Sunday 12 December 2010

Of Turning Pages and Turning Back Time

I've just finished reading Lord Sugar's tome of an autobiography - all 600 pages of it. Well to be truthful I probably read only about 400 pages of it because some of it I found hard going at times with far too much unnecessary detail.

It was interesting to read that many of the products I bought as a kid or teenager, which for one reason or another were quite ground breaking in their day, were actually thought up by and designed by Alan Sugar. When I say this I don't mean by his engineers or his design team but his lordship himself. This includes the twin deck tape cassettes and the stack hi-fi system. I remember my mate buying the hi-fi in probably about 1978. It looked great but at £399 I just knew it had to sound wonky. I was wrong. It sounded great.

I'm a great Apprentice fan and I've huge respect for what Lord Saccharine has achieved. In his life time he's built an empire from nothing. He's improved significantly the quality of many electrical products making them available to an awful lot more people than before. He's created jobs and wealth for hundreds if not thousands of people. So why couldn't I take to him in his own account of how he achieved all of this? May be it was because in these 600 pages he comes across as belligerent, petty, vindictive and lacking in any empathy. You'd expect to find this in a biography of someone that was out to be controversial and make headlines but not in your own work. Churchill once said "History will be kind to me because I intend to write it". Will history be kind to Lord Sugar as a result of this autobiography? It's hard to see.




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