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Sir Nicholas Young * Chief executive * British Red Cross
Sir Nicholas Young inherited a heavy load when he took the post of chief executive at the British Red Cross in 2001. The charity had just come through a difficult restructuring process after accumulating a deficit of L14 million, and Young's first task was to sort the resulting mess out.
"The organisation has been through a really bad time," says Young. "When I came back to the British Red Cross, the restructure had caused an enormous amount of upset and had left a lot of hurt feelings. Morale was really low and there were concerns whether centralisation was the right way to go."
Before the restructure, the British Red Cross was made up of 93 different county branches, each with its own board of trustees and individual working practices. As it grew in size and income, the structure became a bureaucratic and logistical nightmare, so the decision was taken to overhaul its entire operation completely and create a more modern, centralised way of working.
And it has worked. This year the British Red Cross expects to have cleared its huge deficit in less than three years. But, as Young explains, it has not been without significant hardship. "In order to get to this point, we had to make 400 redundancies and close shops. We also had to restructure management, and slim down 93 county branches to just four main regions to try to improve...