THE story of how Niall FitzGerald joined Unilever "by accident" has become something of a corporate legend. As he tells it himself, it is quite simple. Going along with a friend who was interested in a Unilever graduate recruitment function, Mr FitzGerald himself became interested in the company and its prospects. He went for interview and joined the group, starting work with Paul and Vincent animal feeds at Blackhall Place, Dublin, a subsidiary which the company then owned. This month he took up the reins as UK chairman of the worldwide group.
As UK chairman he is one of two men charged with overseeing the development of a group with 50 billion (£31 billion) in annual sales, almost as much as Ireland's entire national output. The other man is Dutch chairman Maurice Tabaskblat.
Niall FitzGerald explains the arrangement as being "like two senior partners in an old-style professional partnership". They have equal status, managers report to both, two weeks out of every four are spent together in either Rotterdam or London.
Born in Sligo and brought up in Limerick, FitzGerald moved to Dublin in the mid-1960s, originally opting to study accountancy but giving it up as being "tedious". He joined UCD when he was a bit older than the average, and with a feeling that he had let a couple of years slip by. As a result he studied "day and night" - literally doing some courses by day and some in the evening - to complete a commerce degree. His stay in UCD included a brief flirtation with left-wing politics and some debating jousts in the L & H with contemporaries like Henry Kelly.
His first job after college was in the financial section of Irish Shipping. And then came that visit to the Unilever recruitment function.
A move to London followed in 1971 and there followed a wide education in a range of jobs in Unilever's worldwide operations, including a gradual climb up the corporate ladder and a lengthy period in South Africa.
A couple of years ago Mr FitzGerald's rise to the top appeared relentless and he was being widely tipped to succeed Sir Michael Perry as chairman. Then came Persil Power. Niall FitzGerald was detergents co-ordinator when the 1994 controversy broke over the washing powder which damaged clothes. Unilevers' big detergents rival, Procter & Gamble took full advantage of the flaw in its rival's catalyst. Eventually the detergent was withdrawn, but by then the affair turned into a major embarrassment for Unilever.
For a time commentators believed Mr FitzGerald's rise to the top would at least be delayed and possibly scuppered entirely. But ironically the fall-out from the affair has included a corporate reorganisation strategy which Mr FitzGerald worked on for six months prior to his elevation to chairman. He now takes control of the new corporate structure he helped to create.
Does he feel intimidated in taking on a company with 300,000 employees operating in 90 countries and with a stockmarket capitalisation of $40 billion? It is a question which he says is not easy to answer. He does not think of the company as a giant organisation, he said, but as a "flotilla or fleet" which reduces it to "manageable chunks" from a management viewpoint.
He adds: "Our job is to set a direction and make sure everyone understands it. And make sure that, like a fleet, the organisation "can turn very sharply and be very fast moving".
To achieve these goals, Unilever is being reorganised. Traditionally, according to Mr FitzGerald, Unilever has tended to operate too much from the "bottom up with each individual area or operation feeding up its own objectives.
The new chairman believes that a more "top down" approach is needed, with clearer direction from the highest level of the company. To achieve this a new executive committee will become Unilever's supreme policymaking body. In a break from the past, this group will not include managers with responsibilities for particular business areas within the group.
Operational responsibility will rest with 14 business group presidents who will look after certain regions, or products within regions (such as ice-creams in Europe). These managers will report to the executive committee, leading to "a sharper separation of responsibilities and a clearer delegation of authority". The culture will be less interference from the top, he says, but faster intervention when problems hit.
The other side of the big challenge for Mr FitzGerald is to get a better return for Unilever's shareholders from a variety of brands ranging from Persil to HB IceCream and from Birds' Eye to Walls. Mr FitzGerald needs to convince investors and the market that he can boost profitability from last year's level of $2.5 billion.
He is keen to play down the idea that he is going to revolutionise the group. "We don't have a $50 billion company because everything in the past was wrong. I am a caretaker of the capital and culture of the business."
But he does have plans for change, to manage the portfolio for value and to create "long-term sustainable value". He intends to concentrate the group much more on key products areas - about 20 of the 57 in which it is currently involved and including areas such as ice-cream, tea-based drinks and laundry products. Such areas will receive a disproportionate amount of corporate resources, while lower potential areas will either be improved or sold off.
Mr FitzGerald takes animatedly about the areas of opportunity for the group. "By early the next century more than half the world's GDP will be accounted for by what are now known as developing and emerging arks," he says. He believes Unilever's sales can match this trend and he will not be disappointed. Sales in these markets now account for about 28 per cent of the total and he will be "disappointed" if this does not rise to 50 per cent over the next seven or eight years.
He sees potential around the globe, reeling off annual sales figures from around the world and clearly believing that much more is possible. India, in particular, is a good bet for the rapid growth, he believes, as is the giant Chinese market where the company's operations are growing fast, often through joint ventures. Eastern and Central Europe can also show strong increases in sales and profits. And so can Southern Africa, including South Africa where FitzGerald spent five years, going reluctantly after having his arm twisted and returning equally reluctantly to London in 1985.
South Africa is a good example of the way Unilever operates he believes others pulled out as a protest against apartheid, Unilever never did, but "never compromised" the way it operated its business. The company was "determined to run its business in its own way and by its own standards", he says, offering fair wages to all and had "by far the most successful non-white management" among major companies. By doing so, Unilever acted as an example of what could happen and the way business could operate, he argues, and took a much more honest approach that many other companies which pulled out but kept an option to get back in later.
Staying for the long haul is one of Unilever's traits. With strong local management in place for years in many of the emerging markets around the world and a knowledge of how these markets operate, Mr FitzGerald believes the global group is well set to capitalise in the years ahead.
