Paul KeenanTony Farmar
In real life Michael Smurfit often appears a shy, tense, hair-trigger kind of man. Not that you would know it from this bland production, which has climbed to the top spot of Irish best sellers.
With the help of a couple of ghost-writers he has produced a chronicle of his life from his birth in 1936 in Liverpool to his present abode in Monaco.
It is of course full of interest, as the story of how a small if flourishing box factory from Clondalkin was driven into world status, in one of the most contested markets in world commerce.
Corrugated brown boxes have been used since the late 19th Century to carry the world’s goods from manufacturer to retailer. There is in fact more brown paper made for this purpose than newsprint. This was the broad but specialised field in which, with extraordinary persistence, Michael Smurfit made himself and his firm world leaders.
This is a serious, improving sort of book, with not many jokes. Not even my favourite tale of when Michael Smurfit injured his hand and went to St Vincent’s A&E with Howard Kilroy. The nurse in charge, trying to place his entitlements, asked: “Do you earn more than £9,000?” “Not every day, I think, Howard?” said Smurfit.
Impressed
The key influence in his life was his father, the redoubtable Jefferson Smurfit, whom he seems to have hated and then loved in equal measure. As he says “a great deal of what I was doing was for Dad”.
Some years ago a manager in the Group’s plant in St Louis, Missouri, told me that even 20 years after the old man’s death Michael Smurfit insisted on there being a photo of the founder in reception.
He also required that special bone china tea cups were available for his use. And most interestingly that one day when they were touring the plant one of the gluing machines jammed and overflowed. Bells and alarms rang through the plant, for the glue in the pots was cooking at least 140 degrees C.
The manager was deeply impressed that instantly Michael Smurfit had his jacket off, had hared up the galley and, using the right tool, was cleaning and clearing the affected channel. He clearly knew exactly what to do.
The first great breakthrough came in 1970 when Smurfit doubled its size by taking over the ramshackle Hely-Thom company, which sold everything from print to prams and dog requisites. When Smurfit and his team started, one Hely-Thom manager said that the sudden surge of new energy was as if the engines of a battleship had roared into life underfoot.
Ambition
In company after company from North and South America to Australia this highly directed, highly knowledgeable surge of energy turned no-hopers into performers. Key to the culture was ‘the numbers’ – and if an unfortunate manager did not know the numbers better than Smurfit himself (not easy) he was likely to be roared at: “What have you done with my money?”
As the Group grew opportunities arose to make deals, one of which, with Container Corporation of America, earned him personally so much money that, as he puts it, the family ‘went from well-off to being extremely wealthy in the blink of an eye.’ Unfortunately he does not explain exactly how this trick worked.
As the title indicates, this is not a self-questioning book. Even for what many people think of as a spectacular mistake, leaving his first wife, Smurfit assures us (twice): ‘I have never regretted that decision’.
There is no note of poignant self-questioning, such as crept into his father’s as yet unpublished autobiography, when Jefferson wrote of his obsessive determination to be a millionaire: “Now I have achieved my ambition, I wonder whether it was all worthwhile.”