Introducing the new Business Leader

Hello and welcome to the new Business Leader.

It is a pleasure to be able finally to write those words. What you are looking at today is the result of months of work, planning and research. All of that was aimed at one thing – to build a new agenda-setting, inspirational and aspirational business publication for the UK.

For too long the UK has looked longingly at the US and other countries and wondered. Why are they more successful at building businesses? Why are their economies more productive? Why do they seem to encourage and celebrate entrepreneurialism more effectively? Is it simply because they have skills that we just don’t have in the UK?

Our answer to that last question is very clear – no.

There is an astonishing collection of people in the UK trying to build businesses, innovate and create jobs. Many of them feature in this edition of Business Leader. But until now there has been nowhere to share their stories of success and failure, nowhere to share their expertise and nowhere to share their views on the news that matters. There is a reason that the 110,000 medium-sized businesses in the UK – the very heart and core of the economy – are often referred to as the “forgotten middle”.

If you look online or on the shelves of WH Smith for business publications you will find a collection of American titles – Fortune, Forbes, and Fast Company to name just three. They are fine publications. But they were created in the US and are for the US. We believe that one of the reasons the US has been more successful at building large businesses is the existence of these publications and how they share expertise, ideas and news among entrepreneurs. To quote Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Now, with Business Leader, the UK has a publication too. We will cover business for those interested in business and for those who want to succeed. Think of Business Leader as your own coach or mentor. We will not be blindly positive or blindly negative. We will be constructive. We recognise that for all the challenges in the world, there has also been extraordinary progress.

We want each edition of the new magazine to be one that you keep referring back to over time. So each edition will have an overarching theme – a vital plank in building a business. That means each edition of the magazine will come together to form a bible on how to build a business. The theme for this issue is strategy.

This is just the start. We intend to introduce more features and content in the coming months. Please get in touch with your feedback and ideas. I want to finish with an extract from an email that Steve Jobs, arguably the most influential business leader in the last 50 years, sent to himself shortly before he died in 2011:

“I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object-oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with."

"I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being."

Welcome to the new Business Leader.