Gerry Robinson, the former boss of UK media group Granada, hosts a famous TV show called I’ll Show Them Who’s Boss (formerly Troubleshooter.) Robinson is a controversial character who retired from Granada before the collapse of ITV Digital and the ensuing confusion in British digital TV project. Whether he was a genuine success at Granada is hard to judge. They gobbled up a lot of businesses under his tenure, consolidating British TV. However, in this week’s episode, a very interesting reversal took place, where he managed to get a failing family firm to reinstate the old general manager they had sacked two years before. He had been responsible for the business’s growth the prior 10 years.

What was interesting here was it seemed to show quite clearly the two types of business people: those that know how to create cashflows (sacked manager), and those who know how to appropriate them (family owners). Seems that Robinson himself may belong more to the latter camp, but he nevertheless appeared to have righted a wrong with everyone going away happy. Of course, who knows what reality looked like before the edit? The reinstated manager offered a simple wisdom: look after the people and the profits will come soon enough, suggesting that being process- rather than results-driven was the key to business success.

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