A £1m boss who thinks his staff are overpaid

The matter of how much money he pocketed was always going to be tricky. City dealers may get £1 million bonuses, but they don't have to earn the respect of tens of thousands of workers.

Crozier does, and lost it when the Post Office gave him a £300,000 bonus on top of his £700,000 salary.

It wasn't just class warriors from the unions who were infuriated. Alan Duncan, the Conservative industry spokesman, said that "people should be rewarded for their competence and the risks they take. These payments seem crazily out of kilter".

Not half as crazy as what Crozier did next. While drawing £1 million, he then told postmen and women on basic pay of £320 a week that they should accept a 2.5 per cent rise. He then announced that Post Office workers were "25 per cent overpaid and 40 per cent underworked when compared with workers in competitor companies".

As soon as he said it, a strike became inevitable. To declare that you deserve a £300,000 bonus as an incentive to make you work harder, while your employees on 50 times less deserve pay cuts as an incentive to make them work harder, would infuriate the most passive workforce - and no one has ever accused posties of being passive.

All right, you might say as you fume about the effects of the dispute on your business or private life, but aren't they destroying their own company? Maybe they are. The Post Office, like the BBC or the cricketing calendar, was an essential British institution in the 20th century but is struggling in the 21st.

People don't write letters, they send emails - to such an extent that authors wonder how they will write biographies when thoughts that were once preserved on paper have been lost in cyberspace.

True, parcel delivery is booming, but the Post Office no longer has a monopoly, and the strike will drive more customers to its rivals.

It seems a self-defeating exercise until you look for Crozier's strategy to revive his company and find there isn't one. His tactic is merely to cut costs faster than he loses market share. So he cancels the second morning delivery, stops the emptying of post boxes on Sunday and leaves much of Britain waiting for its mail until the afternoon.

All he appears able to do is manage decline. Whether they earn too much or too little, managers who can only do that have no place in management.