Many in the City, myself included, have been critical of Katherine Garrett-Cox for the way she fought Alliance Trust’s battle against its biggest shareholder Elliott.
Nevertheless, in this season of shock vote results, Garrett-Cox was last night declared Veuve Clicquot’s business woman of the year.
To her credit, she was winningly humble about her bruising defeat at the hands of the activist investors.
“I’ve been trying my level best to keep a low profile over the last few weeks, so I suppose I’ve fallen at the first hurdle tonight,” Garrett-Cox joked.
But she went on to declaim that her key strength was “resilience when things do not quite go to plan,” adding that she “had such a personal feeling for what I wanted to do” that she had to keep fighting.
It’s telling, that. Garrett-Cox, like many chief executive officers who have been in the job for a long time (seven years in her case), became blinkered by her vision for Alliance Trust.
It was a vision that was out of step with what the company’s shareholders — the people who were footing her large wage bill — wanted.
So strong a presence was she in the boardroom that a groupthink gathered around her.
Dissent was quashed, bad decision making the result. Hopefully, other boardrooms will learn this lesson.
It did not go without note among the Veuve Clicquot crowd at Claridge’s last night that the previous winner, the impressive Harriet Green, was out of her chief executive’s job at Thomas Cook six months later.
