The Bastard's a Genius - Alistair Mant

The story of how Robert Clifford went from being a poor student to a global shipping entrepreneur reads more like adventure fiction than cold hard fact?but it's all true. The tale contains the usual quota of disaster and triumph, spiced with a fascinating account of ingenuity and invention at work. After all, if you go into business, you might as well experience a financial meltdown and a bank receivership. If you take up yachting, you might as well win the Sydney-Hobart race in a near photo-finish. If you invent and then dominate a global fast-ferry market, you might as well win the Hales Trophy for the fastest Atlantic crossing, not once but three times. But behind the swashbuckling adventure story lies a complex, affectionate, and little-understood man of surprising sensitivity and creativity. He is an all-action hero consumed by the need to conceive, shape, and bring to fruition objects of great utility and beauty. He is a man quite unlike the standard-issue "businessman" and much more like those distinguished artists and scientists who are impelled by some inner voice to do the work they do.

Alistair Mant is Chairman of the Socio-Technical Strategy Group, which advises on the inherent capacity for change and responsibility within work systems, and specializes in leadership development, the assessment of talent, the de-bunking of fashionable dogma, and the avoidance of crippling blunders. He is the author of Intelligent Leadership.