THERE I was on Monday in the Horseshoe Bar: it was the launch of
National Pub Week. There was a whole wheen of boys and girls from one of
Tennants pubs and hotels, The Boswell Hotel, a favoured haunt of mine.
Jings it was grand. You got free halfs and the little ones guzzled
bottles of beer and splendid young ladies in little black skirts and
lacy peenies were jouking about serving sausage rolls and canapes and
half of the licensed trade was there telling you how good their
businesses were. Except they weren't.
Underlying every conversation with any businessmen and women for the
past few years is how bad the recession has actually been for them. But
what these people tell you constantly is not how good the company is.
What they tell you is how good the product is. In this they are not
telling lies if they are decent people, and great gobs of nonsense if
they are accountants.
On Monday I found myself in the company of the Scullions, father and
son, who run a famous bakery in Rutherglen, just outside Glasgow. There
I am sharing a libation with Richard and his son and the both of them
telling me about the pies they deliver to the Horsehoe Bar and other
outlets of Mr Tennants. And do you know he was boasting at that?
Well of course he was because his pies are great. and nothing wrong
with the rest of his products. I have written many times before of
people who make splendid products. Products is my word for today's
sermon. Because I had an argument with a wealthy businessman friend of
mine but the other day. He told me that the business of business was
business. He was rather pleased with the epigram. Being in fact a
trained accountant it was difficult to explain to him that this had come
from one of the worst and most discredited Presidents of the US of A. It
was Cleveland. I think.
It doesn't matter because a quote as thick as that doesn't need a
credit. It could have been Hoover. Come to think of it, it could have
been Thatcher. Her ''There is no such thing as Society'' comes close to
President Warren Hastings' immortal ''Back to normalcy'' slogan. All of
the absurd people quoted above are pure Babbitry. Babbits abounding from
their burrows, the burrows of not much sense, little education, and a
sense of such petit-bourgeois greediness that it would turn your
stomach.
Bear with me, I have not much further to go before I hope to make
myself clear. A letter in yesterday's Herald talked of this subject and
I am not sure what our correspondent meant. He was talking of the
functions of the board of any company. Said it was quite simply to make
money for its owners '' -- even if it was a newspaper''.
The truth is that newspapers don't make money anyway, never have.
Maxwell bankrupted everything to run rather rotten newspapers. Murdoch
is selling his rags at a price everybody but his own industry can
afford. Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook that is, lost fortunes on his
blatts. The difference between the first two and the last one is that
Beaverbrook, slighty mad as he was, and horribly egocentric still tried
to produce a . . . product. A quality one. One he wanted to be proud of.
When Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most successful film directors of
all time, finally croaked at an advanced age it was discovered that he
had a little over $3000 in his bank account. The rest had been spent in
making films. Hitchcock lived exceedingly well no doubt, but he spent
his all in making films. In making a product. He spent his money not for
making money but for making films.
He didn't look for any more profit than it takes to make the next
film. I was talking to Peter Broughan who produced the recent successful
Rob Roy film and who produced Tutti Frutti among many other things.
Peter knows that any of the companies he works with make money to make
more products. The Scullion family who make pies and not pictures are
proud of what they offer to the public.
Doubtless their accountants can tell them many ways out of financial
constraints -- make your pies out of the offal of cows' eyelids, add
sawdust or plaster of Paris, or arsenical compunds to increase the
spice. The accountants can tell you everything about business. It simply
doesn't occur to them that making more money for a company and its
dreadful shareholders will result in being poisoned by pies, eggs,
pictures and, at the end of the day, by newspapers.
I wouldn't know because I don't just do what I do for money. But I'm
thinking of it. So are the accountants and all the time at that.
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