Hans Snook is almost too easy a target for lampooning. There he sits in his feng shui'd office with moustache, receding rockabilly hairdo and black Nehru shirt with an Orange motif in the middle that makes him look faintly like a vicar, joking about his fondness for colonic irrigation.
I am sure it must be here somewhere. Either a mug or a sticker on his computer bearing the old saw: "You don't have to be mad to work here ..." - and without the slightest hint of irony.
Snook's studied eccentricity is stamped on the image of the mobile telephone company which he has run since it launched in 1994. He literally wears his offbeat personality on his sleeve - those funky Orange cufflinks - his office has a large fishtank and some aria or other is blasting out when I arrive.
Snook, though, clearly has his talents, not least one for survival. In the past few weeks he and his senior management team, led by Orange's deputy chief executive and finance director Graham Howe, have managed to emerge from three changes in ownership at the helm of a larger, stronger, independent company.
Serendipity's part
The revival of fortunes has been an astonishing turnaround. Just eight months ago Orange was bought for some £20bn by the German telecommunications and engineering company, Mannesmann, and Snook's hangdog expression at the presentation of the deal was enough to say he was none too happy.
Snook the showman did not like play ing second fiddle to the rather dull Mannesmann chief executive, Klaus Esser.
Snook, 52, says that serendipity has always played a large part in his life - and it was certainly good fortune that his larger British competitor Vodafone then bid for Mannesmann and won what had become an ugly takeover battle.
Regulators demanded the subsequent divestment of Orange, and along came France Telecom with an offer of £26bn - certainly one that was too good to refuse.
If all goes according to plan, France Telecom's mobile businesses will be bundled in with Orange, and the combined operation will be refloated on the London, Paris and New York stock markets with Snook and his management team in the driving seat.
The combined business will have around 20m subscribers, with 6m in Britain, 10m in France and the remainder in start-ups or joint ventures throughout Europe, Hong Kong and Israel.
Snook concedes that if Vodafone had not intervened he would no longer be at Mannesmann. Cynically, he could afford not to be - that tendency to rely on good fortune paid off doubly in the Mannesmann acquisition, which converted to hard cash some £45m worth of share options and long term incentives that Snook had in place.
When Orange is floated once again - and a likely date for that is early next year - Snook and Howe will no doubt be awarded a fresh tranche of options which will swell their bank accounts further.
"With France Telecom we had a brief courtship; we're now engaged and we are going to be married," Snook says in his mid-Atlantic accent.
"With Mannesmann it was more of a shotgun wedding. It was very unlikley that we could have stayed part of Mannesmann."
It was clear in the rapidly consolidating telecommunications market as long as a year ago that something had to happen to Orange. Its weaker British competitor, One2One, had just been snapped up by Deutsche Telekom and Orange had the choice of either making an acquisition or becoming the target of a predator itself.
Snook recalls: "At the time we were very close to buying E-Plus [the German mobile telephone company], so our board was ready for growth.
"They understood Germany and even Hutchison [Orange's then largest shareholder] was ready to dilute. Mannesmann then came in to talk to us. If we had done E-Plus it would have put a bit of a stretch on our financial resources. It would have been the right thing to do, and our shares would have rocketed.
"But look at the conditions of the Mannesmann offer: they were offering cash and shares. It was a good price and our shareholders wouldn't have had to worry about increased debt. Mannesmann had promised something similar to what France Telecom have indicated, but Klaus was not able to deliver those elements simply because the management structure in Germany didn't allow it."
It also quickly became apparent that Snook and Esser were singing from different song sheets. "We would actually give different answers on the platform - even though we had an agreed position; with Michel Bon, who runs France Telecom, we have an agreed position and we tell the same story." Esser, he adds, misjudged just how much Vodafone needed to do a deal with Mannesmann in order to retain its own independence.
With typical self-assurance, he suggests that the Germans underplayed the Orange card during the hostile bid process.
Likely contender
Snook was clear that he would not be lured into another deal unless it was on his own terms. Advisers to the company made it plain during the negotiations with France Telecom that, unless their demands were met, he and his management team would quit. Orange had wanted a demerger from Vodafone rather than being put up for sale.
"My concern was that Chris Gent [Vodafone's chief executive] would have liked to have sold Orange to a weaker competitor, and sucked a lot of cash out of that competitor and made it even weaker.
"Hopefully it would also be to a competitor that we didn't like, so a lot of senior management would leave. It would have been a triple win for Vodafone and I said that can't be allowed to happen, and if that does happen we are going to walk.
"We wanted a company that was public again. We knew we would have to move very, very fast and use the currency of our shares to either acquire companies after that, merge with companies or find a strategic investor - all we've done is reverse that position and got France Telecom in as a strategic shareholder up front, and when we float now we will be a much larger company."
Howe adds that the company could possibly do its next deal ahead of flotation. Finnish mobile telephone company Sonera, KPN of Holland, and Bell South and MCI Worldcom from the US are mentioned as candidates.
"Because of our circumstances we know all these companies extremely well now, and if there is something possible we remain the more likely contender. We know who our management team would fit with and who our vision is aligned with. This won't be the end of the road."
They shrug off any suggestions of possible culture clashes with France Telecom, which after all is still half owned by the French government. Its mobile business, which trades as Itineris, was- Snook says - born in competition and shares all the same entrepreneurial, youthful characteristics as Orange.
Snook is often dubbed a visionary and his enthusiasm for the future development of mobile phone technology is admittedly infectious. One of his favourite fancies is an ear stud or lapel badge that will not only be a communications device but help to organise the wearer's life, reminding them of appointments and so on.
Snook waxes lyrical about a hologram on his desk and says the company is investigating ways of using the technology which comes from a New York-based firm. Why not, for instance, have holographic projections of the management team at roadshows instead of the real thing? Unsurprisingly he cannot leave his phone alone and in between chomping on a toothpick he repeatedly checks his handset for incoming text messages.
Snook refutes the suggestion that Orange follows the cult of his personality. Howe, dressed in a white version of Snook's eyebrow-raising corporate shirt, could have been deliberately trotted out to present the team and underline that this is not a one-man show. "Hans's eccentricities are his alone," Howe adds. "We are not all into colonic irrigation."
Corporate cult
However, the intense admiration for Snook among colleagues and advisers means that many of his traits are repeated, without much charm, among others in the company.
His favoured phrases - one is "wirefree future" - are used with depressing regularity. Press conferences are arranged on cramped double-decker buses painted orange (what a jape!) because the company likes to do things differently. Staff at Orange do not call you on their mobile phones, they call you on their "Orange", but do not appreciate jibes suggesting they verge on the Moonie-like.
Snook's unconventional beginnings are well documented. Born in Germany to an English father and German mother, he grew up in Canada. At 35, he was backpacking in Asia with his Chinese wife when he took a job in a paging business in Hong Kong to raise funds for further travelling. He was convinced to stay, and that company was eventually bought by Hutchison Whampoa - which moved him to Britain for the launch of Orange.
Howe, 39, was a fellow founding director and previously worked at Hutchison Telecom, First Pacific and Touche Ross management consultancy. The two appear genuinely fond of each other.
Certainly their achievements in launching and stewarding Orange are not in question - although suggestions that Snook came up with the name are wide of the mark.
The company launched as the first recognisable consumer brand in mobile telephones, and with an iconic advertising campaign. It also challenged the way in which users were charged, introducing per-second billing. In recent months it has regularly topped the rankings for signing new customers.
Snook's mantra is customer service - which, he will tell you at length, is the key to winning and, equally important, retaining customers.
Endearingly, however, his evangelism slips at least once as he recounts the launch of Orange. "We needed a brand with new values from Vodafone and Cellnet," before drifting off with a wince and noting, "God, I'm starting to sound like Tony Blair."
