Tradition and training key to Swire Pacific's future profits

Four months into his new job at the helm of soft drinks to ship salvage conglomerate Swire Pacific, John Slosar is getting to grips with being a hands-off manager - and is arguably the busiest he has ever been.

As a career Swire manager who, over 34 years, has variously run the group's beverages business, worked in its shipping services operations, headed aviation engineering and was most recently chief executive of Cathay Pacific, each of his previous roles has required sharp focus on a single business area.

"In this job, no two days are the same," he tells the South China Morning Post in an interview at the group's Pacific Place headquarters.

A morning spent on board approval for a major property deal might easily be followed by an issue in the beverages business - Swire is one of the world's biggest bottlers of Coca-Cola with a global franchise of 450 million customers - or a multibillion-dollar plane deal at Cathay, or examining the investment needed to help extract oil and gas from some of the world's most hard to reach reserves.

"The nature of the beast is that you can't really focus on any one thing for too long because there is a whole bunch of things to focus on," Slosar says. "It's a transition."

But it is a transition that Swire managers are groomed for - and one that Slosar continually thinks about in terms of the generation of chiefs that will follow him.