My Bloggity Blog
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The MBS Group
is one of the world’s leading executive search firms operating exclusively in Retail, Consumer and relevant technologies, and the most successful sector-specialist firm in the UK
Screw business as usual
Monday afternoon was one of those rare occasions when I was in a room with some of my all-time favourite business heroes, all at the same time! Personally, I never enjoy very large gatherings, but the idea of being part of a group of 30 people engaging in a really interesting discussion inspired me. Hosted by Richard Branson and Jamie Oliver in Jamie’s kitchen, we were there to hear and talk about the concept of ‘Screw Business as Usual’. Under the banner of Virgin Unite, the non-profit foundation, Branson believes that the time is right for a totally different approach to business – one that puts ‘People and Planet’ at the core of how business is done.
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Have you got talent?
I have been loving the semi finals of Britain’s Got Talent, which began on Sunday and ends tonight with the finals tomorrow evening. To be honest, I am really bored with this genre of programme and I vowed not to watch any of them this year, but after watching opera singers, Jonathan and Charlotte, on the first episode, that was it! A box of Kleenex later, and I have not missed an episode! The best part of the show of course is watching the unpredictable and fearless David Walliams who sends Simon up something terrible!
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Lamb's Conduit Street
I remember the very first time I came to London as little more than a teenager in 1977, and went to visit South Molton Street. Browns, still one of my very favourite womenswear boutiques, was then only seven years old and occupied number 27. The street was unique and felt really special – my favourite restaurant for years afterwards was The Widow Applebaum, which was right across from Browns. It was filled with a mix of tourists and interesting-looking local types, and the proprietor, always dressed in black, was as wide as she was short! I have now lived in London for nearly 30 years and, like everyone else, have seen change after change in the city as many streets have begun to look exactly the same, owing to the growth of chain stores. Nowadays, I like the idea of a cluster of entirely independent shops just like all those years ago on my first visit. They’re very hard to find, but on Saturday I went to Lamb’s Conduit Street for the first time – and what a treat it was!
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Going against the tide: Building a luxury brand in a shifting market
Although it was a very wet and gloomy Tuesday morning, our spirits were lifted by listening to Bonnie Takhar, who has recently returned from New York to London as Chief Commercial & Merchandising Officer of footwear brand Charlotte Olympia. The MBS Group was thrilled to host a breakfast with such an inspirational leader in the fashion industry. Having undertaken a variety of projects with labels such as Earl Jeans, Jimmy Choo and Halston, it was a privilege to hear Bonnie’s experiences of building luxury brands in different markets.
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Category:
Event: Panel debate
Message in a bottle
I have always loved mavericks – especially entrepreneurial ones. Three years ago, Mark Rodol, the former CEO of Ministry of Sound and his brother Steven, who worked for Coty Cosmetics, set up a nail polish business called Models Own. The product is manufactured in Britain because Mark believes that nail polish has to be treated just like a fashion accessory and, as we know only too well, customers want it, and they want it now! Gone are the days when you can have a lead time of up to a year, which is what most of the giant cosmetic companies work to. Mark calls it ‘quick cosmetics’, which he equates to fast fashion and his lead times are four- to six-week cycles for new products to be on the shop floor.
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Roaming
Like many, I took the opportunity of going for a beach holiday abroad over the Easter week-end. These days, work continues wherever you are and so five of us travelled with four laptops: two for business, one for revision for law exams and one for performance art via Skype! Never thinking to ask about Wi-Fi charges when booking two hotel rooms, on arrival we were told it would be $22 per room for the first device and $11 for all second devices. For 10 days, this made a total of $640! We were mortified! How, I wondered, can hotels get away with these charges when now for most of us internet access is as much a requisite utility as towels in an en-suite bathroom?
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Get drawing
As you may remember from a piece that I wrote about Angry Birds last year, I am a games addict. Years ago, I used to stay up all night playing Pac Man, and then when I got my first iPhone, I played most versions of Angry Birds. I seem to play them intensely for a few months and then cannot go near them ever again. That was until Draw Something – a new phenomenon – where nearly everyone I know with an iPhone is playing. Draw Something, is a mobile app developed by OMGPOP and it has just won the Flurry App Spotlight Award. In the first five weeks after the launch, the game was downloaded 20 million times. Fifty days after its release, it had been downloaded a staggering 50 million times.
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Jonathan's got talent
As an executive search consultant, I work in an industry in which most days of the week I have to assess individuals according to sets of criteria laid down by clients. An interview usually lasts between 60 and 90 minutes, and in it both the interviewer and the interviewee are under considerable pressure. One thing I try and do every time is to keep an open mind, stay focused on the company and its needs, and remain objective about the person sitting opposite me – not always easy to do if they say something that jars, or if they look or sound out of the ordinary.
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A true brand ambassador
I have been thinking about the notion of brand ambassadors and what really makes a good one. After quite a bit of research, and having waded through numerous celebrities endorsing countless products, I think that I have decided that the best brand ambassadors are those who, when you see them with the brand, are ‘as one’ with the product. Yesterday, the team at MBS were lucky enough to meet and listen to the new brand ambassador for Land Rover, Ben Saunders. Now there is a natural fit! Ben is only the third man in history to ski solo to the North Pole from the Russian mainland, and he holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Brit. In October, he is going to lead a three-man team to Antarctica, following in the footsteps of Captain Scott and attempting (where Scott failed) to make the first return journey to the South Pole on foot. Imagine! In his polar trek, Ben spent 72 days by himself skiing to the North Pole in temperatures of up to –48 degrees centigrade on constantly shifting ice. He even had to get from one sheet of ice to another by swimming in an ocean full of sharks and giant squid!
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Replicating high-street success online
As you may know from previous posts, I’ve absolutely loved guest designers at H&M. However, I had a very disappointing experience on H&M’s site last Friday, and I would love to open up a dialogue about it. The question I have is: do traditional retailers really understand how to execute online shopping? There is a big difference. I was very excited when one of my favourite brands, Marni, became the next guest designer at the Swedish fashion chain. So I did my research and saw that it was possible to buy online. I wrote to them, just to make sure, and they wrote back saying that from 9am the site would go live and we could shop: one item in one size per style. I had a feeling that the site would be busy and therefore prepared everything in advance. I had each item up on a page – you could not put anything in a basket beforehand, which I thought was fair – had my credit card handy and from 8.50am was raring to go.
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Seamless supply chains
A few weeks ago, I wrote about brands that have chosen to manufacture in Britain again. I could have written about it for weeks, as so many people are interested in the subject and I had such an overwhelming response. Some clever brands never stopped manufacturing in the UK, mainly heritage brands that will hopefully last for many years to come. Just to remind ourselves, it was about the turn of the millennium that M&S began to think about going direct and sourcing themselves. After being pilloried by journalists and analysts for being stuck in the dark ages and refusing to modernise, M&S changed and, with it, so did the UK business landscape. As a result, some big British companies disappeared: SR Gent, Stirling, Claremont, Lambert Howarth and Peter Black are all names that I can remember. Dewhirst and Courtaulds, former suppliers, still exist, but on a much smaller scale. In the end, M&S was only following what other retailers were doing, many of whom had stellar reputations for being able to drive price and quality out of factories in the East.
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Fri Mar 02, 2012
I love the idea of ‘pop-ups’, because there is such an element of surprise and immediacy about them. They are a bit like exhibitions or the theatre: you have a finite time to see them and then they are gone!
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Women On Boards
This week sees the first anniversary following Lord Davies’ report on board diversity, and we can see substantive progress in the overall diversity of our largest companies – those in the FTSE 100. The year has seen about 100 women appointed to FTSE boards in those 12 months, a good proportion of whom have no prior experience of serving on a public company board. Of the 11 (down from 21) companies in the FTSE 100 that still have no woman on board, not one is in a consumer-facing sector, and I find that significant. Retailers, fashion and luxury and consumer companies are leading the charge towards more balanced boards and are providing lessons that other sectors could learn from.
The heroes
Jane Scott, founder and chief executive of the Professional Boards Forum and BoardWatch (to whom I am indebted for providing up-to-the-minute statistics) is fond, like me, of marking out individuals for praise. The march towards more balanced management teams is invariably led from the front. One of Jane Scott’s heroes is Gareth Davies, former chief executive of Imperial Tobacco. He now chairs construction materials company Wolseley (where 22 per cent of the board is female) and bookmaker William Hill (also 22 per cent). His personal recommendation was instrumental in the appointment of his successor at Imperial, too. Alison Cooper is one of just four female chief executives to head up a FTSE 100 company: the others are Dame Marjorie Scardino (Pearson), Angela Ahrendts (Burberry) and Cynthia Carroll (Anglo- American).
I would cite Archie Norman, the legendary former chief executive of Asda, who spawned a whole generation of FTSE 100 chief executives including Richard Baker (one-time CEO of Asda and Alliance Boots), Justin King (CEO of Sainsbury’s) and Allan Leighton (former CEO of Asda and former Chairman of the Royal Mail). Justin King was just 42 when he was appointed CEO of Sainsbury’s and Richard Baker just 40 when he became CEO of Alliance Boots, then the youngest ever CEO of a FTSE 100 company. None of them was afraid to promote and hire women, perhaps helped by their age.
There are, in my opinion, more heroes in the UK’s battle for more balanced boards, among our retailers and consumer goods companies than in any other sector. Perhaps because these fields are fast-moving, they attract a more modern, young-in-approach person, but it isn’t just age. Two of the present four women who sit on the M&S board were appointed by then executive chairman, Sir Stuart Rose (now in his sixties), long before Lord Davies put pen to paper.
Now Robert Swannell and Marc Bolland are continuing the fine work. Laura Wade- Gery’s appointment as board director in charge of e-commerce was inspired, as was the non-executive appointment of Martha Lane Fox. Retailers have to reinvent their businesses to take advantage of the digital universe we all live in or face a Jurassic fate. M&S have hired two of the UK’s foremost thinkers in this space who just happen to be women.
But these are not just isolated cases. Back to the numbers, topping the list of all FTSE 350 companies we can see drinks giant Diageo, where 44 per cent of the board is female. Companies with 25 per cent or more women on their boards include Burberry (38 per cent), Marks & Spencer (29 per cent), Morrisons (29 per cent), BT, Whitbread, British American Tobacco, Centrica, InterContinental Hotels, Standard Life and Unilever. Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Aviva, Imperial Tobacco, SABMiller, Kingfisher, Shire, HSBC, Reckitt Benckiser and Royal Bank of Scotland all have boards with at least two women on them. This is where diversity can be seen in action, and other sectors have a lot to learn from them.
In a smart move, John Lewis has just announced the appointment of Helen Weir as finance director of the partnership. Weir, who quit Lloyds last year when she failed to get the chief executive role, isn’t just a high-IQ number cruncher with a Maths degree from Oxford and an MBA from Stanford. From her first role as a graduate trainee with Unilever, her career has been in consumer companies: B&Q, then its parent Kingfisher and finally Lloyds TSB first as finance director and then heading up the retail banking division. Had she selected a different sector – mining for instance – would her talents have been spotted and nurtured?
Ursula Burns, the world’s most senior black chief executive, talks eloquently about Xerox having always accepted her for who she was. This is from an interview she gave late last year to the Financial Times: “When I walked in the door as an intern, I was fairly outspoken, (with) strong views and opinions – sometimes wrong and strong…Today, I still speak as fast as hell and have very distinct views about how the world should go and grow. I don’t play golf. I like certain kinds of music. I dress a certain way.” No-one tried to make her into their idea of a fast-track male executive. “No-one ever said, ‘You are just too urban, too black or too female’. There was never a conversation about it.” Far-thinking companies are adept at making talent feel at home, whatever its gender or colour, and less-progressive firms should learn the lesson.
Executive search firms like ours are now increasingly being directed to offer balanced shortlists. We have recently been awarded a board assignment with a new client only having been able to show that our database of candidates is genuinely diverse. In the case of MBS Group, perhaps because we have been finding senior people in fashion and luxury, retail and consumer, for some decades now, our database is almost exactly 50:50.
Working practices, revolutionised by technology, now make it much easier for women to meet the 24/7, always-on, demands of the most senior roles. No longer do you have to be in a physical office to be working: you are plugged into real-time sales data, email and Skype from any number of mobile devices wherever you are. This flexibility has especially benefitted women, who still tend to do the lion’s share of family and household management. These days, the boundaries between work and home are much more blurred. Who, today, takes a two-week holiday and doesn’t check their email? It doesn’t happen. On the other hand, if you take an hour out of the office to go to your child’s parents’ evening, few will bat an eyelid. It is the way we work now.
It is not surprising that the greatest progress over the last year has been in non- executive appointments. Here, the need for very specific experience and a particular track record, is much less of an issue. A broad range of skills and experience is relevant to the non-executive role, and the pool of women with those skills is much wider and deeper. So far, we haven’t seen the increase in the numbers of women non-execs translating into increases in women executive numbers, but that may still come.
Anecdotally I know of several female non-executive board directors who ensure they ask about progress in promoting women through the management ranks and see this as part of their role.
The numbers
According to the Professional Boards Forum Boardwatch, today 6.5 per cent of FTSE executive directors and 14.9 per cent of non-executive directors are women. Of FTSE 250 companies, women occupy 4.6 per cent of executive directorships and 9.4 per cent of non-executive posts. Since the report was published, 27 per cent of all board appointments have been women, numerically amounting to about 100, and the number of FTSE 100 companies with all-male boards has dropped from 21 to 11. There is no doubt that the UK’s biggest companies have more diverse boards than a year ago but the number of women in executive board posts in the FTSE 350 has actually fallen slightly in the last year.
Diversity further down the FTSE 350 is still a challenge: nearly half of all FTSE 250 companies still have no female director. Even among retailers and consumer companies, there are significant numbers of all-male boards or boards with just one female non-executive. Exceptions – so they belong with the heroes below – are Betfair, EasyJet, Go-Ahead Group, Ladbrokes, Marston’s, Stagecoach, JD Wetherspoon and William Hill – all of which have at least two women on their boards.
Conclusions
The FTSE 100 isn’t quite on track to meet Lord Davies’ targets, but it is a healthier place than a year ago. There is an increasing number of far-sighted chairmen determined to change the male-dominant cultures of the companies they helm, and with that there have been some imaginative appointments. Retail and consumer companies are leading the way. As talented women see others take high-profile leadership positions, there will be an increasing flow of women who believe there is no boardroom closed to them, and that will be real progress.
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Special Report
Women on boards
It’s been a year since the Davies Report came out and I’m happy to report that at The MBS Group we have seen many more of our clients actively encouraging a balanced shortlist of candidates. Not to get too smug or anything, but I’m pleased to say that Retail, Consumer and Leisure businesses have all made good progress in appointing a greater percentage of women to their boards – after all, research has proven that companies with more women on the board tend to out-perform those with fewer. That does not mean that we can rest on our laurels, but it’s a great start and those of us involved in board appointments need to continue making further inroads wherever we can.
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Companies that care
I don’t know if you read the piece that I wrote about youth unemployment back in January? In response, I received some interesting emails about companies that are being proactive and that are really doing something to address the situation. I am sure that those are the companies that will benefit from their initiatives in the long run. As with all good initiatives, someone in every organisation has to be the champion and has to have the drive to make things happen. I passionately believe that business today has to be ‘not only for profit’.
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Social Responsibility