AUTOBIOGRAPHY: What You See Is What You Get: My AutobiographyBy Alan Sugar Macmillan, 589pp. £20
I PICKED UP Alan Sugar's autobiography with some curiosity, as I must be one of the few businesspeople who have never seen the British TV version of The Apprentice, on the BBC. However, I was interested in a man who has been in the news for decades and who seems to have fitted a whole variety of careers into his 63 years.
Sugar’s first venture into capitalism, before he was 11, should be made compulsory reading for all participants in Irish Management Institute courses and also for Leaving Cert business students. How he discovered firelighters, and sold them, at an early age could be a lesson for all budding entrepreneurs.
The book regularly explodes with sarcasm. At one point he writes about someone with whom he fell out: "I don't know what happened to this prat in later life – he's probably a Daily Mailjournalist!"
An interesting aspect of the Sugar story is its illumination of the Jewish way of life and the different levels of religious belief and of adherence to tradition. In his romance with Ann – they have been married for more than 40 years – Sugar had to overcome some of those religious hurdles, and he is very open about the challenges he faced. (Though Ann is also Jewish, her family was far stricter than Sugar’s.)
There is a general belief that a successful businessperson must be aggressive, and Sugar does not emerge from his book as particularly likeable. He appears to be aware of this, however. “It does make me wonder whether my coldness as an individual has something to do with my upbringing. I never experienced any warm feelings of closeness and caring from my parents – a complete contrast to my own family now.”
The Sugar manner of doing business was very hands-on – he claims to have been the “chief cook and bottle washer” in his company – but his negotiation skills must have made him quite a few enemies, and the reader isn’t surprised at the substantial number of people he has fallen out with in his career.
The Amstrad brand name came from the initial letters of Alan Michael Sugar Trading; the company began to make itself well known in the 1970s, when Sugar was just hitting 30. The launch of his low-priced hi-fi equipment caught the imagination of the market, and the public launch of his company, in 1980, made him a millionaire at the age of 34.
The experience of running Amstrad as a public company quickly educated Sugar, and his advice not to trust anyone in a stockbroking firm – “they are full of gangsters and monkeys” – is a reflection of how quickly he had to learn about that world.
It’s intriguing to read of Amstrad’s entry into the computer business in 1984, before Sugar was 40, but it was his involvement in soccer that was the challenge he had not anticipated. Probably of most interest is the public row that Sugar had not just with the Tottenham Hotspur manager Terry Venables but with the Football Association. The club ended up in court after the FA fined Spurs £1.5 million, deducted six points and banned it from the FA Cup. Sugar’s spat with Venables is a reminder to everyone that, for a businessperson, getting involved in sport is a real education. Although he was chairman of the club, Sugar was allocated a seat five or six rows behind Venables – they had both invested in the club – and he felt snubbed.
There is a danger with autobiography that the author will feel obliged to pad things out with trivia. The 589 pages here do include quite a lot of that, and the book might have benefited from being more concise. In spite of this, it’s a good read.
Feargal Quinn is a member of Seanad Éireann and author of Crowning the Customer
