Bill Morrow

I have a tale of terror to tell that should act as a warning to all those who would invent. There are among us those whose minds are inclined toward brilliance, those who look at the world with a slightly different slant - inventors and entrepreneurs obsessed with the bright light of originality and who have changed the way we all live with their thoughts.

But some of these gifted individuals did not survive to fully exploit their great minds, for this is the story of those who met their demise by the very things they had invented. If only they had taken the time or had the money available to them to use more effective materials or test their inventions before trying them out themselves, maybe they could have lived just that little longer. To follow are the ill-fated stories of some of these great men who proved that innovation can be a killer under some imagined investment wanted ads that might have saved their lives.

He may only be the second richest man on the planet, having lost his crown yet again to friend and fellow Bridge player Bill Gates, but Warren Buffett is the man that all private equity investors strive to be even a fraction as successful as.

This unassuming 79 year-old gentleman has kept people guessing all of his life how he has become quite so successful. Whilst other private equity investors have been chasing the fast buck to live the high roller life, he has a slow but steady approach to business. It’s a classic case of the tortoise and the hare and one that aspiring private equity investors would do well to emulate.

So, you finally have your website up and running, and it’s starting to generate some sales. Congratulations! But don’t get too comfortable and start thinking that you can now simply sit back, relax, and watch the sales roll in... Allowing your website to stagnate will undoubtedly hold back your business growth.

Far too many entrepreneurs mistakenly think that, once their website has launched, their input into it has come to an end – and this could not be farther from the truth. Apart from placing new products on the site, all too many businesses allow their websites to become static brochures that quietly slip away into obscurity: sliding down the search engine rankings and becoming lost in the throng – the void that exists beyond the first couple of pages of the search engine results. This is, of course, detrimental to business growth – but it can easily be avoided with effective and structured website maintenance.

It’s official: we’re in the midst of a small business funding crisis in this country. Banks aren’t lending, seemingly frozen in fear of going the way of so many of their fallen peers, unwilling to relinquish the £billions that the government has given them specifically to stimulate business lending. What are we to do in the face of such illogical hoarding that is only likely to deepen and prolong the economic doom and gloom that we are now submerged in?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no feminist… I’m very much a man’s man—a bloke hailing from north of the border, for goodness’ sake—but I don’t think that you need to have two X chromosomes to see that the issue of pay-packet inequality is completely ridiculous. Women have worked diligently for decades on end, trying to achieve what should be a relatively simple goal: equal pay for equal work. But this concept has continuously fallen to the wayside, and has not received the support and encouragement that it deserves. Even after years in the workplace working side-by-side with their male counterparts, the discrepancy in pay and incentives is undeniable—and unfathomable.

For example, an Equality and Human Rights Commission report has uncovered that women working in the finance sector earn up to 60 per cent less than men working in the same field. Perhaps we might expect that of some small, unenlightened area clinging to archaic sexist beliefs about a woman’s place being in the home, but this statistic relates to our beloved, cosmopolitan, diversity-celebrating City of London—and this makes it all the more difficult to grasp.