Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones, chairman and former chief executive of L’Oréal, says the business of selling cosmetics is all about intuition. But in an FT interview today, he makes it clear that climbing the management ladder at the French company was also an intuitive task.

Before getting his own chance to run the company, Sir Lindsay had to answer to François Dalle, whom he describes as having been an autocratic yet brilliant boss. He says Mr Dalle was not the clearest internal communicator either.

“He spoke in riddles so he was a very difficult man to interpret. I think one of the reasons I got responsibility so young was that I could interpret the things he said, which often were the opposite of what he actually said literally.”

Also in today’s paper: the FT’s resident manufacturing guru, Peter Marsh, profiles a British toymaker that has stopped producing plastic parts in China and now gets them made in the UK. Although it costs more, Bedlam Puzzles says manufacturing locally creates fewer supply headaches.