ABSTRACT
One evening in May 1980 John Clark, a man with a reputation for dabbling in a variety of entrepreneurial activities, approached an old college friend who had just commented casually that the company to which he had just been appointed a director with a ‘turnaround’-type brief, had a ‘wide variety of obsolete stock and other rubbish which they had been trying to get rid of for 20 years’. The result of this approach was a lunch date the next week to see ‘the attic’.
