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Excellent article here - well worth a read (a big thank you to Frensic Fred for brining it to our attention).
By Ian King, Sky's Business Presenter.
Read the latest speeches from the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury and John McDonnell and one could be forgiven for assuming most business leaders are rapacious, callous souls with no thoughts other than to enrich themselves and - possibly - their shareholders.
There probably are some business folk out there like that, but they are decidedly in the minority. Most are just as thoughtful, caring and considerate as every other human being.
And, every so often, there comes along an exceptional business person who does fantastic things for wider society without making a big song and dance about it. Tragically, we have just lost one such individual.
Eddie Davies, who died last week aged 72, is perhaps best known for his bankrolling of Bolton Wanderers.
During that time, the club enjoyed more than a decade in the Premier League, four successive top-eight finishes and its first campaigns in Europe.
It was the millions he invested that bankrolled Sam Allardyce's successful management of the Trotters and enabled the signing of globally-recognised stars such as Jay Jay Okocha, Nicolas Anelka, Youri Djorkaeff, Bruno Ngotty, Ivan Campo and Fernando Hierro.
When he handed over control of the club in March 2016, following the most successful period in its history, he wrote off £171m in loans he had made to it and left it with an extra £15m as a farewell gift.
His passing has prompted an outpouring of love and affection, both from within football and across the North West.
The actor and comedian Paddy McGuinness summed up the feelings of many when he praised Ed for investing millions of pounds of his money "putting a smile on the faces" of Bolton supporters.
His backing of Wanderers reflected his pride in where he came from.
Born into a working class family in Little Lever, a village two-and-a-half-miles away from Bolton, he was educated at nearby Farnworth Grammar School. Alan Ball, one of England's 1966 World Cup-winning team, was a contemporary.
Ed became a Bolton supporter as a boy when, in 1958, the Trotters - led by Nat Lofthouse - won the FA Cup.
But his hometown club, which paid tribute with a minute's applause and wreath-laying ceremony before last Saturday's home match with Queen's Park Rangers, was merely one of a number of local institutions and organisations that Ed backed generously.
He was, for example, to have been the guest of honour at the opening of the Egyptology Gallery at Bolton Museum on Saturday, having helped finance it.
As a child, he had developed a passion for art and culture at the museum, eventually inspiring him to become a collector of paintings and ceramics.
Another local institution he supported was the Royal Bolton Hospital. It received £200,000 from him towards a new coronary care unit after Ed underwent a heart bypass operation in 1996.
He also donated towards the original National Football Museum just up the road in Preston.
Ed, who never lost his warm Lancashire accent, once said: "I have got Bolton written through me like [a stick of] rock. I have been born and bred in Bolton and, although I travel all over the world, I still pick up the paper to find out what's happening in Bolton. I'm still a Bolton lad at heart."
Other institutions Ed supported included Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS), where he studied during the 1980s, for which he funded a Chair in Entrepreneurship.
The AMBS library was renamed the Eddie Davies Library in 2004 in recognition of his generous support of library services at the university (full disclosure: Ed was also chair of the AMBS Advisory Board, to which he recently recruited me).
Further afield, he was a generous supporter of the Victoria & Albert Museum, to which he donated many of the pieces of art he had collected, and the museum named its Edwin and Susan Davies Galleries in honour of him and his wife Sue.
His donations of more than £1m also helped construct the much-admired Davies Alpine House at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.
Ed was able to make these generous contributions because of the wealth he accumulated during a successful business career.
After graduating with a degree in mathematics from Durham University, he joined the Lancashire-based Scapa Group, then an industrial manufacturer of paper, travelling around the world in its employ and at one stage running its Latin American operations from Brazil during a difficult period of runaway inflation.
In 1984 and still in his 30s, he was headhunted to run Strix Group - a two-year-old manufacturer of thermostats for electric kettles based on the Isle of Man - by its founder and inventor John Taylor.
Within a few years, it was the world's biggest supplier of heating controls for kettles, and by the turn of the century it accounted for around three-quarters of global supplies.
Its devices were by then found in kettles in around one in five homes around the world and used an estimated one billion times daily.
The pair sold the business to private equity in 2005 but Ed stayed on as non-executive and continued to hold a modest stake in the business.
He remained proud of Strix, which floated on the stock market in August last year, arguing its prospects remained as strong as ever.
Business people and entrepreneurs do not always get credit for their wider contribution to society. Some, like Ed, do not actively seek it.
Yet the world would be worse off without such people. It is certainly worse off without Eddie Davies. We could do with a few more like him.
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By Ian King, Sky's Business Presenter.
Read the latest speeches from the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury and John McDonnell and one could be forgiven for assuming most business leaders are rapacious, callous souls with no thoughts other than to enrich themselves and - possibly - their shareholders.
There probably are some business folk out there like that, but they are decidedly in the minority. Most are just as thoughtful, caring and considerate as every other human being.
And, every so often, there comes along an exceptional business person who does fantastic things for wider society without making a big song and dance about it. Tragically, we have just lost one such individual.
Eddie Davies, who died last week aged 72, is perhaps best known for his bankrolling of Bolton Wanderers.
During that time, the club enjoyed more than a decade in the Premier League, four successive top-eight finishes and its first campaigns in Europe.
It was the millions he invested that bankrolled Sam Allardyce's successful management of the Trotters and enabled the signing of globally-recognised stars such as Jay Jay Okocha, Nicolas Anelka, Youri Djorkaeff, Bruno Ngotty, Ivan Campo and Fernando Hierro.
When he handed over control of the club in March 2016, following the most successful period in its history, he wrote off £171m in loans he had made to it and left it with an extra £15m as a farewell gift.
His passing has prompted an outpouring of love and affection, both from within football and across the North West.
The actor and comedian Paddy McGuinness summed up the feelings of many when he praised Ed for investing millions of pounds of his money "putting a smile on the faces" of Bolton supporters.
His backing of Wanderers reflected his pride in where he came from.
Born into a working class family in Little Lever, a village two-and-a-half-miles away from Bolton, he was educated at nearby Farnworth Grammar School. Alan Ball, one of England's 1966 World Cup-winning team, was a contemporary.
Ed became a Bolton supporter as a boy when, in 1958, the Trotters - led by Nat Lofthouse - won the FA Cup.
But his hometown club, which paid tribute with a minute's applause and wreath-laying ceremony before last Saturday's home match with Queen's Park Rangers, was merely one of a number of local institutions and organisations that Ed backed generously.
He was, for example, to have been the guest of honour at the opening of the Egyptology Gallery at Bolton Museum on Saturday, having helped finance it.
As a child, he had developed a passion for art and culture at the museum, eventually inspiring him to become a collector of paintings and ceramics.
Another local institution he supported was the Royal Bolton Hospital. It received £200,000 from him towards a new coronary care unit after Ed underwent a heart bypass operation in 1996.
He also donated towards the original National Football Museum just up the road in Preston.
Ed, who never lost his warm Lancashire accent, once said: "I have got Bolton written through me like [a stick of] rock. I have been born and bred in Bolton and, although I travel all over the world, I still pick up the paper to find out what's happening in Bolton. I'm still a Bolton lad at heart."
Other institutions Ed supported included Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS), where he studied during the 1980s, for which he funded a Chair in Entrepreneurship.
The AMBS library was renamed the Eddie Davies Library in 2004 in recognition of his generous support of library services at the university (full disclosure: Ed was also chair of the AMBS Advisory Board, to which he recently recruited me).
Further afield, he was a generous supporter of the Victoria & Albert Museum, to which he donated many of the pieces of art he had collected, and the museum named its Edwin and Susan Davies Galleries in honour of him and his wife Sue.
His donations of more than £1m also helped construct the much-admired Davies Alpine House at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.
Ed was able to make these generous contributions because of the wealth he accumulated during a successful business career.
After graduating with a degree in mathematics from Durham University, he joined the Lancashire-based Scapa Group, then an industrial manufacturer of paper, travelling around the world in its employ and at one stage running its Latin American operations from Brazil during a difficult period of runaway inflation.
In 1984 and still in his 30s, he was headhunted to run Strix Group - a two-year-old manufacturer of thermostats for electric kettles based on the Isle of Man - by its founder and inventor John Taylor.
Within a few years, it was the world's biggest supplier of heating controls for kettles, and by the turn of the century it accounted for around three-quarters of global supplies.
Its devices were by then found in kettles in around one in five homes around the world and used an estimated one billion times daily.
The pair sold the business to private equity in 2005 but Ed stayed on as non-executive and continued to hold a modest stake in the business.
He remained proud of Strix, which floated on the stock market in August last year, arguing its prospects remained as strong as ever.
Business people and entrepreneurs do not always get credit for their wider contribution to society. Some, like Ed, do not actively seek it.
Yet the world would be worse off without such people. It is certainly worse off without Eddie Davies. We could do with a few more like him.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
