For a man who has never smoked, barely drinks, and describes himself as “boring”, the new chief executive of Seven West Media, Jeff Howard, clearly likes a bit of drama.

A numbers man, and Seven’s former CFO, Howard has held the scythe as it swung through the upper management of the steadily declining broadcaster. It takes guts to sack your colleagues – chief sales officer (Kurt Burnette), chief marketing officer (Melissa Hopkins), sport sales chief (Lewis Martin) – and green-light both a company-wide restructure and wholesale regime replacement in the newsroom under Stokes whisperer Anthony De Ceglie.