LORD SHARMAN is talking about the events of a decade ago, when he succeeded Jim Butler as senior partner of KPMG, the accountancy firm.

He took no prisoners. “The one thing about major partnerships is that if the guys think they can get away without doing anything, they will,” Sharman says. “Whereas with Butler they could run and hide, because he’d never go and face them down, they knew with me I’d come looking.”

He says it with a particularly scary grin. For a chilling moment I share the terror of the KPMG partner as he sees Sharman bearing down on him. You can run, but you can’t hide.

Warming to his theme, Sharman adds: “People always used to say to me, I would have liked to have been able to do what Napoleon did, which was to shoot one of his marshals after a victory to encourage the others.”

He makes Jack Welch, legendary former chief executive officer of General Electric, sound like a wimp.

Sharman’s elevation to the top job triggered an outbreak of fear and loathing at KPMG. Roger White, author of a newly published history of the firm, recalls an occasion when Sharman fired off a furious handwritten letter of complaint in response to an article in the press. A KPMG partner, on hearing of the incident, exclaimed: “A letter? I didn’t know he could write!” But Sharman is no cardboard cut-out: accountancy’s answer to Hannibal Lecter. A jovial, intelligent man with a rugby player’s build, he brought a new vitality to a firm that needed a kick up the backside. As he says: “That bloody place changed dramatically while I was there, and it had to.”

Since leaving KPMG nearly five years ago, Sharman, 61, has reinvented himself on the boardroom circuit. He is chairman of Aegis and Securicor, a non-executive director of BG and Reed Elsevier, and sits on the supervisory board of ABN Amro. He represents the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords on trade and industry matters.

Past directorships include AEA Technology and Young’s Brewery. He is chairman of La Gavroche, owned by his old friends, the Roux brothers.

Sharman featured in The Times Power 100, which ranked directors of FTSE 100 companies on the strength of their boardroom connections. Executives were awarded points according to the type of directorship and the market capitalisation of the company in question.

Those at a similar level include Kenneth Clarke, deputy chairman of British American Tobacco, and Chip Goodyear, chief executive of BHP Billiton.

Sharman hails from a long line of soldiers and says he has learnt much about management from reading books on military history. He cites Machiavelli’s The Prince and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War as instructive reads. “I’m more interested in looking at case studies,” he says. “I like the ability to interpret myself. I’m very interested in finding out what actually happened in a business situation as opposed to theory.”

Despite working closely with companies for 30 years as an accountant, he found the move from professional services to boardroom unexpectedly difficult.

“Until you actually participate and sit there as part of a board, I don’t think you really begin to understand what it’s all about. What did really equip me well for the board is the ability to analyse. Most of my professional career was spent analysing things and advising people, saying ‘this is what I think you ought to do’.”

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