John Linton
Over night I received an email that greatly saddened me. It was from a long term ex-colleague telling me that someone we had worked with, and had some of the best times of our early working and personal lives with, had taken his own life following the collapse of the business he and his two sons had built and run for the best part of the past 20 or so years. It had a marked affect on me and it took a while for me to be able to pick up the phone. I called him after I had absorbed the news and we spoke for some 30 minutes though I can't remember the last time we have spoken and it produced a confused mix of a flood of memories of much better and certainly far more irresponsible times as well as a deepening sense of something really bad.
He had kept in touch with Ian over the years partly because they had lived in close proximity to each other for much of that time and partly because they occasionally did business with each other. He told me that Ian had given no indication of any serious business or personal problems over the last few months and their families had spent New Years Eve together where Ian seemed to be his usual high spirits. He knew no details of the company's collapse other than that a major bank had appointed a receiver in late February and that his elder son had been contacted by police after they had found his father dead of an overdose in an hotel room in another country on Saturday morning.
After I put the phone down I thought how incredibly wasteful it is that so many really talented people (and I don't count myself as talented in any way) give so much of their lives to their 'careers' when they have so many different talents and capacities for making themselves and those around them happy. Ian was an OK salesman of 'big iron' and only ever an average manager within a multi-national corporation environment but as a small business manager he was exceptional and he became better and better as he continued to grow his business over the years. His business talents were quite limited but allied to his many positive aspects as a human being he combined them into a potent positive mix of sustained success. His sheer 'likeableness made it almost impossible to refuse him any request which perhaps is the greatest 'business' talent of all.
He had that rare talent of being able to take over another company and almost instantly make the people there respect and like him and, at least it seemed from the results, work harder and more effectively under his stewardship than they had done for the previous owners - an almost unique situation from my observations over the years. His 'modus operandi' was to leave the management (and some times the previous owners) in place and then only very gently and over a considerable time, introduce his methods and processes into the taken over business. After a year or so the taken over business was doing far better than it ever had previously but still, largely, retained the previous employees.
I don't know how large he had built his company to but, starting from nothing but a good idea and his passion it eventually sprawled over every major city in Australia and New Zealand and was operating in at least three countries in S E Asia that I know of with more than 1,000 employees. I have no idea of what could have gone wrong and have no desire to find out - my only interest was only ever with the person I had known for all but a small part of my working life and someone with whom I had shared some of the better times of my working life.
Over the past 30 years I would only have seen Ian on far less a dozen occasions - most of them brief, chance meetings at some airport lounge or hotel around Australia and only on two or three occasions for a previously arranged lunch or dinner together with other mutual friends from our 'era'. Whenever we did run into each other he always had the ability to make me laugh simply by his uncontrollably infectious personal happiness and outrageous jokes as well as his capacity to make you think you were some very important part of his personal life - even for the few minutes of a chance encounter. He was a remarkable person.
The world is certainly a poorer and less happy place today.