Sir John Harvey-Jones

John Harvey Jones is one of the few managers in big British business who won his way to the top by maverick means.

A flamboyant ex-Naval character, addicted to bright ties and informal manners, John made no secret of his critical rating of his senior colleagues at ICI. With the giant heading towards shaming losses, Harvey-Jones’s peers seem to have concluded that the outspoken critic should prove that he was right – if he could. Harvey-Jones tackled the job with relish and rapid success, proving that becalmed colossi of British management could be turned round at fair speed by determined and well-directed effort based on the humane and friendly relationships which the new man rightly regarded as the foundations of success, in companies large and small.

That inclusiveness was part of the appeal of his TV programmes: he approached the small companies put under his blunt examination without condescension, showing from the facts how the faults lay in the managers, not in their times – and the most common fault was failure to get the best out of their human capital. The profiled companies were often loth to accept the logic that he expounded so clearly and which had animated the great man’s dissection. For example, Morgan Cars went on promoting the myth that its slow and inefficient production, with the consequent huge delays in deliveries, far from being the cause of relative failure, was the secret of their success – making the cars hard to get and therefore more desirable.

Harvey-Jones had become inured to such obfuscation at ICI and took it with the good humour that was his trademark. But ICI’s grey men had the last word. Given only five years to complete his task, the Troubleshooter left behind colleagues who he supposed to be ‘a band of brothers’. But disparagement crept into their assessments of their ex-leader, whose desire to write about his years at ICI’s top was frustrated in part by the ‘brothers’. Worse still, his potential legacy was wiped out by a return to big business norms. Eventually ICI, savagely weakened by hiving off the jewel in the crown, its drug business, wobbled down the Big League. Even now, the last rites are being read. Let Sir John be remembered as the most remarkable human proof that better outcomes – far better – were within reach; as they always are.