The people of the UK took Thatcher at her word and practised self-reliance, making this the enterprise decade

It was the decade that taste forgot, but its excesses look tame through jaded 21st century eyes. And in Director (which lost the definite article without ceremony halfway through the decade), it was all about privatisation, property and Mrs Thatcher, who featured often in the early 1980s and less as she grew more remote. But recession also topped and tailed the decade, even as Director grew glossier and fatter by the year.
It was a decade of massive change: by the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the City had risen and fallen with a spectacular shock, the internet had made its gentle debut, unions had lost their teeth and redundancy was a word everyone understood and feared.

Director's own pages reflected these dramatic changes, the sober, monochrome editions of the early 1980s giving way to the zippy, high-gloss editions of later years. Even the language altered, starting out sober and lumpy—trenchant, swingeing; inter alia—and ending with "enterprise", "maverick", and boom (and bust).

The faces changed, too, as heavy industry lumbered out and electronics and the media zoomed in. The 1984 Awards for Excellence are telling: of the winners, only John Egan's business career survived the decade, with Gerald Ronson of Heron Corporation jailed for taking backhanders. We were equally hit and miss with the runners up: Peter de Savary, Robert Maxwell and GEC's Lord Carrington, by then Nato's secretary general.

Early in the decade, the magazine was stern about pay rises that "could prove ruinous to profits". In the 12 months to July 1980, the MD's average basic salary rose 18 per cent, the highest rise since 1975, with a £5m-company boss taking home £17,401. Revenue, meanwhile, took less of a bite: income tax in 1975 for earnings of £20,000 was 53 per cent; by 1980 it was down to 29 per cent. "It is not unusual for accountants aged 25, with very little commercial experience, to be offered £9,000-plus at a level which is far from the head of their function," wrote an indignant Nigel Bryant at the beginning of the decade.

Despite this, good governance dominated the editions, with a 1980 board survey calling for "wider independent non-executive representation and use of monitoring committees with non-executive majorities". It would be 20 years before the Combined Code nailed these recommendations. The "exalted status of 'board director' is a present danger that has done... much damage to Britain," said Wendell Clough in 1981, who slammed "secure, comfortable, marginally useful" directors as a hindrance to economic progress. "There is no room for amateurs on the boards of British companies," added Clough.

Likewise, editor George Bull called for "new style" business leaders. "The old image of the port-swilling, expense-account-living company director has long since died in Britain. But the extent to which Britain's recovery depends on the professionalism and drive of its boardrooms is still underestimated." The future, added Bull, was in small businesses, which began to feature more regularly in 1982, when an unprecedented number were starting up. As Professor Joan Mitchell said: "Small is becoming more beautiful as big has been disappointing." The Unlisted Securities Market was created in 1980 for the growing enterprise culture: "It is a market where the small investor holds the advantage," wrote Ivan Fallon in 1983. "And it is here to stay." (Well, until 1996, anyway.)

By November 1987, editor George Bickerstaffe believed "we are all capitalists now..." and heralded a new agenda for business, "with its emphasis on public service and care of the employee as an individual." But in the same edition, Gerald Ratner displayed the "loadsamoney" spirit much more associated with the decade: "There's no room here now for the type of chairman who treated business as a hobby or a vehicle for socialising. I work to make money and my managers know that they or I could be out on the dole next week if we do not achieve our targets." (Little did he know...)

New gadgets abounded: the Walkman hit Britain in 1980; the "fax revolution" was upon us and "electronic mail" via "mailbox bureaux" was taking off. By 1985, a car phone was "fast becoming an essential feature", even if running costs ran into four figures (BT charged £60 for a connection; telephones started at £36.90 month to lease—the cheapest was called, intriguingly, Ruby.)

W R Read, the managing director of Sperry Univac UK, predicted that computers in the second half of the 1980s could sell for "modest sums" such as £50k and a time when "the simplicity of the application package... could be burnt into the hardware. When this comes, you will be able to sell total systems with a manual over the counter."

But eccentric UK entrepreneur Clive Sinclair had already brought computers to the masses with his "latest brainchild, the ZX81 personal computer" sold for a "rock-bottom" £50-£70 in 1981 and the following year was officially designated Information Technology Year. Sinclair epitomised, though, a peculiar British disease identified by management guru Peter Drucker: "Particularly instructive is the failure of the British to reap the harvest of their own knowledge-based innovations."

Property development boomed, despite early predictions that the Greater London Council would ruin the development industry with its rules and restrictions. The City's Finsbury Court was brand new; Barratt Developments was 1980's Business Enterprise Award winner (Coloroll and Allied Carpets were among the runners up; oil man and Cresta Run veteran Algy Cluff was guest speaker). Rates were around £26.60 per square foot.

We clung to our motor heritage, despite all: in October 1980, The Director's cover called BL Cars' chairman, Sir Michael Edwardes, "the man and the legend". In 1981, chief executive Ray Horrocks called on consumers to "Think British", to "recognise that there is a direct relationship between support for British goods and support for British industry." BL became the Rover Group in 1986 and the magazine continued to chart its fortunes right up until the end. More bankable businesses were those in the media, even if it took a few years for the industry to gain cred. In 1981, Allan Rich complained that "British industry—British management in general—doesn't regard advertising and selling as fundamental to success." Martin Sorrell had the same concern eight years later. But in 1981, ad guru Jeremy Bullmore saw it as the industry's duty "to remind our clients... that they have first of all got to make something that people want to buy, irrespective of the strength or weakness of the pound, irrespective of the price."

Stress entered The Director's lexicon thanks to Dr Jack Dominian of the Marriage Research Centre—"serious prolonged marital difficulties cause stress a term loosely used to in medicine to indicate strain..." he explained in the early 1980s. CSR, too, made an introduction in 1981, courtesy of Michael Heseltine, then Secretary of State for the Environment: "The firms involved realise that a concern for the community where they operate must be in their own long-term interest," he wrote. Corporate reputation, likewise, was raised by Alan Watson of ad agency Charles Barker, who predicted that over the next 20 years, "the overall reputation of the major manufacturers, both British and foreign, will become a 'crucial element in consumer decisions'."

The euphemistic "diversity" hadn't become management speak, but the issues were live: in 1980, three per cent of IoD members were women, but board-level women were as rare as "nesting osprey", wrote Carol Kennedy, and the magazine's November 1983 cover shot of Pineapple Studios' founder Debbie Moore in a tracksuit was more cheesecake than chairperson, while "the most important women in the office" cover story turned out to be about executive PAs. Asian entrepreneur and then director of the London Metal Exchange, RK Bagri said: "There is no organised or deep-rooted prejudice affecting the Asian business community," while Narindar Saroop was more equivocal: "The degree of racial prejudice is more than can be identified, but less than people imagine or fear."

The Big Bang of financial deregulation in 1986 was too quickly followed by "Black Monday", October 19, 1987, when the Dow's 508-point fall resulted in a worldwide crash, "the nearest thing to financial meltdown I ever want to see," said John Phelan, the NYSE's chairman. Entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson got the backlash. Mihir Bose wrote of a more risk-averse City the following year: "Branson feels the City does not understand Virgin's strategy of investment for long-term growth... One commentator felt it was understandable if the City saw Virgin as a faddy business."
The 1980s closed a little chastened, but a decade later we'd be "financial raving" again, thanks to one young Briton's brilliant 1989 invention.