Now familiar themes emerged in this decade, including dotcoms, climate change, "fat cats", and "no-frills" airlines

The 1990s were defined by two technological revolutions that changed the lives and working practices of everyone—the internet and the mobile phone. But in 1995, Director still needed to explain how it all worked in a special report on the World Wide Web. Both technologies presented British entrepreneurs with money-making potential—and make money they did.

Indeed, one of the most obvious shifts in Director during the 1990s was its move away from covering big business and politics to focus on entrepreneurs and the service and technology sectors.

The decade began with unrest in the Cabinet and the first Gulf War. Director contributors paid tribute to Mrs Thatcher's legacy, with even non-supporters, acknowledging she left behind a healthier, more confident economy than she'd inherited.

Corporate governance came to the fore, with Director featuring each of the successive reviews from Cadbury in 1992 to Turnbull in 1999.

The fascination for China as an emerging market was ever-present through 1990s Director, and with the world still reeling from Tiananmen Square, civil rights were at the top of the agenda. Such tensions were heightened by the knowledge that the UK and China had to prepare for Hong Kong handover in 1997—itself a subject of much speculation in the magazine.

Director also looked to Eastern Europe as a potential hotbed of new business, particularly for small businesses. In a 1990 cover story on Russia's new capitalism, director Pat Murrin predicted: "Russia will be the biggest market in Europe in 10 years".

There are other familiar themes: in Director in 1990, Jonathon Porritt, then head of Friends of the Earth, said: "Without cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions from cars, it will be almost impossible to meet any kind of target for overall reductions in CO2 and without such targets being met, it will be impossible to do anything about global warming. So much for the 'greening' of government."

In April 1991, 26-year-old, Porsche-driving, Michael Dell—looking the epitome of 1980s cool—talked about his first seven years in business. At the time, Dell's business model was based on mail order, which Dell insisted on calling Direct Relationship Marketing, a sign of the sort of marketing and management jargon that had begun to blossom. There are some tellingly dated views: in an article on personal organisers, Sir Mark Weinberg of Microwriter Agenda explained that he used his organiser as a database: "I even use it to code my friends, (single male, single female) for dinner parties. That way, if my wife's short of a guest I can find someone."

In the same edition, a fresh-faced Chris Gent, then managing director of Racal-Vodafone, said: "The mobile telephone has had an enormous impact on my life. My business day is extended by two hours by being in touch during my journeys to and from work." So that's how to become one of the dealmakers of the decade.

Much was written at the time about how the reputation of business had been undermined by a series of corporate failures and corruption sagas. With directors' reputation under fire, executive pay became a hot topic. It didn't help when a handful of directors earned more than £1m a year. Add in dividend payments and the membership of the million-plus club increased to 40, with David Sainsbury the highest paid on £24.6m.

A narrow Tory election victory that year marked a change in fortune for the economy. But the telecoms sector was already booming. Stafford Taylor, MD of Cellnet, was confident enough to claim that by 2000 some 10 million customers would own a mobile phone. "And these will be used at home as well as for business," he predicted. The figure turned out to be closer to 20 million.

With little flourish, a small story in October 1993 announced the launch of Adobe Acrobat—the PDF had arrived. Also in 1993, one of the other stars of UK business was profiled—WPP boss Martin Sorrell. The owner of JWT and Ogilvy & Mather declared himself "the keeper of the image". By the end of the decade he would be on the verge of also owning Young & Rubicam—still one of the advertising world's biggest deals. "I make mistakes every day," he told Director. "But I am not conscious of a big, horrendous mistake. I see little merit in looking back and I do not have any regrets."

In the same year, Neil Hamilton, just installed as a DTI minister—and later infamous for different reasons—promised to cut red tape, a claim echoed by small business ministers ever since. "We've never had a commitment before on the part of the whole government to deregulation," said Hamilton. Cleverly deflecting blame onto those pesky Europeans, he said that getting the EC to recognise the impact of regulations was "pushing a heavy rock uphill".

Along with a redesign, Director in 1994 saw the first mention of the Al Gore-coined phrase "information superhighway". The world was about to change forever, but for the moment, Director warned readers that the whole thing was terribly complicated. "What online services we have," wrote David Tebbutt, "are usually fronted by an obscure user interface which involves much typing of backslashes and abbreviations." 

By September 1994 Director was hailing this new network. A special report gave various explanations of the wonders of the internet including that it was "a version of the telephone system that lets computer users speak to each other by using a keyboard instead of voice."

As young entrepreneurs began to seek out investors the following year, Tebbutt wrote: "If the hype is to be believed, over 30 million computers around the world can now connect to the internet. In less than five years some experts believe this figure will reach 200 million." If only they'd all ordered one pair of trainers from Boo.com.

The dotcom boom wasn't yet underway, but wiser heads were already warning that the "bubble was about to burst". The mid-90s also saw the first appearance of the phrase "surfing the Net", along with explanations that people surfing the Net are "the ones who run specific programs, called browsers, to help them navigate the internet". There was even talk now of "transforming the Internet into a viable commercial activity".

Another businessman who took off in the 1990s was entrepreneur Richard Branson. He'd taken on BA with Virgin Atlantic, then in July 1995 Richard Branson turned on the drinks giants with the launch of Virgin Cola into a global sector "where the upside is enormous". He went on to explain his vision for Virgin, pointing out that "I've never seen running the companies as pure profit and loss, the challenge is greater than that."

A year later at his old nemesis, BA, marketing man Bob Ayling took the top job. In a profile in Director, he said: "It's probably more difficult to take over a successful business than one that clearly needs something done to improve it". But his aim was to make BA "the best managed company in the UK by 2000".

Inevitably, the pages of Director reflected the UK's movement towards a service-based, enterprise economy. In place of its annual list of the 1,000 biggest firms in the UK, it started to run regular listings of the best small firms. In May 1996, Tim Melville-Ross, then IoD director-general, wrote that "small business is big business". This focus on the "enterprise economy" continued in 1996 with a first feature on "serial entrepreneurs"—successful businessmen (and they were all men) who had made millions with one business and then launched another. It featured Robert Earl, founder of Planet Hollywood, Sir Terence Conran and Dave Whelan, the former Blackburn Rovers footballer who sold his grocery chain to Morrisons for £1m, then built JJB Sports out of one shop.

Football was another big success story of the 1990s, with John Madejski—talking about his takeover of (then) lowly Reading Football Club—and Chelsea benefactor and taxi-owning Benfield Insurance boss Matthew Harding (later killed in a helicopter crash) both profiled in the course of the decade. Aligned to football, Director charted the rising fortunes of Sky, revived by Rupert Murdoch with not a little upset along the way. Brian Haynes, a founder of Sky, described Murdoch as a "dealer not a creator. He has enormous power for good, but does not use it."

In telecoms, the harbinger of change came in the unlikely shape of Hans Snook at mobile phone pioneer Orange. His unusual career—hotel industry, real estate sales and then backpacking—as well as his unusual style (feng shui in his office, dropping his first name, Roger, for numerology) didn't hamper his success, and his customer-first approach remains a high watermark for industry: "It's the same as the hotel business—you get and keep customers by offering the best service," he said.

The decade also marked the arrival of the first female FTSE-100 CEO: Marjorie Scardino joined Pearson in 1997. The amount of negative comment her appointment generated suggested the five-year-old Opportunity 2000 project hadn't achieved as much as it had hoped. "If it was men who gave birth to children, many of the problems that working mothers face would be solved in five minutes." But "diversity" entered the lexicon, with a cover story on the subject in 1998.

Another airline upstart, Michael O'Leary, who'd joined Ryanair in 1993, made an early showing as CEO of the month a few years later. He was rarely in the limelight, according to the piece, in which he admitted to "selling everything that isn't nailed down", instituting a "no-frills" approach inspired by South West Airlines. The sector featured again as Barbara Cassani at BA spin-off Go and Stelios Haji-Ioannou at easyJet followed in the footsteps of airline entrepreneurs Branson and Laker and created one of the success sectors of the 1990s. As small business directors embraced the low-cost services, the full-service airlines began to improve their offerings—with chauffeur collection and better lounge facilities for business class travellers. Regular contributor Hamish McRae predicted in 1998 that public transport will also get nicer, with smaller crowds on trains and at airports. It just goes to show that even the best get it wrong sometimes.
 
Labour swept to power in 1997 after 18 years in the wilderness and Director featured the legendary "Blair's Babes" and a familiar face at the Treasury. Gordon Brown had featured in Director as the shadow trade minister in advance of the 1992 election. There was general praise for his early decision to hand over interest-rate decisions to the Bank of England, but less warmth for the introduction of the National Minimum Wage and a notable chill at the prospect of entry to the single currency in 1999.
Nick Kochan's 1999 interview with Chancellor Brown saw trademark words such as "prudence", "stability", "transparency", "job-creation" and "wealth creation" feature heavily.

Towards the end of 1997, the millennium bug got its first mention in Director. Predictions of how this computer apocalypse would affect all businesses grew more dramatic as 1999 drew closer. As the panic reached fever pitch, singer Pat Boone was made the spokesman for an informal Y2K movement warning people to buy warm underwear. But as it turned out, no planes fell from the skies and the only pop in the UK came from a record numbers of champagne corks.

The same year, Carol Kennedy's disparaging review of Tom Peters' Circle of Innovation ended: "As a book, it would make a great video."
Then, in 1998, a survey of UK SMEs (the decade's term for businesses employing, initially, 250 or fewer) found 64 per cent still didn't have internet access, let alone a website. Mark Compton-Hall, of IBM Global Services, said at the time: "The problem is the hype spouted by the IT industry. It's no more than another channel to market."

Meanwhile, Microsoft's Bill Gates told Director on the launch of his book Business@The Speed of Thought: "If we go out of business, it won't be because we're not focused on the internet, it'll be because we're too focused on the internet." By this stage, Microsoft was employing 20,000 people, 10,000 of them in product development.

Retailers fates' began to diverge: Tesco became "the darling of the sundried tomato classes", while Sainsbury's fell behind. The turn of the new century would mark a difficult period for Marks and Spencer, too, whereas Asda, under the guidance of Director cover stars Archie Norman and Allan Leighton, was made perfect for behemoth Wal-Mart to snap up.

Directors' reputations—a constant issue through the 1990s—came to the fore in July 1999's classic "Fat Cats" edition. "Can directors improve their public image?", asked the editorial. The scandals of the early 2000s proved we have a way to go.