New chief executives are keen to hit the ground running, but marathon man Dave Lewis’s legs are pounding away and he hasn’t even found his way to the corner office yet.
That he is being pressed into service a month early is both a sign of the scale of Tesco’s crisis and the supermarket group’s eagerness to tackle it.
Shareholders are always pressing boards to act more decisively, so Tesco chairman Sir Richard Broadbent is conserving as much cash as possible for Lewis to throw at the company’s escalating woes.
What is worrying is that a rapid store-refurbishment programme is not delivering the desired results and the home of the Clubcard is finding the task of keeping customers loyal so expensive.
Broadbent is intent on keeping Tesco ahead of the wave of changes washing over the retail industry.
You start to wonder whether this once-great company is not waving, but drowning. It will take more than the marketing magic for which Lewis is best known to stop the rot.
