Then, in October last year, he gave it all up and walked away from his job as chief executive of the European arm of the merged Asda-Wal-Mart group. He said he would never again be the chief executive of a major company. He had earned an estimated £80m from Wal-Mart's buyout of Asda, and anyone else would have been forgiven for wanting to take it easy and spend their money on hobbies (one of Mr Leighton's is morris dancing), with a couple of non-executive directorships thrown in.But Mr Leighton, married and with three children, announced he was "going plural", collecting a portfolio of directorships and chairman posts across various industries It is not a synonym for retirement. "The idea of Allan giving up work is like Napoleon giving up war," says a colleague.Six months on, Mr Leighton is chairman of Bhs and lastminute , the internet one-stop shop. He is also deputy chairman of housebuilder Wilson Connolly and a non-executive director of Consignia (the Post Office), BskyB, Leeds United FC, Scottish Power, Canadian baking giant George Weston and the Dyson vacuum cleaner company.He is also chairman of a charity, Race for Opportunity, and has launched a website, www.going-plural , where he gives free e-mailed business advice in a section entitled Ask Allan. The site also features general business thoughts and a large number of pictures of himself.Mr Leighton arrives for our 9am meeting at the lastminute head office in Victoria, London, exactly on the stroke of nine, appearing as from nowhere, shaking my hand and promptly sitting.
Tall with close-cropped hair, permanent light-brown stubble and a trademark knee-length leather coat, Mr Leighton speaks in machine-gun bursts with an unplaceable Estuary accent. ("I've always had the common touch," he says.)He is wearing a blue button-down shirt and blue patterned tie, which combined with his physical presence makes him look like a football pundit "I wanted to be a footballer when I was at school," he says. "But then when I was 15 I broke my leg in six places and that was that."Why did he decide to go plural? "One day, or in fact over a period of three, four, five months," Mr Leighton says. "You think, 'Hang on a minute, I've been doing this a long time'. I just felt at Asda it was time to let our team of executives run the business. I wanted to go and work for a load of companies." But what about rumours that he was dissatisfied with losing control of Asda after it was taken over by Wal-Mart? "That's not true at all," he says, a little too loudly, I think. "They [the Wal-Mart board] are my friends and they were devastated by me leaving.
They had gone out of the way not to change anything, to let me run all the bits. The great thing about them is that they realised they can learn as much from Asda as Asda can from Wal-Mart."Fine, but why take so many jobs (10, at the last count, not including his website)? Why not just, say, five? "I'm not doing it so I can have more non-executive directorships than anyone else in the world," he says, "I don't need to do it because I need the money, I need to do it for me." He works from 6.30am to 8.30pm five or six days a week, more than most of us who don't have the security of £80m cash in the bank.Still, why? "It's because I like it, I actually enjoy it," he says with a smile. "This sounds trite, but the richness in all this is in the learning I'm 47. Not to sound morbid but I always think of it like this: lying on my deathbed what am I going to say I've done?"I suggest "made tens of millions of pounds from turning around a large corporation, then spent 20 years drinking margaritas in the Bahamas" would sound fine to me.
