The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [69]
4.
A series of speakers with claims to entrepreneurial insight had been invited to address the delegates in the late afternoon. Trevor Thwaite, a civil servant, gave a lecture entitled, with a levity which could not quite disguise the anxiety embedded in its theme, ‘How to Turn That Gem of an Idea into Shed-Loads of Money’. Three people attended, including a Malaysian man who had invented a portable lightning conductor.
The auditorium was considerably more animated when, to mark the close of proceedings, the fair was graced by the presence of a famous Scottish industrialist almost universally referred to simply as Sir Bob. Over the course of a forty-year career in business, Sir Bob had amassed a billion pounds, a sum he was planning to bequeath in full to the library at Glasgow University, in part so as to teach his two children about the value of money. Sir Bob had begun in bathroom tiles. After recognising, as a precocious sixteen-year-old plumber’s apprentice, just how phlegmatic the sector was, he had built up a chain of warehouses offering eight thousand different varieties of tiles, manufactured at a plant in Romania for a fraction of their retail price. These harshly lit emporia, echoing with the sound of managers haranguing customers with news of unmissable discounts, had rung the death knell for every small tile merchant from Aberdeen to St Ives and were inextricably linked in the public mind to the abortive redecorating projects of many an ill-tempered rainy weekend. The next jewel in Sir Bob’s crown was a chain of gyms which made the lion’s share of its money in the two weeks after New Year’s, from people too distracted by their swollen body-mass index to read the small print appended to punitive membership schemes. This was followed, fittingly enough, by fifty shops in Scotland and the north of England catering to what Sir Bob called the ‘larger lady’. His interests now ranged from health care to financial services. He owned a dozen motorway bridges in Denmark and a cement plant in Albania.
The president of the British Inventors’ Society had been assigned the task of introducing Sir Bob to the assembly, but undermined his good intentions by digressing at length about a trip he had lately made to the Balearics and the details of his son’s wedding plans, before revealing, at an exceptionally leisurely pace, just how privileged he and his fellow organisers felt to be hosting Sir Bob – who, standing beside him wearing a fixed expression and a pair of platform shoes, was looking less privileged to have accepted the invitation with every new chapter of the interminable encomium.
When at last the time came for Sir Bob, one metre fifty tall, to take the microphone, he sounded closer to anger than the title of his talk – ‘The Entrepreneur in All of Us’ – might have led his audience to foresee. He fired off an expletive-dotted Scots-cadenced tirade against bureaucrats, red tape, no-gooders, scroungers, trust funders and tax inspectors before turning his attention to the ten things his career had taught him about the art of making money. Regrettably, the list was profoundly platitudinous, either because he wanted to keep the real secrets close to his chest until he was safely entombed, and his money was on its way to Hillhead, or because he genuinely did not know quite how or why he, the son of an unemployed Glasgow dockworker, had succeeded in becoming one of the wealthiest people on the face of the globe – and had hence merely settled on some suggestions of where his talents lay culled from business books picked up at airport newsstands.
Whatever his stated strengths, it appeared that the one area in which Sir Bob excelled was anxiety. He was marked out by