30/09/2010
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2010
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The view from the top of business. Presented by Evan Davis, The Bottom Line cuts through confusion, statistics and spin to present a clearer view of the business world, through discussion with people running leading and emerging companies.
Evan and a panel of guests from the worlds of civil engineering, hedge funds and investment discuss the art of staying ahead of the competition.
The ruthless former chief executive of General Electric, Jack Welch, often held up as a model of business leadership, pursued a strategy to establish each of GE's businesses as either number one or number two in the market. Without this approach, he believed the company's prospects would be bleak. Some companies will do anything to be big, even if it means cutting prices and making less money. Other businesses are happy to be smaller and more profitable. Which strategy wins?
The panel also discusses corporate claptrap. Silly jargon, faddish ideas and vacuous concepts - why is the business world so keen on nonsense?
Evan is joined in the studio by Deborah Meaden, entrepreneur and business investor; Keith Clarke, chief executive of FTSE 250 civil engineering and design consultancy Atkins; Hugh Hendry, hedge fund manager and co-founder of Eclectica Asset Management.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a download from the BBC. |
| 0:02.5 | This edition of The Bottom Line, Radio 4's business discussion program, |
| 0:06.5 | was first broadcast on the 30th of September 2010. |
| 0:10.7 | Here's Evan Davis. |
| 0:12.7 | Hello and welcome to the bottom line. |
| 0:15.4 | If this program was a business, |
| 0:17.3 | would we rather it was the most profitable show or the most listened to? |
| 0:21.9 | I think I'd go for the profits, frankly, but many chief executives out there seem keener on securing market share, sometimes at the expense of profits. |
| 0:30.7 | I'm going to ask my guests when size is worth pursuing at all cost. |
| 0:35.5 | And we'll talk about business nonsense. We were going to use a word |
| 0:39.5 | beginning with, Bull, but it's a family show. But why, though, is the business world so keen on |
| 0:45.3 | gibberish? Before all that, let's spend a few minutes meeting each of my three guests. And first up |
| 0:51.6 | is Deborah Meadon, who made millions from a company called West Star, |
| 0:54.7 | which ran holiday parks, also famous as one of the Dragons from that TV program I'm familiar |
| 0:59.6 | with, Dragons Den. And Deborah, you've bought a small textile company in this country. I didn't |
| 1:07.0 | know we sort of did textiles in the UK anymore. That's an interesting misconception. |
| 1:12.3 | I thought the same thing, and I sort of stumbled across this rather wonderful business, |
| 1:17.7 | started in 1772 called Fox Brothers. |
| 1:20.6 | And in the height of its career, it was employing 5,000 people |
| 1:25.2 | and produced in the First World War 8,500 miles of cloth for the British Army. |
| 1:32.1 | I mean, it was a huge, huge business. |
| 1:34.5 | I mean, obviously there was a demise of the textile industry in the UK, |
... |
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