So, farewell then Helge Hansen, KBA president and chief executive, and turnaround expert.

The youthful looking Helge is actually coming up to 65 and reckons it's time to put his feet up. He leaves at the end of next month. Shall miss him, he was a breath of fresh air and seemed to be exactly the right sort of leader to steer KBA through the recently-experienced time of crisis, when press orders fell off a cliff. The latest report from the group show things moving in the right direction - it even opened a new foundry earlier this month. Hansen was decisive and forward-looking, with a nice line in positivity. At Ipex last year he supplied me with a favourite quote of the glass-half-full variety, thus: "The printing industry has excellent long-term prospects. The market may be 25% smaller but it's still big enough for press manufacturers and our customers to make good profits." All hail that.

I'm sure his successor Claus Bolza-Sch?nemann, whose appointment marks a return to KBA's family business roots, will have learned a lot during Hansen's tenure.

Meanwhile, over at HP we have an unfortunate example of a very big business picking what turned out to be exactly the wrong sort of leader. From an outsider's perspective, L?o Apotheker never seemed quite right for the job (that said, I can think of a few notable others for whom the same applies, yet are still in post), but it turned out that plenty of influential people, ie HP's board and shareholders, quickly felt the same way. At least the HP board has acted decisively to try and right this recruitment wrong. Now it will be fascinating to see what Meg Whitman does next.