Few at Unilever can have expected this bombshell when Michael Treschow, the mild-mannered Swedish chairman, took over in the boardroom last year. It's not just that he has appointed an outsider as chief executive, over the heads of a clutch of very plausible internal candidates. He has brought in an outsider from that unmentionable company, Nestlé and, worse still, the boss-designate spent all of his early career at an even more dreaded competitor, Procter & Gamble (P&G). From an internal Unilever perspective, reading Paul Polman's curriculum vitae must be like an MI6 officer reading a dossier on a KGB agent, who might be tempted to cross over.

Indeed, Mr Polman's CV is like a list of Unilever front-line positions in the company's never-ending battle for market share and sales supremacy. He ran fabric care for Proctor & Gamble from 1998 to 2001and then headed the European businesses until 2006, when he switched horses to take on the top finance job at Nestlé. His arrival will no doubt result in a few jokes about a Proctoid invasion amid a lot of internal nervousness. This guy knows Unilever's strengths but he also knows its weaknesses.

Of course, that is precisely why the new chairman chose the outsider, who is, conveniently, Dutch. In a recent interview with The Times, Mr Treschow made clear that he believed Unilever had great marketing, great brands and great salesmanship. What it needed, he said, was consistent delivery. That has been where Unilever's rivals have given the Anglo-Dutch company a knock and a bruise. After more than a decade with P&G, Mr Polman will have deeply ingrained within him the virtues of consistent delivery. If he can bring some of that discipline to bear without sacrificing Unilever's great strengths — its imagination and cultural diversity — the share price, up more than 6 cent this morning, will carry on soaring.

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