When Adrian Mardell was named CEO of JLR (formerly Jaguar Land Rover) on an interim basis late last year, his was a name somewhat from leftfield.
He stepped up from his CFO role to replace Thierry Bolloré and clearly left such a good impression amongst the Tata hierarchy that he was last month given the job on a full-time basis.
The automotive industry is a big place but a small one at the same time, where everyone seemingly knows - or knows of - everyone, particularly when the top job is at stake. However, while Mardell’s wasn't a name not widely known externally, internally he's as well connected and respected as they come.
That much was obvious when we sat down with him for an hour last week for a full interview you can read in this week’s Autocar magazine.
We talked about Jaguar, the House of Brands, the future of Discovery, financial performance, electrification, quality issues, what dealers have told him and of course Mardell himself, as thoroughly a decent leader as you could ever meet and a man with the bit between his teeth to deliver the Reimagine plan.
When he tells you this is personal and he cares deeply about the company and its people, he means it. I hope you enjoy reading the interview.
It was also fascinating to discover the life of a CEO and what it entails for someone thrust into that role for the first time. Even though he had no expectation of becoming a CEO, when he found himself there, he realised he had the skills to be an effective company leader.
Mardell’s 19 roles at JLR in 32 years have mainly been in finance, and that has had him work with all kinds of different teams on all kinds of different people, from new-model programmes to due diligence on acquisitions, to negotiating with governments on new factories.
“I’ve spent 29 of the 32 years within different finance roles but importantly working alongside operating teams," he said. "So most of the people that I know in the company work within different disciplines and different chapters. I understand how you make money in this place like no one else and people have consistently leaned on those skills. But that didn’t necessarily mean I needed to be the chief executive; that’s just what I did for the organisation.”
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"When it comes to board discussions where decisions ultimately need to be made, Mardell says he tends to skip the first meeting to ensure that people can speak as freely as possible."
And how is that good? He knows that people would not speak freely when he is there, a good leadership attitude would be to understand why it is so, and fix it, not leave the room. Adrian might be a great person, and I am sure he really cares, but JLR finance process are an important reason why everything is so slow. Want a budget validation for an HR project deemed important? 5 layers of validation, more than 6 months. An engineer in R&D wants to buy a 1500 tool to test a potential solution for the project they work on, more than two months delay before getting the money to do so. Those were real situations less than two years ago. Beyond all niceties, the real question is: having spent such a long time at JLR, does Adrian know what to change and how deeply to change in order to compete against the wave of Chinese brands who studied and learnt from Tesla? I do not know all the persons in his first line, but I know some others in charge of the change, and like him too many of them are long time JLR people, with not much clue what to change to get faster and compete against really fast players.