The hyperactive postmaster
Allan Leighton is having a Cannons day. The famously "plural" businessman, who sits on eight boards when he isn't trying to bring the Post Office back from the brink, has just walked out of the gym chain's board meeting.
Multi-tasker: I'm confident, but not complacent, says Allan Leighton
Striding around the Crawley branch, he wants to know how the staff are and whether the lights work properly. He asks for coffee in a special mug – he can't be doing with those "cups as big as soup bowls".
Not that he needs caffeine: the 49-year-old is full of beans. The fact he was pounding the treadmill at 6.20 this morning may have something to do with it.
That was before he noticed the showers. Liquid soap was dribbling on to the tiles and staining the grouting. He told the management to sort it out.
This is Leighton all over: a straight talker who loves nothing more than to test his own businesses by turning up at post offices or gyms unannounced.
"I draw a pyramid and if you think that's business, the top 20 per cent is strategy and the bottom 80 per cent is called execution. It's 'does it happen, does it change, do people improve, does it work?' And the way to get there is a thing called communication."
This stuff seems so instinctive that he barely has to think, the words just pour out of his mouth in half-finished sentences. If David Brent, anti-hero of the BBC comedy The Office, had a razor-sharp brain, he would be Leighton.
His focus on the bottom of the triangle is why this son of a Hereford Co-op manager "went apoplectic" when someone at the Post Office decided that posties should wear cheaper shoes.
"If you are a postman, your feet are your most important asset. When I go to a delivery office, they say: 'Look, I've got a blister here and here.' Well, I'm moving them back to the original shoes!"
I am beginning to see how this corporate man of the people, with his country bumpkin-meets-estuary vowels, ginger-grey designer stubble and sharp suits (today: red pinstripe, dog-tooth shirt and peach tie), has ruffled a few feathers since becoming the chairman of what was Consignia in January.
He is on a mission to turn the group's £1m daily loss into profit by 2005. So far he has ditched the silly name and the chief exec (a replacement will be named within the next 10 days), borrowed £3bn and stemmed the red ink flow.
The next stop on Leighton's mail train is the regulator's office. He wants Postcomm to drop plans to fix the average price of Royal Mail's services at 29.1p (the quid pro quo for allowing it to increase stamp prices by 1p in April).
"We wrote a plan and said: 'Can we have funding for this plan? We won't be able to deliver it because I'm going to have a load more regulation on top of me which is going to cost me probably £750m and I'm not going to borrow any more money because I can't afford it'."
Isn't this the game all monopolies play: squealing publicly about a pending price control only to discover a year later that they are outperforming the regulator's targets?
Leighton, who came of age in the ultra-competitive confectionery market during 18 years at Mars, disagrees. "I'm not playing a game because I don't know what game I'm supposed to be playing. [My message is] spare me all the regulatory gobbledegook.
"I'm just a simple soul who's gone and borrowed some money to save a company. Let me have my 1p price increase and I don't mind if you don't speak to me again for three years and I promise I won't speak to you!"
Archie Norman, the Tory MP and former Asda boss who helped a bright, impatient young marketing director rise to the top of that supermarket group, says: "If he doesn't succeed at the Post Office, it will be because of political dabbling."
Leighton's verdict: "Am I confident? Yeah, I am actually. But am I complacent? No. Because I think it's tight. It's not slam dunk" (for which Americanese I blame Norman, who sent Leighton to Harvard Business School).
So, two years after quitting Asda to build up a portfolio career, where does the two-day-a-week Royal Mail job leave Britain's Mr Plural? "I'm still plural. I do lots of things, but I do them in a very singular way."
This means juggling the Post Office with the demands of (in alphabetical order): Bhs, BSkyB, Cannons, Dyson, George Weston (the Canadian foods giant), Lastminute.com, troubled Leeds United (he reckons heads will roll at Elland Road in January, but won't say more) and Wilson Connolly.
That's apart from his charity commitments and the Going Plural website which has made him an agony uncle for small businessmen.
The result, according to Bhs owner Philip Green: "Allan's a fantastic ideas man provided you can keep up the pace. You need to have a quick ability to pick up on his ideas once he's come up with them."
Leighton says the key to keeping all his corporate balls in the air is "ignoring anything that's not important", phoning his secretary every day, going to sleep at 10.30 and maintaining a good diary.
He scrabbles around in his bag and produces the evidence: a sheath of A4 timetables, four weeks on a page, with each period neatly filled in by hand. "I have a system! These are my old Mars periods and this is a Segal," he says, brandishing a plastic folder.
What is he talking about? "Julian Richer [the retail entrepreneur], who's a friend of mine, has the same thing. He's like me, he keeps things simple.
"We used to have a guy who worked for Asda called Bernie Segal and Julian was sitting having a cup of coffee one day and Bernie knocked his coffee all over his four weeks. So it's called a Segal!" He emits a seal-like laugh.
There's one other thing: Leighton doesn't do lunch "because it just breaks up the bloody day". That, combined with daily runs and twice-yearly fasts, keeps him lean.
His daily routine also ensures that he arrives home in time to catch up with his wife of 28 years, Anne, who, all being well, will have enjoyed a surprise birthday party last night which Leighton and his three twenty-something kids have spent months planning.
There isn't much room for his old hobbies like campanology (aka bell-ringing), although Lastminute founder Martha Lane Fox says he has promised to resurrect his morris dancing at her 30th birthday next year.
Leighton is getting twitchy. He uncurls his enormous legs and roams around, chatting to the photographer (he says his "chummy-chumminess" is about showing "respect" for those who most bosses don't bat an eyelid at).
Next on the timetable is a postal trade union rep who is waiting, looking thoroughly out of place, in the Cannons cafe. Then it's home to Beaconsfield via Basingstoke.
"There's a new Bhs store I want to see and I've got a delivery office down there. I'll just pop in, have a wander around and ask everybody what's going on.
"I'm the world's worst shopper because I'm more interested in the other stuff. I spend more time in delivery offices and stores than anybody. That's what I do."
