business telly

A contestant on The Apprentice, just now.

I was tutored by Al Gore, and personally mentored by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.

Grumpy old Uncle Alan has sent them all out to buy fruit and veg. I like Grumpy Old Uncle Alan. Grumpy old Uncle Alan is basically Harold Pinter in business, only a bit more talkative. Indeed, Grumpy old Uncle Alan has things to tell us, and is not shy of telling them. He will see through fools personally mentored by the Buddha and curse them roundly.

Comments

[Charlie]

Nice timing, also. "The name of your team is 'Logic', is that right?" And the bit at the end where he said "there's no shame in doing what you're good at ..." and the poor guy as good as burst into tears. It's the sympathy that's unbearable, after all.

[jamie]

Not quite: better than that.

"There's no SHAME in you being an accountant, Edward..."

I'm watching it on the one hour delay thing.

[dsquared]

Quite apart from anything, both Gore and Dalai are basicallly famous for losing (in the Lama's case epically so). And Tutu is more a case of "surviving long enough to be in the right place at the right time" than any gift of strategy that might be transferable to the business world; he's the epitome of the Cautious Colin that Alan Sugar claims to despise.

[jamie]

"...both Gore and Dalai are basicallly famous for losing (in the Lama's case epically so)

Ooh, that's dead wrong. The Dalai's the sole reason why anybody cares about the Tibetans rather than, say, the Hmong or the Wa or the Naga. He's done absolutely brilliantly with the cards he was dealt. There are whole actual countries that would die for the attention the Dalai gets, and none that I could think of that could get people out on the street like Tibet can. He's a great politician who's probably done the best it's possible to do against insurmountable institutional barriers, which is to say that everyone thinks that there is such a place as Tibet that is ruled by China, rather than part of China that happens to be home to Tibetans.

[dsquared]

Hrrrm, all these things basically true of Owen Glyndwr though.

[chris y]

I'd have thought the historical analogy for the Dalai and his plucky little band was rather the Miami Cubans - disproportionate influence on Western policy for a generation, but growing old and increasingly losing their tenuous grip on the levers of power, so that whatever settlement is finally made between Washington and Havana will pay no attention to their demands whatsoever.

Putting off the evil moment. Slow motion car crash.

(For the record, I don't regard the Dalai, at least recently, as being as pernicious as the Miami Cubans.)

[Phil]

I burst out laughing when Edward Not-An-Accountant said he "hand-picked" the nice Irish guy to run the soup operation, and Seralan just repeated it back - "Hand-picked?" He's got a great ear for bullshit. Even better than watching EN-A-A trying to use his Jedi mind tricks on Seralan, and failing -
Says here you was trained at a posh accounting school, that right?
- It's all there.
Is that a yes or a no?
- I carry it with me. It is what it is. There is no spoon.
Well, was you or wasn't you?
I'd have felt quite sorry for him if he hadn't been such an annoying tosser.

[ajay]

The Dalai's the sole reason why anybody cares about the Tibetans rather than, say, the Hmong or the Wa or the Naga.

I care about the Hmong!

But, yes, point taken.

Re the Miami Cubans point: this reminds me of something I wrote at (ahem) FoE, pointing out that when John Le Carre, writing in 1979, wanted an utterly hopeless, dwindling nationalist movement for Smiley's People, he picked the Lithuanian exiles; because who could possibly imagine Lithuania ever regaining its independence from the USSR?
And, twelve years later, there it was.

[ajay]

Grumpy old Uncle Alan is basically Harold Pinter in business

That's not quite fair. I can't stand Pinter, but he had a highly successful career - he was one of Britain's most successful playwrights and unquestionably the most critically acclaimed. Alan Sugar, on the other hand, ran Amstrad.

[skidmarx]

Who could possibly imagine Lithuania ever regaining its independence from the USSR?
Algis Budrys.

[Phil]

when John Le Carre, writing in 1979, wanted an utterly hopeless, dwindling nationalist movement for Smiley's People, he picked the Lithuanian exiles

Doesn't really compare, given that I never even wrote this down, but when teenage 1970s me (plotting out the stories that were going to make my name as a Writer) wanted to imagine a form of Maoism even more extreme and at odds with reality than the Albania line, I picked on Montenegro. (The idea was going to be that this guy became an activist in the Montenegro-line CP(M-L), and nobody quite knew whether he was the only member or if there even was such a party. And plot, there was going to be some plot as well.) Obviously this was at odds with what was actually going on in the socialist federated republic of Montenegro, but I didn't think anyone would know or care (cf. Moldavia). It's probably just as well that I'd never heard of Kosovo.

[skidmarx]

Cf. Evan Tanner, who supports any number of never-going-to-succeed national movements, like that to restore the Stuarts to the British monarchy, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, and that of the heir to the Lithuanian throne.