The week before Sir Crispin Davis became chief executive of Reed Elsevier, Fortune magazine asked: “Is this the first company to be destroyed by the internet?” The next day, when he met one of the biggest customers of its academic journals, he was greeted with the words: “We do not like you.”

It was an unpromising, if unsurprising, start. By 1999, when the marketing executive arrived to fill Reed’s year-long leadership vacuum, its shareholders were seething after three profit warnings, its customers felt ill-treated and its Anglo-Dutch dual board had become notorious for infighting. “You can’t help feeling sorry for Crispin Davis,” the Daily Mirror concluded.