Sharp suit with an iron hand in a woolly glove

The Guardian photographer is trying to make Adam Crozier relax. He tells him to loosen his shoulders and Crozier, sitting stiffly and gripping a Royal Mail mug, makes an effort to shrug a little. The photographer asks him to stand. "If you can get your back against the wall," he says. Crozier does as he is told and looks like he is facing a firing squad.

I had first met Crozier some 12 years earlier, on the day he and Tamara Ingram were named joint chief executives of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Maurice and Charles Saatchi had just walked out and taken most of the senior staff and some of the biggest clients with them. Crozier was just 31 and looked even younger. The more energetic Ingram did much of the talking. Against the odds, they held the business together. She went on to carve out a successful career in advertising and now manages the USD 1bn Proctor & Gamble advertising account. But Crozier was the one to step further into the public eye. He was chairman of the Football Association at 36 and chief executive of the Royal Mail by 39.

It is an odd career path on paper – Crozier admits with a laugh that his CV might suggest he is someone who doesn't know quite what he wants to do. But there are common threads. Each has involved periods of painful upheaval. A business studies student might call it change management. Each of them has also been high profile – he was a familiar fixture behind former England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson during FA press conferences – but still the spotlight makes him shudder. "I hate it," he says in his soft Scottish accent. "Absolutely hate it. The bizarre thing about the last three jobs I've done is that I don't like [the public profile] at all. I will go to enormous lengths not to do public things – because it is just not me."

When he joined the Royal Mail, Crozier described it as one of the last "really big corporate turnarounds in the country". He is one of only three public sector officials earning more than GBP 1m a year. The unions, one imagines, must have been sharpening their knives for the former advertising executive with the sharp suits and the baby face – at 43 he still looks young, although no longer improbably so. Writers have previously waxed lyrical about his boyish good looks and his "doe eyes". He is affable and his voice rarely rises above a murmur.

Paul Burns, a Saatchi director, says his overriding memory is of Crozier's sense of calm during crisis, his logic and his ability to give clients a sense of confidence. You are always described as calm, I tell Crozier. Don't you ever lose your temper? He thinks for a second, raises his head and smiles. "No. Not really. I don't know why."

High stakes
Soon after he joined the Royal Mail Crozier had to face down a threat of industrial action. Four years later, he is in the same position and the stakes are even higher with strike threats over pay, plans to reform the final salary pension scheme and a decision to put post offices in branches of WH Smith. It would be the first national strike in more than 10 years.

Crozier and chairman Allan Leighton, the more outgoing former Asda boss, have been on a campaign to modernise the business, which operates under three brands: Royal Mail, the Post Office and Parcelforce. Some 45,000 jobs have gone, the afternoon delivery has been dropped and more recently it was announced that 2,500 post offices would close. Losses of GBP 1.1bn at the start of a turnaround plan in 2002 were turned into a profit of GBP 355m in 2005.

But the turmoil is far from over. Crozier details the "legacy" problems of the Royal Mail; a lack of investment over the past 20-30 years, a GBP 6.5bn pension deficit and the sheer size of the Post Office network, much of which is losing money. At the same time the Royal Mail is now facing full competition from the likes of Germany's Deutsche Post and Dutch group TNT. Hampered by price controls imposed by the regulator, Crozier reckons the Royal Mail will have lost 40% of its corporate mailing work by the end of the year – the part of the company that has traditionally subsidised the price of a stamp for the rest of us. It has already lost BT, Centrica, Vodafone and Barclays. A growing number of government contracts including TV licences and pension statements have also been handed to competitors, causing some MPs and labour leaders to cry betrayal.

"It is still work in progress," says Crozier. "When you have got an organisation that didn't change for a long time then goes through four years of change, there is a tendency to then go, phew, that's great, we've changed, now we can go back to normal – but if we started off at minus five out of 10, I think we are now at four out of 10.

"You sort of have two worlds colliding here. We've got a company that is coming out of 350 years of being a monopoly where there were no consequences to inefficiency or lack of competitiveness because there was no competition. And we are moving into a world where competitiveness is everything."

The company has secured a GBP 4bn investment from the government, a large part of which will upgrade its sorting technology and inevitably mean thousands more job cuts. He is careful not to aim criticism in any particular direction but says competition has been introduced into the postal market the wrong way round ."If you look at the other utilities they kind of modernised first, then competition came in, then a regulator – if you think about us it has been the other way round. So we've gone through the process that BT went through over 25 years, but we've concertinaed it into three."

His determination to push through change was clear at the FA: he moved it from Lancaster Gate to Soho Square, changed management, cut the main decision-making committee from 91 to 12, got the Wembley redevelopment under way and hired Eriksson, the first foreign coach. The two are still friends. Eriksson's agent Athole Still is full of praise for Crozier. "He is clearheaded, not frightened to take the controversial decision and to see it through. He is his own man – he was the first chief executive of the FA who persisted in not wearing a tie." He described Crozier's style as the "iron hand in the woolly glove".

Enemies
But he has made enemies along the way. He is regularly characterised as a Blairite moderniser. "Put it this way, I wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire," said a former FA executive. "He has to take credit for modernising the FA. But he was an advertising man brought into run football and he didn't know a great deal about football. He hired this new breed of advertising and marketing people on super duper wages and left a black hole in the finances. There was a lot of clear resentment. Morale was very low."

I ask Crozier if he doesn't sometimes get frustrated with the unions. Instead, he says he has empathy for the job they are trying to do. There is that unflappable self again. He notes, however, that the latest demand for 27% more pay and a shortened week to bring workers in line with the national average would cost GBP 1bn. "That's just not tenable."

Some of Crozier's decisions have also risked the wrath of the public. On the post office closures, he says there are simply too many branches. "There are 14,500 branches. I doubt if you added all the supermarkets and banks together it would come to 14,500. We have to cut them down and we have to make them more viable. The great example, or the terrible example, is that 1,600 of them have fewer than 100 customers." The Post Office is introducing new products including financial services but Crozier concedes they will take time to work.

Then there is a request with the regulator to increase the price of a stamp by 6p. "Here's the difficult message," Crozier says. "Clearly over time the business prices have to come down and the stamp prices have to go up and that's why we've always counselled the regulator and others when they say competition is great for everyone. We've always said, well, be careful because we don't think it is. In the long run it is great for businesses but it undoubtedly to consumers means higher prices."

Given the brickbats and the sheer scale of the job, Crozier seems remarkably upbeat. He introduces me to a Scottish word – thrawn. "It means deliberately difficult. When I first started this job, people said you're mad, why are you doing this? And the more they told me that, the more I thought this was the right thing to do, which was being thrawn." At Saatchi, he says, other people would gravitate toward the glamour accounts. He found it more interesting to run the difficult business. "I wanted to work on the ones that were about to fire us or we had a really terrible relationship with because actually it was more interesting," he says. "So I suppose it was at that point that I realised I actually like changing things. I didn't think about it like that at the time, clearly, but thinking back …"

CV
Born
1964, Isle of Bute
Educated
Graeme high school, a Falkirk comprehensive. Degree in business organisation at Heriot-Watt University
Career
Had trials for Hibernian FC
1984 Graduate trainee, Mars Pedigree Petfood
1986 Media sales, Daily Telegraph
1988 Media executive, Saatchi & Saatchi, made media director in 1990
1995 Joint chief executive, Saatchi & Saatchi
2000 Chief executive, Football Association
2003 Chief executive, Royal Mail
He is on the boards of Camelot and Debenhams
Family
Married to Annette; two daughters