D A GRAY (Britain's defective entrepreneurs, May 15) is right to suggest that our financiers need to take lessons from our competitors. The motor industry provides some interesting examples.
When the British motor industry was thrown together into one bed - ''big is beautiful'' was the idea in the 1960s - the greatest asset they had was Alec Issigonis, the Anglo-Greek engineer who had designed the Morris Minor and the Mini. He was, at the time, the best car designer in Europe. He had on test a small four-seater hatchback, before any other manufacturer in the world.
In another country, he might have been made the chairman of the new company: he should certainly have been put on the board. But it would be unthinkable to give real authority to an engineer in this country: the man they put in charge of British Leyland was a bus salesman. They scrapped Issigonis's prototype, and did not even give him a job.
Salesmanship is all very well, if you have a good product to sell: but if you use high-pressure salesmanship to sell rubbish, you just give yourself a bad name. Which is more or less what happened.
At a later date, De Lorean had no trouble getting money for his manufacturing project.
Our financiers, who take a pride in their ignorance of technicalities, are unable to tell the difference between an honest engineer and a plausible rogue.
Things are different in Japan: Mr Marita, the co-founder and for long the chairman of Sony, and Honda, the founder of the firm that bears his name, were both engineers. And in Germany there are local banks that are committed to supporting local industries. They often own enough shares in these companies to be able to protect them against takeover bids. They also employ technically qualified people to assess the technical merits of their proposed investments.
In neither of those countries have they ever heard of ''management science''. They expect their managers to know something about the things that they are managing.
P W Agnew,
Energy Speaker,
Scottish Green Party,
8 Forth Crescent,
Riverside, Stirling. May 16.
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