David Kappler: Chairman, Premier Foods and HMV Group.
| Position | Interview |
The last time we met, you were about to retire. Now you're chairman of two companies in the FTSE 250. Did you get bored?
I wasn't so much retiring as diversifying. I was 57, I'd done nine years as CFO of Cadbury Schweppes and I needed some new challenges. We'd recently acquired the Adams chewing-gum business, which required a lot of interesting work, but I knew it would be hard to find anything to keep the adrenaline pumping after that, because the company had taken on quite a lot of debt to make that transaction. The time was right to take on some non-executive directorships with a range of companies.
You already had experience as a non-executive director.
At Cadbury Schweppes you were allowed to have one external directorship only. I think that rule was right--I was aware of colleagues who had one and found it very time-consuming when there was a crisis. I was a non-exec for seven years at Camelot and then at HMV after its flotation in 2002. I've been on its board ever since. This year I was appointed interim chairman until I find a permanent successor.
Did you have particular challenges in mind?
I'd worked out some criteria and took some advice from other non-execs. I wanted to be in an industry that I really understood. I wanted to work with people I could really relate to and who had the same business standards. And I also wanted to work within fairly easy access of my home in Buckinghamshire. The hardest thing was to avoid the stereotype of being an audit committee chairman. Eventually I joined the boards at InterContinental Hotels and Shire Pharmaceuticals Group. Both are interesting companies in terms of their products and their corporate evolution. Premier Foods came along more or less as I was retiring. The private equity owners were planning to float the company and asked me to become chairman. That ticked all the boxes.
And it's been a rewarding experience.
It has been very interesting and enjoyable to help a business develop. For example, the executives of Premier Foods hadn't had much plc board experience and a number of new elements had to be taken into account, including extra governance requirements. We had to develop a number of things from scratch--we didn't have a company secretary, for example, or an internal audit function.
What's your most important responsibility?
Being a middleman. On the one hand you want to support and encourage the executives, yet you should also be challenging them. It's an interesting tightrope...
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