Vegas & The Aftermath - Diary

[Royal Flush]

No Greenberg?

Which Greenberg - Alan Greenberg, who took Bear-Sterns to bankruptcy? No!

But I've always wanted to read his book, "Memos from the Chairman", which is on my Bucket List.

Good to hear from you just now, welcome home. I dare you to tell that story, about the trip home......

was thinking Hank Greenberg of AIG.

[nirvana]

I managed to get a lot of good business speakers to my conferences - as well as the guru types like Stephen Covey, Michael Porter, Tom Peters, Gary Hamel et al we attracted some truly inspirational and/or 'just very good at what they did' business leaders like Charles Dunstone, Jack Welch, Anita Roddick, Allan Leighton, Val Gooding and many more

Always grated that I never managed to persuade Terry Leahy - I walked up to him after he'd finished speaking at a major retailers conference and we had a conversation that went something like this.

Me " Hello, I'm Glenn and we organise 'The European Conference on Customer Management'......."

I gave him a one minute pitch on how unmissable an opportunity it was for him and how much our audience would relish hearing from him. He paid me full attention, asked his assistant to give me his card so I could wirte with more details and thanked me for my interest in him and his business.

Feeling lucky, I pressed on "Since we've had this brief chat, is it likely that you'll accept our invitation this time ? "

Sir Terry Leahy, smiling and very politely  ........... "No"

Great story.

You mention Tom Peters - he was, in the 80's, in America, the absolute top guro of Management theory, & he charged tens of thousands ($$'s) for lectures, & folks would flock from all over to attend. I was a Member of the American Management Association (AMA) for many years, went to Amereica twice for major Management Courses, & read all his - many! - books. It was inspirational stuff, he was messiah-like, sort of evangelical in the way he spoke/lectured/preached. He was probably a crap, failed, businessman, but he could really talk the talk. I imagine he's retired now.

Of the other names you mention, I would not trust Dunstone an inch, despite his clear vision, & I'd not cross the road to listen to Roddick. In fact, I'd have crossed the road to avoid her. But Jack Welch - now there's a proper man, and he makes O'Leary look second-rate. What a man, what a career! He reserructed GE almost single-handed. His autobiography is an absolute must-read.

As to that Leahy story, it does not surprise me at alll - as DD says, "class act" him. Tesco, under Terry, have been astonishingly successful. They survived one of those periods a few years back wheh the media got on their case - because they were successful. British disease. Since then, they have powered on, & they made some daft profit this year, £3billion or somesuch. Amazing, & something to respect.

In his Annual Report, he stressed that Tesco will expand - build more stores - in the UK in the next 2 years than ever before. And why? Because, in recession, Construction Costs & Capital costs are so much lower. He can build 30% more store space for the same money as he could 3 years ago.

Top man him. I'd love to meet him. Never ruffled, across his brief totally, does his share of Charity work, several NED's, & a personal life untouched by scandal.

He the man.

Tom Peters, even up to around 5 years ago was still tremendous value. Not always 100% consistent & coherent, but totally compelling. As well as our main annual event we ran a couple of 'guru' days with Tom Peters. We could still sell out, the typically small UK hotel venues , with 600 or so paying customers for an event that featured only him for a full day.

We would have him ' in the round' no stage, just him with seating encircling him and enough screens and cameras so wherever you sat, whichever way he faced you could see him in person or on screen. The man is just an incredible professional and was still commanding $80-100,000 for a booking back in 2004.

Speaking of speaker costs it is really quite incredible what they can be paid. Jack Welch was $150,000 for a 2 hour session and he would only be interviewed live on stage rather than just get up and speak at people. We hired Kirsty Wark to interview him. Good days looking back now.

In terms of business leaders to admire there are several less well known names that I would rate alongside most of the big names

Horst Schulze during his time at Ritz Carlton
Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines
Fergal Quinn from the Irish supermarket chain
Ricardo Semler of SEMCO, Brazil
John Timpson of Timpsons

This link (although it's lost some formatiting now) carries some details of the events we use to run.... happy days

http://web.archive.org/web/20040328200318/http://ecsw.com/

[Ironside]

branson

nice guy to boot

one of the guys that resuced him after his ballon land in water instead of land later went onto to break his neck

branson helped him out alot


vant think of anything he has failed in

and he owns some trains (must clinch it)

[Karabiner]

branson

nice guy to boot

one of the guys that resuced him after his ballon land in water instead of land later went onto to break his neck

branson helped him out alot


vant think of anything he has failed in

and he owns some trains (must clinch it)

 

[Karabiner]

TESCO   T.E. Stockwell and Albert Cohen

Nooooooo! Close, but no cigar.

JACK Cohen!

When Jack Cohen was knighted in the 1970's I think it was, he became Sir John Cohen which rather tickled me.

[booder]

No Greenberg?

Good to hear from you just now, welcome home. I dare you to tell that story, about the trip home......

 

[Jon MW]

On a businessy theme -

Orange did a poll of business managers, among other things it discovered that the most popular 'business-based film' was The Godfather

There's a link to an article on it here but that was the headline.

[Lucky]

Orpey is doing In-Poker with me this week, as Compo is not available. She'll go down well in Manchester, I fancy.

LOL

[AndrewT]

Carnegie - VERY successful, he of US Steel, but I don't know much about him, so I have to omit.

If you convert to real terms allowing for inflation, Andrew Carnegie was the 2nd richest man in history (only John D Rockefeller is above him) and yet he managed to give most of it away to charitable foundations before he died.

[TightEnd]

Andrew Carnegie was the principal figure behind America's transformation from a rural agricultural country into an industrial power. He helped make the U.S. the world's leading steel-producing country, partly by gauging efficiency of management with individualised records that compared cost to output. Carnegie's knack for novel techniques was so deep, according to the late Northwestern University economic historian Jonathan R.T. Hughes, that he once started a board meeting with the sentence, "Well, gentlemen, what shall we throw away this year? In 1901, J.P. Morgan paid $480 million for Carnegie Steel, making its founder the world's richest man. Carnegie eventually gave away almost his entire fortune, most famously to endow so-called Carnegie libraries.

[Newmanseye]

Not a Howard R Hughes on anyones list?

The chap was a loon a suppose

[TightEnd]

Leahy...I met him on several occasions when I was an institutional investor. As everyone says, a class act. The Sainsbury's point is important though. They completely mismanaged their core business, for example predominantly continuing to trade from smaller high street locations and employing a series of second rate, and non retail, managers such as Dino Adriano and Mick Davis to run their business for them. All the time Tesco was expanding into out of town, and establishing price points consistently below Sainsburys for product that was of similar quality. Sainsbury has yet to recover and Tesco's out of town presence is unassailable. Its only the competition authorities that have prevented it from more or less monopolising that market, as they would have bought Safeway if allowed

Branson. I worked on the team that took Virgin public (later to be taken private again when Branson did not like the attention on his business....accouting attention not PR attention). Beneath the glitz and the PR rest assured Branson's empire is not founded on completely ethical accounting principles. Tremendous salesman, and a tremendous identifier of new markets but I know that the edifice beneath the glamour is sketchy, to say the least.

[TightEnd]

I give you a new nomination

been spending some time browsing Forbes...


Sakichi Toyoda was a weaver who, in 1924, invented a loom that would detect an error and automatically cease production, preventing the creation of defective goods. He later sold the patent on his machine to a British firm for about $150,000. That money was used to help his son found a start-up, Toyota, which would become the world's second-biggest carmaker. Toyoda's innovation of instilling human judgment on machines, also known as autonomation or Jidoka, would be adopted to his son's automobile enterprise--and then almost every industrial enterprise--cutting down on waste, improving customer relations, revealing problems and conserving resources.

Corporate Heirs
Toyota Motors (nyse: TM - news - people ), Honda (nyse: HMC - news - people ), Nissan (otc: NSANY - news - people ), Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people )

[neeko]

Steve Jobs - Billionaire twice over from Apple and Pixar

James Dyson - great British designer

Joe Bamford - whose brand name became the product name (JCB)

[77dave]

I beleive JCB has been added to the dictionary as a word

Isnt Rockerfella the richest man of alltime in real terms