It was a sad day yesterday for anyone who has had dealings with Tesco CEO Philip Clarke.
Whatever the merits of his leadership, since he took over from Sir Terry Leahy in March 2011, there can be no doubting his passion for Tesco and his 100% commitment to turning its fortunes around, after what for shareholders has been an almost unthinkable period of decline.
A look at the sheer number of initiatives launched under Clarke will tell you this is not a man who went down without a fight – and it speaks volumes that he has agreed to stay on until October despite the axe falling. Indeed he will make himself available till after Christmas if successor Dave Lewis needs him.
In the end though, the job of seeing through the turnaround he so wanted has proved beyond the likeable Liverpudlian, and to the BBC he described yesterday’s announcement as “an enormous relief”.
Yet there are few among Clarke’s critics who could point the finger with too much confidence at any one single fatal mistake.
The list of problems by the time the end came were so wide ranging, most bosses would have struggled even with Tesco’s still-huge resources behind them, and there were several elements beyond his own control.
He came in to take over a previously all-conquering empire, fronted by a legendary retail leader, at a time when the world (let alone UK), economy was being battered on the rocks; as technology was about to send the space race strategy Tesco had led crashing to earth; and with years of austerity creating a perfect breeding ground for the rise of the discounters.
On other matters Clarke was probably more culpable. He lost too many of Tesco’s most talented leaders and at least for long spells took on too much of the massive job on his own back.
Despite eventually having built up a talented top management team, these have, at the chairman’s own admission, not been in place long enough to join the board and help Clarke calm nervous shareholders, as the poor results have kept on flooding in. A bit like Alastair Cook, Clarke has looked anything like being on “the front foot” as he suggested Tesco was back in 2012.
The boss called for the reinvention of Tesco’s stores, in service and design, and there have been outstanding examples. But these are still too much of an exception to the rule rather than the norm, and the money-sapping process has taken far longer than he wanted.
There have also been suggestions of morale issues on the shop floor, which of course is where it all began for Clarke and where, previously, he appeared to be having some of his biggest successes.
When it came to the big strategy decisions, Clarke admitted – perhaps too honestly – that when it came to tackling the discounters, it would take years to get it right. That’s not a message the City wanted to hear, despite his chairman agreeing that a strategy of fully fledged price cuts would be a “strategy of decline”.
Clarke was zealous in his visions for Tesco to take the lead in multichannel and here his legacy in years to come may prove to be more flattering than it stands today. The retailer is way ahead of its rivals in many respects.
But sadly when it comes to the bottom line, it is next quarter’s profit margin that really counts and the board signed off with a pretty damning verdict yesterday. Things were actually looking worse – not better – than when Clarke got to his feet to face the flak at the AGM in June and they could not be confident he was the man to get it right.
Too few of the many elements of his turnaround plans seemed to be coming to fruition, despite their heart, like his, being in the right place.
You can take a look at some of the highlights – and lowlights – of Philip Clarke’s reign on The Grocer website, alongside the verdict from retail experts and news from the City.
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