What makes a great businessman: a silver tongue or a killer instinct?

‘Who’s the most impressive business leader you’ve ever met?’

‘Who’s the most impressive business leader you’ve ever met?’ I asked a group of senior executives the other night. I confess I interjected the question (as I do here) to enable me to mention that I have just edited a book of business obituaries. But it provoked a lively debate about the qualities that make great entrepreneurs and industrialists.

Among living candidates, no one voted for any of the current crop of buccaneers: Sir Philip Green in retailing, Michael O’Leary in the air, Michael Spencer in the City. Instead, there was strong support for 80-year-old Sir Ernest Harrison — visionary founder-chairman of the electronics group Racal and its offspring Vodafone, which was the runaway leader of the British mobile phone market while other potential players were still saying ‘It’ll never catch on’. Also praised was Sir Martin Sorrell, long-serving chief executive of the advertising group WPP, for the relentlessness of his business appetite; and more to my surprise, Sir Gerry Robinson for his silver-tongued salesmanship as chairman of Granada. ‘He could persuade you of absolutely anything,’ said Sir Gerry’s fan, but the rest of the group was not persuaded that this was a winning attribute.

As for those who have passed on, Closing Balances: Business Obituaries from The Daily Telegraph (Aurum Press) offers 100 to choose from. Some, like Forrest Mars of the eponymous confectionery group, who was in the habit of ordering his grown-up son to kneel and pray during business meetings, were avaricious, egotistical monsters. But most deserve admiration, even when (like the airline entrepreneurs Sir Adam Thomson of British Caledonian and Freddie Laker) their ventures eventually came to grief.

The obituary subjects whom I actually met offer a catalogue of useful traits for would-be tycoons.