Hello and welcome to the latest edition of The Only Story in Town, where you get one great business story every week.

This week I have been in San Francisco to speak to Brian Chesky, the co-founder and chief executive of Airbnb. Because I am reporting on location, there will be no audio version this week.

I spoke to Chesky after he hosted Airbnb’s annual summer release event at its headquarters in San Francisco. This is where Airbnb announces the new features it is adding to its app.

The focus of the conversation was AI given the work that Airbnb is doing, the growing backlash against the technology and Chesky’s fascinating views on all this.

The new Airbnb feature that has attracted the most attention and headlines so far is hotels. Airbnb users will now be able to book rooms at independent and boutique hotels, alongside the apartments, villas and houses that are already available. This feature will initially be available in 20 cities, including London and New York.

This represents a remarkable U-turn for Chesky. Airbnb was launched in 2007 in San Francisco as an antidote to hotels. It was a way for people to stay in more interesting places than characterless conference hotel rooms.

“Our first tagline was forget hotels. I thought we existed in opposition to hotels,” Chesky said.

Chesky has even avoided staying in hotels since founding Airbnb because of concerns it would undermine the brand if he was spotted in one.

“I don’t book a lot of hotels,” he said. “I was always afraid someone would photograph me in a hotel. I don’t have a lot of answers to my favourite hotels. I haven’t stayed in many in the last 18 years because I was like: ‘Oh, I will have to wear sunglasses and a fake moustache.’”

Read more

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of The Only Story in Town, where you get one great business story every week.

This edition is slightly different in that I want to explore an idea rather than a story. This idea is that constraints make us better. It is that success does not come from boundless ambition or aiming for the stars, but from setting boundaries that can unlock our creativity.

This idea comes from a new book by David Epstein called Inside The Box, which has just been published. The idea is counterintuitive, so let me explain.

I have been looking forward to this book since the author’s last title Range. That book explored how generalists were better placed to succeed in the modern world than specialists.

Range gave examples such as Roger Federer, perhaps the greatest tennis player of all-time. Rather than spending his whole childhood playing tennis (and building up his 10,000-hours of practice, which Malcolm Gladwell said was the key to success in his book Outliers), Federer played lots of different sports when he was young, only committing to tennis when he was a teenager. According to Range, this helped to explain why Federer moved so gracefully across the court and played with a style that had never been seen in tennis before.

Inside The Box puts forward another idea - that setting boundaries makes us more creative. As Epstein writes, reducing our choices forces us to get more out of what remains, which encourages us to be innovative. In contrast, when we have total freedom people tend to follow the path of least resistance, or just get lost.

The examples he gives on this are fascinating. They include Dmitri Mendeleev, who invented the periodic table because he needed a way to fit an explanation about chemical elements into a book. Another is the failure of the tech company General Magic in the 1990s. It had access to seemingly unlimited funds and talent but was unable to come up with a product that people actually wanted. It just produced a collection of interesting but random innovations. No-one at General Magic ever wrote down a hypothesis or a plan, they just tried to invent stuff.

Another person that Epstein features in the book is Bent Flyvbjerg, who was professor of major programme management at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. His research found that only 8.5 per cent of big projects - such as public infrastructure work - finished on-time and on-budget.

He concluded that the projects which succeeded took the approach of “think slow, act fast”. They took the time to set boundaries and look at potential problems so the project could not spiral out of control. Then they got on with building it. In contrast, those that went wrong did the opposite - “think fast, act slow”. They started quickly and by the time it was clear there were problems, the project had become too big, so it was slow and expensive to change it.

In the book Epstein also speaks to Ed Catmull, the co-founder and former boss of Pixar, the brilliant movie studio behind Toy Story, Coco, Inside Out and a string of other animated movies. “I found early on that an abundance of resources leads to sloppiness,” Catmull says.

As you can see, these examples and comments challenge a lot of assumptions that are dominant in business right now. We celebrate start-ups based on how much money they raise, we talk about the beauty of having a “blank canvas” to work with, leaders are encouraged to give their team as much freedom as possible to flourish and Mark Zuckerberg has championed “move fast and break things”.

But much of this is dubious. The amount of money a start-up has raised represents its potential - how much money people are willing to commit to an idea to make it a reality - not necessarily the quality of their product. As the General Magic story shows, that potential can end in nothing. This feels like a particularly apt example right now as AI businesses like OpenAI raise tens of billions of dollars without the revenue or profit to match it.

What is also striking about the ideas in Inside The Box is that they are not that new. It is an important and excellent book, but these ideas have been around for years - even centuries.

Epstein’s book is full of stories from history about successful people using constraints to make themselves better - Mendeleev with the periodic table in the 1860s, Johann Sebastian Bach with music in the 1700s and Virginia Woolf with writing in the early 20th century.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” is a proverb that stems from the Greek philosopher Plato. In the book, Epstein also references a mantra from the advertising industry about trying to come up with a great new marketing campaign: “Give me the freedom of a tight brief.”

So why does this all need saying again in a new book? Why have we become fixated on valuations, freedom and blank canvases?

Read more

Read the story or listen to our mini-audiobook in just 20 minutes.

Share The Only Story in Town

Tom Enders was not a typical chief executive. He had been in the German army and reached the rank of major in the reserves. He was a qualified pilot and loved skydiving. In 2010 he was one of the first people to skydive out of Airbus’s new A400M military plane.

He was also a born optimist. This gave him the confidence to try things that others wouldn’t. But it also meant he could get frustrated with bureaucracy and people dragging their feet. One place he found this was politics. Enders and politics were not a natural fit.

In the summer of 2012, Enders, now 53 years old, had just been given the biggest job of his life. He was chief executive of EADS, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, which was the owner of Airbus, one of the biggest planemakers in the world alongside Boeing.

Despite only becoming boss in June, Enders was ready to do something audacious. He wanted to merge EADS with BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest defence group and the maker of the country’s nuclear submarines and fighter jets.

This task would not only require the backing of the companies’ shareholders but the support of the UK, German and French governments. Enders the optimist was ready to take this on, despite his unease with politics.

Before pressing ahead with the talks, however, Enders went hang-gliding.

Given his love of extreme sports, this was not particularly unusual. But the consequences would be significant.

Enders had an accident. He crash-landed the glider and injured his arms. He had to cancel a trip to China with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.

Missing this trip would cost Enders a vital opportunity to build relations with Merkel.

‘An astonishing piece of strategic myopia’

Airbus was founded in 1970 as a European competitor to Boeing. The German, French and Spanish governments were all involved. The UK initially declined the chance to be part of the project. It was concerned about the cost of the separate Concorde initiative - into which it had invested more than £1 billion developing a supersonic jet - and was considering a domestic alternative that could have involved Rolls-Royce and British Airways.

However, nearly a decade later, the UK joined the project. Airbus needed the UK’s expertise in wings for the new A310 aircraft. It wanted Hawker Siddeley, which was state-owned and part of British Aerospace, to develop smaller wings for the plane.

The UK government agreed a deal that would see the country take a 20 per cent stake in Airbus in return for building the wings and helping to finance the project. This deal was done in 1979.

The partnership was a success. The UK became the hub for Airbus wings, which were then shipped to Toulouse in France, where the planes were assembled. Airbus became a true European rival to Boeing.

However, just over 25 years later, in 2006, the UK stake was sold. British Aerospace had become BAE Systems plc by this point. It was no longer a state-owned entity but a publicly-listed company increasingly focused on expanding its defence business in the US. And there were concerns about the mounting costs of Airbus’s A380 superjumbo project.

BAE sold the stake for £1.9 billion back to EADS, now the parent company of Airbus. Thousands of British workers would continue to work for Airbus and make wings for the planes at its factory in Broughton, North Wales. But the UK would no longer have a direct stake in the business.

David Davis, the Conservative MP, later described the sale of the Airbus stake as “an astonishing piece of strategic myopia” and a “hideously short-term decision”.

But people at the time questioned it too. For instance, Will Hutton wrote in The Observer that it was “strategically stupid, technologically vapid and deeply depressing.”

History has not been kind to this deal, at least in financial terms. Today a 20 per cent stake in Airbus is worth around £25 billion.

The exit of the UK left EADS and Airbus dominated by French and German interests. Both held a 22.5 per cent stake in the business. France’s was held by the government and the media group Lagardère. Germany’s was held by Daimler, owner of Mercedes-Benz. The Spanish government held a 5.5 per cent stake.

This all meant that the governments wielded control over EADS and its key decisions. France and Germany squabbled over the nationality of the chief executive, the base for the head office, and where key investments in research and development were made. There were concerns in Germany that its influence over the company was waning as Airbus aircraft were assembled in France.

Enders was tired of all this interference. He wanted EADS and Airbus to behave like a commercial company free of political meddling. And he wanted to be able to beat Boeing.

A deal with BAE offered a way to do this. And it gave the UK a chance to rectify its mistake.

Read more

Read the story or listen to our mini-audiobook in just 20 minutes.

Share The Only Story in Town

“I could see there was an advantage in having the shoe as light as possible.”

Those are not the words of Sabastian Sawe, who became the first person to win a marathon in less than two hours at the 2026 London Marathon. They are the words of Sir Roger Bannister, who in 1954 became the first person to break the four-minute mile.

Running has always been about shoes and new technology. And shoes have always been about running.

Sir Roger got his shoes from GT Law and Son, a British company. It had a factory in Towcester, Northamptonshire and a workshop in Wimbledon, London.

GT Law was an athlete who thought that the running shoes he wore could be better, so he started making them himself. He set up the business around 1910 and his son, Charles, also joined.

GT Law’s running shoes were popular with athletes during the 1948 London Olympics. It also made football and rugby boots.

Sir Roger and a friend, Eustace Thomas, who was a fell-walker, approached GT Law and Son about making shoes to his specification for an attempt to break the four-minute mile. Sir Roger and Thomas wanted to get the weight of each shoe down from six to four ounces, roughly 113g.

The shoes were made by Charles Law at GT Law’s workshop in Wimbledon. They ended up with a shoe where the leather and the running spikes were unusually thin.

On May 6 1954 at the Iffley Road track in Oxford, Sir Roger used the shoes in a race for the first time.

This is Sir Roger’s account of approaching the finish line in his autobiography:

“My body had long since exhausted all its energy, but it went on running just the same. The physical overdraft came only from greater willpower. This was the crucial moment when my legs were strong enough to carry me over the last few yards as they could never have done in previous years. With five yards to go the tape seemed almost to recede. Would I ever reach it?

“Those last few seconds seemed never-ending. The faint line of the finishing tape stood ahead as a haven of peace. The arms of the world were waiting to receive me, if only I reached the tape without slackening my speed. I leapt at it like a man taking his last spring to save himself from the chasm that threatens to engulf him.”

His time was 3:59.4. Sir Roger’s new shoes may have been the difference between breaking four minutes or not.

In 2015, those shoes were sold at auction for £266,500. Sir Roger donated the proceeds to charity.

Yet despite its role in this historic achievement - and the apparent value of the shoes - GT Law and Son is long gone. By 1970 the business had shut down as a wave of new international brands piled into the shoe market.

However, it had set a path that others could follow.

Shoes and new technology could help humans to do remarkable things. And that is an incredible way to market and sell a product.

Just do it

Nike was always about running.

Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, was a runner. Every evening after work he would go for a run to keep fit and clear his mind. “I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place,” Knight wrote in Shoe Dog, his book about how Nike was built.

It was on a run that Knight had the idea of Nike.

Read more

Our story this week: The ultimate accountable decision

Share The Only Story in Town

“Every year someone comes out of this looking like a donkey,” Sonny Weaver Jr says. “I got a feeling it could be you if you don’t make this deal.”

Jeff Carson, who is on the other side of the phone, mulls his options. He is new in his job. He really doesn’t want to look like a donkey. He makes the deal.

The room around Weaver goes crazy. They think he is mad. Then the owner barges in. “You son of a bitch,” he shouts. “Sonny, you’re a dead man.” Weaver is going to be sacked. He has clearly lost the plot.

But then there is a twist.

Weaver gets straight on the phone and sells what he has just bought from Carson for a much higher price. It is masterful deal-making. He knew what he was doing all along. Weaver is a genius.

Unfortunately we will never know how this deal worked out for everyone.

That is because this is a scene from Draft Day, a movie about the NFL draft. Sonny Weaver Jr is being played by Kevin Costner and he has just bought and sold the sixth pick in the draft.

Draft Day turns the NFL draft into a Hollywood movie. The draft is perfect for Hollywood - it is all about a single dramatic decision that defines everything - who will you pick? It is a decision that can define your year, even your life.

Unlike in Draft Day, in real life we get to see how these decisions play out too. For the general manager of an NFL team, who is the executive responsible for making the pick, it is the ultimate accountable decision. If it is wrong - and the player they choose isn’t very good - they will lose their job. This will happen to those making picks in the 2026 draft, which started on Thursday night.

But the draft also shows something else about big decisions - they don’t matter as much as we think they do.

Read more

Share The Only Story in Town

“Then he threatened to kill me again. I know it sounds silly, but apparently he says he was in the helicopter squad of the SAS. And I know he has got a gun.”

I wrote that line in The Guardian in 2016. It is probably the most bonkers paragraph I ever put in a story.

It is a quote from Darren Topp, who was then the chief executive of BHS and giving evidence to MPs about the collapse of the department store chain.

BHS fell into administration 10 years ago this month. 11,000 jobs were lost, 164 shops were closed and 20,000 pensioners were left with a £571 million deficit in their pension scheme.

The story remains one of the most extraordinary I have ever worked on. It involved meetings in pubs with sources, veiled threats, not-so-veiled threats and, most importantly, the loss of many people’s livelihoods.

We ran a diary from an anonymous BHS employee in The Guardian as the final shops closed that summer. The employee worked in a shop in Kent and the account of their final shift was a sobering read.

“We spent Sunday morning throwing whatever odds and ends were lying around into a giant skip in the store’s loading bay,” they wrote. “Staff went through everything to see if there was anything worth scavenging, but little was of any real use. I pocketed a metal tape measure, despite a total lack of interest in DIY.

“Once the general detritus had been disposed of, the remainder of these two shifts was a waste of everyone’s time. I spent several hours kicking a football around the now-empty ground floor. There was no tearful farewell to the old building as we exited the front doors for the last time, because, having sat in the stifling heat doing nothing for the previous three hours, we were all desperate to stretch our legs and feel some fresh air on our faces. No-one even looked back, as far as I recall.”

A decade on, there is still much to learn from the mess of BHS. But one lesson stands out - that strong leadership, hard work and dedication cannot overcome a bad owner.

LinkedIn has driven an obsession with culture, mindset and the language of leadership. But the BHS saga demonstrates an uncomfortable truth - none of that matters if the owner of the business doesn’t know what they are doing.

Read more

Share The Only Story in Town

One September morning in 1977 a man made his way on to the golf course at Augusta National and shot himself in the head.

How the man got there is still something of a mystery. He was 83 years old and sick with terminal cancer. It is unlikely that he walked all the way, given his health, but no-one has ever admitted driving him out there.

Clifford Roberts was found dead next to Ike’s Pond on the par-3 course at Augusta. The pond was named after the former American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was a friend of Roberts.

Roberts had left a note for his wife: “Dear Betty. I am sorry. I love you. Cliff.”

Roberts seems to have been determined to end his life on his own terms at the place he felt most at home.

In the years that have passed since, many have commented on how fitting it was that he died here.

Roberts was the co-founder of Augusta National and the Masters. He had obsessed over everything at the golf course. The myth of the Masters stems from him.

Roberts initially grew up on a farm in Iowa but seems to have moved around so much as a child that he could barely remember all his different homes. This was one of the reasons he felt so settled at Augusta.

I debated many different ways to start this story about the business of the Masters and how it came to be. What about the drama of Rory McIlroy’s victory in 2025, when he finally completed the career grand slam and gave Augusta another historic moment? What about the unique experience for the spectators who visit the 2026 tournament this week, including the cheap beer and sandwiches? “My favourite thing about the Masters is the sandwiches,” the 2020 champion Dustin Johnson once said. “All of them.” Or what about how Augusta didn’t admit its first black member until 1990 or offer membership to women until 2012?

But really, all of this comes back to Roberts. The story has to start with him.

The beauty of Augusta, the spectacle of the Masters and the majesty of it all are no accident. I have studied and written about the founders of the biggest luxury brands in the world. The story of the Masters is like that.

These founders, such as Enzo Ferrari at Ferrari, were all obsessed with their craft, with every minor detail of their product, and with protecting the scarcity of their brand, so that only a few people could ever access it and everyone else wished they did. “I have yet to meet anyone quite so stubborn as myself and animated by this overpowering passion that leaves me no time for thought or anything else,” Enzo Ferrari once said. “I have, in fact, no interest in life outside racing cars.”

These founders were often seen as dictators or bullies by their critics. They wanted control of everything. This was Roberts too. He was, according to the legendary golfer Sam Snead, a “tough bastard”.

This story isn’t about fashion or fast cars, it’s about golf. But it also shows that the Masters isn’t just a golf tournament, it’s one of the most successful luxury brands in the world.

Read more

The story this week: How Chris Meledandri turned Mario from a Hollywood disaster into a $1 billion blockbuster for Illumination and Nintendo.

Subscribe now

Despicable Me, Minions, The Secret Life of Pets, Sing, The Grinch, The Super Mario Bros Movie and now The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

One man is behind all of these films - Chris Meledandri. He founded Illumination in 2007 and has built it into a hit machine.

But it wasn’t always like that for Meledandri. He once lost Rupert Murdoch $100 million.

And while his films have won over audiences around the world, Illumination has not won over film critics.

Despite its huge commercial success, Illumination has never won an Oscar. And its latest film has been described as “worse than AI” by film critics.

Yet Illumination has made more than $11 billion (£8.3 billion) from 16 films. Critics may not like it, but audiences love it.

This is the story of how Meledandri built a hit machine.

Read more

Share The Only Story in Town

How do you judge the success of a new shop?

Sales, surely - how many customers it attracts and how much they spend.

That used to be the case at Next, Britain’s biggest clothing retailer. But not anymore.

Next opened 15 new shops in the last year and they have missed their sales target. It wasn’t that close either. Total sales from the shops were 12 per cent below the target. 13 of the 15 shops missed their individual target.

However, Next has concluded that these shops were a success.

Next is one of the smartest and best-performing businesses in Britain, so what’s going on here?

These are the new rules of British business.

Britain used to be a growth economy, now it is an extraction economy. It is where businesses get what they can. This means success isn’t about finding new customers, it is about getting more out of the ones you already have.

Read more

Share The Only Story in Town

Shohei Ohtani has broken the rules of baseball. He is a brilliant batter and a brilliant pitcher, which shouldn’t be possible. He has been named the Most Valuable Player four times in the last five years in Major League Baseball and won the World Series twice in a row. Ohtani is a Japanese superstar who has transformed this quintessentially American sport.

Which makes a partnership with Uniqlo perfect. Uniqlo has just agreed a deal to give its name to the stadium of Ohtani’s team - the Los Angeles Dodgers.

This is the latest part of Uniqlo’s own plan for global domination - to be the best in the world at what it does while defying convention.

At the heart of the Uniqlo story is one man - Tadashi Yanai, the chairman, president, chief executive and founder of the modern Uniqlo. He is a 77-year-old man whose autobiography is called “One Win, Nine Losses.”

Yanai had big ambitions for Uniqlo from the start. And what is extraordinary is that this was about building a clothing retailer that does not obsess over trends or fast fashion.

While TikTok and Instagram create trends that push people towards cheap clothing from Shein and other online retailers, Uniqlo ignores them and obsesses over reliability instead - being there for its customers, whether they are children, parents or grandparents.

The UK is a key part of the story. It was London where Uniqlo first arrived outside Japan. And it was London where Yanai learned harsh lessons that have shaped the modern Uniqlo. The title of Yanai’s book tells you a lot about how he thinks - the importance of learning from mistakes. One of his biggest mistakes - which he described as “devastating” - was in the UK.

The appeal of Uniqlo is that everything seems to work. The clothes last for ages, the self-service tills are actually useful, and you can get everything you need in one place. Once you discover Uniqlo, there is no going back. Then you realise that your friends, family and colleagues feel the same - and are wearing Uniqlo too.

People in Japan, where Uniqlo is from, realised this ages ago. They even have a word for it - “unibare”. This reflects the extraordinary ubiquity of Uniqlo but also the challenges the brand faces to achieve its ultimate goal - to become the biggest clothing brand in the world.

Read more

Share The Only Story in Town

It’s 3-0 after 15 minutes. It can’t get any worse than this. Can it?

It can.

Now the goalkeeper is coming off. This is crazy. No-one ever substitutes a player this early in a match, let alone your goalkeeper.

Antonin Kinsky is just 22 years old. He has made mistakes for the first and third goals, gifting the ball to the opposition. But this is a public humiliation. He walks off the pitch disconsolate, patted on the back by his teammates in a vague show of support as he goes.

The manager who decided to take off Kinsky ignores him as he plods past. This man - Igor Tudor - has already lost his first three games as Tottenham Hotspur manager. It will soon be four. He was brought in to make a short-term impact. He has done that. He has made things even worse.

Five minutes later, there is another goal. It is Atletico Madrid 4 Tottenham 0.

Is this really happening? Just seven years ago, Tottenham played in the Champions League final in the same stadium. That feels like a long time ago now.

This is what happens when the bottom falls out of an organisation. Minds are frazzled. Bizarre decisions are made.

Brilliant leaders have a paranoia that everything could go wrong at any moment - that everything they built could collapse tomorrow.

Simon Arora once described this to me as “healthy paranoia”. It is a type of humility, he explained. It is recognising that you are not perfect and that bad things could happen to your organisation if you are not careful. “That healthy paranoia makes you a better leader because you plan for those eventualities,” he added.

Arora bought a small collection of rag-tag shops in northern England for £525,000 and built them into a discount retailer worth £5 billion. This was B&M. Yet he worried that the botched opening of a new warehouse could lead to B&M going bust. It didn’t, of course.

It is almost certainly not good for your mental wellbeing to think like this. But it is a common trait in the founders and leaders of multi-billion-pound companies. These leaders run organisations employing thousands of people and generating billions of pounds in revenue. They are not just going to disappear.

But this is what is happening to Tottenham Hotspur. The bottom has fallen out. The ninth biggest football club in the world by revenue could be relegated from the Premier League. The club with the gleaming £1 billion stadium could be hosting Lincoln and Stockport next season. A nightmare is coming true.

Not long ago, Tottenham was heralded as the best-run football club in Britain, if not the world. Now it is struggling to do the most basic thing for a football club: win matches. The unthinkable has become a reality. How did this happen?

The doom loop

There is a name for what is happening to Tottenham - the doom loop.

This phrase was coined by Jim Collins, the acclaimed management guru. Tottenham fans will recognise some of the symptoms that Collins identified in a doom loop - constant changes of strategic direction, decisions taken without addressing or understanding the core problem, fanfare about new initiatives and strategies, and regular pleas for unity and attempts to “enlist the troops”.

An organisation in a doom loop finds itself in a downward spiral where every action you take unwittingly sends you further down the spiral. All forward momentum is lost and every attempt to try to get the wheels moving again sends you in the wrong direction. What is even scarier is that the people within the organisation are really trying to improve and change things.

Collins published all this in his 2001 book Good to Great, one of the best-selling business books of all-time. He and his team wanted to understand why some organisations went from showing promise to becoming truly world-class and the best at what they did, while others who showed promise simply fell away and disappeared. They studied the performance of 1,435 businesses over 40 years.

They found the organisations that went from good to great entered a flywheel - a virtuous circle where every improvement led to another. They had the discipline to stick with a simple strategy over many years. They had a steadfast commitment to excellence over the quick fix.

In contrast, those that fell into a doom loop changed direction at the merest sign of a problem. There was little discipline. They did this again and again, lurching in different directions and taking away any momentum. They would often make a splashy acquisition and buy a business - but this was about trying to grab some growth rather than investing in the foundations.

Ultimately, when you are in a doom loop, everyone in the organisation sees their spirit drain away. No-one is sure of the right thing to do any more because there is no vision.

Again, this will all sound familiar to Tottenham fans.

Since 2019, Tottenham have had nine interim and permanent managers. These managers have all had radically different personalities and tactics. Antonio Conte - the fiery Italian pragmatist. Ange Postecoglou - the buccaneering Australian. Thomas Frank - the urbane Dane. Igor Tudor - the fixer.

Over the same period a net £700 million has been spent on new players. But these players have not been bought for a particular system. As Tottenham has zig-zagged between managers and strategies they now have a collection of players that don’t fit any.

In January, Tottenham fans also got a plea for unity and support, which is common in a doom loop. Vinai Venkatesham, the chief executive, issued a public message in which he spoke of a “genuine reset” at Tottenham and how the board “share the same ambition as our supporters”.

Read more

Share The Only Story in Town

Read more

Read more

It was Michael Burry, the investor played by Christian Bale in The Big Short and famous for predicting the financial crisis, who took the opportunity to compare Alphabet to Motorola after it emerged this month that the owner of Google was issuing a 100-year bond.

Burry has been warning that we are in an AI bubble and saw the 100-year bond as an interesting reminder from history:

A company that has issued a 100-year bond means it has agreed to borrow money and pay it back over a century. You could read that either as a sign of hubris - the business is confident it will still be around in a century - or pessimism - the business feels it needs to spread repayment of debt over 100 years. Either way, it is a sign of strength. Only the biggest, most reliable companies can get lenders to agree to their debt being repaid over 100 years. This is why 100-year bonds are usually reserved for national governments and rare for businesses.

Motorola issued its $300 million (£222 million) bond in October 1997. The chief executive at the time was Christopher Galvin, the third generation of his family to run Motorola after Paul, his grandfather, who founded the company, and Bob, his father, who built it into a global powerhouse.

But Christopher Galvin would be the last member of his family to lead Motorola. Six years after the 100-year bond was issued, he was ousted by the company’s board. Motorola would never be the same again.

This is the story of what happened…

One small step

“It’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Without Motorola the world would never have heard Neil Armstrong say these words or see him take his first steps on the moon in 1969. Motorola produced the transmitters and receivers that beamed this historic moment to Earth.

The company proudly promoted its role in the moon landing through an advert that simply stated: “Motorola was there.”

By this point, Motorola was established as a technological powerhouse in the US. Motorola had been founded by Paul Galvin and his brother Joseph in 1928 in Chicago as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation.

Before founding this business, Paul Galvin had already had two ventures go bankrupt. The lessons from these setbacks would be pivotal in shaping Motorola. Galvin was obsessed with constantly evolving the business and not being left behind by technology. Indeed, many years later, Christopher Galvin, his grandson, would say: “The company’s success was born of failures.” Given what would later happen to Motorola, this is particularly ironic.

Galvin Manufacturing Corporation started making battery eliminators - a power converter that allowed people to plug battery-powered radios into their household electricity. But it quickly moved into car radios. This is where the name Motorola comes from - it is a combination of the words “motor” and “victrola”, which is a record player. It then moved into two-way radio, walkie-talkies, televisions, and semiconductors.

In 1973 Motorola invented what we now recognise as the mobile phone. It started working on the technology after a request from the chief of police in Chicago, Orlando Wilson, according to a great piece on the history of Motorola by Chicago magazine. Wilson wanted a way to stay in contact with his patrol officers while they were out on the streets of Chicago trying to clamp down on violent crime.

Motorola developed a radio telephone system that meant multiple mobile phones could use the same radio frequency at the same time. Until this point, anyone with a mobile phone had to wait until a dial-tone or frequency became available because the system could only handle one call at a time. The company’s breakthrough was in developing the computer system and transmitters to make this possible.

The network and phone were first launched in 1973. A decade later, Motorola made it available for consumers. The DynaTAC was the world’s first commercially-available portable cellular phone. “Even rush hours are office hours,” Motorola proclaimed in adverts.

It was Bob Galvin who drove the company into mobile phones. He had succeeded his father Paul as chief executive in 1956. Paul Galvin sadly died shortly after in 1959. Bob Galvin would lead the business from 1956 until 1990, when he stood down as chairman.

Such was Motorola’s success during this period that it was one of the 18 companies that featured in Jim Collins’ legendary management book Built to Last which was first published in 1994. This book looked at how a tiny collection of businesses had been able to deliver stellar results over many decades. It also included Sony, Disney and Walmart.

This is what Collins wrote about Motorola:

“Ever wonder how companies like 3M and Motorola grew from small, innovative companies into large ones? Partly by practicing the discipline of removal… In a bold removal, Motorola jettisoned its television business at the height of its success in the 1960s. To fill the vacuum, it sought out exciting new fields, such as microprocessors and cellular communications. Instead of milking cash cows, Motorola slays them.”

Collins picked-out a quote from Bob Galvin to demonstrate Motorola’s approach of evolving but staying true to some core principles.

“Change unto itself is essential. But, taken alone: it is limited. Yes, renewal is change. It calls for ‘do differently.’ It is willing to replace and redo. But it also cherishes the proven basics.”

However, despite featuring in Built to Last, Motorola’s success would not last. It would go on to have the ignominy of featuring in a second Jim Collins book for the opposite reason.

From Chicago to Stoke-on-Trent

If Collins had known where to look, he could have found evidence of the mounting problems for Motorola in the 1990s. In fairness though, one example was thousands of miles away from the company’s home in Chicago.

In Stoke-on-Trent, England, a car dealer had become known as the “Motorola Man”. John Caudwell was obsessed with mobile phones and their potential. He had bought 26 Motorola phones for £1,350 and started trying to sell them on. It took him months, but eventually he sold them.

Read more

The Only Story in Town exists to tell these stories. To reveal how great institutions were built and others collapsed. To uncover the people, decisions and rivalries that changed everything.

As AI threatens unprecedented upheaval, these stories from the past and present have never been more important. They can help us understand what comes next - a technological revolution, a financial bubble, or both.

Only journalism can do this properly. But with many media organisations under financial pressure, business journalists find themselves with little time to do anything more than rewrite press releases and quarterly results. The gap they have left behind has been filled by PR and influencers selling the fantasy that there is one path to success. A PR once told me that the media only covers 5 per cent of what actually goes on in their organisation. We can do better.

A myth has also been allowed to develop that business is dry. It is not. Some of the defining television shows of the past decade - such as Succession and The Bear - are dramas about building a business. They combine deeply personal stories of craft, loyalty and ambition with the brutal transparency of sport - which always shows who is winning and who is losing.

The Only Story in Town will combine the depth of the Acquired podcast with the drama of a Michael Lewis book and the agenda-setting analysis of The Athletic. How did Marks & Spencer become the biggest brand in Britain, lose its status and then fight back? Why did other retailers such as BHS and Woolworths collapse? How did a Brit who developed the video game Theme Park end up at the forefront of the AI revolution? How did an animator go from working on Peppa Pig to building the most-watched television show in the world? These are the stories we will tell.

Every week The Only Story in Town will publish one great story, starting this Friday. It will be sent directly to your inbox and you will have the choice of whether to read it or listen to it as a mini-audiobook lasting about an hour.

The Only Story in Town will be supported by our subscribers, not advertisers. This is so we can commit time and resources to delivering high-quality and deeply-reported stories for you, not click-bait for algorithms. To celebrate our launch we will offer subscriptions for £5-a-month or £50-a-year for the first 100 subscribers, down from £10-a-month or £100-a-year usually. Only subscribers will be sent our content.

You can sign-up for a subscription via the link below.

Subscribe now

If you love business, want to understand why things succeed and fail, or just want great journalism and stories, you should join us.

Thank you.

Graham