AN educated guess suggests that if Marilyn Orcharton were to be presented with the concept of the half-empty glass and the half-full one, she would reach straight for the latter. She would probably market it, and while making a cool million out of the half-full glass, would still manage to convince someone that the half-empty one was A Good Thing.

The president of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce has confessed that she knew she was an entrepreneur at the age of 15. The only member of

staff willing and able to sell the ''sens-ible'' shoes which carried a two-and-sixpence commission, she made her Saturday job pay packet match the salary of the full-time sales staff through a shrewd assessment of customers' feet as they walked through the shoe shop door.

Metaphorically, she has been looking at customers' feet ever since, judging how best to make her two-and-sixpence from them. Now she has it in mind to make some half-crowns, or more

likely some euros, not for herself, but for the city during her term of office.

If any macho west of Scotland male felt it was a risk to appoint the first female president in the Chamber's 215-year history, they should have been reassured by Dr Orcharton's entrepreneurial skills and her stated optimism about the positive effects which a new devolved Scottish Parliament, closer links with Europe, and the new millennium can have on Glasgow. ''These,'' she said when she was appointed president of the Chamber of Commerce in January of this year, ''are all great opportunities for Glasgow businesses, not threats.''

Dr Orcharton is 52 years old, but seems to be something of an enfant terrible in the hitherto staid world of the Chamber of Commerce. When she joined in 1990, she saw the Chamber as getting out of touch, and agreed that it was not good for its image to have no women on board. She became a director, then vice-president, before her appointment as president.

Her stated intention has been to drag it into the 21st century, and she has said it was a case of move forward or die.

She has encouraged other women into the Chamber, but she hotly disputes that she is a feminist. Indeed, she sees feminists as ''a woolly hat brigade who want positive discrimination''. It is doubtful whether a woolly hat has ever graced the well-groomed locks of Ms Orcharton and she professes an honesty about the qualities of women, which do not include being good about business rules. She refers to women treating business meetings like a coffee morning and has spoken scathingly of her contempt for women who sleep their way to the top.

Perhaps it is her logical science

background which makes her the exception who not only knows the rules, but has turned them into a money-spinner. First there was Denplan, and now Isoplan, both aimed at maintaining standards in the professions. Well endowed with self confidence herself, she feels women let themselves down through lack of it.

If this makes her sound a bit of a hard cookie, there is evidence to prove she is quite the opposite. Hard to believe of a woman well on her way to her second fortune, she is inclined to be over-trusting when showing her wares to clients. She is also a bit of a softie when it comes to her family. She is the doting mother of 29-year-old Aileen, a chartered surveyor and amateur singer, and Alan, 27, a systems analyst in America, and supportive wife of David, now studying for his Masters in construction law.

It is not only her family who bring out her softer side. She is determined to

help Glasgow's disadvantaged children through a scheme to recycle computers. Evidently 20% of old computers are recyclable. She has networked contacts and come up with a scheme which will make those computers as new, when they will be put into schools in Cybercafe-style situations with university students teaching the kids computer skills. Simultaneously, she hopes to bring to Glasgow a Swiss machine which disposes of the other 80% of old computers in an environmentally friendly way, thus bringing 600 jobs to the city, employing students more gainfully than delivering pizzas, and helping disadvantaged children at one fell swoop.

She sees herself as an ideas person, coming up with 20 a day, half of which she recognises as ''ridiculous''. The rest she encourages others to put into action. If the phrase cock-eyed optimist comes to mind, forget the cock-eyed and

concentrate on the optimism, which appears to be rooted in a happy childhood. She was educated at Jordanhill School in Glasgow and then at Glasgow University, where she went hot on the heels of John Smith, Donald Dewar, and Jimmy Gordon. Did that happy band all use the words motivation, hope, and optimism as the keys to their success? And what about the word ''networking''? Once seen as part of the old school tie syndrome, this has become a practice which women in business use with a vengeance, and none more so than Dr Orcharton. Which is presumably how we see Jimmy Gordon (now Lord Gordon of Strathblane but in 1992 still Jimmy Gordon, chairman of Radio Clyde) taking a 20% equity stake in Kite Consultants, the company Dr Orcharton bought that year with her first million.

Although she dates her entrepreneurial skills back to her teens, Dr Orcharton's first career was as a dentist. Good at science, her career options were presented as being medicine, dentistry, or pure sciences.

With a view to later juggling a career and family, she chose dentistry as the best option and it wasn't until 1986 that she first dipped a toe into the business world, when she set up Denplan, a leading dental business planning consul-tancy. It also offered an insurance scheme which allowed the public to spread the cost of dental treatment. A simple idea, but one which netted her #1m when a venture capitalist bought her out. Kite Consultants came next, and Dr Orcharton set her sights on another million by researching and putting together her Isoplan series, a do-it-yourself guide for professional people to achieve the British Standards Institute ISO/9000 quality assurance standard. With no money coming into the company, Kite Consultants took the gamble of investing #200,000 in putting Isoplan together. It was launched in 1996, with 10 titles, aimed at dentists, doctors, pharmacists, and

other professionals. Dr Orcharton described it as ''a simple Enid Blyton kit'', and claimed that if the best practice standards it advocated were used, mistakes would not happen.

Are we just talking pushy woman with an eye on the main chance? If so, it is a pushy woman with charm and personality. That she is Glasgow Chamber's first woman president is seen in the commercial world as a very positive move, and although she may be realistic about the limitations of women, deputy president Subhash Joshi sees her not only as a role model for other women in business, but as a great support to the ethnic business community.

She is described as exuberant and charismatic. She is even compared with Billy Graham: an evangelist not for Jesus but for Glasgow. It is said she will bring about change in a fuddy-duddy institution and manage to bring traditionalists along with her. She is also described as dynamic as well as a listener: a paradox, surely, in the cut-and-thrust world of the multi-millionaire.

''Evangelistic'' is not a word she argues with. At one stage in her life, she could have been described as being so in her religion, but was an enfant ter-rible even in church. She taught in

Sunday school some 20 years ago, and compared God to the good feeling the children got when they received gold stars in their jotters. This, however, was too simplistic for the church authorities and Dr Orcharton was removed from office, the only recorded instance of failure on her CV.

Today she evangelises the grown-ups for the benefit of mammon, not God. She is throwing ideas at the city, but is aware she is not the person to be ''Pied Piper, taking them to the promised land''. Although she has said that the new Scottish Parliament will be positive for Glasgow, she is a self-confessed unionist. Having changed career direction with ease, she may well change her political mind: she is not a woman to go with the flow, but one who will turn the flow to best advantage. She is more the lobbyist than the politician, and if her public speaking is anything to go by, her privately presented arguments should be persuasive enough to achieve her aims.

Hooked on the cut and thrust of the entrepreneurial world, it is hard to see her relaxing into her planned ''retiral'' job as a cruise-line lecturer. Dr Orcharton is mainstream, not slipstream.