Lend Me Your Ear

Sir Martin Jacomb was born in 1929. After Eton and Oxford, he was a barrister, before starting a career in business. He has been Vice-Chairman of Kleinwort Benson, Deputy Chairman of Barclays and was Chairman of the Canary Wharf Group, the London Docklands property company, during the epic takeover battle of the early 2000s. Sir Martin has also held senior board position at Rio Tinto and Marks and Spencer, been Chairman of Prudential and served on the Court of the Bank of England.

John Rossman is a US tech entrepreneur who worked alongside Jeff Bezos as he built Amazon. America’s third most valuable company after Microsoft and Apple, Amazon has a stock market value approaching a trillion dollars – bigger than the national income of Switzerland, Taiwan, Sweden and all but 17 countries in the world. The company accounts for almost half of all US internet-based retailing, up from less than a fifth back in 2011. And this e-commerce giant – whose activities now range from retailing to entertainment, health and life sciences – is increasingly in the firing line, over subjects including data use, market power and tax. John Rossman, who launched and led some of Amazon’s most important divisions, provides insightful analysis on all these issues and more. We also discuss his book - "Think Like Amazon: 50 and a half ideas to become a Digital Leader" This interview was written up in The Telegraph on Sunday 13th October 2019 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/10/12/amazons-success-stifl

Jonathan Tepper is the co-author of "The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition". In his book, Tepper describes how America has gone from an open, competitive marketplace to an economy where a few very powerful companies dominate key industries that affect our daily lives – from health insurance, to many consumer goods and also tech giants like Google and Facebook and Amazon. “Every day, ordinary people transfer their money to monopolists and oligopolists” says Tepper – proposing instead vigorous anti-trust legislation to return America and other Western nations including the UK to an era when competition created higher economic growth, more jobs and higher wages, and more start-up companies too. As a founder of several companies himself, with a background in both finance and citizen journalism, this is a story Tepper is well-qualified to tell.

Elisabeth Schimpfössl is the author of “Rich Russians – from Oligarchs to Bourgeoise” – an eye-catching study of the new Russian business elite that’s emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Originally from Austria, and now an academic at the UK’s Aston University, Schimpfössl enticed dozens of so-called oligarchs and minigarchs to discuss their personal stories, how they acquired wealth, their views on Western culture – and the future of East-West relations during what some now call “a New Cold War”. “Schimpfössl’s book benefits from this long parade of interviews” says Foreign Affairs magazine, “which put a human face on her analysis”. Her analysis is one of robber barons becoming gentlemen, of a rush to be seen as refined and bourgeoise, of “the man’s world” in post-Soviet Russia, but also of “powerful, unstoppable” Russian women.

James Barr is the author of “A Line in the Sand” – a riveting book on how British and French diplomats re-made the map of the Middle East during and after the First World War. This British historian tells a tale of hubris and political skulduggery, as two colonial powers cooked up the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, dividing the region by drawing a line across Syria, from the Mediterranean to the Persian frontier. Now Barr has written a follow-on book – Lords of the Desert – about the UK and America competing for influence across the Arab World during and after the Second World War. “People have been fighting over Syria for as long as we have written records,” he says, during this wide-ranging discussion on post-colonialism and pipeline politics. Amidst today’s tragic Syrian conflict, with foreign powers still vying to control the region, Barr’s beautifully written books are of huge relevance.