I met Archie Norman for the first time this week. You can see the edited highlights of our conversation here.
He was very impressive: clear, honest, direct. And refreshingly disparaging about the alleged business geniuses of private equity who now face difficult times.
I couldn’t help thinking: here is a brilliant businessman who struggled – a bit like Lord MacLaurin, the former Tesco chief executive – to make his mark in politics (see bio above). These two worlds, business and politics, may seem to have much in common but are in fact utterly different – like journalism and academia.
That Mr Norman was not a huge smash in Westminster does not, I fear, reflect well on Westminster. Maybe he lacked a certain “flexibility” that the system – and us, the voters – demand. He’s now back doing what he does best: building businesses.
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Lucy Kellaway, FT columnist and associate editor, offers her solution to your workplace problems in a column in the Financial Times. In the 
