Genius bursts to life

By Selwyn Parker

Ten years ago it would have been an understatement to say that New Zealander Martin Leach lacked prospects.

At 34, he didn't have any money - indeed, the bailiffs were knocking on the door of his London flat.

Having left school at 16, he hardly had the educational qualifications that would impress a prospective employer. Up to then, most of his working life could be described as temporary, with a succession of short-lived jobs. To boot, Leach had just left behind in Sydney a failed venture in cut-price air tickets.

Today? Leach is still in London, but he is an unusually successful publisher with a pre-tax profit of about sterling 300,000 ($938,000) on revenue of sterling 2.5 million ($7.8 million), and has a staff of 30.

This is why he has made an appearance in The New Alchemists, the latest book by Charles Handy on "visionary people who make something out of nothing."

Handy, doyen of British authorities on management, is a great admirer of people like Leach with a talent for starting things up and running them successfully. And in this book he has thrown together a series of snapshots of often extremely unlikely alchemists, including Virgin's Richard Branson, a carphone salesman who built an empire that turns over sterling 171 million ($534 million), an Italian who turned her love of languages into an astonishingly successful translation business and a refugee from Uganda who created a chain of pharmacies. And Leach.

Handy is more interested in the psychological make-up of his alchemists, many of whom are women, than in the substantial profits they make.

Notebook in hand, he has gone out to seek the wellsprings of these people's success, and the results make thought-provoking reading.

Few of these alchemists appeared to be successful at school.

Branson, for example, was "pretty hopeless" in the classroom by his own admission and says he still can't work out the difference between gross and net profit, although he heads a commercial empire turning over sterling 2 billion a year.

Handy's alchemists are usually big thinkers who enjoy tackling dramatic ventures that would daunt others. London's biennial International Festival of Theatre, now a sterling 2 million enterprise, was launched nearly 20 years ago by two woman friends, Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal, who simply decided that the city needed some more exciting productions.

Alchemists turn setbacks to good. For example, when Michael Young, who Handy describes as a "prince among alchemists," had a proposal to turn Cambridge into a distance-learning university during its holidays thwarted, he tried another gambit. That became known as the Open University.

Most alchemists set standards for customer service that are religious in their fervour.

When the price of carphones plummeted last year, 33-year-old Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse sent a voucher for the difference to customers who had earlier paid the full price. That's the sort of thinking that makes him pre-tax profits of sterling 14 million a year.

Passion, rather than pecuniary reward, drives these people.

John McLaren, a music-loving banker, pulled off one of the commercial coups of the decade in the arts. Frustrated at the dearth of new compositions, he launched Masterprize, an international competition for composers that paid the winners big money and gave them an international audience.

Alchemists appear to be extremely, but not blindly, determined.

McLaren, for example, takes no for an answer only when there's nothing else for it.

"When people say it can't be done, I ask them why not and if I agree with them I give it up. But if they just mean it's difficult then I will find a way around it."

Ever the student, Handy has learned a lot from his alchemists, as he made clear in an interview in Auckland. He is, for example, particularly impressed by the high principles they and their businesses display.

"The best businesses are crusades," Handy argues, recalling with regret the words of a long-serving employee of a now-privatised electricity supply company in Britain. "We used to say to each other that 'we kept the lights on'," the man said. "But now we are told to make money for our shareholders. It just doesn't feel the same."

That is one reason why Handy deplores some aspects of the American way.

"Americans are quite happy to see everything as a business, even lawyers and doctors," he observes.

"In my view doctors should have patients, not customers. They should be seen as giving professional services."

After writing The New Alchemists, Handy is sceptical about the ability of education to produce essentially non-conformist people like these. He thinks schools could be reorganised in ways that would unleash the power of motivation by tapping children's natural enthusiasms.

"Schools have too many tramlines," he argues. "Alchemists don't like tramlines. I would like to see opportunities for young people to learn more of those things you don't learn in classrooms. There's too much school in schooling."

He would prefer formal schooling to be over by lunchtime and the pupils handed on to a more inspirational structure managed by others, including businesspeople, artists and sportspeople.

"For all of these people [alchemists], school was not important. They either hated it or they sailed through it. They learned the important things outside school."