In Laura Wade-Gery, Tesco has lost a rare thing for the company – a high-flying woman

SHE HAS followed in the footsteps of Marco Polo in his famous 13th-century journey across Asia to the court of Kubla Khan in Xanadu, and she once single-handedly routed a rabble in Delhi during the violent aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

Now the formidable Laura Wade-Gery is giving up a chance of the top job at Britain’s biggest retailer in favour of a new challenge at Marks Spencer.

Wade-Gery’s exploits, documented by her travel writer friend William Dalrymple in his best-selling book In Xanadu, happened when she was in her 20s, before she embarked on a glittering corporate career, first at Gemini Consulting, followed by the investment bank Kleinwort Benson and, in 1997, Tesco.

Now aged 45, she is jumping ship to MS, where she will take on the task of revitalising the retailer’s woefully outdated online operations.

Landing Wade-Gery is a real coup for new MS boss Marc Bolland, who took over from Sir Stuart Rose last summer. She had only recently been promoted to head Tesco’s substantial non-food operations in the UK, after running the supermarket group’s successful online business for the past seven years. She had been due to take up her new role at Tesco in March.

Widely regarded as a future chief executive at the supermarket group, Wade-Gery’s online experience will be invaluable to Bolland. Analysts welcomed her appointment as a sign of the MS chief’s determination to tackle one of the group’s weakest areas. MS shares jumped 13.5p to 373.3p as the market signalled its approval.

At Tesco, Wade-Gery presided over online growth last year of 16 per cent, taking sales of the internet operation to £1.2 billion (€1.4 billion). Tesco’s online operations are seen as the model for retail rivals – it was the first to break into profit and its online sales now account for around 10 per cent of its total UK sales.

At MS, online sales languish at less than 5 per cent, although Bolland has pledged to at least double online revenues from £400 million last year to between £800 million and £1 billion by 2014.

Growth has been held back by MS’s failure to develop its own website – in 2005, preferring to concentrate on its struggling core stores chain, the group struck a deal with Amazon under which the online specialist would provide the technology behind the retailer’s website, in-store ordering and telephone sales.

While this freed the then management team to focus on the stores, it has left MS with a system that is inflexible and slow- moving. The deal with Amazon ends in 2013, however, after which MS will be able to roll out its own tailor-made system.

Wade-Gery will be making that slow-moving website move a whole lot faster when she arrives. When asked in an interview a few years ago why she decided to switch from being an external consultant to Tesco to joining the group full time, she made it clear that it was fast action she admired.

Having suggested something on a Friday afternoon, she returned on Monday morning to find that it had been done. “I want to be part of this, thank you,” she said.

The importance of getting the online operation right is underlined by the fact that the new recruit from Tesco will sit on the MS main board, in the newly created role of executive director of multi-channel and e-commerce. No details have been given of Wade-Gery’s salary, nor has a start date yet been agreed.

Tesco may prove somewhat reluctant to let her go early – it is the second time in a fortnight that it has suffered from retail poachers, with its head of personnel, Hayley Tatum, lured away by Asda just last month.

The loss of Wade-Gery is a blow to Tesco’s new chief executive, Phil Clarke. Her departure fuelled fears among some analysts that cracks may be starting to appear in the UK operations of Britain’s biggest retailer. Tesco has been underperforming its food retail rivals, recently reporting its worst Christmas trading since the early 1990s.

However it’s not simply because Wade-Gery is so highly regarded that her loss will be felt. With companies coming under increasing pressure to promote women in the boardroom, few companies can afford to see talented female executives defect as they reach the peak of their careers.

Tesco, with just one woman executive director on its main board, corporate and legal affairs director Lucy Neville-Rolfe, does not have a particularly good track record in this respect. What a shame for Tesco that Clarke didn’t offer Wade-Gery promotion to the main board. It might have made all the difference.

Fiona Walsh writes for the Guardian newspaper in London