Donald Gresham Stokes
Page 59
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On Monday, 1)onald Stokes—managing director of Leyland Motors Ltd. and sales director of the Leyland Motor Corporation Ltd.—was named as recipient of the Marketing Board Award for 1963, a new annual award by the Institute of Marketing and Sales Management. Yesterday came the news that he is to be chairman and managing director of the Leyland Motor Corporation (which includes Leyland Motors, Standard-Triumph International, Associated Commercial Vehicles, Albion Motors and Scammell Lorries).
This latest Di-motion comes only just over a year after his appointment to the managing directorship of Leyland Motors Ltd., a mark of the regard paid to his abilities. "The Commercial Motor" arranged this exclusive interview to provide an up-to-theminute personal assessment of the man who will be in day-to-day control of Britain's largest commercial vehicle manufacturing group.
66 EYLAND MOTORS GROUP has secured a repeat order from Finland for 260 automotive diesel engines
and 200 gearboxes worth more than £200.000 . . . an 05,000 batch of orders for tractors, concrete mixer chassis and semi-trailers has come from Northern Ireland. The Indian organii_ation of the Group, Ashok Leyland, is to supply 225 buses worth £500,000 to the Gujerat State Road Transport Corporation."
That was an extract taken at random frorn.a recent issue of the Financial Times. The paragraph, for it was no more, was not sensationally headlined. It was not even at the head of a column. It was not, in a word, an unusual story. For Leyland Motors Ltd„ with factories at Leyland, Lancashire, covering 340 acres, and many affiliated organizations overseas. is the largest exporter of heavy commercial vehicles in the world, and that collection of factories at Leyland is among the most comprehensive of its kind in the world.
One of Donald Gresham Stokes' functions is to make sure that expansion of Leyland's exports and those of its associate companies does not pause. But that sentence throws insufficient light on this middle-aged man whose restless energy, imagination and, I think it must be said, opportunism, have been the means of .selling heavy vehicles in most countries of the world. He is no stonewaller. I4e is in there to make runs. and fast. He does not think of his job as merely keeping the brakes off (to change the metaphor) but as putting his foot down hard on the accelerator, with regard to safety.
Donald Stokes is a true Leyland man. Even before he left Blundell's school he had formed an ambition to enter the company's service. This he succeeded in doing, as a trainee, in the 1930s, and in due course achieved high skill in this specialized field of engineering. .
No doubt he still knows what goes on under the bonnet of a heavy vehicle. He certainly knows what various types of heavy vehicle can do. Experience all over the world has taught him, in fact, that nobody can be a successful commercial vehicle salesman—or sales director, by the same token—who lacks a firm foundation in engineering.
That he takes as axiomatic. But he has not achieved such a high rung of the ladder merely by being a good engineer.
What other qualifications has he? The short answer is: just that little extra the others haven't got. Brain—that, of course, is a sine qua non. But he has a quick brain, He assimilates rapidly, seizes the "inwardness" of a proposition just as soon as it is made and is capable of drawing accurate inferences and dynamic conclusions without dithering.
Dynamic—that's the word. Get on with it—or get out. Ruthless, then? He does not deny it. "Of course one must be ruthless," he told me. "You have to sink personal preferences and sentiments, subliminate them, so that they do not gtit in the way of the company's progress."
I have used the word opportunism. It has unpleasant connotations, but not in the sense in which 1 use it to describe the Stokes outlook. He is pragmatic, a seeker of sales opportunity. Get in when you can and how you can—that principle,
1 am sure, informs his sales policy. It has certainly paid off in his exporting career. Though he sets little store, for instance, by the kind of wining and dining said (with little objectivity) to be the normal activity of top tycoons, he will engage in it wholeheartedly if it shows promise of orders. The art of making friends and influencing people he sees as indispensable. In a highly competitive world, when there is often a very narrow margin, or perhaps no margin at all, to influence the choice of this vehicle or that, it is probably the best-liked man who gets the order.
"Never underrate the team," he said with emphasis. "In Leyland the very closest co-operation between departments is a basic principle. Here no man, no department, is an island. I have to rely upon them all—the statistical and economic experts who study trends, designers, of course, our researchers, the production departments and, not least, the ever wakeful sales organization. But given all that, nothing can take the place of world travel and close knowledge of personalities. All the same, when I travel, and I do so to all our actual and potential world markets continually, I do so with the confidence that I am really part of a team of which every member is fulfilling an essential function," During the war Stokes returned to Britain to deal with technical difficulties which had arisen in connection with fighting vehicles. He took an opportunity of looking in on his old firm whose leaders were already thinking about post-war prospects. He let them know that exporting interested him most of all. So when he put off his uniform for the last time Leyland's gave him his chance. His brief was wide. It was that he should examine export potentialities from every conceivable angle. It looked as though responsibility for the company's future, which very evidently depended upon exports, was his.
The result we know. Today no less than 65 per cent of the company's commercial vehicles are exported. Stokes reports success on all fronts: South Africa, India, the Caribbean (including Cuba), South America and elsewhere.
Even the United States is being successfully reconnoitred. The company is at present testing the market around New York and some 200 vehicles per annum are being sold in America.
Nowadays, export often means much more than what may be termed "straight" selling from one country to .another, Leyland has set up a number of manufacturing companies overseas. This, too. may be regarded as an export channel.
But, as Donald Stokes pointed out to me, though limits to home production and overseas sales can hardly be set, expansion of overseas manufacture is a different problem. It is not so much a matter of capital. Leyland can no doubt find all it needs. Rather, such companies must inevitably be limited by available know-how. To set up large manufacturing units means men. and there are not always enough men overseas to meet the necessities.
As to top men at home—if Donald Stokes is a criterion of the company's quality, then the future is bright indeed. H.C.