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Those who have shaped his thinking include Don Jacobs, Dean of the graduate school of business at Northwestern University in Chicago, where Sharman studied in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he worked closely with the famously blunt Sir Kenneth (now Lord) Keith, who chaired companies ranging from Rolls-Royce to British Airways. A third mentor was Sir Richard Giordano, the New York lawyer who scaled the heights at BOC and British Gas.

Among his peers, he singles out Sir Robert Wilson, chairman of BG, and Sir John Bond, chairman of HSBC, as businessmen for whom he has a great deal of respect.

Sharman says the hardest thing he ever had to do was push through mass redundancies at KPMG in the early 1990s, when he was responsible for operations in London and the South East. The firm got rid of 500 people in two tranches.

“KPMG had never, ever made anybody redundant,” he recollects. “In previous downturns they’d managed it somehow. But you make that decision as soon as you know you’ve got to do it. Don’t procrastinate. If you procrastinate, it only gets worse. If you get leaks, it just destabilises everybody.”

Sharman’s mistake was in telling staff that there would be no more redundancies. “I learnt to keep my mouth shut more often. The big mistake I made was, I said it was over. And of course, we got to the end of the next year and had to do another lot.”

Despite his somewhat ogre-ish reputation, Sharman inspired a lot of loyalty at KPMG. He had a great ability to persuade people to follow his lead. “He was a great, no-nonsense guy,” says a former employee. “He was always happy to tackle difficult issues head on and be very forthright in his views.”

Others recall that he could scream at you one day and make you forget it the next.

Sharman took an interest in staff at all levels. At the launch party for Roger White’s book on KPMG, he made a point of finding the two secretaries who had typed up the manuscript, and asked them to sign his copy. It is the sort of gesture that means a lot to people.

Sharman insists it was just luck that saw him leave accountancy in 1999, just before the Enron scandal broke. “My friends pull my leg unmercifully about my timing. The one question I’m always asked is, ‘Did you know this was going to happen to the accounting profession?’ And I say, ‘Of course’ . . .”

He considered it inevitable that one of the big accountancy firms would succumb to a devastating lawsuit. “I thought one of them would fold as a result of a claim in the States, but I didn’t think it would be Andersen.”

Effective leadership, he believes, involves sending a clear message from the top. “A lot of it comes down to communications. The first thing I did when I became chairman of KPMG was change our mission statement to something very simple. The original mission statement was one of those long things about ‘We’ll be the leading global accounting firm which will continuously exceed everybody’s expectations and . . .’.

“We changed it to: ‘KPMG exists to turn knowledge into value for the benefit of our clients, our people and society at large’. That was it. I could explain it to the guy who runs the mailroom in Beijing.”

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