marco pierre white on the corporate world

"... it was my first experience of the corporate world and i thought it was horrible. you think blue-chip companies are run perfectly, but in my opinion they are worse than private companies. board meetings are painful. we'd have an hour-long meeting about the price of coffee, with them wanting to produce coffee for five pence a cup and spending sixty minutes talking about how every penny counts. "you can get spectacular coffee for twelve pence a cup," i'd say, and then emerge from the meeting brain dead. it was all about percentages rather than working out what's going to make the customer happy."