Bolland fires up the boosters at M&S
Having begun the long, hard slog of restoring Marks & Spencer's fortunes, amid a squeeze on real incomes, the ambitions of chief executive Marc Bolland look to be intergalactic.
Among his new appointments is a 'director of space' soon to be followed, no doubt, by a logistics manager for the solar system.
Back on earth Bolland - who has managed to lift profits at Britain's favourite retailer by 13% to £714m - has all sorts of starry-eyed plans for restoring the company's fortunes.
The simple things include improving the signs so shoppers no longer feel that they are confronting the Hampton Court maze once they are inside its stores.
Another big idea, inherited from his predecessor Sir Stuart Rose, is to resurrect the group's global glories.
We have some early evidence of where this is going to lead the group with China and India marked as priorities and the Champs Élysées already earmarked for a Paris store. But Bolland could do worse than take a leaf out of the Burberry book if it is really serious about this.
He seemed almost shocked to discover under questioning from a war reporter in Tripoli that the company actually has a franchise in Colonel Gadaffi's backyard.
In fact it has 320 franchise operations across no less than 41 territories which, if properly managed from HQ in Paddington Basin, could be transformed into something really good.
As retail group GUS found when it was sorting out Burberry, untangling franchises is never easy and can be costly. But in the case of the luxury goods firm it has paid off handsomely down the road.
One territory which Bolland subconsciously looks to have in his sights is North America.
This has been the scene of M&S failure in the past with the Canadian operation a disaster and the US emblematic clothing chain Brooks Brothers sold in haste when the company was down in the dumps. Rose took the view that this was a mistake and Bolland would seem to agree.
Investors, looking across at Tesco losses on the West Coast, may feel that crossing the Atlantic as well as going to the stars is all a little too much to take for one day.
The reality is, however, that M&S is riding the recovery reasonably well and Bolland's proposals for segmenting the offering - the social make-up of Kensington High Street is not quite the same as Margate - looks eminently sensible as long as it can be done without turning the lesser stores into Poundland.
M&S investors have had a better time of late with the share price riding up 15% before easing back a little in latest trading. Bolland seems to understand the Marks quality message. If he sticks with it and reinforces the Britishness of its branding, at home and overseas, he might even earn his signing on fee.
Softly, softly
Paul Fisher, the Bank of England's executive director of markets, is one of the lesser known Monetary Policy Committee members.
Yet he can lay claim to having held one of the most important roles during the financial panic when he was responsible for flooding the UK markets with cash through £200bn of 'quantitative easing.' Clearly, he is not entirely satisfied that this has done the job of propping up prosperity.
In a surprisingly downbeat speech to a Scottish audience Fisher worries that the current weakness in the economy may prove to be more than a soft patch.
He is concerned there may be a period of more prolonged weakness in demand triggered by the paucity of consumer spending. So unlike some of his colleagues he thinks putting up bank rates at present would be exactly the wrong thing to do.
The thing which has most protected home-owning households during the recession and squeeze on incomes has without doubt been low cost mortgages. A rise in the Bank's official rate would almost certainly trigger a follow-through on home loan rates.
What it certainly shows is that the past consensus on the MPC is polarising.
Flower power
Former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin may have tried to keep the content of his life private with the help of a super-injunction, but his former colleagues clearly feel no need for such a strategy.
Seen peeping out from behind the peonies and water features on 'masters of the universe' night at the Chelsea Flower Show were none other than former RBS chairman Sir Tom McKillop, who signed off on Fred's pension, and former chief of RBS's investment banking arm Johnny Cameron.
How charming.
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