|
|
|
William Lever: Father of
brands
|
|
|
Take
another quick look at the portrait on this page of William Lever.
That painting by Augustus John, Britain's famously Bohemian portrait
painter of the 1920s, may never have seen the light of day was it
not for an accident. Lever had commissioned John to do the portrait,
but after having seen the final painting when it was sent to him,
he was so upset with the unflattering rendition of his visage that
he flew into a rage and, with a kitchen knife, sliced the head off
the canvas. And hid what remained in one of the rooms of his mansion.
Of course, Lever paid John in full for his effort. All would have
been well if a housekeeper at the Lever household hadn't discovered
the painting with a hole and, unwittingly, sent it back to John.
All hell broke loose thereafter. With an insulted artist, a righteous
press and an unrepentant tycoon embroiled in an unseemly tussle,
readers of the more risqué newspapers in Britain those days
must have had a jolly time. The painting, by the way, was restored
after Lever's death.
Anecdotes such as these make Adam Macqueen's
biography of the son of a grocer who became one of the world's greatest
creator of brands in the 19th century and, quite possibly, the earliest
creator of a true multinational corporation, a good read... a page-turner
even. Not very many corporate biographies (a good number of them
are officially sponsored, in any case) are engrossing. And too many
of them-even the ones written by journalists-are hagiographical
in their tone. Macqueen's is a refreshing exception. That may have
something to do with the (somewhat self-promoting) blurb about the
author. Macqueen, says the book's jacket cover, became a journalist
only after a career of cleaning toilets, packing mail-order baldness
cures, leading canoeing holidays for teenage drug addicts and a
few other things that sound (but may not necessarily be) cool to
have on an author's curriculum vitae.
|
|
|
THE KING OF SUNLIGHT
By Adam Macqueen
Bantam Press
PP: 328
Price: Rs 1,078
|
Lever was a paternalistic industrialist whose policies and management
style pioneered employee benefits as they are known today. He was
also a control freak and an eccentric, sleeping for most of his
life in bedrooms without roofs, exposing his body and mind to the
vagaries of nature, come rain or snow. At meals, he encouraged his
associates, including Lever Brothers' officials, to chew every mouthful
32 times and liked to control his workers' lives even as he emerged
as an epitome of employee welfare.
But more fascinating is the story of how Lever
used advertising to build his Sunlight and other brands and of how
he expanded the operations of his business, first within Britain,
then in Europe and soon around the world. For much of his time at
the helm of the company, Lever was obsessed with control. Sometimes
to paranoid proportions-like when he appointed a private detective
to find out whether an underling who headed the US business was
slacking off or working hard.
Macqueen recreates the soap wars of the late
19th century when newspapers went to town with a debate about Lever's
ethics in advertising at a time when London was being stalked by
the mysterious Jack the Ripper. For Indian readers, there are some
nuggets like the heated debate between Lord Curzon, a passionate
protectionist, and Lever, a diehard free-trader, aboard a cruise
ship. Or of how a 21-year-old architect, Edwin Lutyens, was one
of the professionals that Lever hired to design the first township
for Leverites in Port Sunlight. It would be years before Lutyens
would design the stately buildings of New Delhi or the Cenotaph
in London's Whitehall.
Lever's philanthropy is well-known, but Macqueen
reveals Lever's significant tenure as a Liberal member of parliament.
He became an mp in 1905 and campaigned for old age pension and women's
suffrage. Macqueen's book takes the reader behind the brusque exterior
of an entrepreneur who built a multinational in his own lifetime
and fathered modern marketing.
|
|
|
INDIA'S EMERGING ECONOMY
Edited by Kaushik Basu
Oxford University Press
PP: 318
Price: Rs 525
|
It is indeed difficult
to do justice to a collection of essays written by some of the finest
minds of India, and that too on issues spanning the entire spectrum
of the Indian economy. Especially, when the compilation raises fundamental
questions about the sustainability of India's economic growth, about
the prospects of its much-touted information technology supremacy,
its benefits to the grass roots workers, democracy, governance and
much, much more.
Yet, the Kaushik Basu-edited India's Emerging
Economy: Performance and Prospects in the 1990s and Beyond, is a
tour de force in the sense that it effortlessly tackles these issues,
especially in their social and cultural context (something most
economic treatises tend to ignore). And the 12 chapters boast of
some of the country's-if not the world's-top academics, economists
and business thinkers: Amartya Sen, Pranab Bardhan, Y.V. Reddy,
Nicholas Stern, and N.R. Narayana Murthy, among others.
If Nobel laureate Sen argues in his typical
fashion that it is not too much democracy, but too little of it,
that is holding up India's growth in his essay, Democracy and Secularism
in India, RBI governor Reddy makes a strong plea for greater legal,
policy and procedural reforms for the financial sector in Monetary
and Financial Sector Reforms in India.
For the World Bank trio of Stern, Manuela Fero,
and David Rosenblatt, the only way out for India's laggard states
is to frame pro-poor policies, which should rest on the twin pillars
of improved investment climate and empowerment of the poor to contribute
to and benefit from growth. But in their chapter Globalization and
Economic Reforms as Seen from the Ground: SEWA's Experience in India,
Renana Jhabvala and Ravi Kanbur argue that despite the overall benefits
of globalisation, there are three troubling features at the ground
level-relative decline in wages of the unskilled, their increased
vulnerability and declining bargaining power.
However, as Basu, eminent economist and editor
of this book, writes in the first essay, "Though there are
still innumerable important reforms to undertake, the fundamentals
of the Indian economy are probably strong enough to implement and
benefit from another round of market reform and further opening
up of the economy.'' If that whets your appetite, read the book.
-Ashish Gupta
|
