PROFILE
26 l Profiles
Simon Watkins draws paralells between
himself and the most recent head of
Vodafone, Vittorio Colao and discovers
he’s doing a better job than his predecessor
Man
the Phones
The first thing that strikes one about Vittorio
Colao, the relatively new Chief Executive
Officer of the world’s largest mobile
telephone company, Vodafone, is how
young he looks. He looks a lot younger than me, for
example, despite his being 49 and me just having
turned 42. But then, he doesn’t smoke two packs of
Red Marlboro a day, or have a particular fondness
for 10-year old Macallan scotch whisky, or three exwives
for that matter either. And he also looks keen
– really keen – but then he’s not a got a newborn
kid to minister to in the middle of the night, so he’s
probably doing better on the sleep front than I am
as well. In fact, it’s fair to say that he looks exactly as
well-scrubbed, bright-eyed, and eager as one might
expect of a typical be-Harvard MBA’d ex-McKinsey
management consultant, son of an ex-Italian
policeman, although the odd speck of grey around
his temples might tend to portray something of the
strain of steering the telecoms giant through the
worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Of course, call it a function of market perception, call
it a product of a peculiar type of alchemy of character,
or, as Groucho Marx once said “just call it a banana”,
but the ramifications for the once troubled Vodafone
shareholders of this replacement for the widely-perceived
‘visionary’ Arun Sarin as CEO could hardly be more
extreme. Under Sarin, Vodafone notched up the largest
annual loss in European corporate history at the time
(in the year ending March 2006) of £21.9bn, following
which disaster 9.5 percent of the firm’s shareholders
unsurprisingly voted to oust Sarin at that year’s AGM, an
outcome only averted as the beleaguered CEO vowed
to reorganise the company into three distinct business
units covering Europe, emerging markets, and new
technology. After this had helped Vodafone to achieve a
record full-year profit, Sarin allegedly fell on his sword (‘to
spend more time with his family’ – no, seriously), leaving
Colao to take up the gauntlet.
In fact, Colao was no stranger to the vagaries of
Vodafone, a firm for which he had already worked
when Omnitel Pronto Italia – where he was employed
– was swallowed up by Vodafone in 2000, as part of
its uber-takeover of Mannesmann. Moreover, he was, it
is rumoured, being groomed as a possible successor
by Sir Christopher Gent as CEO even then, until Sarin
got the nod for the top position himself, and Colao, in
true Commedia dell’Arte fashion, exited stage left to run
the Italian publisher RCS Media, whose assets include
the Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper. Here, however,
matters did not run altogether smoothly for Colao, with a
major row over strategy with some serious shareholders
leading to the Italian’s departure back to Vodafone, with
at least one industry-watcher having determined that
Colao is “a man who, once he’s made up his mind on a
subject, appears extremely loathe to change it”.
Determined, then, in his pursuit of what he believes
to be the correct way forward, but what else in Colao’s
character might make him the right choice as a CEO,
and as a man indeed, to lead Vodafone into a bright
new future? “A vital quality for any good CEO is the
ability to find a balance between looking at a business
both from above and from within,” says Charles Luke,
co-manager of the Murray Income Investment Trust
at Aberdeen Asset Management, in London: “They
need to have an over-arching vision for the future, but
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