Marks and Spencer Strategy Insight

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Marks and Spencer Strategy Insight

At the Marks & Spencer AGM, on the 11th July 2001, Luc Vandevelde, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Marks & Spencer, gave a key speech regarding the managements recovery plan for the company, which was launched earlier in the year. The speech and extracts from Marks & Spencer Press Releases, presented below, provide a valuable insight into the nature of strategic planning within large organisations, and the role of the Chairman and Chief Executive in this process.

Extracts from the Speech

'Good morning. Welcome to the 2001 Annual General Meeting. I want to pick up exactly where we left off a year ago. In response to the very last question from the floor at the 2000 AGM, I made this statement: 'I am taking charge and I will create shareholder value in the future.'

I'd like you to keep that statement in mind. In everything we have done or are planning to do for your Company, we share with you the common objective of increasing the value of your investment by returning Marks & Spencer to its rightful, leading position in the marketplace.

As to 'taking charge,' at the last AGM I'd been with Marks & Spencer for less than five months - and I didn't take over as Chief Executive until two months after the AGM in September 2000.

At that point, a little over six months in, I came to certain conclusions about the Company's strategy ... and it took six months because Marks & Spencer is a very unique and very complex company.

My conclusion was that the recovery plan, then in place, was doing a lot of useful things ... getting us closer to our customers, improving our supply chain, and so on. But it still wasn't good enough to address the real problems of the Company which, as I've already admitted, were more serious than I realised when I first took up this post.

The previous plan was like feeding a tree that was already overgrown and unhealthy. What it really needed was serious pruning back. It had unproductive limbs that were hampering its growth and a lot of its best characteristics were lost in the foliage.

It became clear that for M&S to grow productively, we had to get back to its core strengths - to those fundamentals that underpinned its success in the past - and begin our recovery from there.'

Putting together the right team

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