These are entirely understandable but don't necessarily fit with the situations I get in."His dislike of too much box-ticking process explains why he won't be joining the board of Wm Morrison, the Asda rival brought to its knees by its acquisition of Safeway. And his thoughts on J Sainsbury suggest that his former Asda prot?, Justin King, is doing enough there to persuade shareholders to back management rather than sell out to a Norman invasion."I think Sainsbury's, under its new team, will go from strength to strength."Like another Archie Norman prot?, Allan Leighton, who is now chairing the Royal Mail among many other things, Mr Norman wants a portfolio."My plan is to build a small group of similar-type turnarounds and transformations so that I can manage my time and go through with each one the very intense period at the beginning and then bring on a team to develop it. By selling its swanky central London offices and axing the headcount by 1,000, he brought much needed discipline to the management of Energis, stabilising it sufficiently to flog it off in just three years."I've done the job I was asked to do. I think I know what I do well which is I like working in complex organisations that are often in distress, that need reshaping and turning around."So can we expect to see him mounting a private equity-backed bid for a big, quoted basket case? "It doesn't have to be a large quoted company, but yes, that's the sort of thing."No private-equity fund has an exclusive rights over Mr Norman's management talents - "I've worked with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts , Permira and others" - but he is also open to another Energis-style turnaround where he saves the banks from their own sloppy lending habits."I want to find a new challenge. Having been plucked from his consultant's lair to help Sir Geoff Mulcahy man the defences against Dixons' 1986 hostile bid for Woolworth Holdings, Mr Norman found himself appointed finance director of the FTSE 100 company, subsequently renamed Kingfisher, at just 33."We doubled the market value in four years but by 1991 Geoff was obviously going on for ever so I went to Asda, which was a complete shipwreck."At least it wasn't in administration, which was the case with Energis.
As chairman of Energis, one of the UK's biggest but financially most troubled telecoms companies, he has persuaded Cable & Wireless to part with £594m in cash plus up to another £80m in three years' time to buy the phone company, which is £740m in hock. Although the ink is barely dry on the C&W contract, speculation is intensifying about what he does next. "I'm going on holiday for a week," says Mr Norman sitting in the company's ugly home on a Reading roundabout.A 50th birthday treat for a best friend, involving a four-family sojourn in Tuscany, is a nice little break but presumably there is something more significant on the horizon for the man who, at 28, was the then youngest partner at McKinsey, now Tony Blair's favourite management consultancy."Energis is an independent company until September when I will be despatched and I will have to look elsewhere for my Bupa subscription."He probably won't have to look too hard. Archie Norman has pulled it off. The honourable member for Tunbridge Wells, until the last election that is, and one-time grocer who sold Asda to Wal-Mart for £6.7bn, has done what most thought impossible. The publicly quoted sector needs people like Mr Norman, but it's all too easy to see why he's so reluctant to step up to the plate.j.warner independent.co.uk. In the absence of these two you can have any number of rules you like but they won't prevent calamity.
Rather, it's to do with sound judgement and competent people. Marconi and other corporate scandals of the last bust exposed severe weaknesses in the system of checks and balances to protect investors from reckless and negligent management. Yet in the end, good corporate governance is nothing to do with prescriptive ways of doing things. By way of example he points to his own experience at Asda, where eventually he became chairman, making way for Allan Leighton to replace him as chief executive.This proved a hugely successful business partnership which produced an outstanding result when Asda, a basket case when they arrived, was sold to Wal-Mart.