Ruthless Chairman

[canarytim 0]

I just googled our new Chairman and, well he seems not "nice" I suppose is the word. (see "Why I became A Socialist" )

I know there are two sides to every story but he seems to make JR Ewing or Alan Sugar like  pussycats.

But unfortunately we probrably need a ruthless Chairman in our present situation.

Whatever criticism anyone had for Roger Munby no one can deny he really cared about the club and was a very decent fella, so perhaps our owners feel we need to go in a different direction.

Time will tell.

 

 

[BlyBlyBabes 0]

[quote user="canarytim"]

I just googled our new Chairman and, well he seems not "nice" I suppose is the word. (see "Why I became A Socialist" )

I know there are two sides to every story but he seems to make JR Ewing or Alan Sugar like  pussycats.

But unfortunately we probrably need a ruthless Chairman in our present situation.

Whatever criticism anyone had for Roger Munby no one can deny he really cared about the club and was a very decent fella, so perhaps our owners feel we need to go in a different direction.

Time will tell.

[/quote]

You have encouraged a vision of  two old dears walking their pitbull through Norwich marketplace on a Saturday afternoon.

Crumbs!

OTBC

[singing canary 0]

im not going to pass judgement on him yet .

but didnt we have a ruthless manager not that long ago ..which ended in failure.

hopefully not that ruthless to make major blunders as we have seen so many times before.

[Evil Monkey 52]

I''ve just read this quite interesting article on Bowkett... its from some 15 years ago admittedly, but gives a little insight into the man and his methods.  From everything here it looks like we''re in for interesting times - take a look...http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/search/article/409617/uk-profile-alan-bowkett/"When the son of a miner took over at Berisford, he turned the

clapped-out trader into a success and became the darling of the City.

Andrew Davidson talks to the rescuer of lost causes.

On

the day two and a half years ago that chief executive Alan Bowkett

stepped into the top slot at Berisford he signed a cheque for £1.1

million to buy a bundle of shares in the company. It was designed not

just to show his wealth - he had walked away with a fortune from his

last position - but also his commitment to the troubled commodity

trader-turned-conglomerate. That very same night - as he slept soundly,

dreaming of the outfit''s rosy future - the coffee market dropped like a

stone and plunged Berisford into a new liquidity crisis. Bowkett woke

to find Berisford''s bankers yet again preparing to pull the plug.

Most of us,

points out one friend of Bowkett''s, would have stopped the cheque then

and there. The fact that he didn''t, and that he stayed and sorted out a

bigger mess than he can ever have expected to find, convinced the banks

to stick with it. No sooner had he extricated Berisford from its coffee

fiasco, than he co-ordinated a bold bid for ailing shoe giant Clarks,

which narrowly missed out. Unfazed, he was in like Flynn for Magnet,

the joinery and kitchens business, a one-time £630 million management

buy-out that he took for £56 million in January this year. Observers

did their sums. The company, with £30 million cash in it, cost him just

£26 million net. Jaws dropped at the deal. ''Is it a bird? Is it a

plane? No, it''s SuperAl ...'' gushed the Daily Mail. Woomph went the

hype. Woosh went the share price. So, two years after signing the

cheque, Bowkett''s stake became worth a lot, lot more and his own

reputation, like the stock of his company, is now riding very high

indeed in the City.

Too high? The thought has crossed a

few minds. The problem now is that Bowkett has a whole heap of

expectations to live up to, and not just in the City. The media, too,

is pining for the days when bosses were brassy and takeovers were

10-a-penny. And Bowkett, the miner''s son trained by BET who made

millions from a ball-bearing sell-out before promising to build a new

style of conglomerate at Berisford, could so nearly fit the bill.

Yet sitting with him in a fourth-floor meeting-room at Berisford''s old

City HQ - the company has just moved head office to Baker Street - it

doesn''t take long to realise that anyone yearning for a bit of ''80s

flash from the million-pound man is going to be very disappointed.

Tall, chubbily sleek and bearing a passing resemblance to the BBC''s

foreign editor, John Simpson, Bowkett in interview is deceptively

charming and thoughtful. Deceptively, perhaps, because as another of

his friends told me: ''He did not get to where he is by being the nicest

man in business.'' For all the hype, the task he faces at Berisford is

huge. Murray Stuart, the previous chief executive, had acted as

''company doctor'' to sort out the mess left by Ephraim Margulies,

Berisford''s guiding hand in the ''80s, but even so the company was still

a clapped-out trader with horrific debts and huge tax liabilities in

America when Bowkett arrived. Now 42, he has been given a free hand to

cut, close or sell anything he wants, and rebuild anew sticking to his

own philosophy of what will work in the ''90s. It is an extraordinary

gesture of faith by shareholders in one man.

The Bowkett

principle is simple. Anything he builds at Berisford, he says, has to

be for the long term; he is not a financial engineer. In that, perhaps,

he is an interesting example of the new ''90s-style conglomerate chief,

although at times it can seem an uneasy mix of old and new.

''Certainly,'' he says, considering how conglomerate bosses differ from

others, ''running a conglomerate means you don''t have the emotional

baggage that some bosses have. It means you can be brutally objective.''

He stops to savour the words. ''Yes, brutally objective. You work out

what is essential to make the outfit work for the future, and if that

means closing factories that have been operating for 200 years in the

community, you do it.'' Then he goes on. ''Should there be other

considerations? I don''t make the rules. But if you talk to others, they

might argue there should be social considerations and, in the long

term, capitalist considerations, too, in that if you keep making

everyone unemployed and don''t train them, the economy will be

jeopardised. I do not disagree with that, but so long as we are

measured by shareholder performance, profit before tax and dividend

performance, we work to those rules. The interesting situation is that

if it were less easy to close factories or make people redundant, would

a manager be more creative in finding value-added opportunities? That

is a highly theoretical question that I don''t know the answer to.''

Bowkett, as is swiftly apparent, is quite capable of conducting an

interview with himself and still making it interesting. He has, confirm

others, a degree of self-fascination and vanity common to many

self-made men, but it is leavened by a smooth wit and a canny ability

to get on with people, from the shop floor to the poshest City

boardrooms.

Nor does he avoid the awkward questions. Later when

I ask him: ''Would he consider himself a working-class boy made good?''

He laughs at the impertinence then looks so genuinely uncomfortable

that he makes you feel rotten for asking. ''Well, er, it''s never

mentioned really, um, if you look at others ... no, if you put me on

the spot I would say a public-school background is probably a

disadvantage in industry now.'' The great irony, he goes on to point

out, warming to the theme, is that while a whole tier of people taking

power in industry and the civil service are products of the grammar

school system, most, like himself, now send their kids to private

schools.

There is a lot of the politician about Bowkett: he

speaks well, anticipates criticisms, is a good rescuer of lost causes

and inspires trust and loyalty. He is, say some of his friends, the

best MP the Tory party never had. A one-time councillor in Ealing

during the late ''70s - ''My wife told me to stop shouting at the TV and

do something'' - and Thatcher fan, he now admits to being disillusioned

with the current government and has recently been an outspoken critic

of its industrial policy. ''What industrial policy?'' he asks, raising an

eyebrow. ''I am hard-pushed to identify it.'' He has also been forthright

on social policy, for years telling all who would listen that the

Government should simply increase teachers'' salaries by 50% and bring

in continuous assessment to solve education problems.

Of course,

even a 50% hike is unlikely to bring many teachers into the Bowkett

earning bracket. Last year he earned £370,000 at Berisford to add to

his share pile. Now, say friends, he enjoys playing the rich man too

much to rekindle his political ambitions. Those hobbies? Opera,

shooting and gardening, and when not running Berisford, he can usually

be found sorting out the lambing at his Norfolk estate or sunning

himself at his Tuscan villa outside Lucca. Then there are the holidays

in Barbados. While not flash, he can, say friends, be a bit showy.

''I''m always pulling his leg that he does these things because that''s

what he imagined rich people did when he was a little boy,'' laughs Roy

Hammond, an old friend who followed him from RHP, the ball-bearing

company, to Berisford. Not that it all comes effortlessly, adds

Hammond, mischievously. A lot of Bowkett''s jet-set gloss has been

groomed into him by his wife, Joy. So what makes a successful

conglomerate boss in the ''90s? Calculation, perhaps; vision, certainly.

Bowkett arrived at Berisford with a ready-made philosophy and a view on

history. What he had gleaned from management in the ''80s, he explains,

is that turnarounds were easy.

''As you were working in an

inflationary environment, you could manipulate the prices up quite

easily. You could also rationalise the product range, make a fortune

selling off spare capacity in city centres to Sainsbury''s, and sort out

all the key problems that had been going on for about 20 years.

Basically, you had done 80% of the job.'' That was the key to

conglomerates in the Thatcher years, if only because there were a whole

host of undermanaged companies around. ''But in the ''90s,'' he continues,

''one of the driving things is that the easy work has been done.

Inflation is non-existent, so there is no hiding place. You have to

focus on achieving real benefits which are not just one-off reductions

from rationalising the product range or taking a factory out. You have

to differentiate yourself through product development and quality

improvement, all of which has a longer gestation period to perform than

just doing the easy stuff in the ''80s.'' He cites the management methods

of the Japanese as a major influence. ''We did joint ventures with them

at RHP for three years and it was very interesting to see how they

approached particular issues.'' He tells a long, complicated anecdote

about ball-bearing manufacture, the gist of which seems to be that

whereas British management are happy just to pick off isolated problems

on a production line to improve short-term performance, the Japanese

approach would be to tear everything up and start again properly,

aiming for the long-term gain. That kind of thinking is going to be

crucial in the ''90s, says Bowkett, as the key issues become continuous

improvement and unit cost reduction.

He has travelled a long way

from the Nottinghamshire streets where he was brought up. Born the

elder of two sons to a one-time miner and later garage owner in

Bilsthorpe, Bowkett whizzed through grammar school, University College

London, and a first job at the Economist Intelligence Unit with barely

a backward glance at his pit-village roots. He was glad to get out, he

says flatly. He has no time for the common sentimentality about mining

communities. Why?

''I have never met a miner yet who wanted his

child to go down the mine,'' he says, ''and as for protecting their

communities, I always felt they were strange communities. Very bigoted,

very intolerant, very masculine oriented, certainly in the 1950s. I

don''t know whether that still pertains now.'' His big break, he says,

came not at the London Business School, where he did an MBA after the

EIU, but at BET''s Lex Service which he joined shortly after. There he

trained under Trevor Chinn in a management hothouse with a whole host

of up-and-coming stars: Gerry Robinson (Granada), Jim White (ex-Bunzl),

John Lovering (Tarmac), Mike Williamson (Appleyard), Jim Maxmin

(ex-Laura Ashley). ''Chinn hired very bright people and paid them lots

of money and you had to run very fast to keep up,'' he says now. Those

who knew him then remember that his foremost qualities were always his

ambition and his almost old-fashioned steadfastness. He was keen to

kick the traces of his working-class background but unlike some racing

to get the top in the ''70s and ''80s, he operated to a very strict moral

code. He has always been absolutely straight with everyone and never

lets people down, says Hammond. Another friend attributes it to the

major event in his up-bringing: Bowkett''s father running off and

leaving his mother. ''That left a scar,'' says the friend.

Bowkett

always wanted to be rich. Bored with ''bag-carrying'' at BET, he talked

his way out of corporate strategy at Lex and into a proper management

job. At 34, he was given BET''s Boulton and Paul, an ailing

building-products group, to sort out. Within two years he had turned

that around. Hungry for more, he then led the management buy-in bid for

RHP in 1987. No one has ever discovered just how much he made out of

his time there. Suffice to say that after selling RHP to Japan''s NSK

for £210 million, including debt, in 1990, Bowkett took the biggest

slice of a £22 million hand-out to the key managers. His ambition to be

a millionaire was fulfilled.

Many would have just concentrated

on lifestyle for a bit. But Bowkett, with a sharp eye on Tomkins and

Williams Holdings, had long ago worked out his own conglomerate

game-plan. He was just looking for the right vehicle. Intriguingly, he

took a lot of convincing that Berisford fitted the bill. When he was

first offered the top job in a Sunday-night call from a headhunter he

barely gave it a second thought. He just remembered the bad headlines

about Berisford. ''I said no, it''s a pile of shit, I''m not interested,''

he admits bluntly. He had reckoned without the perseverance of some old

friends at Barings. Berisford''s non-executive directors, including

BAA''s Sir John Egan and Brian Smith, turned on a concerted charm

offensive. Eventually he was seduced.

What changed his mind?

Bowkett doesn''t quite answer the question directly. His initial

reluctance, he says, was because he associated the new Berisford with

the old problems. The non-executives put him straight: ''When you have

four non-executives of the calibre of John Egan, Brian Smith, Murray

Stuart and John Sclater, men of utmost integrity, telling you that they

have solved the problems, that these are the issues and that they

really think this is an opportunity to take the business forward, then

it becomes highly attractive.'' Bowkett also did his homework, spending

time with the full range of Berisford''s advisers - Clifford Chance,

Coopers Deloitte, Barings and Hoare Govett - and making sure he got the

conditions he wanted. One of those, unusually, was that he didn''t want

a contract. ''The day the board would not support me in what I wanted to

do I would say fine, and go and look after my sheep.'' In the end, he

compromised on a contract with a three-month notice period - something

which, if Berisford is a rip-roaring success, just might make company

shareholders sleep a bit uneasily (although a man with a million of his

own money in the company is not going to dent the share price by

walking off too fast at the first attractive offer). Smartly, given the

press''s fascination with the topic, Berisford also softened any PR

fall-out by settling on a much lower basic starting salary (£250,000)

than that of his predecessor Stuart (£410,000). The total package has,

of course, risen rather fast since then.

Once inside Berisford,

and on top of the various problems such as the coffee collapse, he ran

his slide rule over a host of targets - some of which had been touted

round the City for years, others that weren''t even up for grabs at all

- to see if they fitted the Bowkett criteria. ''What I was looking for

was businesses operating in large markets so that even if the market is

down, there are still opportunities. They might have been market

leaders in the past, and involved in something with substantial value

added, hence probably in manufacturing rather than in the service

industries, businesses which you felt offered organic growth

opportunities through a change of direction, either in product range or

markets.'' It sounds logical, and quickly won over the City - ''After

RHP,'' says one banking Bowkett fan, ''many think Alan walks on water'' -

but putting it into practice is a lot tougher. Bowkett missed out on

Clarks, the Quaker-founded, family-run firm, which eventually rejected

his takeover bid by the thinnest of margins. It was his first real

taste of public failure. Did it hurt? Yes, but it also helped, he says,

hardening his team''s resolve. Others at Berisford, noting Bowkett''s

fierce drive to win and his dislike of losing, say that they all kept

out of his way around that time.

Then he pulled the rabbit out

of the hat with Magnet, a £180 million-turnover joinery business he had

looked at for a long, long time. So favourable was the deal''s reception

that Bowkett''s advisers began to get worried. ''We tried to get the

froth taken off the coverage but it didn''t work,'' says one. Within

weeks newspapers were talking of Bowkett targeting America for an

imminent deal, even though he had said that expansion there, where

Berisford carries huge tax debts, was years away.

So now

Berisford carries huge expectations as well. The difficulty is that the

hard work is only just beginning. As one analyst points out, economic

recovery in the UK runs in Bowkett''s favour, but despite his success at

Boulton and Paul and RHP, he actually has little track record in

running a big listed conglomerate and is now suddenly on a very fast

treadmill. There are some nasty decisions ahead, especially over the

old Berisford. Does he keep Ketlon, the motor components arm? Can he

ever sell the agribusiness interests? And what will he buy? As he found

with Clarks, takeovers are much tougher now, both in political and

market terms.

''What he has to watch out for is not to become a

victim of his own hype,'' warns one banker. In short, any evaluation is

premature. It is on Magnet''s performance, and that of the next major

buy, that Bowkett and Berisford will eventually be judged."

[. 0]

[quote user="canarytim"]

I just googled our new Chairman and, well he seems not "nice" I suppose is the word. (see "Why I became A Socialist" )

I know there are two sides to every story but he seems to make JR Ewing or Alan Sugar like  pussycats.

But unfortunately we probrably need a ruthless Chairman in our present situation.

Whatever criticism anyone had for Roger Munby no one can deny he really cared about the club and was a very decent fella, so perhaps our owners feel we need to go in a different direction.

Time will tell.

 

 

[/quote]

Fear not... he''ll be putty in Smith''s hands just as long as some of the celebrity stardust rubs off...

[yellow hammer 131]

He sounds like an asset stripper. Though I''m sure he''s Norwich through and through....

[Joanna Grey 0]

[quote user="canarytim"]

I just googled our new Chairman and, well he seems not "nice" I suppose is the word. (see "Why I became A Socialist" )

I know there are two sides to every story but he seems to make JR Ewing or Alan Sugar like  pussycats.

But unfortunately we probrably need a ruthless Chairman in our present situation.

Whatever criticism anyone had for Roger Munby no one can deny he really cared about the club and was a very decent fella, so perhaps our owners feel we need to go in a different direction.

Time will tell.

 

 

[/quote]

The good news is that Bowkett really cares for the Club as well, he''s a City fan as much as you and I. I agree on how ruthless he is as well (I have done my own research), it seems he does get results.

[Ivana_rubyatitz 6]

[quote user="Mustachio Furioso"]

The good news is that Bowkett really cares for the Club as well, he''s a City fan as much as you and I. I agree on how ruthless he is as well (I have done my own research), it seems he does get results.

[/quote]

Agree with the above, surely it is the last bit that we should judge him on in the end.

[chicken 0]

It is sometimes possible for companies to have too many assets and require streamlining to get the focus back on the key asset that makes them the most money.

[McCanary 0]

[quote user="Cluck is God"][quote user="canarytim"]

I just googled our new Chairman and, well he seems not "nice" I suppose is the word. (see "Why I became A Socialist" )

I know there are two sides to every story but he seems to make JR Ewing or Alan Sugar like  pussycats.

But unfortunately we probrably need a ruthless Chairman in our present situation.

Whatever criticism anyone had for Roger Munby no one can deny he really cared about the club and was a very decent fella, so perhaps our owners feel we need to go in a different direction.

Time will tell.

 

 

[/quote]

Fear not... he''ll be putty in Smith''s hands just as long as some of the celebrity stardust rubs off...

[/quote]

 

Did you actually read the article??

[PKC 0]

I worked for Boulton and Paul during the period he was CE and I think it is true to say that he is ruthless and had an eye for cashing in on assets. I am not saying this makes him the wrong man to be Chairman jut an observation.

[canarytim 0]

Yes i did and there is no doubting the mans ruthlessness.

[BlyBlyBabes 0]

[quote user="chicken"]It is sometimes possible for companies to have too many assets and require streamlining to get the focus back on the key asset that makes them the most money.
[/quote]

The restaurant(s)?

Okayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.......

OTBC

 

[. 0]

[quote user="McCanary"][quote user="Cluck is God"][quote user="canarytim"]

I just googled our new Chairman and, well he seems not "nice" I suppose is the word. (see "Why I became A Socialist" )

I know there are two sides to every story but he seems to make JR Ewing or Alan Sugar like  pussycats.

But unfortunately we probrably need a ruthless Chairman in our present situation.

Whatever criticism anyone had for Roger Munby no one can deny he really cared about the club and was a very decent fella, so perhaps our owners feel we need to go in a different direction.

Time will tell.

 

 

[/quote]

Fear not... he''ll be putty in Smith''s hands just as long as some of the celebrity stardust rubs off...

[/quote]

 

Did you actually read the article??

[/quote]

Did you actually need to make such an inane post?

Really?

Did you though?

Mmm?

Did you?

Mmm?