The best portrait photographers are those who spend time getting to know you. I once had the privilege of having mine done by David Bayley for GQ for a feature on people who have shaped Britain’s dining scene. I turned up at his studio at the allotted time, and we sat on a sofa chatting for the best part of an hour. What I didn’t realise then about what he was doing was that he was looking inside me, to get beyond the character brief the editor would have given him, to decide how he sees me.

Just as our hour-long schedule was coming to the end, he stood up and said: “Right – I’ve got you now. Stand over there.” A couple of minutes later I was done (Chef Nobu Matsuhisa, a much more worthy candidate, was up next).

Some years later, a session with another brilliant photographer called Franklyn Rogers was gifted to me by an art gallery in Shoreditch which I was just completing my term of chair as. He spent even longer – more than two hours – getting to know me. One of his questions was who in my life had made me the angriest and instantly I said my school careers adviser. I had applied to a sixth form college to do my A levels and when I arrived for my interview, I was given my file and asked to wait and pass it on to the lecturer who would meet me.

Naturally, I opened the file and read the report from Mr Williams, my school’s careers officer. I couldn’t believe what I read: “He’s coming to you about A levels but frankly, he won’t pass his O-levels so I wouldn’t waste time with him. He’s trouble.” Luckily the college let me in, I then got into the LSE and started to do the stuff I ended up doing.   

There are many people with similar stories, my favourite being that of Sir Tim Martin, whose careers officer told him he’d get nowhere in life. If you’ve ever wondered why is called giant pub chain JD Weatherspoon, it’s because that was the name of his career officer who did the same to him.   

Sir Paul Macartney has a new album out today at the ripe old age of 83. In an interview in today’s New York Times, he’s quoted as saying: “I’m just some kid who went to school, went to the careers master who said to me, you know, ‘You haven’t got qualifications and, there’s not … I don’t see a great future for you.’”

Franklyn Rogers told me a woman he’d recently done a shoot with was told at school the best she could hope for in life was to work in the local factory. She became the vice chair of The World Bank.   I suggested Frankly stage an exhibition titled: “People who refused to fail”.

This morning we’re all reading that for the first time, over one million young people in Britain can’t find a job or training despite 84% saying they want to. This costs the state £124 billion a year in benefits and associated costs – more than we spend on education.

For decades I’ve watched young people turn up for job interviews late, not really know anything about the company they’ve come to, don’t look their interviewer in the eye. About 15 years ago, I found out that only 44% of graduates from the University of East London ended up with graduate level jobs. I got to know the then Vice Chancellor there and asked him why he didn’t have preparation for employment and the learning of soft skills as core curricular activities so that the people from under-privileged backgrounds who typically attended there could have a greater chance of making it in life. His answer was – and I’m not kidding – “Iqbal, it’s not my role as an educationalist to teach people how to get jobs.”

Back to my old school. Early in my 20s, I became a published author and had a rising media career. One day I got a call from my old headmaster congratulating me on my early career gains and asking me if I’d like to become a governor of the school.

“On one condition,” I said. “Is Mr Williams still there?”

“Yes, and he’s also the teacher governor.”

“Then I’m coming.”

I spent most of that first meeting staring at Mr Williams. At the end we were all invited to the pub next door where I quickly pulled to him to one side and asked him how many young peoples’ lives he had ruined by writing references like the one he had done of me. His reply made me realise something I’d never considered. His main job was as the school’s PE teacher, and this role had been bolted on. No training, no targets – just a role the school was obliged to assign to someone.

If there are so few jobs around, why aren’t we using a bit of that £124bn to subsidise employers properly to take young people on? Why not use a fraction of that to help young people develop their entrepreneurial ambitions and become self-employed?

And why not use a bit of that to create an educational system that’s fit for purpose to give young people solid paths to be the leaders, workers and wealth creators they’re desperate to become and who our future needs them to become?  

One of my early grown-up jobs in my 20s was as a reporter for The Independent and one of my first assignments was to look into the awful conditions junior doctors had to work under. Some 40 years on, that problem still goes unresolved, probably worsened by student loans.

If you’re a regular user of the NHS, you’ll have seen how incredibly hard everyone works often only to be faced with complaints and insults. Those insults then get compounded when successive governments fail to deal with these long-suffering people who feel compelled to go on strike as we again see today and their opposition leaders spout solutions which they didn’t introduce when they were in charge.

I have an idea which I don’t see being promoted here and which could significantly ease pressure off the NHS if politicians had the guts to pursue.  When America introduced the Affordable Health Care Act (aka Obamacare), we thought that it was lucky that we had the NHS so didn’t need that.

The main measure of the act was to ban insurance companies from refusing health plans to customers who had existing conditions.  It was one of Barack Obama’s lasting legacies (though unsurprisingly Trump wants to overturn it).

What if we were to introduce something along those lines here? A lot of people I know don’t take private health care even though they are able to afford to because their existing conditions wouldn’t be covered so they’d be spending needlessly. The last major NHS survey found that 46% of adults have existing conditions. When it can often take months or even years to get an NHS hospital appointment, when there are undoubtedly a significant  number of people who could comfortably and happily pay for cover to get a rapid private consultation, when the poor and less fortunate sit in the same queue alongside the more affluent I wonder if we’re not missing a trick to ease up the waiting lists to make them easier on those who don’t have that option.

If we had a leader like Obama with the courage to guide health insurance companies (who between them are valued at £8bn in the UK alone) down this route, we’d be able to embrace the following positive consequences: the providers would see a flood of new customers signing up and the NHS would be freed up to serve those most disadvantaged and more likely to have compound economic consequences from huge waiting lists preventing them for working or leading a healthier life.

It would likely also have the following negative consequence: people who already have private cover will undoubtedly see a rise in their premiums, though some kind of governance against greed can surely be applied here. And although I’m a graduate of the London School of Economics, I’m not able to calculate whether the rise in the number of memberships and a reasonable rise in existing customers’ premiums would offset the rise in the number of payouts (currently £4bn a year) will be anywhere near close enough to cancelling each other out.

But if we’re committed to honouring the founding principles of the NHS, if we really do believe that we’re all in this together and if we were ever to have another visionary political leader, wouldn’t the shake-up be worth it?

A magazine in Bangladesh asked me my views on authenticity. It was a useful challenge as I hadn’t realised what my views were until I wrote this!

When we were growing up in the 1960s and 70’s, unlike most Bangladeshi settlers here with modest means, our family and friends would take regular trips across the country – the Lake District, Dorset and a village in Sussex all come to mind because we were invariably the first brown people the locals had seen in real life. I remember we all walked into a busy country pub one evening and suddenly it was silent as everyone stared at us.

Somebody then came over to Mum and asked: “Excuse me miss, is that what they call a sari?”  Mum said indeed it was and explained how it was made. It was always very friendly apart from one visit to the seaside resort Littlehampton. We wandered off in different directions with a plan to regroup at lunchtime in pursuit of fish and chips. But after a few minutes, we heard Mum shouting at the top of her voice.

We quickly ran over to where we heard her and there was a sight we’ll never forget: she was berating a small group of skinheads who had clearly said something racially abusive to her. But Mum, a headmistress, was as confident as they come and with her tongue-lashing had reduced these thugs to quivering wrecks. We got there just in time to deliver the final line of her tirade: “YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO THE BRITISH EMPIRE!”

Watching the Tommy Robinson followers ooze their hate and vile on the streets of London last weekend made me wonder why we weren’t protesting in equal numbers to theirs, why were Muslims in particular being told to stay at home to be safe and indeed, why were there so few arrests.

In 1978, at the height of Britain’s Paki-bashing shame, the far-right National Front were audaciously parading their filth in areas with strong Asian concentrations like Southall and Brick Lane thinking Asians were a soft touch and wouldn’t fight back.  Little did they know that in community centres and gyms, young brown men were toughening up and in both those areas, they came out on to the streets and took battle because they knew they couldn’t rely on the police to protect their families and communities. With the support of a group called the Anti Nazi League, they fought the NF off their streets and they became safe again.

I would never have imagined that racial bigotry would today attract over 100,000 people to central London, to see thousands picketing hotels for housing migrants, to see our prime minister kowtow to it all and call us an island of strangers.

And to see our flags used as symbols of hate.

If Mum were alive today, I’d encourage her to use that spirit of Littlehampton to put the likes of Farage, Robinson and yes, Starmer, in their place.  As that’s unlikely to happen, it’s on us to stop being quiet.

In Jemima Khan’s wonderful film What’s Love Got To Do With It? this question is asked to someone who decides to end a casual relationship which turned out to be a poor fit.  

Let’s apply that same question to business.

What happens if you aim high and dismiss thoughts of missing? When I first met the late, great Lord Noon about 35 years ago he told me how he started his ready-made meal empire which eventually valued him at over £100m, I thought everyone needed to hear how it happened and so I wrote a big profile on him for The Sunday Times. He’d arrived in Britain from Bombay in the late 1980s and watched with curiosity the public’s obsession with Indian restaurants and clocked two things: having a curry would soon no longer necessarily mean a night out and people would be eating as much of it in their homes.

He surveyed the supermarket offerings in the chilled and frozen sections and found them way below restaurant standards, so he got himself in front of Sainsbury’s, Bird’s Eye and Waitrose and showed them the curries that they were currently selling their customers and his version of the same dishes. The response he received from all three was identical: “Yes of course your dishes are higher quality but try making them in a factory”.

He stunned them all with his reply: “I did.”

In turn, they each asked: “Whose factory?”

“Mine!”

“Why do you have a factory when you say you haven’t started trading yet?”

“Because I am going to win your business”.

And he did – all three signed him up.

Today, for businesses that are driving their profits by tackling the problems we face all around us like the destruction of our planet and rising social inequality, aiming low is not going to deliver a safer, fairer world. Just think Patagonia.

When Paul Polman, the poster boy for responsible business, became chief executive of Unilever in 2009, he set out his stall by saying be would double the sales of the company whilst simultaneously having its carbon footprint which sceptics struggled to believe possible, but he nonetheless achieved this ahead of the deadline he’d set himself.

So going back to the question that we started with, perhaps the answer is this: Maybe – unless we aim high, we’re all going to hurt.

How does something that starts off great stay great?

If you’ve watched The Idol, a TV drama about a tortured pop star, you probably felt the same as me: its fascinatingly risqué and entertaining first episode quickly plummets into sleaze, presumably to cover up the poor acting and weak story line. It’s probably the most slated thing running at the moment.

It’s the same with restaurants. In St James’s there used to be a space called Sake No Hana – an expensive place which had as its differentiator that it didn’t serve western wine, just the fermented Japanese rice wine called sake.

At first people flocked to it, in The Emperor Has No Clothes way. But soon customers complained so the owners then brought in Champagne, though just Krug at £30 a glass. It wasn’t enough so they then brought in a beer – at £20 a glass and then eventually a wine list. The restaurant kept the same name even though the claim was no longer true. Each year fewer and fewer people went. The owner had deep pockets and plugged the losses. He invited me to have lunch one day to give him some advice on what to do with it.

I told him he should shut it down. He didn’t like it, but eventually he did.

There’s a magic, a mystery, a largely undefinable art in making a restaurant great. In New York, Danny Meyer has the city in his palm by giving people what they want, just better than others do – the formal but friendly Gramercy Tavern, beer, wings and ribs at Blue Smoke, the burger brand that everyone secretly wishes they had created in Shake Shack.

London’s equivalent to Danny has for the last few decades been Jeremy King, who with Chris Corbin put exceptional service on a pinnacle at The Ivy, Le Caprice and then the Wolseley group. Food has always been the point for Gordon Ramsay and given the rate of knots at which he’s growing who’s to question him.

I can’t help feel, though, that we need to re-consider what greatness looks like and that starts by us understanding ourselves better. We have, in recent years, managed to simultaneously become both deeper and shallower – deeper in that we expect restaurants to treat their teams with respect (Darjeeling Express) and have the most rigorous sustainability standards (Fallow) and when they do, we join their queues.

Our shallowness erupts when groups like Big Mamma open another successful outlet where “experience” is key – theatre in how dishes are presented (Salt Bae is another example) to how places are designed so cleverly that by you making yourself look on trend on Instagram and Tik Tok, you are doing their marketing for them. That’s a clever business model.

And so what do we make of this? Here’s my prediction: in future, restaurants will be successful if they are both deep and shallow. But that’s not to confused with being deeply shallow.

I’ve never really shared this before, but I love watching boxing matches. Facebook knows this and kindly sends me clips of Tyson and Ali which I start my day by watching. I’ve even watched all five Rocky films and then yesterday I was staggered to know there was a sixth one called Rocky Balboa which I immediately had to watch, where he’s now much older, retired and has a restaurant (why does everyone want to have a restaurant?). To everyone’s dismay, he decides to do a tournament match with the current world heavyweight champion who’s around half his age.

His son tells him he can no longer hit hard enough, to which he replies: “It’s not about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit.” That pretty much sums up the last few years of my career. A series of business ventures that I have wanted to get off the ground have fallen at the last hurdle and one thing I have never let myself indulge in is disappointment or dismay. To allow oneself to go that route is a trap, a downward spiral from which it hard to recover.

If other people let you down, it’s not your fault and with that realisation, it’s much, much easier to dust down and fire up again. If other people tell you your plans are misguided, it’s important to step back, kick the tires on your idea and if need be take on board any useful suggestion that might make what’s in your head sit more comfortably in someone else’s head – whether that’s a landlord who has a restaurant space available which many people are pitching for or a highly talented individual who you want to bring into your team or an investor you want to back you.

When I’m mentoring anyone who is experiencing doubt about themselves, I regale them with the story from my journalist days when I once interviewed someone who made a billion dollars in his first year in business. He said that every morning he stared at himself in the mirror for 30 seconds and say to himself: “I am going to achieve whatever I set out to”. Try it – it’s not as easy as it sounds.

I was lucky to have been brought up to believe I can achieve whatever I set my mind to, which puts me in a sort of place of privilege as I don’t have a glass jaw (boxing term) and which is why I do so much mentoring as I keep coming across people jointly facing self-doubt and ambition. It’s a joy to help people untangle the two and overcome perceived obstacles.

I think I shall quote Mr Balbao liberally from now.

“It was only a bit of fun”. How many times have you heard that as justification in the workplace? An Asian journalist in a national newspaper told me once he was called “Gunga Din” by his news editor. Muslim workers will tell you how often they’ve been referenced as Taliban or Bin Laden. And over 40% of women have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace, the number rising even higher for disabled women and BME women.

According to the TUC, 79% of women don’t report harassment in the workplace. Instead, the process of quiet firing takes place and people resign rather than report/make a complaint.

A survey of 2200 people conducted by law firm Irwin Mitchell found that 32% of employees had been victim of bullying being disguised as banter, the figure rising to 40% for those in hospitality. When it goes unchecked and unreported, it only gives licence to those doing the harassing to continue.

A Bill is making its way through Parliament that will amend The Equality Act to make companies liable for third party harassment – whether that’s from colleagues, clients or customers. It’s a bold initiative and MeToo and Black Lives Matter campaigners are among those whose efforts have brought the initiative close to being passed.

But there’s a worry that opposition to it might see it watered down at the last minute, as often happens with radical bills. And it’s been criticised by Toby Young of the Free Speech Union for supposedly “turning business owners into banter police”. Part of the problem with Toby’s message is the messenger – an able-bodied straight white man from a privileged background will have no clue what it’s like to be black, female, gay or disabled in a workforce. He has influence in sections of The Conservative Party but let’s hope Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch does the right thing and tells him to sling his hook.

Interestingly, businesses themselves and the trade bodies that represent us have been largely quiet on the matter. Many will be worried that they are not capable of monitoring what happens in their organisations, that there will be people doing and saying things that could lead to lawsuits which they were unaware of. Will they dare articulate their worries? Only at the risk of alienating swathes of their workforces and their customers.

Will they implement organisational change to stamp out harassment and bullying? The statistics I’ve quoted are a major indictment on us. Let’s hope this brings a step change in how dignity comes as standard in how we conduct ourselves going forward.

The other day I wrote my CV for the first time in my life. A head-hunter had approached me to see if I would be interested in a very prestigious board position they had been instructed on. I said I would and that’s why I had to write it.

I’d forgotten about some of things I’ve done. There are seven publications under my name, one of which was from 2014 and was titled “How businesses can deliver better good than governments” and addressed the ways businesses in the future would need not just to conduct themselves differently but also develop new ways to express themselves and communicate their activities.

In his celebrated book Marketing 3.0, Philip Kotler takes the reader on a journey as to how businesses have evolved over time. Marketing 1.0 revolved around selling an existing product, summed up best by Henry Ford’s description of his Model T: “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants,” he said, “as long as it is black”. Marketing 2.0 stems from today’s information age and the digitalisation of our communications strategies to tailor the way consumers now rapidly scour markets and actively participate in the production of goods and services which we then purchase. We are now “Prosumers”.

Marketing 3.0, he argues, builds on the customer-driven approach and widens its appeal to incorporate values − and by values he means addressing means of tackling society’s problems. To quote: “Marketing 3.0 lifts the concept of marketing into the arena of human aspirations, values and spirit. Marketing 3.0 believes that consumers are complete human beings whose other needs and hopes should never be neglected. Therefore, Marketing 3.0 complements emotional marketing with human spirit marketing.”

So, what does that mean and what are we to take from it? It means the market, namely consumers, are ahead of us in terms of wanting to see businesses not just produce goods and services that we desire or will want to desire, but that their moral codes are in tune with those who make them rich.  

Marketing 4.0 − which is coming ever closer − will be when the consumer shops elsewhere when they find their existing producer cannot live up to their expectations. From Henry Ford telling us what we can have, the consumer is increasingly telling us what they want to earn our custom.

The smart marketing of the future needs to involve less shouting and more listening.

One of the problems with how politics works is that we elect people to govern us who on the whole don’t know very much of practical use. They say they want to bring unemployment down, inflation down, growth up, prosperity up.

And they all say they want to be tough on crime.

Over the last 15 years I’ve chaired a number of bodies aimed at improving the criminal justice system. Ministers and secretaries of state would always take meetings with me when I asked. It’s staggering what I’ve heard some of them say. One asked me why businesses weren’t offering inmates the chance to come and work on day release so they could get a taste of a life away from crime, to which I replied: “That would be because your department stopped that programme six months ago.”

I told another minister there was a very successful collaboration in America between students in a university who would go to their local prison and teach inmates skills in coding with many ending up following a career doing that, to which he asked: “How can prisoners understand coding?”

With the Labour Party (my party) being led by a former Director of Public Prosecutions, maybe I shouldn’t be so disappointed with their announcement yesterday that a future government led by them would re-visit sentencing and involve victims of crimes to have more of a say in how perpetrators are treated. Nothing wrong with that, in fact a welcome move. But it’s not going to change much.

The party sadly doesn’t seem to have learned much since Tony Blair’s vote-winning slogan “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” as they also said yesterday they wanted to understand the routes to crime more, such as whether people broken homes were more likely to drift that way, which sounds more like an A level student’s essay assignment because if they had done their homework they would have known there’s stacks of evidence already available about this.

I once wrote an article about the entrepreneurial skills of gang leaders and that 79% of prisoners in a survey said they wanted to run their own (legitimate) business, twice the national average. In Texas a prison had set up a fund to back inmates who had decent business plans, again with students helping them. In another article I suggested there should be ways here for us to do the same, though instead of students we invited big firms like PWC and EY to get volunteering placements going and on the back of that I was invited to No 10 to meet one of the PM’s advisers who told me they really liked the idea and encouraged me to pursue this.

He quickly added: “Of course, we can’t be seen to support this.” And that was because they couldn’t fear the wrath of The Daily Mail.

It seems Labour’s announcement yesterday was at least in part to court Daily Mail readers, with the shadow justice secretary saying he was once a victim of a knife crime and therefore understood the desire for retribution.

I haven’t seen anything from Labour about the biggest route to stopping people re-offending is to train them inside with skills to get them jobs on the outside – about 70% of young prison leavers are back in within a year but that figure drops to roughly 15% if they have a job. It’s costing us billions and making us no less safe.

Maybe they needed to say the things they did yesterday because that what’s required to get them elected. I hope they do and then they embark upon more radical measures. Those of you who are kind enough to read his blog regularly know I like to quote from shows I’ve watched on TV. Yesterday I jotted down this gem from The West Wing: “Let’s achieve things we can’t imagine yet.”