Josh Ozersky, in his earnest Colonel Sanders and the American Dream, stresses at the outset his alarm over the fact that a growing number of Americans don't realise that unlike Uncle Ben - in fact unlike any other such marketing creation - Colonel Sanders was a real person, not a corporate creation. And not only a real person, an exemplar: "More than almost anyone in the hagiographic literature of American business, he truly lived the American Dream."
Ozersky's book is part of the University of Texas Press's Discovering America series, which operates on the premise that much of US history still remains to be written and sets out to tell the peculiar and perhaps illustrative side stories that get lost in the drama of wars and westward expansion. But since the food company that Colonel Sanders founded, Kentucky Fried Chicken - KFC - has a worldwide reach (more than 15,000 outlets in more than 100 countries), it's incumbent on Ozersky to do a little clarifying about that central conceit of his book - just what is the American Dream?
He rejects the simple definition: "Often it is used to describe hard work leading to fortune, but there is nothing especially American about that; that is the Protestant work ethic wrapped in a flag," he writes. Instead, he digs deeper: "The phrase 'American Dream' was coined specifically to describe a state of egalitarian opportunity, a novus orbis where a man might transcend his roots and create himself as he saw fit." Our author's main contention in this energetic little book is that people shouldn't forget that Harlan Sanders was a real person, because forgetting that fact would drastically lessen the heroism of the man's personal journey from obscure beginnings to global figure.
Harlan Sanders was born in 1890 to a farmer in rural southern Indiana. The oldest of three children, Harlan lost his father at age five and in the years that followed became by necessity his mother's chief support in helping the family to survive. "No one can fully appreciate the Colonel's life and character," Ozersky claims, "without understanding how desperate and how unexceptional his mother's situation was." Young Harlan got a variety of menial jobs but aspired to more.
This aspiration led to a brief stint as a lawyer - a stretch that ended when Sanders got into a fight with his own client in the courts. He went back to menial work, pulling double shifts on the railways to support his new wife and family, until he landed a job selling insurance. He was sacked twice from that job, and a spate of similar non-starters followed, from selling tyres to backing the manufacture of acetylene lamps. Eventually, he ended up in Corbin, Kentucky, running a petrol station and it was there he had the idea of making a little money on the side by serving homemade food to paying customers. The idea was just the latest in Sanders' long line of business schemes, and like all of them, it was a long shot: "It was a gas station with some rooms attached, in a backward corner of a backward state, in the grip of the Depression, and it was a desperate undertaking, like most small businesses were at that place and time."
Through dint of unrelenting effort and lots of luck (and plenty of trial-and-error experimentation with the pressure cooking he used to prepare his birds), it worked: Sanders eventually expanded his little restaurant, making first one, then two, then a few franchise deals to sell his meals around the state - deals that were sealed with a handshake and gave him a nickel profit on every chicken. As Ozersky puts it: "Kentucky Fried Chicken was built on the efforts of one old man tirelessly driving around to back-road diners nearly as decrepit as himself."
Over time, he adopted the familiar guise by which he's known today, the white suit and tails, the black tie, the gold-tipped cane, the white hair and goatee. He would get himself booked onto local TV shows in order to promote the opening of some new franchise, and he would show up with a bucket of chicken and hand drumsticks out to members of the audience. He was a natural performer and began filling his everyday speech with the backwoods slang he'd been at pains to shed when he thought the insurance world didn't approve of it. Ozersky is being perhaps tongue-in-cheek credulous when he grudgingly admits "there was a level of artifice", but he wants to stress that any play-acting was shored up by good old-fashioned hard work.
But Ozersky's contention that Sanders embodies that elusive concept, the American Dream, becomes harder and harder for the book to support, especially when that oft-mentioned but ill-defined concept begins to part ways with mere financial success. By the mid-1950s, Sanders had "completed his transformation from worker to living asset," our author tells us. "His white suit would never be seen with a spot of dirt or grease on it. Why should it? It would be his job to represent the chicken, not to actually cook it." But even that representation was fraught with problems, as Ozersky is the first to admit. No matter how hard a worker he was, culturally speaking, Sanders was more and more coming to embody a lie: "[he] created an alternative reality in which the white planter not only ate the chicken but implicitly made it. Nothing could have been further from the truth."
The truth was that as the Kentucky Fried Chicken conglomerate continued to boom, the professional businessmen and restaurant backers who had been brought in to run the most lucrative franchises and organise things on a national and international level pushed Sanders into an ambassadorial role. As Sanders himself puts it in his memoir, "the popularity of Kentucky Fried Chicken was growin' right over me and mashin' me flat".
He wasn't from Kentucky; he was only an honorary colonel; he wasn't an antebellum Southern gentleman - he wasn't legally allowed to change his public appearance by so much as a handkerchief in his breast pocket, and he quickly surrendered even nominal input into the company he'd founded. Not only is this unlikely to be most people's idea of the American Dream, but it also goes a long way to undercut Ozersky's contention that KFC's founder was a real person: certainly by the time the company became a global phenomenon, Colonel Sanders was as close to being a fictional character as anybody could get.
He had flare-ups of personality too. This was a man who "had made a lifelong habit of swearing at employees, his own and those of lucky restaurant owners, and knocking any nearby surface with the end of his cane to indicate his displeasure at imperfectly cooked scrambled eggs". But for the most part, he was as well-behaved a corporate icon as the Jolly Green Giant, a cheerleader for the success of the company bearing his name.
Ozersky's book deals with that success as much as it does with the man who started it all, and the chapters concerned with the present-day KFC are among the book's most fascinating. There are now Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants all over the world, and Ozersky makes the excellent point that this ubiquity is largely the result of sidestepping cultural prohibitions. "The fried-chicken tradition of the American South, with its communal connotations and complicated racial history, may not have meant anything to the citizens of Bahrain or Beijing," he points out. "But the people there ate chicken, and they ate salt, and they ate fried, crunchy things of varying degrees of spiciness, and so Kentucky Fried Chicken made sense in a way that its burger-based rivals didn't."
Ozersky isn't always happy with this success and laments the decline of his hero's currency, noting that since his death his image has become "more common and less meaningful". How much meaning there ever was in the image will be for readers to decide, but nobody finishing this book will look at their local KFC in the same way again.
Steve Donoghue is managing editor of Open Letters Monthly.
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Pakistanis%20at%20the%20ILT20%20
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The alternatives
• Founded in 2014, Telr is a payment aggregator and gateway with an office in Silicon Oasis. It’s e-commerce entry plan costs Dh349 monthly (plus VAT). QR codes direct customers to an online payment page and merchants can generate payments through messaging apps.
• Business Bay’s Pallapay claims 40,000-plus active merchants who can invoice customers and receive payment by card. Fees range from 1.99 per cent plus Dh1 per transaction depending on payment method and location, such as online or via UAE mobile.
• Tap started in May 2013 in Kuwait, allowing Middle East businesses to bill, accept, receive and make payments online “easier, faster and smoother” via goSell and goCollect. It supports more than 10,000 merchants. Monthly fees range from US$65-100, plus card charges of 2.75-3.75 per cent and Dh1.2 per sale.
• 2checkout’s “all-in-one payment gateway and merchant account” accepts payments in 200-plus markets for 2.4-3.9 per cent, plus a Dh1.2-Dh1.8 currency conversion charge. The US provider processes online shop and mobile transactions and has 17,000-plus active digital commerce users.
• PayPal is probably the best-known online goods payment method - usually used for eBay purchases - but can be used to receive funds, providing everyone’s signed up. Costs from 2.9 per cent plus Dh1.2 per transaction.
Confirmed%20bouts%20(more%20to%20be%20added)
%3Cp%3ECory%20Sandhagen%20v%20Umar%20Nurmagomedov%0D%3Cbr%3ENick%20Diaz%20v%20Vicente%20Luque%0D%3Cbr%3EMichael%20Chiesa%20v%20Tony%20Ferguson%0D%3Cbr%3EDeiveson%20Figueiredo%20v%20Marlon%20Vera%0D%3Cbr%3EMackenzie%20Dern%20v%20Loopy%20Godinez%0D%3Cbr%3E%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3ETickets%20for%20the%20August%203%20Fight%20Night%2C%20held%20in%20partnership%20with%20the%20Department%20of%20Culture%20and%20Tourism%20Abu%20Dhabi%2C%20went%20on%20sale%20earlier%20this%20month%2C%20through%20www.etihadarena.ae%20and%20www.ticketmaster.ae.%0D%3Cbr%3E%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
More coverage from the Future Forum
SPECS%3A%20Polestar%203
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The specs
Engine: 2.7-litre 4-cylinder Turbomax
Power: 310hp
Torque: 583Nm
Transmission: 8-speed automatic
Price: From Dh192,500
On sale: Now
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More from Rashmee Roshan Lall
Ten10 Cricket League
Venue and schedule Sharjah Cricket Stadium, December 14 to 17
Teams
Maratha Arabians Leading player: Virender Sehwag; Top picks: Mohammed Amir, Imad Wasim; UAE players: Shaiman Anwar, Zahoor Khan
Bengal Lions Leading player: Sarfraz Ahmed; Top picks: Sunil Narine, Mustafizur Rahman; UAE players: Mohammed Naveed, Rameez Shahzad
Kerala Kings Leading player: Eoin Morgan; Top picks: Kieron Pollard, Sohail Tanvir; UAE players: Rohan Mustafa, Imran Haider
Pakhtoons Leading player: Shahid Afridi; Top picks: Fakhar Zaman, Tamim Iqbal; UAE players: Amjad Javed, Saqlain Haider
Punjabi Legends Leading player: Shoaib Malik; Top picks: Hasan Ali, Chris Jordan; UAE players: Ghulam Shabber, Shareef Asadullah
Team Sri Lanka Cricket Will be made up of Colombo players who won island’s domestic limited-overs competition
Company%20Profile
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heading
Iran has sent five planeloads of food to Qatar, which is suffering shortages amid a regional blockade.
A number of nations, including Iran's major rival Saudi Arabia, last week cut ties with Qatar, accusing it of funding terrorism, charges it denies.
The land border with Saudi Arabia, through which 40% of Qatar's food comes, has been closed.
Meanwhile, mediators Kuwait said that Qatar was ready to listen to the "qualms" of its neighbours.
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RESULTS
1.45pm: Maiden Dh75,000 1,400m
Winner: Dirilis Ertugrul, Fabrice Veron (jockey), Ismail Mohammed (trainer)
2.15pm: Handicap Dh90,000 1,400m
Winner: Kidd Malibu, Sandro Paiva, Musabah Al Muhairi
2.45pm: Maiden Dh75,000 1,000m
Winner: Raakezz, Tadhg O’Shea, Nicholas Bachalard
3.15pm: Handicap Dh105,000 1,200m
Winner: Au Couer, Sean Kirrane, Satish Seemar
3.45pm: Maiden Dh75,000 1,600m
Winner: Rayig, Pat Dobbs, Doug Watson
4.15pm: Handicap Dh105,000 1,600m
Winner: Chiefdom, Royston Ffrench, Salem bin Ghadayer
4.45pm: Handicap Dh80,000 1,800m
Winner: King’s Shadow, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”