You see, after chatting with King for a couple of hours it becomes clear this passion for sailing ­ which he's had for 15 years or more ­ says far more about the man than anything on his hugely impressive CV. In short: King is a chatty and likeable bloke who also happens to have a major competitive streak. He admits he hates coming second and that's why he throws everything he has got into his sport ­ and his work ­ to make sure he wins. Always. Armed with this insight, you then learn about his family and his desire to balance work with home life. And guess what? He's now teaching his 10-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son about messing around with boats. King clearly enjoys that. But there's an ulterior motive. He hopes that once his kids are truly proficient he will be able to get back to competing in races other than fun events for parent and child. King laughs as he says this. But you know he is partly serious. He is looking tanned and relaxed after two weeks' sailing on the Solent with his family, and is talking about how, having just turned 40, he finds himself at M&S. Our discussion tacks about a bit, but seems to turn on a few personal questions. For starters: how would friends describe him? King thinks before replying, using adjectives such as committed, passionate and, yes, competitive. But is he ambitious? "No," he insists, "not in the conventional sense." He explains: "My ambition is to be successful and win at whatever I am doing. But I would like to do it in a way that does not leave a lot of detritus in my wake. Ambitious people tend to be self-serving. I hope people would say I am collective and collaborative." King's race to the top started in the early 1980s at Bath University, where the young Midlander was doing a business degree ahead of a job in the British motor industry with Lucas. But things changed. "While I was with Lucas on work experience it shut its parts operation and the office I was in. That was quite a formative experience. It taught me never to work for a business going backwards. It's just too painful. When I came to leave university I decided I wanted to be be involved with something slightly more dynamic than the British car industry." And that's how King came to join the Mars' graduate training scheme. It's a two year "up or out" regime, but King thrived, gaining a "fantastic" grounding. "There's a misconception that my career was all marketing," he adds. "But I started buying nuts and bolts for the factory and engineering equipment." After working with the Mars' sales team to develop display units for independent stores, King was offered the chance to swap roles. He grabbed the opportunity, working first in confectionery and later grocery (where he got to know Allan Leighton). "My 10 years with Mars locked me into fmcg and food as a product group. Those two things have really driven me," King says. "Then an opportunity came up when I was still young and reasonably free ­ though not single ­ to move internationally with Pepsi. I was working in the Middle East but based in Cyprus, which was absolutely the life of Riley." A year later his career changed course again when he was offered the chance to launch Häagen-Dazs in the UK ­ after being headhunted by a former Pepsi colleague. "At the time the only place Häagen-Dazs was sold in the UK was Harrods. I flew home for the interview and went to Harrods to buy an ice cream bar. I thought this has got to be the world's easiest job, if I can't sell this, I will never be able to sell anything," King recalls. He is proud of what was achieved in the next three years. "It's easy to look at the market now and make light of what Häagen-Dazs did. But this product was 10 times more expensive than the next most expensive on the market. The business was incredibly successful. It's remembered most for its advertising and I guess that's why I am partly thought of as a marketer. But, in truth, it's probably the first bit of marketing I ever did." When GrandMet folded the Häagen-Dazs operation back into its food business, King says he decided that it was time to move on. "I believed then ­ and still do ­ that people who have experience of both retail and manufacturing are the best equipped to work in this industry. For quite a while I harboured this desire to work for a retailer. I knew Allan from Mars so that's how I ended up at Asda." The Asda culture of flat management structures and informality was based very much on the Mars model, says King, and again his career prospered. He started out in 1993 in charge of alcoholic drinks, took control of own label, then became deputy trading director with responsibility for supplier relationships, before taking charge of Asda's hypermarkets. "Almost within days Asda was bought by Wal-Mart and the division became the focus of its developments. I had the good fortune to set up the first three UK Supercenters. The opportunity to see Wal-Mart from the inside out was fantastic. A lot of what is written about it is true. Much of it is not." But if life was so great in the Bentonville empire ­ and King insists it was ­ why did he move to M&S? "My decision was based on what I wanted to be doing with my career. I wanted to stay in food. But I have a young family and did not think most international opportunities were appropriate. And the kind of opportunities that would have come my way in Wal-Mart would be to run some of the less sexy parts of the world, or to work in the US. That's not something I felt fitted with what I wanted to be doing, which was to be running a decent sized business. "So when I got a phone call offering what I think is the best job in food in the UK, why should I not take it?" By the time King sailed into Stamford Street after a period of gardening leave from Asda, the M&S food business had been without a director for almost a year and everybody was keen to see what the new guy would do. King says: "Part of my objective in my first four or five months was to convince people that I had the same passion for the brand as they have ­ and the same desire for it to be even more successful than it is already. "This business is full of people who are passionate about food, whose ambition is to make the best quality food available through value and innovation." King accepts that when he took the helm not everything was "100% okay". But just a few months into the job he has a clear idea about where the business needs to be heading ­ and it's a steady as she goes' strategy rather than a steering through choppy waters' course. "The big dynamic for us ­ and it's not something I fully appreciated until I came here ­ is that we are a small but important part of a lot of people's shopping baskets. Broadly speaking, we have as many customers each week as the Asdas and Safeways. What that means is that most of our customers shop somewhere else as well. That is both an opportunity and a potential threat. The opportunity is that by satisfying more of their needs we can take more of what they spend on food. The threat is that most of our customers can check almost every week whether we do a good job because they go somewhere else as well." King also rejects the argument that food is doomed because fewer people are buying M&S clothes. "If 30% more people came into our stores to buy clothes, I am sure we could persuade them to buy food. But it's wrong to make the cause and effect link between you lose a bit of footfall in clothing and therefore are going to lose on food. The reason people spend less money is because you satisfy them less. It's that simple." And his strategy for satisfying them more? "We are not the cheapest ­ that's not our aspiration. But given the quality of what we sell we offer spectacularly good value. And if I learnt the importance of that lesson anywhere it was at Häagen-Dazs. Do I think a £3 pot of ice cream is good value? Absolutely. That philosophy can underpin not only a brand such as Häagen-Dazs, but a whole range of products under a brand called Marks and Spencer," says King. "Competition is getting tougher," he adds, "But the world is a competitive place. You win by doing what you are good at and not trying to do something else." King is good at winning races. He loves it. And you can't help feeling he is going to help M&S win its race too. n {{FEAT. PROFILE }}

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