Post man promises to deliver: profile & interview with Adam Crozier
Adam Crozier’s tackling didn’t impress everybody at the Football Association. So will he score in his new role at the troubled Royal Mail?
THE last time I met Adam Crozier he had just stepped out of a car crash after presenting Sven Goran Eriksson to the British football press. That’s a real car crash, not a metaphorical one. Characteristically, he never mentioned it. Slim, boyish, immaculately dressed in a charcoal designer suit and open-necked shirt, he had just seemed rather distracted in his quietly calm way, apologising for being late and looking as pensive as an Easter Island statue.
Back then, when he was just 36, his friends had been amazed that he had left Saatchi & Saatchi to grasp the poisoned chalice of running the Football Association (FA). Braggart-bully club chairmen, venal agents, underachieving national team – don’t even mention rebuilding Wembley. And Crozier, having witnessed Eriksson get a mauling at the hands of the xenophobic press, was beginning to get a sense of what he had taken on.
What would they all say now? Eight months after leaving the FA, here he is, beaming from ear to ear, presenting the Royal Mail’s Pounds 611m pre-tax loss to a group of grim-faced journalists on a grey May morning. Is he mad, masochistic or what?
No, just ambitious. “I think this is the last of the really big corporate turnrounds in the country,” he says in his soft Scottish burr. “The sheer scale is what really appealed. And the fact that some people think it cannot be turned around appealed too. My view before I joined, and more so now I am here, is that it can be done.”
Presentation over, he is sitting in his shirtsleeves in his fifth-floor office in east London. He looks much more relaxed than he did at the FA, where the constant jabbing from football’s vested interests meant his guard was permanently up.
Smiling and chatting, one leg tucked under the other on the sofa, Crozier explains that he became Royal Mail chief executive for the challenge, and also for the opportunity to work with Allan Leighton, former Asda boss and now Royal Mail chairman. He is not even depressed about the footie from the night before, when his beloved Celtic had crashed out of the Uefa Cup Final in Seville. Crozier had given his ticket to a friend because he couldn’t find anyone with a jet to fly him back for that morning’s presentation, so maybe he felt he got off lightly.
Anyway, optimism is the mood of choice at the Royal Mail these days. The losses are coming down, he says, changes are afoot. Yet hang on. In a short career that spans pet food, ad sales and agency management, surely he knows absolutely nothing about running a vast organisation employing a quarter of a million people?
No, he smiles, but he can learn. And having completely revamped the FA, he knows all about instigating change.
But the Royal Mail? Overmanned, in the red, dogged by union unrest, soon to be swamped by competition – he could have chosen an easier brief. To Crozier, however, the problems present their own advantages. Everyone knows what’s at stake now, strike disruption is down, offices are being rationalised, 30,000 redundancies are on the cards.
“If you look at the huge turnround we are achieving at Parcelforce, for instance, I think it’s because plan A, which is changing it, is so much better than plan B, which is closing it. Sometimes,” says Crozier, “you need a bit of a spur to get people to realise that you have to move on.”
You also need some hard selling to workers and customers alike, the talent for which he was really hired. One of his old agency bosses describes Crozier’s unique skill as “intelligent seduction”, the ability to sell ideas to anyone without them realising what’s going on. He even sold a Swedish manager to the stuck-in-the-1960s FA.
He will need all that, and his love of organising, if he is going to thrive at the Royal Mail. And even that might not be enough if the economy turns down, competition turns
