Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

This room was full of chief executives and politicians, dinner jackets, good wine, the kind of audience that decides, between the soup and the speeches, who is going places.

At the podium is a man named Gerald Ratner.

He runs a jewelry empire with shops on nearly every high street in Britain.

And he's been given some advice, kind of advice that sounds perfectly sensible in a planning meeting.

The next morning, the newspapers ran it.

And here's the thing about that.

The audience Gerald Ratner was performing for was a few hundred people in dinner jackets.

The audience that mattered most was not that.

yeah

there are some really famous examples as well of people who very capable people who make some incredibly inexplicable decisions or statements like gerald ratner do you remember that one classic classic i think

A classic example of obvious self-sabotage.

When someone does something that's incredulous, where you look at them and like, why would you make that choice? That is always the hallmark of self-sabotage, getting the better of someone.

Do you just want to quickly say what Gerald Ratner said? Yes.

I think at some conference, he stood up and said, you know, the product, the jewelry that we sell is shit, right? He just was very dismissive and rude.

about his own product and it caught national press and the business tanked, right?

This is potentially right now where Neil Doncaster and the SPFL...

What we were talking about the other day, the Gerald Ratner situation, they are selling something as a product because of the excitement and the uncertainty, but the quality is not there.

Because it's tight and it's competitive, and the title went in the last game of the season last year, they'll market that as, oh, it's a

competitive

I think if they hadn't decided to leave, they would have just naturally no longer been someone who anybody would have used.

Well, British listeners might be familiar with the Ratner moment.

You know, Gerald Ratner, CEO of an affordable jewellery and homeware company, was once asked in a press conference, how do you make your product so affordable?

People say to me, how can you sell this for such a low price?

I say because it's total crap.

I think when fans...

Who was the jeweller? Ratner.

Was it Ratner? Yes, Gerald Ratner.

Scottish football becomes Gerald Ratner, right? There's a problem.

When you're losing that identity within your football club, where there's no longer players coming through, it all kind of lends itself to a dark place.

It's funny you should say that, because I think one of the things the SPFL want to do with this TV deal... is they'll try to lean into the chaos and the mayhem of Scottish football.

My job's to get money in and I'm getting money in.

And it's increasing every year.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I was listening to an interview with Gerald Ratner.

Oh, yeah, yeah, infamous.

Yeah,

And yet, uncertainty and blame-shifting remain, and arguably that has made things even worse for the man who just can't escape being at the centre of it all, namely Elon Musk.

Musk, who must be wondering whether he scored the worst own goal in business since Gerald Ratner told an audience that his company's products were, quote, ''total crap''.

Originally, we had a story by The Telegraph suggesting that the decision had been Donald Trump's, but the idea had been suggested to him by Elon Musk.

But then we had the exclusive by The Wall Street Journal that said that Elon Musk himself had ordered the slowdown of the military-grade version of Starlink used on the battlefield, down to a speed that would interfere with Ukraine's ability to operate effectively.

It's a story that could be taught in business school.

Something we call in the UK a Ratner.

If you're my age and you're in the UK, you'll know exactly what I mean.

But there was a guy called Gerald Ratner and every high street in the UK had a Ratner's jewellers.

And it was a kind of a low-end jewellers shop.

So you got... you know, earrings and diamond rings, but it wasn't, you know, some of the stuff they sold, teapots and stuff, they were selling for, you know, whatever, back in the day, this was probably the 80s, 90s, selling for very, very cheap prices and people liked it.

It was still a jeweler's, you went into a proper jeweler's shop and Gerald Ratner, who owned it, gave this speech after a speech that someone recorded one night where he basically said, and I think I can quote him here.

And he said, people ask us how we can sell a teapot and tea set for $9.99.