On the buses
Sir Brian Souter was on good form at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland annual conference in Glasgow recently.
Talking about his early days as a trainee with Arthur Anderson Sir Brian told the audience he decided to keep his weekend job as a bus conductor.
No-one was the wiser until an altercation with a passenger on a late night Saturday service left him with “lacerations and bruises”. The managing partner of the firm was not best pleased with the explanation on the Monday morning.
What's in a name?
IT’S always sad when historic investment trusts get taken over and renamed.
Edinburgh's British Assets for instance earlier this year became the unsnappily named BlackRock Income Strategies trust. But shareholders in an investment trust run by fund group Jupiter have just agreed a name change without any change of manager.
The new Jupiter Global trust has somehow managed to run along for 43 years under the name Jupiter Primadona Growth Trust, but manager Richard Curling said: "Investment trusts have all sorts of weird and wonderful names that bear no relationship at all to anything that they actually do, and this sends people the wrong message."
Joys of social media
Back to the ICAS conference in Glasgow where Sir Brian Souter spent some time talking about the challenges posed by changing consumer behaviours and the move towards digital.
When he was Stagecoach chief executive he used to go through Twitter reports for the firm and its rivals.
After describing the colourful language used to describe transport companies Sir Brian admitted he used to go through competitor reports first to cheer him up before being brought back down to earth by the comments on the business he co-founded.
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