It’s our job to make it special again

An edited version of the call to arms delivered by new M&S chairman Archie Norman, yesterday

WHEN you become chairman of a reasonably challenged business like this in the first few weeks, you go through a process of discovery: opening the cupboards, getting the skeletons out and looking under the carpets, with the help of chief executive Steve Rowe.

As you forage around the business, you get good surprises and less good surprises, and I can tell you that there have been both.

One of the things that has been important, however, is that I have figured out that – in the last 18 months – somebody has been going around this business grasping a few nettles and slaughtering a few sacred cows, and that has been Steve. However, over not five years, but probably 15 and maybe even 20 years, the business has failed to change in line with the customer, and as quickly as the competition.

That failure is not to do with the strategy or the intellectual approach nearly as much as it is to do with the organisation, the culture and the capability.

The really important thing about today is that the genesis of any turnaround of this scale starts with a recognition of the unvarnished truth.

We know that this business is a really special business; it is just our job to make it special again.