Straight-talker Stuart Rose has a reputation for delivering shareholder value but can he do the job for Marks and Spencer? Nils Pratley reports.

Stuart Rose seems determined not to be outdone by Philip Green in the plain-speaking stakes. His diagnosis of what has gone wrong at Marks & Spencer, his old alma mater, sounds like something from the bidder's textbook of no-nonsense management.

"If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck, right? That's how I operate. I'm not going to take the duck's bloody footprints, send them away for DNA analysis and find 10 weeks later that it's a duck, by which time it's flown away.

"That's where I think they have been a bit slow here sometimes. It's analysis-paralysis," says Mr Rose, the man M&S has turned to for salvation.

It's the sort of tub-thumping stuff that, in a week, has hauled M&S off the ropes. Last weekend, the power was with Mr Green, the iconoclast offering shareholders an escape from M&S's years of drift and excuses. Mr Rose's arrival on Monday with his sharply cut suits and sharper rhetoric, was the moment the momentum was reversed.

He did 17 years at the M&S coalface during the retailer's glory years and has a reputation from Argos and Arcadia of delivering value for shareholders.

Perceptions change quickly in the world of takeovers and, post-Rose, Mr Green's plan suddenly looked like an attempt to snatch the most famous name in British retailing on the cheap. The worst that could be said of Mr Rose - and Mr Green says it at every opportunity - is that the M&S board, including the current non-executives, seemed sniffy about his talents until the bidder was at the door. The appointment seemed just a little expedient.

Mr Rose clearly can't speak for the non-executives, but he says his first contact with the board was nine days ago, hours before Mr Green made his initial announcement. That was Thursday, and he signed on Monday. He even got a £1.25 million(€1.9 million) golden hello.

"On my side it was quick because I had been waiting for the job for 30 years," he says. "In case they took the offer away, I thought I had better say yes pretty quick."

But why, as somebody who personally made £25 million at Arcadia, did he need such a huge signing-on fee to take the job he had always craved?

"Much as I love the business, they would have thought I was soft in the head if I said I would come here for nothing," he says. "It was a very reasonable commercial rate for the job."

The cleverness of his appointment is that he is a tricky man for Mr Green to attack. The two are friends and Mr Rose was even a guest at Mr Green's infamous toga-clad 50th birthday bash in Cyprus.

M&S's new man makes clear where the friendship stops. "Philip is the most stimulating, entertaining, amusing and intelligent man that I have met in a long time," says Mr Rose. "But I don't want to work for him.

"I describe our friendship this way: we see each other for a meal, but we do it in a restaurant, not in our houses. He's a great guy, but one of the reasons I get on with him is that he doesn't own me... He's a great bloke, but I wouldn't work for him for five minutes."

The two men, of course, have tangled in the past. Mr Rose was Arcadia's chief executive, one half of the old Burton Group, who agreed to sell the firm to Mr Green in 2002 for £850 million. Arcadia is now the cornerstone of Mr Green's private high-street empire and the biggest asset within his estimated £3.6 billion personal fortune.

Profits at Arcadia doubled to £228 million in the year after Mr Green bought it, clear evidence, say Mr Green's supporters, of which man has the greater retailing skills.

Mr Rose says Arcadia was sold at 412p a share, a more than decent return for shareholders who bought near the low point of 38p. He argues that the immediate improvement under Mr Green was a function of two things: a retail market that grew at 4 per cent rather than the expected 2 per cent, and Mr Green's management for short-term results.

"I don't deny he improved the sourcing and this and that, but I was there as a public company chief executive and I had to manage two, three, four years out and make sure we were under-promising and over-delivering.

"He wanted to show, for a completely different reason, that he could squeeze it like mad to show the banks he could pay down the debt. His objective was 'Christ, I've borrowed 800 million quid and I've got to pay it back'. It was yin and yang - a bit like he and I are on this business."

Mr Rose reckons that if he and Mr Green sat down to discuss how to fix M&S they would agree on 80 per cent of the solutions.

The choice for shareholders, he argues, is whether they want to retain full ownership of M&S or accept Mr Green's cash plus a stake of just 25 per cent in his Revival Acquisitions vehicle.

"Philip would say he could do it [implement change] faster than me; he would say he could do it better than me," Mr Rose says. "Even if that's the case, and even if I'm half as good as him, shouldn't the shareholders get 100 per cent of it rather than 25 per cent?"

But what are these coming changes at M&S? And what did the board mean in its formal rejection of Mr Green's offer when it spoke of maximising "value creation" for shareholders?

Such terms are usually code for crystallising value in the form of special dividends or share buybacks. The obvious mechanisms would be a securitisation of the revenues of M&S Money or further sales of the freehold property, both thought to be part of Mr Green's blueprint.

So should shareholders expect some cash back? "I wouldn't rule it in and I wouldn't rule it out," is all he will say.

There will be job losses within top management, but Mr Rose's immediate priority is to restore accountability. He is promising a return to the good old days when M&S managers were regarded as among the best decision-makers in the land, rather than committee men looking for consensus.

"M&S has definitely changed. I think there is an element, from what I have seen so far, that people have forgotten their roots," he says.

"It seems to me there is a little bit of clinging on to each other. But you can't hold hands. We live in a cruel, hard, tough commercial world.

"The business definitely suffered a little from the A-word - arrogance - in the mid to late-90s. It looked out the window and found the world had passed it by. Playing catch-up in this environment is quite difficult.

"There has been a false dawn and my job is to come in and help it run faster for the near term so we catch up with our peer group. But it's not bust. It is still a business turning over £7.5 billion a year, still a business that made £750 million last year. It's a big engine."

- (Guardian Service)