42 Degrees - Business from a different angle

We've all seen Sir Alan Sugar's interview technique. For 12 weeks this spring, the nation watched, toes curled, as he grilled wannabe assistants on the BBC's business reality programme The Apprentice. The contestants resembled bunnies blinking into the headlights of an oncoming juggernaut as he first dazzled them with the merciless brilliance of his interrogation and then flattened them with the crushing weight of his logic.

So it is not surprising that Sir Alan is no great believer in interviews as a way of assessing people. He favours a more pragmatic 'suck it and see' approach. "You just can't tell about people upfront," he growls. "The interview is a useless way to tell what they are made of. The only way to really be sure about people is to work with them for three or four months."

As grand inquisitor in the series, which has transformed him from a run-of-the-mill multi-millionaire businessman into a modern entrepreneurial icon, he comes across as tough and obsessively focused on business performance, with little regard for anyone's feelings. And his clinical demolition of candidate after candidate could leave you with the impression that people and team building lie fairly low on his list of priorities.

Yet he says the leap from lone-wolf businessman to becoming leader of a team – otherwise known as a manager – is one of the hardest but most important lessons an entrepreneur will ever learn.

"For an entrepreneur to succeed, it is vital that they are a team player. No one is an island and an entrepreneur is no exception. Without the help and support of other people, not only among their own team, but also in partnership with other businesses and business advisers, a loner will not survive."

Strangely enough, he takes exactly the same no-nonsense approach when the roles are reversed and he is in the interviewee's chair – or sun lounger to be more precise. But, despite being on holiday in Marbella, he is not exactly relaxed and you would struggle to describe his manner as sunny.

Mind you, he's always polite. He just doesn't seem to know how to dissemble. He doesn't fake warmth, he makes no effort whatsoever to adjust himself to his audience and he applies exactly the same brusque economy of logic to answering questions as he does to posing them on The Apprentice.

So a conversation with Sir Alan is a master class in straight talking and straight thinking. He answers only the question asked, providing no more or less than the information requested. He swats away questions he finds difficult or uninteresting with a curt: "Can't remember. Next!"

It is only when the subject of people and the role they play in the life of the entrepreneur comes up that he becomes more expansive. He expresses an acute appreciation of both the symbolic and practical help they offer. "The first important people in my business life were those I adopted as role models or heroes," he says. "I never fixed on people who were miles ahead of me. At every stage in my life I have always drawn inspiration from people who were just a few steps ahead of me."

His first business hero was his uncle, John, who ran a hardware shop in Victoria, central London. "My dad was a wage earner. But Uncle John showed me that there was another way to live – working for yourself."

When pressed, however, for people he particularly admires now, he names Arnold Weinstock, the legendary founder of GEC, "for his hard work, creative instinct and nose for the market place."

But the closest he gets to full-blown hero-worship is his admiration for media magnate Rupert Murdoch. "Murdoch's got a lot of balls. He's a gambler, a non-conformist who is prepared to go against the flow. His most impressive moves were when he took on the print unions at Wapping and transformed Fleet Street. A few years later he took a massive 20-year gamble in setting up satellite television in this country and transformed that industry, too."

His point is that even Murdoch would not have been able to do it all alone. He hints at regret that he didn't learn that lesson earlier in his own career. "When I was starting out I was on my own. I had no mentor, no guidance, nothing."

In fact, it was precisely his mistrust of traditional recruitment procedures married to his awareness that entrepreneurs cannot act alone that drew him to working on The Apprentice in the first place. "It wasn't exactly an on-the-job assessment, but it was a great way of getting to know people and understanding their strengths and competencies," he says.

He built his own team slowly over time by the simple means of employing people and staying faithful to those with whom he gelled and rapidly parting ways with those with whom he had no rapport. "On the way up, you need other people to take on the things you can't do yourself. My employees tend to last five minutes – some people are frankly unmanageable – or 15 years. When they stay, they grow to understand how you work and how you think."

He may need people but, as you might have guessed, Sir Alan has little patience with collegiate or consultative management styles. The role of the boss is to provide clear leadership, he argues. "People have a need to know who is the boss and where they stand at all times. Never forget that."

For anyone who has ever worked for Sir Alan Sugar, such a possibility seems extremely remote.

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