The Arrival of Peter Rothwell and the Culture Clash That Followed

Changing the culture of a successful business is probably one of the hardest management challenges there is, because the very people and behaviours that created the success in the first place are often the same ones you eventually need to change.

His solution was typically direct, and he poached Peter Rothwell, the young Sales and Purchasing Director from our arch-rival Thomson Holidays.

Thomson understandably didn't take this particularly well and immediately put Peter on gardening leave for the full 12-month notice period in his contract, which created the unusual situation where we all knew our new boss was coming long before he actually arrived.

I wasn't particularly delighted either.

At 35, Peter was only a few years older than me and had just been given the job I had rather optimistically identified as the next major step in my own career. I therefore fully expected not to like him, but instead Peter became one of the bosses I respected most and probably had more influence on my subsequent management style than almost anybody else.

His introduction to Airtours, however, could hardly have been worse.

Towards the end of Peter's gardening leave, David organised a three-day strategy retreat involving the tour operating, retail and airline divisions and invited Peter along to meet his future colleagues and understand how we operated.

Then came the fight.

And I don't mean a heated management disagreement. I mean an actual punch-up.

Our fiery Finance Director, Chris Mottershead, got into an argument with the equally fiery MD of the Airline, Mike Lee, over a little-known tax loophole, which culminated in Mike swinging a haymaker at Chris's head and me having to physically manhandle Chris away before things got worse.

David was so disgusted that he walked out on the first morning and never returned.

The rest of us spent the remaining couple of days half-heartedly completing the strategy exercise, knowing perfectly well that none of our decisions really mattered without David there to approve them. I have never known quite what Peter thought about the organisation he was shortly joining, but he presumably realised fairly quickly that Airtours wasn't Thomson.

Things didn't improve much when Peter subsequently organised his first Airtours tour operations away day.

To describe the difference between Peter's management culture and ours as a culture gap would be one of the great understatements of my career.

One of Peter's first requests was that we introduce a non-swearing policy, which Paul Evans immediately greeted by telling him to "fuck right off", before Chris Mottershead helpfully explained that he saw his own role as making sure that if he put a pot of money on the table and turned the lights off, none of us "buggers stole it".

Welcome to Airtours, Peter.

Yet Peter didn't try to turn us all into Thomson managers overnight. He gradually introduced a much more structured management style, and one thing I learned from him was the use of quarterly objectives. Rather than managers simply being handed targets from above, Peter encouraged people to set objectives themselves and then measure their own performance against them.

It created accountability without the constant need to interfere, something I subsequently adopted throughout my own career.

Not every management experiment worked quite so well.

Surprisingly, Peter later put Chris in charge of HR, which eventually led to one of the more bizarre episodes of my Airtours years, when Chris accidentally recruited a notorious con man as HR Director.

I had my suspicions about the guy after he gave an extremely odd speech at an overseas managers' conference before publicly seducing one of the managers and disappearing off to bed with her, which I didn't remember being covered in many HR textbooks.

It took another six months and numerous complaints before Chris finally asked the internal audit team to investigate his references. They discovered they were completely fictitious and, even more remarkably, that our HR Director had only recently been released from prison following a previous fraud conviction.

You really couldn't make Airtours up.

Looking back, Peter's arrival taught me something important about changing businesses. Company culture isn't created by mission statements, management consultants or posters on office walls. It is created by the personalities, behaviours and unwritten rules of the people who work there, which means trying to change it without changing large numbers of those people is incredibly difficult.

Fortunately, Peter didn't try to replace all the old dogs.

Instead, he taught some of us new tricks, and I was certainly one of them. He taught me the importance of building balanced management teams, giving good people clear objectives and then allowing them enough freedom to deliver them.

Airtours probably changed Peter as much as Peter changed Airtours, but he certainly changed the way I managed people for the rest of my career.