Summary
The view from the top of business. Presented by Evan Davis, The Bottom Line cuts through confusion, statistics and spin to present a clearer view of the business world, through discussion with people running leading and emerging companies.
If business is about anything, it's about products. Evan's guests come from companies that invent them, manufacture them and sell them and they each tell the story of a product that has shaped the fortunes of their business in some way.
They also discuss the art of dismissal. How easy should it be to fire an employee?
In the studio are Sir George Buckley, former Chief Executive of 3M, the US company behind the Post-it Note and Scotch Tape, and now Chairman of private equity firm Arle Capital; Clara Gaymard, Chief Executive of the French arm of US company General Electric; Ian Cheshire, Chief Executive of home improvement retailer Kingfisher, whose brands include B&Q and Screwfix.
Producer: Ben Crighton Editor: Innes Bowen.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this programme. |
| 0:02.2 | Stories of jet engines, power tools and sandpaper in this edition of the bottom line, |
| 0:07.2 | with Evan Davis and a trio of top executives. |
| 0:11.4 | Hello and welcome to the program. |
| 0:13.4 | Now, if business is about anything, it is surely about products. |
| 0:17.5 | And my guests today come from firms that invent them, manufacture them and sell them, |
| 0:21.4 | and they'll each tell us the story of a product that has shaped the fortunes of their company in some way. |
| 0:27.6 | And we'll also talk about firing people. |
| 0:30.0 | How easy should it be to dismiss an underperforming employee? |
| 0:34.3 | But before any of that, let's, as always, just take a few minutes to meet my three guests. And first up, returning to the programme is Ian Cheshire, Chief Executive of Kingfisher, the Home Improvement Retail Multinational, with goodness, I don't know how many stores in, is it 900 or so. Actually, about next week it's 1,000. When we open Lublin in Poland, that'll be our thousands of store. |
| 0:55.1 | You're going to have the bunting out. |
| 0:56.8 | We've got lots of bunting prepped up. |
| 0:58.7 | So the brands are, well, familiar here, B&Q, screw fix. |
| 1:04.1 | And Casarama and Bricotip in France. |
| 1:06.4 | And they're also represented in places like Poland, Russia and Turkey. |
| 1:10.9 | Global downturn, slump, call it whatever you will. |
| 1:14.3 | Not great, I would have thought, for your line of business. |
| 1:17.9 | Consumers generally across most of the, certainly Western European world, have basically pulled |
| 1:23.1 | their horns in, but we've seen the number one and number two, and most of our markets have |
| 1:26.7 | actually been able to gain share. But what is striking is the difference in places like Russia, |
| 1:31.2 | where we're seeing sort of 20% growth and places like Turkey. So it's not uniformly sort of awful |
| 1:36.6 | everywhere. And the emerging markets are now very different from Western Europe. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.