He had spent his life travelling the world and trading, building a mighty conglomerate of companies, most of them market leaders in their sectors but none of them household names and none of their products remotely sexy. He was 60 years old and his only daughter had just presented him with his first grandson, who had been named after him.
He couldn’t help himself from beaming with pride as he passed a photograph of the boy across the lunch table at his club in Pall Mall.
‘When he is 40,’ he said, ‘and I am long gone, and he visits his mother and asks what exactly Grandpa did to make so much money, I want her to be able to send him to her library where this book will be waiting for him. We only need to print up one copy, but it must be done beautifully and it will tell him all the things I would be able to tell him if he was sitting here with me now. I want to tell him about my parents and my grandparents, about where they came from and what they did to help me get started, and then I want to explain how I built the company.’
He was under no illusion that the book would ever be of interest to the general public, although I did convince him that it would be worth printing up a few dozen copies so that it could go into various archives within the company as well, for the use of future historians. In essence, however, all he wanted was an 80,000 word letter to his grandson. It was a joy to be working with such a specific and achievable brief, not having to worry about finding agents or publishers or scheming how to get it into the shops and the charts.