I remember one Easter term when I was at school. I was 12 and I was in a class of 13-year-olds and I came second in the class. You used to take your report home and give it to your father.
I gave it to Dad and all he said to me was, "What happened to first?"
Years later, the night before I got married, I went for a drink with him and he said, "Have
I ever done anything that deeply upset you?"
So I told him that story. He obviously remembered it, because he said, "So where did you come next time?" I said, "First." He said, "Exactly." He obviously knew how to push me and
what buttons to press. There was no settling for second best. I responded and I delivered.
I got a naval scholarship to read Law at University College, London. One time during my naval training we were learning to do things in teams of four and we practised an assault. Three of us did it really well and one didn't - and we were failed. I couldn't understand it, I'd done really well.
The Fleet Chief Petty Officer said, "You've spent the last month preparing for this and trying to prove to me how good you are. I knew you were good. You got a scholarship, you're a bright lad. I didn't want to know how good you were, I wanted to know how you got the best out of him, because he's lousy. The big thing was, would he excel? I wanted to test your leadership. I wanted to know how good you were at getting the best out of someone else. And on that basis I'm going to fail you."
It was the most enormous lesson. People are kind enough to say about me now that I'm very good at getting the best out of people and leading a team, and I put it down to that day.
If you're unhappy in your job, get out. I was 40 when I became a senior partner at my law practice. By the time I got to 43, I was bored. Really, really bored. I was getting to a point where I wasn't very nice to live with, I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I wasn't exercising enough. This was my life, it was what I had decided to do with my career but my whole instinct was telling me to go and do something else. One day I just walked into the office and handed in my notice. I'd decided to do something completely different with my life, although I had no idea what it was. Don't sit there and let it take you down. If it ceases to
be fun, just go.
A headhunter rang and said he'd like to talk to me about the new director general of the CBI. I said, "Oh, who's that going to be?" I actually thought he was asking me for a reference for someone else. He said, "We thought you might put your name forward." I said, "Me? That job goes to clever, grey-suited people from London and I'm a Brummie lawyer from the wrong side of the tracks."
He sent me the job spec and my wife Pat read it and she said, "This is you." I said, "I know, but have you seen the appallingly small amount of money they pay?" And she looked me straight in the eye and said, "I'm up for this if you are."
It fundamentally changed our lives. We sold the big house in Birmingham and bought a small house in Warwickshire and a flat in London. Money wasn't the driver. Fulfilment, self-respect, contentment - they're all far more important than money.
If you're going to swim in the animated goldfish bowl of public life, don't just be careful about what you say, but also what you don't say.
I'd been at the CBI about a year when a business journalist came to interview me one day. He arrived 45 minutes late and absolutely soaking wet. It turned out the trains were on strike and when his train finally turned up, the roof of the carriage was leaking. Then there were no taxis and he arrived in my office like
a drowned rat. He said, "It's like living in a bloody banana republic, this country." I said, "I know what you mean, take your coat off, have a cup of tea." We then had a fabulous interview about workplace regulation, transport, skills, taxation and so on.
Next day in the newspaper: "CBI chief says Britain's a banana republic." I rang him up and said, "I don't want you to print a retraction, I just want to know why you wrote it, because I didn't say that." He said, "You didn't deny it."
One statistic that staggered me when I was Skills Envoy was that 20 per cent of the adult population of the United Kingdom, which is the fifth biggest economy on Earth, cannot read to the standard of an 11-year-old, and a third of the population cannot add up two three-figure numbers. And we want to take on India? We want to beat China? We want to beat Brazil? We can't read!
Gordon Brown asked me to be Minister of State for UK Trade & Investment. I visited 31 different countries in 45 overseas visits over 15 months. I learnt that there's only one country on Earth that doesn't like us, and that's us. We really give ourselves a kicking.
The rest of the world by and large sees us as arrogant and slow, but they trust us, they think we make good partners, we're innovative, we trade brilliantly. It's no coincidence we're the biggest overseas investor from Europe in China, we're the biggest overseas investor in America, we're the biggest overseas investor in Australia, we're the favoured trade partner in most of the Gulf, we're the biggest home for inward investment in the world apart from America. But we're really downbeat about our role in the world.
Our system of government militates against reform, value for money and a public sector that delivers more for less. The function of the civil service in this country could be delivered by half the number of people.
By and large politicians don't understand business. They learn how to spend money but they don't know how to earn it. At the end of the day you can't spend what you haven't earned. Perhaps the politicians think you can.
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