“You’re fired!” I can’t wait for someone at the BBC to say that to Lord Alan Sugar after what feels like the 478th series of The Apprentice, a TV show that sheds about as much light on running a small company as Jack and the Beanstalk does on the forest products industry. For me, Sugar is a one-hit wonder, or maybe one-and-a-half hit wonder (Amstrad plus making satellite dishes for Rupert Murdoch), the Kajagoogoo of British business. To my mind his enduring profile says more about the paucity of the media’s imagination, than it does about his actual achievements or indeed the quality of British management.
In that respect, Sugar is not dissimilar to Sir Richard Branson. Don’t get me wrong. I’m old enough to have listened to Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, an album that would have never been released if not for Branson’s fledgling Virgin label. And I remember, in the late 1980s, the thrill of being treated like a person, not a number, as a passenger on Virgin Atlantic. And then I had the misfortune to take Virgin Trains from London to Manchester. As time wears on - and his success rate diminishes - I suspect that Branson’s greatest skill is promoting himself. And I’d love to know how he reconciles his passion for space travel with fighting climate change - given that each flight could emit 30-60 tonnes of CO2.
My real concern is that these fellow septuagenarians have, as much by default as anything, come to stand for private enterprise in the UK. If we’re trying to attract the best and the brightest young Britons to work in proper business - and resist the siren call of media studies, TikTok and the like - we badly need some new role models. I have more time for the Dragon’s Den judges, especially Deborah Meaden and Peter Jones, but wouldn’t it be great if we had a public face for business who is under 30, a woman, from an ethnic minority, or just working class?
Someone needs to make business cool in this country in the 21st century - as a variety of corporate leaders from Steve Jobs to the idiosyncratic Elon Musk have done in America - and Sugar and Branson make private enterprise look like a panto or a sleight of hand.