Shownotes
In this Omni Talk Retail episode, recorded live at Retail Technology Show 2026 in London, Chris Walton is honored to talk with Archie Norman, Chairman of Marks & Spencer, about what it really takes to lead a successful business turnaround in today’s retail environment.
Archie shares why struggling organizations often create internal narratives that mask reality, and explains how transformation begins by confronting the “unvarnished truth.” He outlines the importance of listening to frontline employees, rebuilding trust across the organization, and creating a culture where honesty unlocks energy for change.
Drawing on decades of leadership experience, he also breaks down why urgency and patience must coexist in any turnaround, and how empowering teams at every level drives long-term progress.
The conversation also explores the evolving role of AI in retail, not as an immediate profit driver, but as a force that is reshaping how leaders access information, make decisions, and increase transparency across their organizations.
Key Topics Covered:
• Why failing businesses develop narratives that hide the truth
• The role of frontline insight in driving real transformation
• Why culture change requires both urgency and time
• The importance of leadership honesty and decisive action
• How to build an engaged and effective board
• Why AI is transforming knowledge access and decision-making
• The growing impact of transparency across organizations
• Why strong data foundations are critical for AI success
Thank you to Vusion for supporting Omni Talk Retail’s live coverage from Retail Technology Show 2026!
#RTS2026 #RetailTechnologyShow #OmniTalkRetail #RetailLeadership #BusinessTransformation #AIinRetail #RetailStrategy #CorporateGovernance #Vusion
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
Transcripts
Hello, everyone, this is Omnitalk Retail.
Speaker A:I'm Chris Walton and I'm coming to you live from the Retail Technology show in London from the Vuzion podcast studio.
Speaker A:And I am very honored and privileged to introduce my next guest.
Speaker A:My next guest is Archie Norman, the chairman of Marks and Spencer.
Speaker A:Archie, welcome to omnitalk.
Speaker A:It's great to have you.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker B:Great to be here.
Speaker A:You just got off stage, like literally you just came off stage.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And what you and I were joking beforehand.
Speaker A:What was the main, what was the main information that you shared with the audience here at Retail Technology Show?
Speaker A:What was the main gist of what you discussed?
Speaker B:Well, we had a wide ranging discussion.
Speaker B:People in the uk, they're always so interested in M and S. You know, we're such a public company, we almost like everybody thinks they own us and that makes them also our most critical friends as well.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So they're so interested in product in our stores where we opening.
Speaker B:Why are we closing stores?
Speaker B:Our technology.
Speaker B:Last year we had this incident which we like not talk about.
Speaker B:Now.
Speaker B:Everybody does want to talk.
Speaker A:I'll probably have to ask you about.
Speaker B:It too, but yeah, we have to, you know, how did you get through it?
Speaker B:How did you manage and you know, what you do, the team, how things change, the results.
Speaker B:So we talked about that.
Speaker B:We talked about retail theft.
Speaker A:Did you?
Speaker B:There comes and goes.
Speaker B:At the moment, it's very topical.
Speaker B:We talked a bit about that and then we talked about AI and technology and like that's affecting all our lives, isn't it?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Anything, Anything that you wish you had said that you didn't get to in the conversation?
Speaker B:Probably a few things I wish I hadn't said.
Speaker A:You wish you hadn't said yes, right, yeah.
Speaker A:You had the editing button more ready to go.
Speaker A:All right, so I'm interested to talk to you because, you know, you've had a, you've had a very long and distinguished career.
Speaker A:You've engineered a number of turnarounds in your career.
Speaker A:I'm curious, is there any consistent pattern you see in the troubled businesses that you've helped turn around, or is every turnaround really a different disease?
Speaker A:At the end of the day, the.
Speaker B:Answer is yes and no.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Expect so.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:I, as you say, really, I've ended up spending a lot of my career in retail, but not all.
Speaker B:I've been in broadcast, I've been in public life.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:I've been in telecoms.
Speaker B:I also chair an infrastructure company called the M Group that supports critical infrastructure in the uk.
Speaker B:So, but the common thing in a turnaround is that failing organizations develop their own narrative that explain nobody wants to be a failure.
Speaker A:That's interesting, right?
Speaker A:Rationalize it.
Speaker B:And typically when things are struggling, it becomes more hierarchical, more centralized, slower, more bureaucratic.
Speaker B:When you come into a failing company, you've got to give it a chance to succeed.
Speaker B:That means you've got to fracture the old culture.
Speaker B:You have to change a lot of people and you have to tell people their unvarnished truth by unvarnished truth.
Speaker B:I think the reasons why if we don't change, we may not be around because everybody in you take an M and S, everybody on the front line, they know what is really like and they don't, they don't believe what the top management says anymore.
Speaker B:You've got to restore credibility and then rebuild from the bottom up.
Speaker B:And you know, you've got to recognize it's going to take time.
Speaker B:That doesn't mean you don't have urgency and doesn't mean you don't act fast.
Speaker B:But changing culture and people takes time.
Speaker A:It does take time at M and.
Speaker B:S. You know, now we're in our probably seventh year and I think we're 40% of the way through what we're going to achieve.
Speaker B:Yeah, no, we've done some great things, but we're only.
Speaker A:Wow, that's, that's pretty impressive.
Speaker A:That's, that's, that's saying a lot given what you've already accomplished.
Speaker A:So if, if so might have take from that too, that as you come in and you engineer a turnaround that is really important to get your, your ear to the ground in terms of what the lower level employees are saying, the people that are closest to the customer are saying.
Speaker A:And how do you do that?
Speaker B:First thing, the new leader, all new leaders have to arrive with a thunderclap.
Speaker B:Okay, my view, interesting, you say you, you, you can't, your opportunity to impact is in your first hundred days.
Speaker B:So you've got to set direction.
Speaker B:But having set direction, then you go and listen to the front line because the truth is on the front line.
Speaker B:The truth is in the stores, the truth is with the store managers.
Speaker B:And then you have to bottle that truth and then tell the whole company and its stakeholders and the people who work there, this is where we really are.
Speaker B:And facing into the unvarnished truth releases the energy for change.
Speaker B:Because people then say, ah, it's okay to say this isn't working right.
Speaker B:It's okay to say this product isn't good enough.
Speaker B:It's okay to say Our prices are too high.
Speaker B:As opposed to the previous psychology, which is you've got to defend everything.
Speaker B:And once you've done that, you'll unleash energy.
Speaker B:And then, of course, you've got to bring in.
Speaker B:You've got to bring in new people.
Speaker B:Typically, there's sometimes new people in your company.
Speaker B:There's some.
Speaker B:No, there's some people still fighting.
Speaker B:You bring them up, but then time, you bring from outside.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And retail change, because it's such, in our case, 120,000 different products, 50,000 colleagues.
Speaker B:It's not like you can't do that from the boardroom.
Speaker B:It requires leadership, almost irrational energy from the leader to nail things and drive things through.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I can see why.
Speaker A:I can see why you're successful.
Speaker A:I'm curious, like, as you've done that, do you, as the leader, do you feel the sense of relief that the organization gets from being freed, you know, in that situation, from the straight plain talk that you're giving them?
Speaker B:Yeah, but I mean, to be fair, my role is now to be the chairman.
Speaker A:Yeah, right.
Speaker B:On the team coming.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Now you're the coach.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:And I've got a brilliant team led by Stuart Machin.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Who are so hard driving.
Speaker B:They work so hard for the business and care so much about it.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So my job is to support them and to advise them and sometimes to say, guys, I think we're going off piste here, but you, you do need that.
Speaker B:And Stuart has this phrase which he's coined, called positively dissatisfied.
Speaker B:So he's saying, look, our job is to be positively.
Speaker B:We're not negative, but we're positive about the business.
Speaker B:But we're dissatisfied.
Speaker B:And we need to be always dissatisfied because, you know, we're only as good as the change.
Speaker B:We interliven the arrowhead.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:And that means that in our meetings, you won't be able to come and say, we're getting.
Speaker B:Not to say how well we're doing.
Speaker A:Yep.
Speaker B:Well, you couldn't say that if you like.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Get onto.
Speaker A:But keep them inspired, too.
Speaker A:That's what I take from that.
Speaker A:Never satisfied.
Speaker A:But keep them inspired.
Speaker B:Everybody in the company, you see, you want.
Speaker B:Every colleague in the company has to believe that they can play a role in improving our business.
Speaker B:They can have a shout, because then you get a business where everybody is striving for continuous improvement.
Speaker B:You get this noise all the time.
Speaker B:You send people the wrong product, they all tell you, and that's what creates the energy and the continuous process.
Speaker A:And hence why there's so much Pride for M and S in general.
Speaker A:All right, so that was kind of the turnaround topic.
Speaker A:I started with the turnaround topic.
Speaker A:Now I want to talk about the day to day because you mentioned it.
Speaker A:You had the cyber attack.
Speaker A:The day to day, there's AI.
Speaker B:Cyber's not day to day, right?
Speaker A:No.
Speaker B:Right, yeah.
Speaker A:But yeah, it was the black swan event, Right.
Speaker A:Almost in a lot of ways.
Speaker A:And you've got AI coming.
Speaker A:That's challenging new ways of thinking all the time.
Speaker A:What is your advice in terms, especially as chairman for governance, like what advice you have for other CEOs, other executives out there in terms of governance, having gone through that both on the cyber attack side and as you're starting to come across the different challenges that arise with the advent of AI too.
Speaker B:Yeah, we should talk about AI a bit.
Speaker B:Obviously, when you get great corporate, I say great, but life threatening corporate events, whether it's a cyber or a hostile takeover or whatever it might be, right.
Speaker B:Then that's when the board and the executive need to come together.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:And a good board is one which is close to what's really happening.
Speaker B:So it's informed.
Speaker B:It's not standing back judging because you can't come together if one side is judging the other.
Speaker B:The board does have to sit in judgment and that's a small part of what you do.
Speaker B:In the end, they may come to the conclusion that management needs to change, they need to do that.
Speaker B:But day to day, if you want to get through a crisis, you've got to stand shoulder to shoulder and give the executive the space to handle what is an incredibly intense event.
Speaker B:But at the same time, be there for them.
Speaker B:Provide the guiding hand, be there for advice.
Speaker B:Sometimes be there for therapy and sometimes to say no.
Speaker B:Just be careful.
Speaker B:Let's have a discussion about it.
Speaker A:How do you, as chairman lead the board to create that atmosphere or that relationship with the actual retail executives?
Speaker B:So my view, and this is not for everybody, I run an engaged board.
Speaker B:So we have 11 meetings a year.
Speaker A:Oh, wow.
Speaker B:We have.
Speaker B:Each one is half a day.
Speaker B:I don't like long meetings.
Speaker B:Some people think they are too long.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:That's on your perspective.
Speaker B:Four dinners here, four breakfasts year a board engagement.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker B:All my board members are invited to go to executive events during the year.
Speaker B:It might be a range review, it might be a new store opening.
Speaker A:Really.
Speaker B:So go along and feel it.
Speaker B:So you can smell our business relate to.
Speaker B:Because then people tell you things that inform.
Speaker B:You know, you didn't hear that in the boardroom.
Speaker B:And also that's the fun of being.
Speaker B:Who wants to be a non executive director, sitting with their feet on the table.
Speaker B:What's fun is our business.
Speaker B:We do have a great business.
Speaker B:We want people to feel it and feel they're part of it.
Speaker B:And then when they have an engagement with the executive, they can relate, they can talk about the business in a useful way and that's what creates a good board.
Speaker B:I think at a good board meeting, as an outsider, you should be able to watch that board and you can't quite tell who's an executive and who's a non executive because they're all talking about how we improve our business, how we address this problem.
Speaker B:Now, of course, in fact, you can, not least because my chief executive is so obvious.
Speaker A:Right, right, right, right.
Speaker B:But you can.
Speaker B:But it's got the spirit of.
Speaker B:It has got to be total transparency.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And I imagine that expectation of those, that meeting schedule and how you're going to do that is set right from the get go with you.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:As well.
Speaker B:The big issue with boards is get people engaged.
Speaker B:When you look at boards that have failed or big corporate catastrophes, it's not because they didn't have eminent people on the board.
Speaker B:Sometimes it probably, but mostly it's not.
Speaker B:You look at those boards, they're eminent, smart people, is that they didn't understand what was really happening on the board, the ground.
Speaker B:So the good board is the knowing board.
Speaker B:And so that's, that's what we, we try to achieve.
Speaker B:And look with that, we want people to have fun too.
Speaker B:We want to have the laughter.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Anger and you know, it's got to.
Speaker A:Be enjoy the brand.
Speaker A:Enjoy the pride in the brand too.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker A:This is, this has been, this is why I love doing my job.
Speaker A:I had no idea we were going to have this conversation this morning.
Speaker A:All right.
Speaker A:You mentioned AI.
Speaker A:Let's talk AI for a little bit.
Speaker A:What is your, what is your, what is your take on the AI opportunity in retail right now?
Speaker A:How, how are you viewing it?
Speaker A:What do you think the retail industry.
Speaker A:How do you think the retail industry should be viewing it?
Speaker A:What are your thoughts there?
Speaker B:So it's obvious that.
Speaker B:Is it going to change our lives?
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:Is it going to change so many of our processes?
Speaker B:Yes, it is.
Speaker B:But I just, just important, remember.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:At the moment, although every chairman and chief executive will tell you how brilliantly they're doing an AI, there's hardly one that's able to say my profits are 5% higher because of AI.
Speaker A:Great point.
Speaker B:So at the moment it hasn't really happened.
Speaker B:We're on the lip of this and you know, you hear people talking about the great slaughter of the clerical classes.
Speaker B:You know, how white collar jobs are going to be decimated.
Speaker B:That hasn't happened yet.
Speaker B:That could be happening.
Speaker B:And you can see it a bit in recruitment.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:But in truth, we employ at M&S in the support center, we employ a hundred fewer people than we did a year ago.
Speaker B:And that's not because of AI.
Speaker B:No, it's because we got more efficient.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:So this hasn't happened yet and we don't quite know how it's going to happen and the extent of it, but we are seeing is everybody just picking up on it.
Speaker B:So in our organization and we've given co pilot is now we've given it to a thousand people.
Speaker B:Every store manager is co pilot.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:It's integrated with our systems.
Speaker B:So they can use copilot or other AI devices to say, could you please analyze my results last week and tell me what's right or wrong.
Speaker B:So what you are seeing at the moment, that looks, there's lots of applications of AI, right?
Speaker B:I mean, quite a few things that probably four years ago we wouldn't call it AI.
Speaker B:Now we call it AI to make us look cool.
Speaker A:But the, you know, very plugged in.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Our dairy herds are monitored by AI.
Speaker B:So we.
Speaker B:We monitor the health of all our dairy cattle by AI driven cameras.
Speaker B:So there's an example.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Very exciting.
Speaker B:20,000 Cows.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Life is better for cows.
Speaker B:But it.
Speaker B:What.
Speaker B:So in my life, in the daylight, what is really changing?
Speaker B:His knowledge.
Speaker A:The knowledge.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Because the chief executive now does not have to get into the office early on Monday morning to go through pages and pages of reports.
Speaker B:He jumps in the taxi, he gets his phone and he says to co pilot or whoever, he says, could you just go through all the trading results for food last week, tell me what went well, what less well, which stores outperformed and why the margin was down.
Speaker B:Yeah, it all comes up.
Speaker B:And now there's danger in that because you've got to get into the detail too.
Speaker B:But it does mean everywhere you see people.
Speaker B:Now, before, I just came to be interviewed by Kate Hardcastle.
Speaker B:So on the taxi on the way, I'm saying, please give me some tips.
Speaker B:I'm being humorous about cheeky.
Speaker B:You're seeing that everywhere.
Speaker B:So this is going to change more than we think it is because the knowledge that senior leaders have about their organizations is going to dramatically change.
Speaker B:Now your ability to have teams of people preparing reports for you that's not going to be that important anymore.
Speaker B:No, you can do that.
Speaker B:And this is going to change the culture of companies.
Speaker B:So for instance, in theory I can tell what the mood was in M and S last week by asking Copilot to go through all the emails I don't actually have.
Speaker A:Right, right.
Speaker A:But you.
Speaker B:In theory, yeah, in theory I'd say go through all the emails, all the teams sent it M and S and tell me about the mood.
Speaker B:Was it happy, was it sad?
Speaker B:And bring up the 10 instances where anger was shown.
Speaker B:Right now I'm just saying that, for example, you don't do that, but you could do that.
Speaker B:So I think one of the things we don't understand is how this is going to create the transparent organization.
Speaker A:That's exactly what I was going to ask you.
Speaker A:I was going to ask you because that from a leadership perspective, what I'm taking from what you said is it's going to make the data exchange or the data sharing on say a Monday morning when you come into work much more objective and transparent, which goes and runs through the themes that we've actually already been talking about as well.
Speaker B:You get this thing that middle management never tells the truth, they manage the truth for you.
Speaker B:With AI, that's not going to happen.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:When you have the meeting, you already know the facts.
Speaker B:Now we're going to talk about what to do about it.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:So the cultural impact of this in business organizations and probably in government too.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:I don't know another subject.
Speaker A:Right, right.
Speaker A:Not my specialty.
Speaker B:It's really going to be dramatic.
Speaker B:The economic impact I'm not so sure about.
Speaker B:Now remember, AI is going to be a great leveler.
Speaker B:So there's really nothing.
Speaker B:I mean, everybody will say we're doing market leading things on AI, but in truth, if our competitors are, we can too.
Speaker B:We're all pursuing the same thing.
Speaker B:It's like online or anything else.
Speaker B:In the end it's accessible to everybody.
Speaker B:So I, I'm not convinced that there'll be huge winners and losers, obviously the big changes, but I think you have to be up with races.
Speaker B:You've got to be in it.
Speaker B:And your space of adoption is as much to do with your culture and your appetite for it and your confidence around it as it is with your firepower and technology.
Speaker A:Well, that's maybe the question I want to end on too, because I think the how you do this is also important.
Speaker A:And you look at the technology investment and how you structure the technology side of the organization.
Speaker A:And in doing my research, I found that you were very overt or have been in your time at M and S to say there was some vanity in the technology culture in terms of the belief that we need to build everything ourselves versus buy.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And AI, depending on how you look at it, could actually make that more likely, less likely.
Speaker A:How do you think about that?
Speaker A:What is your overall advice for everyone listening in terms of that conversation, particularly now given what you just said?
Speaker B:The point you're raising is you had, I think in the old ms, not being unkind to slight attitude as we're the great M and S. Yeah.
Speaker B:So we don't buy anything that anybody else buys.
Speaker B:Everything has to be custom for us.
Speaker B:We do things differently, we do it our way.
Speaker B:Result is you get highly tailored customized systems that are very hard to change, often don't work as they were intended to work.
Speaker B:And we have to have the humility to say no.
Speaker B:There's great technology companies around the world, we're not a technology company, but we need the best of their technology to power us.
Speaker B:And so.
Speaker B:But the other related to that, the point was, you know, in the spiritual, unvarnished troop.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:All companies like ours still have a lot of legacy.
Speaker B:So an old version of SAP.
Speaker B:And we all know upgrading SAP is like a life threatening experience.
Speaker A:It's like a root canal.
Speaker B:You have to do that.
Speaker B:So we've still got that.
Speaker B:Now if you just, if you build your company in the last five years, you don't have that problem.
Speaker B:We do have that problem.
Speaker B:We've got to spend a lot of money to do that.
Speaker B:And getting that base systems architecture and your data in a form that AI can use is critical to your success.
Speaker B:So people don't realize this because they think AI can read anything.
Speaker B:Most AI we're talking about is some form of large language model or quantitative version of them.
Speaker B:And so they have to read the language.
Speaker B:If the language is gobbledygook, they can't read it.
Speaker B:And so part of our thing critical for us because we want to be very personalized in our approach to customers is we've got 24 months to spend just cleaning, ordering, sorting data so the system can read it.
Speaker B:So there is some what my point is that underneath the foundations, the foundations for good AI is good data and good basis systems architecture and we got work to do.
Speaker A:Yeah, and that's a great, that's a great point to close on too because you can tell that retail industry is changing when you have the chairman of M and S long and storied career talking overtly about data and its importance in the future of retail.
Speaker A:So, Archie, thanks for your time today.
Speaker A:It was really great.
Speaker A:This was a graduate class for me in retail and how to think about things as an executive, so I appreciate it.
Speaker A:Thanks to Vuzion.
Speaker A:Thanks to the Retail Technology show for sponsoring our content here all week long.
Speaker A:And as always, on behalf of all of us here at Omnitok, be careful out there.