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.
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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.