With all the muck being flung in the soap wars James Hill has come out whiter than white. Hill is the man behind the launch of Persil Tablets across Europe ­ the product that put Lever Brothers back at the top of the washing pile ­ and since becoming chairman a year ago he's been charged with keeping the company's performance spotless. This also means not sullying his hands with speculation as to what Lever will do next ­ the question we all want to know the answer to. But there's no way he could air his new laundry ideas in public as he'd immediately be hung up to dry by the competition. For a second he looks as though he's about to answer, then he laughs and says: "I'm not telling you ­ but let me tell you we're working on several things I think are going to have a huge impact." Not even a little sniff of where we can expect this impact? Well, it appears there's a wind of electronic developments about to stir Lever's washing line. An awful lot of time, money and effort is being invested in improving internal electronic competence and experimenting with e-commerce. "If there were half a dozen key strategic thrusts in this company, which there are, that would be one of them, which it is. We're investing more than we strictly speaking need to to make sure that we're in a good position to exploit it." He won't elaborate any more. His answers are as carefully measured as the amount of powder that goes into his detergent tablets ­ no more and no less than Lever thinks you need. You can tell his first job was in a negotiating role. A career long devotee to Unilever, Hill, 38, joined as a management trainee in 1980 and spent five years at the factories handling industrial relations during a time when union negotiations were at the heart of UK business activity. He then moved into brand management ­ "I realised that in an fmcg company like Lever the marketing and sales functions are what drive the business" ­ before heading for the continent in 1990. He spent a decade climbing Lever's European ladder in Spain, Greece and Belgium before returning to the UK head office a year ago. Scottish born Hill ­ for whom the phrase "soft spoken Scotsman" was invented and who is truly Scottish in the kilt wearing, bagpipe playing sense of the word ­ feels his European experience brings a fresh eye to the UK business and helps him see the bigger picture. "There's no truer maxim than travel broadens the mind'. Experiencing different patterns of consumer behaviour and relationships with your customers helps you to have a much broader perspective and to see things in more strategic terms rather than just firefighting all the time." He certainly had a broad vision for revolutionising the detergent market. While the tablets launch "was very much a team effort and that's not a cliché", Hill will go down in fmcg history as the laundry tablets man. When he took the job in Belgium in 1996 in charge of strategy for detergents in Europe, the tablet project was still at the bottom of the washing basket. An anecdote he thought was hilarious is that when he took over, his predecessor joked: "We haven't lost a single minute since I've been here. It was three years from launch when I arrived and it's still three years from launch now." Hill says: "I resolved I would kill or cure that project and I would get it to market or abandon it within a year. So I invested a huge proportion of our money and our scientific resource and overcame a number of very difficult obstacles to bring it to market on time and in good style." Not only do the numbers make him feel proud of what he's achieved ­ tablets have overperformed and now account for over 20% of the £1.1bn laundry market ­ but it also left rival Procter & Gamble lagging behind. Gratifying, when it had been trampled on by P&G during the disastrous Persil Power fiasco: "We had a difficult period in the mid '90s when we'd made a major attempt to change the structure of the market, but it wasn't as successful as we wanted it to be and it backfired." At its Persil Power low, the Persil brand fell to a 20.8% share in 1995 ­ but the tablets boom has helped bump that back up to 25.8% compared with Ariel's 20.4%. Hill adds: "Now that we've got our confidence back we're prepared to be much more adventurous. When you have a difficult period, you learn an awful lot and then you're redoubled in your confidence because you know that you can handle adversity." Maybe that's why the killing of Radion was swift and bloodless ­ though Hill denies it was murder. "The focus internally is about creating a small stable of power brands, it's not about killing off at all." But that's not to say Hill hasn't got a bit of nostalgia for Radion. After all, he was the brand manager who launched it. Not that he regards it as a failure ­ it made money in its lifespan. They even had a party to celebrate its demise. "When you do something, you're totally committed to making it a success. If it doesn't happen you remove it completely because you've got to move on." He delivers the Unilever mantra so perfectly. One might suspect 19 years in the same company has turned him into a corporate automaton. Has he become Unileverman? "Unilever has never been a company where everyone has to follow orders issued by one person," counters Hill. "It has the mind of a big company but the heart of a small company, so we still have a reasonably high degree of autonomy for the individual units. "That helps us to be successful because you get loads of new ideas and occasionally people disobey the rules ­ not in a bad way but in a constructive way ­ which I think is good." He's certainly been through the Lever Brothers spin cycle several times. He's so on-message that New Labourites would be proud of him. By all accounts Lever Brothers is a marvellous, wonderful, exciting place to work. He is also evangelical about the role Lever can play in society ­ which some may think is taking it just a wee bit too far. "I don't want to sound too philosophical or religious," he says. "But we ascribe to ourselves a real importance out of what we do. Society needs clean clothes and hygiene and clean surfaces, and I think it's damned important to give people excellent products at sensible prices without wasting resources." He doesn't go quite as far as talking detergent at dinner parties ­ "I'm not that boring," he says ­ but he leaves you in doubt that he completely and absolutely loves his job. "You know how you can sometimes step away and listen to yourself talking? I think, My God, that guy's really passionate about detergents! How can he get so excited about this product improvement or that piece of advertising?' But I guess I do..." It's as though he's playing a big corporate game that he always wins and he has fun at ­ after all, his attitude is that if he has to spend so much time doing it then he might as well enjoy it. "Nowadays people want to express themselves through their work and I certainly do with mine. I don't believe in this philosophy that you only work in order to enjoy the times when you're not working. It's really important to have fun at work and get a sense of fulfilment out of it too." n {{PROFILE }}

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