Dixons Carphone: Always think twice before playing the blame game, says Simon English

Was Seb James a hopeless chief executive?

Reading the remarks of successor Alex Baldock in his statement to the stock market on Tuesday, you’d think he surely must have been.

Dixons Carphone is a shambles, Baldock says, more or less. The company James ran before suddenly jumping ship to Boots in January is “nowhere near” making the most of its strengths.

Baldock, eight weeks in, has had to clear away “unnecessary layers and silos” before he can get anything done around the place.

Dixons needs some “long-term direction” and has suffered from under-investment. He needs to bring “conviction and discipline” to the company, something it plainly lacked.

Baldock, “won’t tolerate” the present situation.

Chief executives can do this sort of thing once, I guess, after that the issues they have identified are their problem.

One of the many failings with City short-termism is that the candidate for the top job who says “your business is in deep trouble, hasn’t got much going for it, will take £5 billion and 10 years to save” doesn’t get appointed.

So we get over-confident chief executives who insist they have a brilliant plan for a quick-ish turnaround and trash their predecessor as an opening gimmick.

Maybe Baldock is a retail genius. It seems more likely that Dixons is shot, that no executive can unshoot it, and that in two years time another chap will be explaining what a fool Baldock was.

The words of Warren Buffett come to mind: “When management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”