The smile on Rick Haythornthwaite's face says it all. Last week, the chief executive of Blue Circle Industries, Britain's largest cement maker, was facing defeat at the hands of a seemingly unstoppable hostile cash takeover bid from Lafarge of France.

But investors judged the revised bid level of 450p sterling (771 cents) as too niggardly and rejected the £3.65 billion proposal by a clear margin.

Sitting in his sixth-floor office overlooking the roofs of Pimlico in central London, Mr Haythornthwaite now has a brief respite. There is no daily 8.15 a.m. meeting to co-ordinate the Blue Circle defence. But the need to work on meeting the ambitious forecasts made as part of the defence is pressing.

His success in beating off a cash bid in a market where cash was clearly king has propelled a little-known executive "totally unknown", he insists, into prominence.

Mr Haythornthwaite (43) had been with Blue Circle for only two and a half years and chief executive for just seven months when Lafarge launched its offer in February. Asia was proving a tougher market than expected and Blue Circle's share price had been hit by a profits warning last autumn.

He acknowledges that there was nothing in his previous business career to prepare him directly to fight the bid but 17 years at British Petroleum, the oil group, did provide a good grounding in making organisations work and getting people to deliver their best.

Convincing the City that the changes made at Blue Circle over the past year had made it a more viable company was one of the main reasons why shareholders opted to stay with the present management, he says.

"The school of BP was a good one given the changes that company under went in the early 1990s. It involved changing the behaviour of people rather than pushing assets around the board. It recognised that process is important but that it had to lead to hard results."

Setting tough publicly stated targets for improving profits and reducing costs helps motivate people, he says. It is a technique he learned from the triumvirate of senior directors at BP Sir John Browne, now chief executive, and his predecessors, David (now Lord) Simon and Sir Robert Horton who helped form his business view.

"They were good at publishing targets and then getting to them," he says. "But it is brutal and unfair to do that before you have equipped your organisation to do it."

It was while he was at BP that Mr Haythornthwaite was sent off on a one-year business course to the Sloan School at MIT.

One concern expressed by analysts during the bid was that he came over as a business school technocrat lacking in any passion for the company and his cause.

"I do take a rational view of business," he concedes. "But you don't motivate people on the ground by talking about strategy." Lord Tugendhat, Blue Circle chairman, agrees that Mr Haythornthwaite is not flamboyant "but in talking to executives he does have charisma and authority".

Mr Haythornthwaite was seconded as a consultant by BP for a few months in the early 1990s to the Tate Gallery, which was says Lord Stevenson, chairman of Pearson, which owns the Financial Times. Lord Stevenson was then chairman of the Tate trustees. "He combined all the right analysis with incredible interpersonal and political skills."

After BP, which he had joined as an exploration geologist, he went to Premier Oil, a small independent company, but left the oil industry for cement, an equally international business.

There was no promise of the chief executive's seat when he joined Blue Circle but Lord Tugendhat says "he was extremely well rounded. He had run things for BP; he had been to business school and worked abroad in Venezuela and France in different cultures".

His time in France proved useful in fighting off Lafarge. "I understood the politechnique mentality driving their organisation," he says. "French organisations have a cohesion and determination about where they want to go."

The defence of Blue Circle has required an equal determination.

Asked whether he ever thought he might lose the battle, he avoids a direct answer but says: "When Lafarge came up with their revised offer, that was a bitter-sweet day. The price gave us a chance of winning but the share purchase made me realise we were starting a couple of tries behind."

Weighing the alternatives of a possible break-up of Blue Circle or taking the company private was also difficult. "That challenged everything we believed in and also posed the danger of our becoming distracted from the defence campaign," he says. "In the end we came back to our original strategy."

The victory has raised Mr Haythornthwaite's profile in the City. "If you win against the odds people take you more seriously," says Lord Tugendhat. Mr Haythornthwaite sees it in terms of boosting the company, which reaches its centenary this year. "Blue Circle is a company with a superb history but people were taking it for granted," he says.