Two years is no time at all to be the boss of a large FTSE 100 company, but the departure of Debra Crew from Diageo, the Guinness and Johnnie Walker group, has felt possible for at least half that period. Now she has gone “by mutual agreement”.
Crew’s first problem was that she followed a genuine corporate superstar in the form of the late Sir Ivan Menezes, whose strategy of “premiumisation” – encouraging punters to drink more expensive stuff – did wonders for profit margins year after year. Any successor would have found it hard to match his record.
