It was a decade of discontent, yet entrepreneurs such as Branson and the late Anita Roddick emerged

Of all the questions asked during the 1970s, "What's wrong with Britain?" was perhaps the most frequent. During a decade of industrial unrest, three-day weeks, soaring inflation and manufacturing decline, the UK's executives used the pages of The Director to vent their frustration, but also to question the policies, leadership and direction of the government. Comparisons with other industrial nations did little to boost confidence. Japan's success, in a November 1971 article, was "characterised by a judicious mixture of planning and free enterprise", a combination the UK seemingly lacked.

Germany, the US, France and even Canada were all considered to be in ruder health than the "sick man of Europe". For some struggling UK businesses and CEOs, it was largely a decade to forget.

Youth was beginning to be favoured over experience. In December 1971, the magazine visited the phenomenon of the executive on the dole, with many of those heading for the exit vitriolic in their response to their younger replacements. The Director featured the experiences of one sacked executive, "Jim", faced with the humiliation of signing on at the labour exchange. "I had a seat on the board for 20 years" but "then came the all too familiar story of amalgamation, the handshake, and the 'thank you Jim', to a man left high and dry at 55. With it came a drop of income from £5,000 to nil."

For those board members who managed to hang on to their jobs, "heavy wage inflation and a rapid increase in the cost of living—combined with difficult trading conditions and reduced profit margins—gave most companies a dilemma over their top pay arrangements." By 1972, the median salary for a director was around £6,000.

At least there was Europe: in 1973, after much debate, Britain finally joined the EEC. In a January editorial, The Director discussed the potential for new beginnings: "After many false starts Britain at last will be able to participate in the mainstream of Europe's political and economic development. No one can predict what impact membership will have, but Britain will surely change more rapidly in the years ahead than at any stage in its previous history." Maybe this was wishful thinking. In the same issue, we compared the UK's appetite for strikes with that of Germany. "The German lay-term for rickets is 'the English disease'. In recent years this has acquired a new popular connotation: namely to describe the more widespread British sickness of industrial unrest."

The launch of a new The Director chairman's panel put that sickness into context. "I believe we are facing a real threat of industrial anarchy and that this is carefully planned," said one shipping company chairman. "The near unparalleled anarchy in British industrial relations imposes excessive demands upon top management time and has the effect of frustrating its real potential."

The Battle of Wapping was still over a decade away, but a September profile of Rupert Murdoch managed to pick out some of the characteristics that marked him for stardom. Author Sheila Black offered a brief glimpse of family life at breakfast. While everyone, including three-year old daughter Elisabeth, helps themselves, she wrote: "Rupert devours the papers above his congealing eggs and bacon. He will look at the Mirror and say: 'they did that bloody well.' But with pleasure, and some triumph, he will praise The Sun when it does something better than the Mirror. The FT and The Times get the same treatment—the comparison nearly always coming out in favour of the FT, although he admits that: 'I occasionally take time out to dream about buying The Times one day.'"

The first oil shock of 1973 did little to suppress galloping inflation. In a February 1974 open letter to the energy minister, City correspondent Kenneth Fleet wrote: "There is no precedent for a quadrupling, virtually overnight, in the cost of a primary source of energy. The economic world has been put in a unique position by the Arab oil producers putting up the price of oil and restricting its supply." Fleet suggested offering "real incentives" to help Britain become less reliant on oil altogether, such as "whipping up renewed enthusiasm for gas exploration in the southern North Sea, which has been overshadowed by the drive for oil further north."

In the same edition, The Director's editorial summed up the general malaise. "There is an old Chinese curse 'may you live in interesting times' and nobody can deny from that point of view that we in Britain have been soundly cursed. Any industrialist, as he copes with the consequences of the past few months, might be pardoned a momentary wish to emigrate."
Those views were put to Prime Minister Edward Heath, who countered with the accusation that the UK's directors simply weren't investing enough in the country's future. He also castigated them for failing to fight their corner through the media: "Trades union leaders are always ready and willing to go on television and state their case. Only one industrialist in 1,000 will go on—and 50 per cent of those who do go on, do it badly."

In an early nod to this year's Good Director campaign, David Moreau delivered his verdict on the "ever-popular sport of director bashing." Moreau wondered why in the US, company presidents frequently ranked "in popularity well above doctors and writers, whose professions still top Britain's social order". Maybe it was because aristocrats traditionally saw the "tradesman" as "a serious threat to the stability of social ecology because he could progress from barefoot hawking to building his first country mansion in a matter of a few years." And as for the dons and schoolmasters, "the thought is abhorrent that a businessman can create his own rules as he goes along, and end up owning vast areas of land having exercised no more intellectual talent than being able to sell things more expensively than he buys them."

In September 1975, Enoch Powell, writing about Harold Wilson—a man who had lost power in 1970, hung onto leadership of the Labour party and won back the keys to number 10 in the 1974 election—had this to say: "The fact that he could survive, beyond all expectation, the humiliations that were heaped upon him between 1970 and 1974, to emerge once more as Prime Minister, was due to something more than simple persistence... A proud man could never have lived through those years. Only the total absence of pride could enable any human being to survive that terrible rain of insult-absence of pride, allied to an infinite suppleness and resource."

But 1976 began with the familiar refrain: what is wrong with Great Britain? Sir Jack Callard, former chairman of ICI, delivered his damning opinion: "Is it impossible, in these days of power politics, where so often the obtaining and maintaining of power takes priority over what is best for the country, to expect government to concentrate on creating a better infrastructure within which industry can operate and purge themselves of their apparently insatiable hunger for introducing new laws, often merely to have them changed when a minute swing in electoral voting creates a new government of different complexion?"

In aerospace, Concorde split opinion straight down the middle. Twenty years and £500m in the making, few were enthusiastic about its arrival. "If you are a businessman working for a company with an elastic travel budget and a belief in the adage that time is money, then you'll love it," was Arthur Reed's view. "If on the other hand you live under the Heathrow flight path, believe that the £500m would have been better spent on schools, hospitals and roads, and are certain that the airliner will be used by big business alone, you will loathe it."

Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher ended the year with a speech at the IoD convention, promising to "refine the role of government" and "cut it back a little". By 1977, the British were keen, if not slightly disheartened, to learn that the generally perceived US view of Britain's woes was echoed by its press. "Goodbye Great Britain, it was nice knowing you," said the Wall Street Journal. The Economist joined in: "Steady as she sinks," ran the headline. (Today it's the US's turn, as a September 2007 International Institute for Strategic Studies finds its authority and prestige on the wane.)

Howard Hicks's riposte generated what was probably the largest reader response of the entire decade. One of the UK's "most successful industrialists" of the era provided a frank and bruising account of life at the top of a 1970s company. "To realise suddenly that the average chief executive in British industry is only earning, net, two thirds of the pay of a man driving a garbage truck in New York is a shattering revelation. This charade has now gone on far too long to the great detriment of our country. It is our country, and not the domain of a tiny Marxist minority, who would be delighted to see our standard of living equal to or lower than the Russians, so long as they gain power. Ours is to reason why."

Time appeared to be up for James Callaghan's government and its controversial wage restraint policy. An eerily prescient March 1979 article analysed the Tory front bench of the future. Geoffrey Howe was seen as a "pragmatic and flexible monetarist" and "a man of indefatigable stamina". Michael Heseltine was described as an "extremely shrewd, businesslike politician—something of a loner, but a cautious loner, who is aiming high." On Thatcher herself, political correspondent Ronald Butt compared her potential reign to that of Queen Elizabeth I, since both could "manoeuvre out of difficulties with skill, standing firm here and yielding there, making survival the ultimate necessity. Mrs Thatcher has not always been adept at seeing trouble coming. But she's tough, and she's a survivor (may the Equal Opportunities Commission forgive me) in a man's world."