No, I wasn’t in business for ninety years but I have now been alive that long. And I learned as much about business from the part of my life that was not involved in it – my early childhood and the times with my growing family – as I did from my mentors, colleagues and bosses.

About creativity

The greatest personal lesson came slowly and in fits and starts. It was that, despite many weaknesses and an only moderate brain, I had a creative ability better than some others. It was an ability to associate apparently unrelated events and relationships. This facility is invaluable if you start to lose your memory. A schoolmaster first spotted it when teaching me French at age 8. He told me I would never be lost in Paris because if I didn’t know the word I wanted I would find other words to get around my ignorance. One of the creative directors who worked with me in advertising summed it up perfectly. I had persuaded him to read Koestler’s book The Act of Creation. He produced the definition: “Creativity is the ability to perceive relationships.” My modest talent was finally confirmed to me when I wrote a farewell for the funeral of the second boss I had had in London. He got a wonderful send-off. By then I was 58.

What is courage?

The second thing I discovered was taught to me by my first wife. It was that courage was an ability to take risks and that involved occasionally losing. Courage is a difficult thing to teach a young man who has had a somewhat barren upbringing without parents or grandparents present – and who grew up during a World War. It is not, as some would have you believe, persistent risk-taking or facing a string of dangers most people would avoid. Doing either of those things can be foolhardy. Courage is taking a stand on matters of principle on a selected few things, some to do with work, some to do with life.

My “causes”, if we can call them that, were first that the treatment of women in business was appalling. I concluded this at the age of 20 and determined to fight for better behaviour towards them right through my career. I came very close to being fired on 3 occasions. Fortunately I was not shot, just thought of as slightly strange to have such a cause. In the 1950s and 1960s it was still a novel issue.

I had other causes, too. High on the list was to treat suppliers decently, not try to screw them into the ground. Suppliers are wonderful sources of information and contacts. So are the clerks of business, the people who do the daily grind often without thanks and usually putting up with a lot of complaints. They are the foot troops of management. I regarded all employees as worthy of good treatment. I even rewarded the mistakes of others judgement – at least the first two or three. I treated my colleagues as family. The reason for these causes was that I believed in them. I adopted them without thinking of a return. In the event they paid off handsomely. I’m still glad I did them expecting no reward.

How should we negotiate?

My third big lesson was about negotiating. Many of my bosses regarded negotiating as permanent tight-lips, table-banging, orange-squeezing brutality. Negotiating is actually just another form of communication. And all good communication is seduction. Watching a duck catcher drawing his victims into a netting tunnel by getting a weasel to entertain them until he could close off the end of the trap was an art anyone could learn.

GET BT IN YOUR INBOX DAILY

Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign UpVIEW ALL

Well, people aren’t ducks, though many of them quack a lot. But they are certainly capable of being seduced to your point of view – and that means your price much of the time. Too many people have a short-term view of negotiating. They see the issue as resolved when the price is agreed. But how you survive and develop afterwards is more important than a victory roll for being brutal. I once did what I afterwards thought was too good a deal for my company when I was taking over another business in New Zealand. I felt we should have paid more. I wanted to give some back! But as a public company I couldn’t do that, of course, and anyway my shareholders would have gone mad at the idea. It taught me to better consider other people’s situations in any takeover.

Reading people by asking questions

To know what others are thinking is the way to handle, to control when necessary and to achieve cooperation – always vital. These are lessons you learn all the time. But what if they were taught much earlier in your life? If worldwide education included, as a basic subject, reading people, it would advantage those who would otherwise be victims of con artists. The learning would be capable of misuse, too. But since everyone else would be learning the same ability to observe, process and diagnose, the net benefit would be to the honest. It would also save many people big sums of money.

The process of reading people involves asking a lot of questions. I learnt about this when being trained by my wife Eliza. It does more than help you read people. It enables you to have a discussion instead of simply a Q&A. It allows you to engage, to participate with other people and to bring solutions nearer than when in a straightforward negotiation. It also makes life infinitely more interesting.

What is our purpose?

Business is about money but not exclusively so. When money becomes the only purpose of a business, it generally gets very boring – or, as one trader put it, very lonely. For companies, profits are a major consideration. No profits, no future. Most companies, however, and all individuals have a purpose to fulfil if their work is to be meaningful. Besides, it is not easy to have a passion about money and your life’s efforts are most rewarding when they achieve a level of passion.

Recognition of the importance of purpose started early. I was 13 when an old Polish soldier, living out the war as a refugee in Britain, taught me how to plough. He showed me that aiming for the “Tree on the other side of the Field” would achieve a straight furrow, and all subsequent furrows would follow the line of the first. Ever since then I have known each morning, when rising from bed, where my Tree is. My Tree has changed sometimes because of accident, opportunity and necessity – but I have always had a clear purpose. It has been the single biggest driver in my life.

Your purpose as a life-enhancer is best when it involves other people. It is a sad commentary on the development of the human brain that it is still used overwhelmingly for selfish reasons, but the survival instinct is the cause of that. It has its good points, too. There have been many attempts to express the importance of purpose. My favourite is John Steinbeck’s. In his most famous book, The Grapes of Wrath, written in the Great Depression of the 1930s, he tells us quite clearly what we are about. I think it is still valid today so I shall end with a quote from it.

“The last, clear, definite function of mankind, muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need. This is manself*. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of manself and to manself to take back something of the wall, the house, the dam. To take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving.”

It is quite something that I can still recite the whole chapter from memory. And when I can no longer do that it will still be in my heart.

Genius is the gold in the mine,

Talent is the miner who brings it out.

– Marguerite Gardiner, writer (1789-1849)

* Steinbeck used the word ‘man’ but I think he would endorse my modification to “manself”

The writer is founder and chair at Terrific Mentors International