As Rami Baitiéh makes his first appearance since taking over as the boss of Morrisons, what do his first public words as chief executive reveal about him as a leader?
Since first being announced as David Potts’ replacement at the end of September 2023, ex-Carrefour France boss Rami Baitiéh’s rise to the role has taken on almost mythical proportions.
Experts and admirers alike began talking about him as the French retail giant’s great problem solver. The polyglot retail guru with two decades-plus experience and a Midas-like quality to turn anything he touched into gold.
Able to parachute into any country – Taiwan, Argentina, Spain – and turn the business from loss-making to market leader, the UK’s famously competitive grocery market was just the next challenge for him to overcome.
Within days of his starting in the role in November, stories had already begun to emerge of Baitiéh’s radical approach to leadership, focusing particularly on his relentless attention to detail and almost fanatical focus on the customer.
“He’s a genius,” said one source who has worked with him directly. “A bit of a mad genius, but a genius nonetheless.”
After weeks of glowing reports, rumours of 21-hour working days and fantastical tales of achievements past and present, could the man measure up to the myth? And, in less than an hour, would he be fully able to convey his vision for restoring Morrisons to its former glories?
Always on call
What is overwhelmingly clear after just 45 minutes of talking is that Baitiéh is not a leader afraid to get into the weeds and get his hands dirty turning over every single aspect of the business.
Despite delivering what he called an “encouraging” most recent set of results, Baitiéh said that Morrisons’ performance more generally hasn’t been good enough.
“I must be direct. Since the pandemic, Morrisons has not been in peak form and our market share has slipped slowly but consistently. Our like-for-likes, although on an improving and encouraging trend now, have been behind the pack for a while and the switching data hasn’t been encouraging,” he says.
To address a multitude of issues, Baitiéh has implemented a 30-minute online call with “the top 100 people in the business every evening. Six days a week.”
In this meeting, Baitiéh says: “We look at what is happening in stores. We look at what customers and colleagues are telling us. We are training really hard, but to be the best you need to work at it.”
Walking the walk
Retailers everywhere love to talk about putting the customer first or being ‘customer-centric’, but there can’t be many who have put those words into action in such a literal way as the new Morrisons boss.
In what many viewed as an extraordinary move, one of Baitiéh’s first steps as CEO was putting his direct contact details on the Morrisons website.
“I try and talk to customers every single day,” he explains. “I try and talk to current customers and ex-customers. Customers who stopped shopping with us two or three years ago. I respond every day to customers who write me with complaints.
“Because of this, I understand more every single day, more and more what we need to do, me and the 91,000 Morrisons colleagues, what we need to do to make our customers happy in stores. What we need to do to be confident that, if we do the basics and make sure our customers are satisfied, I’m sure they’ll come back.”
Baitiéh doesn’t just expect this level of transparency with the customers of himself. He has also made public the contact details of his whole senior team and says Morrisons “are not having any more major meetings without customers there”.
This availability to the customer extends to store managers too. “Every store now has two customer round tables a month” while “challenged stores have one every week”.
While some retailers might consider this level of transparency with the customer to be overkill, Baitiéh is convinced this will help turn Morrisons around. “If we listen carefully enough, then our customers and colleagues will show us the way,” he says.
Price and value
Baitiéh seems to tacitly accept that Morrisons has been too slow in the past to respond to the flight to value spurred by the cost-of-living crisis.
Again, with customer feedback firmly at its core, he says that he wants the retailer to be more flexible and pragmatic with its pricing.
“I look at our prices and I think our prices are appreciated by our customers. Now, do we have one or two products where the price has not worked well? This is why we have listening sessions; they allow us to understand what products [are too expensive] and immediately we can correct that.”
He also points out granular issues, such as incidents of “differences between the price on the shelf and the price at checkout”. All such issues, he says, “should be eliminated”.
Baitiéh’s drive and commitment to the project cannot be questioned. But what’s not clear is if he can keep up this relentlessly granular approach in the long term? Or whether we’ll see him – after he feels his process and vision have been understood by every colleague at the business – standing back from the day-to-day and widening his focus?
Whatever happens, it’s clear Baitiéh has brought a new and completely different energy to the top job at Morrisons. Anyone hoping to coast through on past achievements or do things as they’ve always done them looks to be out of luck.
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