WE HAVE had far too few admissions of failure from corporate Scotland since the banking crash in the autumn of 2008.
From the likes of Fred Goodwin in the banking sector we have seen scant penitence and there has been continued delay and obfuscation on inquiries into what went wrong, as we report today in the case of HBOS.
Against that backdrop, it is all the more admirable that business leader Sir Tom Hunter can admit that he failed to see the crash coming and that, as a result, his West Coast Capital private equity business was insufficiently prepared.
That the 54-year-old entrepreneur used the phrase that this was "100 per cent his fault" and to make the admission to a group of young business people makes this all the more refreshing. "We did not stick to our knitting," he said, in a phrase that describes ignoring core business activities. "If I am honest about it we had lost our focus and were too widely spread in the investments we were looking at," said Sir Tom.
"When the crisis hit we were in bad shape to deal with it. It was nobody else's fault, absolutely 100 per cent my fault and I had to deal with it."
It is worth pondering the ruthless honesty and self-analysis of that phrase, for these sentiments are heard all too rarely. That he is passing on not just his expertise or his passion for business but an attitude of blunt self-appraisal to the next generation of entrepreneurs is commendable.
He also preached the need to learn from history in order to avoid repeating it, saying he had now became "an anorak about the financial crisis" after he realised that there had been lone voices in the wilderness giving warning of potential disaster.
Hindsight is a gift to us all. Of course Ponzi schemes, junk bonds, bundled-up packages of defaulting mortgages and the rest should have foretold the looming calamity. Better now, though, that the likes of Sir Tom are prepared to read the runes properly, because not all of this malfeasance has gone away and not all have learned the lessons.
It was also good to hear his continued commitment to social enterprises, which are set to remain vital in the coming years of continuing austerity as a vital mechanism for helping hard-hit communities work their way out of the pit of disadvantage they could all too readily be sucked into.
Sir Tom's view - summed up as a total focus on turning a profit first, before diverting these proceeds back into the community - smacked of both acumen and decency.
This makes the latest delay on the report into the HBOS collapse yet more depressing. The Herald reveals that the findings of the inquiry started in September 2012, already pushed to beyond the General Election, will now be delayed until at least October.
It is as if no-one had noticed how corrosive this kind of failure has become in the wake of Chilcot. If our entrepreneurs are owning up to misjudgments, arming themselves with the knowledge to learn from these, and passing this attitude on to the next generation, how sad it is that sclerotic official inquires are often so hopeless at helping inform this process.
The conclusion must be that official inquiries into our crises should be focused and swift so that their lessons are delivered in time to be relevant. Someone like Sir Tom Hunter is crying out for the information on which to base better decisions in future, but officialdom appears to be locked into delay and denial.
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