The scale of the job awaiting Bolland means that if he pulls it off people will quickly stop worrying about what he’s being paid

This week has been all about two men with big jobs ahead of them. One’s just left Bradford, the other’s about to arrive.

Retail Week’s revelation last Wednesday that Dalton Philips was going to be the new chief executive of Morrisons surprised most people, but while he wasn’t on anyone’s lists of possible successors, including ours, he should have been. We’d increasingly been hearing his name as a star that was in the ascendant, and his mentor in Canada Allan Leighton keeps very close to Morrisons.

Everything we hear about him suggests he’s a good hire, and will bring the dynamism of an Andy Bond or a Justin King to Morrisons. His experience in operational transformation from Loblaw should be invaluable as Morrisons grapples with bringing its systems into the modern era, and he should work well with Morrisons’ existing strong management team.

One of the big attractions of the job will have been the potential there is still to go for at Morrisons. It doesn’t do online, it doesn’t do non-food in any significant way, it doesn’t do convenience and it only operates in the UK.

Marc Bolland’s view was the retailer didn’t need to do any of these things yet because the biggest opportunity was in rolling out stores to the many areas of the country where its core, store-based offer remained unrepresented.

That is still the case but the progress Morrisons is making on the property front means Philips will have to start looking at extending the brand along one or two of these avenues before long. The key will be doing it in a measured way that remains true to the brand’s unique heritage and positioning.

And what about Bolland? There’s unsurprisingly been outrage at the enormous package he’s been granted by Marks & Spencer, although in fairness once he’d been appointed the company had no option but to compensate him for the share options he was losing from Morrisons.

Morrisons might be a bigger company in terms of market cap, but the scale of the job awaiting Bolland means that if he pulls it off people will quickly stop worrying about what he’s being paid. Sir Stuart Rose and his team have done a good job with the business overall, but the new chief executive faces the fundamental issue that if M&S didn’t exist today, there’s no way you’d invent it.

Like Philips for Morrisons, Bolland is a good hire for M&S. But coming up with and executing a vision of the M&S of the future is on a different scale altogether to the task he was faced with at Morrisons.