The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

1.

Towards the end of this project, I ran into an inventor (solar-powered electric scooters) who told me that no essay on modern work could be considered complete if it treated only well-established industries operating in orthodox and mature fields. He urged me to consider the legions of entrepreneurs, many working by themselves in short-let offices at second-hand desks, with only a logo and a business card for legitimacy, who every year bring forward unfamiliar inventions and services, in the hope of transforming our lives and their fortunes.

It was on his recommendation that, a few months later, I travelled to a convention centre located in an unfamiliar part of north-west London to attend an annual event designed to introduce small businesses to potential investors. Two hundred enterprises from Libya to New Zealand had rented stands in a hangar and were taking advantage of discounted accommodation in an adjacent Best Western.

There were new proposals in every imaginable sector of the economy: satellite tracking systems for cattle, hand-held radar devices for recovering lost golf balls, inflatable battlefield surgical theatres, high-density ear plugs for the spouses of snorers and a gift-voucher scheme for opticians. Many companies were rethinking ways of generating energy and fresh water. Three Swedes had brought with them a scale model of a power station run on chicken droppings, with supporting statistics on global faecal tonnage. Near the entrance to the hall, a group of psychotherapists were presenting plans for a service providing executives with psychological counselling on long-haul flights.

The range of offerings suggested that capitalism as currently developed remains in its infancy. We may think of ourselves as living late in the history of consumer society, but the most sophisticated contemporary economy stands to be perceived by subsequent generations as no less primitive than we judge Europe to have been in the Dark Ages. It is a mere eighty years since deodorant was introduced, the remote-control garage door has been in existence for barely thirty-five and only in the last five years have surgeons discovered how safely to remove tumours from our adrenal glands and insert aortic keyhole valves into our hearts. We are still waiting for computers to help us identify whom we might confidently marry, for scanners to locate our lost keys, for a reliable method of eradicating household moths and for medicines which will guarantee us eternal life. Untold numbers of new businesses lie latent in our present inefficiencies and wishes. The fulfilment of a significant, and perhaps the most important, share of our needs remains untethered to the mechanisms of commerce.

2.

Looking through the brochure of attendees, I conceived a particular desire to meet Mohsen Bahmani, an Iranian who had invented a pair of shoes to help one to walk on water. Each shoe consisted of a spindle-shaped piece of fibreglass fitted with a miniature outboard engine, in which one could travel at fifteen kilometres an hour, while keeping one’s balance with the help of adapted ski-poles. Bahmani had spent five years fine-tuning his product, testing it in the waters near his mother’s house in the resort town of Mahmudabad on the Caspian sea, and envisioned application in both the recreational and military markets.

The two of us had made plans, via email, to meet for lunch at a Pizza Hut concession opposite the convention hall. I had just put in an order for some garlic bread and a bottle of sparkling water when I received the news that Bahmani had been detained at Heathrow on the suspicion of importing bomb-making equipment and taken for questioning to an immigration centre in Hounslow. The message was delivered by one of his colleagues, a scientist named Mohammed Shorabi, whose old-fashioned courtesy, cadenced English and tweed suit pointed to a strain of Anglophilia now unlikely except among those whose contact with the United Kingdom has been restricted or exclusively mediated through literary works of the pre-modern period. Shorabi told me that he had, at least, managed to get Bahmani’s promotional brochures through customs and had set them out across his stand. The two were colleagues at the Institute of Inventors, a research facility in Tehran set up by President Khatami in the hope of transforming Iran into a centre of innovation. Five of the Institute’s products, the shoes included, were being presented at the fair.

Because it was already past one-thirty and I knew that he must have expended considerable energy in tracking me down, I asked Shorabi if he might like to join me for lunch. So we ordered a couple of Super Supremes and discussed Shorabi’s own invention, a crash-protection system for cars and motorbikes. Based on exploiting what he termed mistakes in Newton’s first law of motion, it involved the strapping of a system of weights and pulleys to the front wheel of a bike or the fender of a car. ‘Nobody will ever have to die in a road accident again,’ Shorabi told me, paraphrasing his company’s slogan. He then pulled out from his suit pocket a sheet of yellowing newsprint torn from the Tehran Times, which featured a report on a successful test of his equipment conducted on a jeep at an army base in Mianeh – as well as, at the bottom of the page, an unrelated item about a strong finish by a member of the Iranian national ski team, Hossein Saveh-Shemshaki, at a slalom event in Turkey. Shorabi expressed regret that export constraints had prevented him from shipping a whole demonstration car to London, but he invited me to visit his stand after lunch to examine a child’s bicycle which he had been able to bring over and which, he said, supplied ample proof of the principles behind his invention. Once back in the hall, he needed no convincing to ride up and down the carpeted aisles, his frame awkwardly hunched over a diminutive machine which reminded me of my own childhood Chopper bike, whilst talking rapidly in precisely enunciated yet increasingly incomprehensible English about automotive safety and what he alleged to be the CIA-instigated boycott of his innovations by all the major Western car manufacturers.

A few stands away from the Iranians, I met Caroline Oakley, a young mother from Kent and the inventor of the Crisp Bar, comprising twelve centimetres of grey-hued deep-fried crisps – as many as might ordinarily be found in a twenty-five-gram bag – pressed together into one oleaginous ingot. The idea had come to Oakley during a moment of frustration at having to use two hands to eat her favourite snack, and she felt sure that the bars would, with time and the right investors, become as ubiquitous as their cereal counterparts. She had but a single home-made sample with her, which visitors were welcome to touch whilst she reviewed for them some of the notable advantages that crisps squashed into a bar form enjoyed over those loose in a bag: they were easier to fit into children’s lunchboxes, they took up less space in kitchen cupboards and they could be moulded into pine-tree shapes for Christmas and hearts for Valentine’s Day. The marketing of the product was the province of Oakley’s boyfriend, an intense young man obviously in awe of his partner’s talents, who pressured me to bite off a corner of the sample bar and take an information pack home with me. I tried to reflect on what other consumer goods were currently using up valuable space in air-filled containers and might one day benefit from being compressed into rods, but I lost my train of thought. I moved on to reflect on how the pair behind the Crisp Bar might beat a dignified retreat from this high-point of entrepreneurial energy: how they might fend off the well-meaning and unintentionally humiliating enquiries of neighbours and consider their crisp experience from the vantage point of old age, the sole memento of their venture a box of marketing materials stowed in a corner of the attic next to their children’s cast-off playthings.

Entrepreneurship appears to be almost wholly dependent on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible. The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, but merely evidence of the conformity and lack of imagination of the herd. Yet the milieu also demands that its protagonists develop a hard-headed awareness of certain intractable financial and legal truths, as well as an accurate sense of what other human beings are actually like. The field seems to require a painfully uncommon synthesis of imagination and realism.

3.

Given the rarity of this combination, it was particularly ominous to see so many people being encouraged to have a go. The popularity of the fair (as well as its vigorous promotion by a local authority and a government agency) suggested how closely linked the idea of launching a new business is to the modern notion of fulfilment, being filtered through our society via admiring pro-files of high-flying entrepreneurs, coupled with a relative silence regarding the bankruptcies and not-infrequent suicides of their less accomplished colleagues. The start-up company may be as central to our contemporary ideals as the ritual of praying for the souls of the dead or the maintenance of female virginity was to the values of our medieval ancestors.

Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule. The statistical probabilities of successfully rerouting commercial reality were laid bare for me by a wry venture capitalist who had come to the fair with few expectations, save for having the opportunity to spend a day away from his office. Of the two thousand business plans he received a year, he said, he immediately threw out 1,950, scrutinised fifty more closely and ended up investing in ten. Within five years, out of those ten enterprises, four would be bankrupt, another four would be stuck in what was termed a ‘graveyard cycle’ of low profits and a mere two would be generating the significant returns which keep his industry afloat. Here was a vision of success guaranteed to disappoint 99.9 percent of its subscribers.

Then again, there was a certain heroic beauty in the exuberant destruction of both capital and hope entailed by the entrepreneurs’ activities. Money patiently accumulated through decades of unremarkable work would, in a rush of optimism inspired by a flattering business plan, be handed over to a momentarily convincing chief executive, who would hasten to set the pyre alight in a brief, brilliant and largely inconsequential blaze.

Almost all of the exhibitors at the fair were destined to throw themselves at the cliff face of entrepreneurial achievement and fall flat; for example, people like Paul Nolan, who had come up with a system of tilt-out under-bath shelves on which to store cleaning products and toiletries, or Edward van Noord, a publican from Amsterdam who had devoted his life’s savings to the development of 1-2-3 Stop Fire, a disposable fire-extinguishing system with a restricted applicability in the real world – just two of the many participants of the fair who would one day be compelled to return to more modest ways of anchoring the motives for their existence.

Nevertheless, these entrepreneurs could at least be celebrated for embodying an honourably stubborn side of human nature, one which in other areas causes us to get married without duress and to behave as if death might be an avoidable condition. They were proof of the extent to which we ultimately prefer excitement and disaster to boredom and safety.

In the early afternoon, I dropped in on a session of the British Inventors’ Society, where one of the members was unveiling an idea for a deodorant-dispensing machine designed to be installed in railway stations – a concept premised on his realisation that he and his fellow commuters were prone to sweat prodigiously on their way to and from crowded city platforms. The society’s members were united by their belief that the manner in which the world was presently organised was in no way representative of its full potential. They were in the habit of scanning their homes and environments for anything which did not function optimally: rubbish bags which declined to close securely, lunchboxes which were too hard to clean or parking posts which would have been better off retracting automatically when lorries backed over them. Although I had never invented anything, as the afternoon drew on (and the after-effects of a few glasses of wine I had ordered over lunch kicked in), I felt able to share with the group some of my own tentative notions for businesses as yet missing from the world economy, including a new kind of holiday company which would take tourists around industrial locations rather than museums; a chain of secular chapels which atheists could visit to appease their confused religious yearnings; and restaurants which would focus on offering diners instruction in the arts of friendship and conversation rather than on the food itself. Even among people as broad-minded as the inventors, my list precipitated a tense silence.

It has often been said that while any fool can have a good idea, only a few great minds have it in them to start a profitable business. The members of the British Inventors’ Society seemed to turn this unflattering equation on its head (pleasingly so in the eyes of a writer, a species congenitally fated to be better at thinking up ideas than at knowing what to do with them). These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world for the better, one deodorant-dispensing machine at a time.

4.

A series of speakers with claims to entrepreneurial insight had been invited to address the delegates in the late afternoon. Trevor Thwaite, a civil servant, gave a lecture entitled, with a levity which could not quite disguise the anxiety embedded in its theme, ‘How to Turn That Gem of an Idea into Shed-Loads of Money’. Three people attended, including a Malaysian man who had invented a portable lightning conductor.

The auditorium was considerably more animated when, to mark the close of proceedings, the fair was graced by the presence of a famous Scottish industrialist almost universally referred to simply as Sir Bob. Over the course of a forty-year career in business, Sir Bob had amassed a billion pounds, a sum he was planning to bequeath in full to the library at Glasgow University, in part so as to teach his two children about the value of money. Sir Bob had begun in bathroom tiles. After recognising, as a precocious sixteen-year-old plumber’s apprentice, just how phlegmatic the sector was, he had built up a chain of warehouses offering eight thousand different varieties of tiles, manufactured at a plant in Romania for a fraction of their retail price. These harshly lit emporia, echoing with the sound of managers haranguing customers with news of unmissable discounts, had rung the death knell for every small tile merchant from Aberdeen to St Ives and were inextricably linked in the public mind to the abortive redecorating projects of many an ill-tempered rainy weekend. The next jewel in Sir Bob’s crown was a chain of gyms which made the lion’s share of its money in the two weeks after New Year’s, from people too distracted by their swollen body-mass index to read the small print appended to punitive membership schemes. This was followed, fittingly enough, by fifty shops in Scotland and the north of England catering to what Sir Bob called the ‘larger lady’. His interests now ranged from health care to financial services. He owned a dozen motorway bridges in Denmark and a cement plant in Albania.

The president of the British Inventors’ Society had been assigned the task of introducing Sir Bob to the assembly, but undermined his good intentions by digressing at length about a trip he had lately made to the Balearics and the details of his son’s wedding plans, before revealing, at an exceptionally leisurely pace, just how privileged he and his fellow organisers felt to be hosting Sir Bob – who, standing beside him wearing a fixed expression and a pair of platform shoes, was looking less privileged to have accepted the invitation with every new chapter of the interminable encomium.

When at last the time came for Sir Bob, one metre fifty tall, to take the microphone, he sounded closer to anger than the title of his talk – ‘The Entrepreneur in All of Us’ – might have led his audience to foresee. He fired off an expletive-dotted Scots-cadenced tirade against bureaucrats, red tape, no-gooders, scroungers, trust funders and tax inspectors before turning his attention to the ten things his career had taught him about the art of making money. Regrettably, the list was profoundly platitudinous, either because he wanted to keep the real secrets close to his chest until he was safely entombed, and his money was on its way to Hillhead, or because he genuinely did not know quite how or why he, the son of an unemployed Glasgow dockworker, had succeeded in becoming one of the wealthiest people on the face of the globe – and had hence merely settled on some suggestions of where his talents lay culled from business books picked up at airport newsstands.

Whatever his stated strengths, it appeared that the one area in which Sir Bob excelled was anxiety. He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others’ mediocrity – suggesting that a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction. He admitted to a thoroughgoing distrust of all his employees and subcontractors, to an insistence on personally signing off on all expenses accrued within any of his companies and to a habit of staying up for much of every night scrutinising an array of spreadsheets – no doubt long after Edward van Noord of 1-2-3 Stop Fire had slipped into an unvexed sleep in his house in the suburbs of Amsterdam.

We tend to cling to the notion that all human qualities should cohere, that we may be at once beautiful and thoughtful, vigilant and relaxed, gifted and well balanced – but it seemed clear that, admirable though Sir Bob’s achievements and energy might be, it would surely not be such a treat to be his wife or son.

At least Sir Bob was inspiringly democratic. In any area of business he happened to contemplate, he refused to believe that success would be impossible for someone like him. His varied activities had furnished him with an unusually keen sense of how things worked, freeing him of the naive and childish perspective from which most of us still see the world. He regarded the large artefacts of finance and industry which surround us, and which we often assume to be as inevitable as the earth’s natural features – our warehouses, shopping centres, control towers, banks and holidays resorts – not as the products of remote or obscure processes, but of efforts by people a little like himself, plucky and hard-working types who felt that destiny was theirs to mould. He knew how things fitted together: he knew how to finance a supermarket and go about building a fifty-two-storey skyscraper. He knew which city lawyer could help him to acquire an oil platform and how to negotiate with the government of Australia to buy up private schools in New South Wales. He could look out across any landscape and be confident that it was not the gods who had made it, but people a little like himself. He was – in this sense, at least – a true adult.

There was time allowed for questions after the talk, and a studious-looking man seized the opportunity to stand up and ask why Sir Bob had decided to leave his fortune to a university library. To judge from the latter’s monosyllabic response, the inquiry either irritated or bored him. His detachment reminded me of the attitude of the many barons throughout history who had spent their careers plundering the earth and hounding their employees, but who then, nearing death, had quietly dropped their loot into foundations which to this day continue to distribute money to impoverished souls afflicted by a strong desire to write monographs on early Assyrian pottery or to play the bassoon – as if the barons had ultimately felt they had no other option but to redirect their ambitions and their avarice in order to wind up seeming good in the most conventional of ways.

5.

I left the entrepreneurial gathering feeling at once inspired and chastened. I recognised my admiration for visionaries such as Mohsen Bahmani (of the floating shoes), whose fledgling businesses sought to pick up on and exploit desires overlooked by more mainstream enterprises. Yet I also appreciated the extent to which the aims of these energetic men and women were undermined by their obvious misunderstanding of how people actually went about making decisions on such matters as how to cross a lake or eat crisps, how to store products in the bathroom or put out a fire. These individuals were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review by some bright young person from the London Review of Books but by a lack of custom and a prompt foreclosure.

By contrast, Sir Bob’s grasp of psychology could not be faulted. He apprehended the public’s love of spacious parking-lots and prominently advertised deals on discounted bathroom furnishings. He knew how panicked we could be made to feel about the girth of our thighs but also how greedy we could become upon spotting a competitively priced sausage (his holding company had just a few years earlier acquired a profitable stake in a Hamburg-based fast-food chain, Goldene Bratwurst). Yet for all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation and evidently did not care to study whether commerce could by itself deliver any of societal benefits he so mockingly relegated to the pious and unmanly field of charity.

Still, an imaginary merger between the best sides of the visionaries and of Sir Bob yielded something resembling a picture of the ideal entrepreneur. In character a judicious fusion of the utopian and the practical, he or she would succeed not only in identifying an important need but also in mastering the challenges of bureaucracy and finance in order to give the resolution of that need an institutional form, and thereby affect others’ lives in ways that theory alone could never do.

This ideal was not, in the event, limited to the realm of the imagination: there were a tantalising array of real-life cases in which entrepreneurs had succeeded in founding innovative schools and progressive political groupings, new forms of community and life-enhancing technologies. I knew how deeply I admired them, because any accounts of their exploits that I came across in the media or (even worse) heard from old friends at parties had an exceptional capacity to catapult me into spasms of envy and inadequacy. These enterprising types had not – like me – fled back into their own dreams at the first mention of a sales tax or an employee ledger; they had instead managed to survive the challenges of finance, law and recruitment and, as a result, they had been able to give their flights of fancy a lucrative and consequential dimension. These paragons bore much the same relation to the mere intellectual as a restaurant-owning chef might to a writer of cookery books.

If there is any excuse for making such bathetic confessions of envy in public, it is that my feelings in this context are unlikely to be unique. A striking number of us (that is, we who have yet to become who we are) are apt, in our private moments, to express our understanding of how the world could be altered for the better by picturing to ourselves various businesses we would like to start. In our more self-indulgent moods, we may even entertain detailed musings about what the awning should look like above the shop or how the advertisements for the new service ought to be phrased. These pleasing and all-consuming daydreams appear to spring from those very same aspects of our personalities which led us as children to delight in running a grocery store out of a corner of the kitchen or to open a hotel in a cardboard box in the garden – as though there was some sort of innate and enduring human impulse to lend entrepreneurial form to certain of our deeply held enthusiasms and insights.

I pledged that I would return to the fair one year with some floating shoes of my own.