/debate
