PREFACE
Now that I have published several books, I am often asked how long it takes to write one. The normal answer is between eighteen months and three years. This one, though, took thirty-five years.
Its tone was set by an incident which happened when, in my mid twenties, I was asked to be executive assistant to the Deputy Chairman of BT. He (the former Deputy Chair of Barclays Bank) was brought into the company by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to run the privatization. I was his only assistant and was closely involved in the marketing of the float. There followed eighteen months of demanding work with a project that set all kinds of firsts. Afterwards, though, the newly privatized firm had to set up several radically new approaches. One was a mechanism to assess and approve capital projects, a level of spend which dominated the new company because of its extensive backbone network. My boss wanted to set up a “capital appraisal committee” to ensure that more commercially orientated decisions were made at the acquisition and spend of capital investment. He asked me to investigate “discounted cash flow analysis” and “internal rate of return” in order to draft the methods by which this capital spend (which at the time was massive) would be evaluated and approved.
I spent several hours with internal and external accountants, and academics, on this interesting project. At some point it struck me, though, that these concepts (like many management tools) were merely a way to ...
