Sir Terence Beckett, who has died at the age of 89, had a career which included six years as chairman of Ford in Britain and several years as director general of the CBI. But despite his successes, the industrial and political problems of Britain in the 1970s and 1980s prevented him from achieving as much as this model of a modern manager could have done a few years later. As he himself put it, "We have had an inheritance of inertia in this country which has been disguised by the industrial revolution, the empire and North Sea oil."
