That Dino Adriano is a nice guy is not in doubt. The problem ­ as Safeway's Colin Smith found out last year ­ is that being nice counts for nowt when your rivals are getting nastier by the day and your business is going south. Like Smith, Adriano is an accountant by trade. He joined Sainsbury as a management trainee 35 years ago and in 1981 moved across to the Homebase business where he made his name. Adriano became group chief executive in 1998, just as life started getting really tough for the UK's grocery retailers. Adriano quickly discovered that Sainsbury's supermarkets division was hopelessly ill equipped to deal with the changing business climate. Probably his first big mistake was to ditch higher margin non foods and focus instead on food. Mistake number two was clearly the highly irritating Value To Shout About! campaign. Of course, the roots of Sainsbury's problems were years of underinvestment in its stores and a hierarchical culture that was incapable of coping with rapid change. These were problems that Adriano inherited. Last spring he set about trying to tackle them with a massive programme of change. The problem for nice guy Dino was that he was not getting the sort of results his board and the City were demanding. By October, responsibility for the supermarkets was handed to deputy group chief executive David Bremner. But investors wanted more significant changes. Adriano's position was further weakened by his decision to appear in a BBC tv documentary showing how he fared on the floor of one of his stores. The programme was a personal PR disaster and demonstrated just how out of touch Adriano was with what was really happening on the shopfloor. Soon after the programme was aired the Sainsbury board began looking for a new group chief executive. They gave the job to Sir Peter Davis and he is the one who asked that Adriano stay on as an executive director until May 31. After he has completed the handover to Sir Peter, Adriano plans to retire. {{NEWS }}

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