Marcus Agius was strolling round his Hampshire garden last summer when a headhunter rang to inquire if he would consider becoming chairman of Barclays Bank. ‘It took me a nanosecond to say yes,’ says Agius. ‘Barclays is a great brand and I love great brands; it’s 300 years old; it’s huge and it’s going through
When Win Bischoff and his colleagues Robert Swannell and David Challen threw a party last month to celebrate 100 years of working together at Schroders and Citigroup, it was quite a bash. Not only did it draw the cream of FTSE-100 chiefs — Sir Chris Gent, Sir Nigel Rudd and Stuart Rose, to name just
Justin King feels underappreciated. Dubbed ‘Tigger’ by his staff shortly after arriving as chief executive of a crisis-ridden J Sainsbury Plc in March 2004, the 45-year-old’s normal bounce is notably absent when we meet at the grocery chain’s Holborn Circus headquarters to discuss his progress in ‘making Sainsbury’s great again’. Sales over the 12-week Christmas
Philip Richards is an extreme investor. His willingness to bet against the crowd has turned his initial £150,000 investment in his hedge fund company RAB Capital into £150 million since 1999. In particular, his Special Situations Fund, which he manages personally with the credo ‘to maximise returns with minimal restrictions’, has performed spectacularly. Since he
Judi Bevan says that new technology has at last created real liberation for women — by enabling them to run successful businesses from home Kitchen table tycoons — the new buzz phrase to describe women who set up their own businesses from home — now account for £4.4 billion of sales a year, according to
If you get up early enough you might spy the solid frame of Allan Leighton running round one of the London parks before he pays a surprise visit to a Royal Mail delivery office. The reaction of the postmen and women is usually the same. ‘They always say, “Oh s***, it’s the chairman”,’ Leighton laughs.
During his school holidays, Stuart Hampson used to help his mother behind the counter of the family drapers shop in Oldham, Lancashire. But as he grew up, he set his sights higher than mere retailing. ‘I always had a fixation on becoming a civil servant,’ he says crisply, in an accent stripped of any hint
Charles Dunstone wants Carphone Warehouse to be the Tesco of telephony. ‘You grow your market share, provide the best service at the best price and keep investing the gains you make into the business to make prices even more competitive.’ It is a typical Dunstone statement: simple to say, hard to do. It is no
A black-helmeted cyclist half-circles in the middle of the road and wobbles to a halt to greet me in front of the Boden headquarters in North Acton. Johnnie Boden, eponymous founder and chairman of the mail-order-clothes-for-middle-class-families business, is arriving at work. Comparisons with David Cameron inevitably spring to mind. Boden also went to Eton and