The death last week of Ralph Halpern prompts the thought, where have all the interesting British business leaders gone and does this matter? Whatever was said about Halpern – and, behind his back, his retailing contemporaries were often critical or condescending – “uninteresting” was never the adjective.
This wasn’t just because he led the transformation of the Burton menswear chain from fuddy-duddy and failing to glitzy and successful in the 1980s, a decade when British retailing seemed to be the world’s best. It was also the manner in which he did it – mixing naked ambition and retail nous with humour and showbiz in roughly equal measure. So somehow it seemed appropriate that his career came to be caricatured – perhaps even defined – by kiss-and-tell tales of “five times a night” with a soft-porn model 30 years his junior.
True, Halpern – at that time the highest paid chief executive among FTSE 100 companies – was hardly the first boss to mix extracurricular activities with the day job. But the private shareholder who spoke at Burton’s annual meeting the week after those revelations was missing the point when he said he didn’t care how many times a night Halpern did it so long as he kept earnings per share growth lively. By then, it was already becoming tough for Burton to maintain its growth rate since, as much as it needed the retail acumen of Halpern and his team, it also needed bigger and bigger acquisitions to munch upon and the skills of a smart finance director to turn accounting’s grey areas into profits’ growth. When a diversification too far meant Burton faltered badly in 1990, Halpern was quickly shown the door and, despite being only in his early 50s, never got another chance to lead a listed company.