View from City Road: No peace for Reed's autocrat

The best wartime generals usually make the worst peacetime leaders, as Peter Davis's sudden departure from the co-chairmanship of Reed Elsevier, the Anglo Dutch publishing giant amply demonstrates.

His abrasive and determined style was vital in pushing through the 1993 merger of the UK's Reed International and its Dutch counterpart Elsevier.

Few industrialists would have had the necessary drive to overcome the inbred inertia of two such very different corporate cultures, as well as the stamina to deal with the fiendishly complex logistical and technical problems involved. Mr Davis, sternly schooled in the single-minded culture of J Sainsbury, was perfect for the job. Without him, the idea would probably have sunk without trace somewhere in the middle of the North Sea.

Even by Anglo Saxon standards, however, Mr Davis's management style was autocratic and egocentric. To the collegiately minded Dutch he must have seemed like the co-chairman from hell.

He certainly won few Continental fans with his high-handed derecognition of the print and press unions. Many in the Dutch group's management, raised on the tradition of compulsory worker participation, were as scandalised as their staff.

The official line on his departure - and there seems no reason to doubt its veracity - is that Mr Davis refused to settle for an airy, hands-off, strategic co-chairman's role. The Reed Elsevier board saw his job as setting an overall framework in conjunction with Peter Vinken, his Elsevier opposite number. The nitty-gritty of running the group was to be left to the co-chief executives of each company.

That was not a role which satisfied Mr Davis's itchy fingers; having tried it out since last September, he settled for an amicable divorce.

There seems nothing in this to upset investors, a conclusion the share price - which rebounded nicely once analysts had satisfied themselves nothing untoward was going on - seemed to support. Shell and Unilever have both grown and prospered with similar twinned corporate structures.

Clearly it was not an environment Mr Davis found to his liking. One is left to wonder what campaign he will find to catch his eye next. Having created so much shareholder value at Reed, he won't be short of offers.