The rise and fall of Marks&Spencer

And so, Marks & Spencer, 114 years old and the second most profitable retailer in the world, the subject of three Harvard Business School case studies, five times winner of the Queen's award for Export Achievement and with cupboards groaning with trophies for managerial excellence, steamed on full-throttle towards the iceberg ...

Who could have guessed that within two short years the company's reputation would be smashed, perhaps irretrievably, or that all but one of the sixteen executive directors would have gone, consigned to the dustbin of corporate history? Who would have believed that branding experts would compare the name of Marks & Spencer to Rover as an example of a British brand that had lost all credibility? And who could have foreseen that learned commentators would be dismissing Marks & Spencer, along with the Tory Party, the Monarchy and the Church of England, as one of those national institutions that bad ceased to have any relevance to life in modern Britain?

Sommaire

• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Prologue
• In the beginning
• New direction
• After Simon
• Goodbye to the family
• Along came Rick
• Suppliers
• The glory years
• Storm clouds
• The challenger
• Crisis
• Hello, Philip
• New beginnings
• Bibliography
• Appendices Index