WHILE business organisations have spent years complaining about Scotland's roads, Chris Parr is someone who claims to enjoy commuting. But then, the man who starts his day with a 40-minute drive from Edinburgh to Fife past thousands of cars queuing to go the other way is someone who enjoys going against the flow.

In an unlikely endorsement for the M9, Parr describes the trip as "therapeutic" and says it gives him time to get his head into gear for the challenges of the day, while on the way back he gets the chance to think ahead.

When he arrives at his desk, Parr's life becomes still more singular, because the 42-year-old chartered accountant is one of a dwindling band of Scottish executives who can claim to run a successful heavy manufacturing operation.

In Parr's case, the company is Tullis Russell, the employee-owned papermaker which sticks out like a sore thumb in an industry in which the count of Scottish failures has mounted with monotonous regularity in recent years.

Only last month, the 135-year-old Curtis Fine Papers called in administrators, who made 180 of the 260 workers at the St Andrews firm redundant.

Sitting in his spacious 70s-era room in the sprawling site at Markinch where Tullis produces 150,000 tonnes of paper annually, Parr recounts the grim statistics with a sombre note that is at odds with his otherwise relentlessly positive demeanour.

"We have lost 45% of the mills in the UK in the last eight years and 46% of the people employed. In Scotland, it is even worse, we have lost 75% of the mills."

While there were more than 20 mills north of the border in 2000, when the industry was hit by a game-changing combination of rising costs, unhelpful currency movements and falling demand, there are only five left.

The son of a man who spent 20 years working as a buyer in Inveresk Paper's Caldwell Mill, the empty shell of which dominates the rail approach to Inverkeithing station, Parr knows all too well the human cost of the industry's problems.

Given the decline of industries such as mining and linoleum manufacturing, the pain in Fife was acute.

But Tullis, which was founded in Markinch in 1809, is in rude health. The company recently announced that underlying operating profit increased from £500,000 to £1.4m in the year to March.

Parr is proud that with the 200th anniversary looming the company has only ever made a loss twice. The last trading deficit was a relatively piffling £94,000 incurred in the year to March 2001.

As Parr gets ready to celebrate a year in post next month, he appears genuinely anxious to ensure that his predecessor Fred Bowden gets the credit for the fact Tullis has weathered the storms so successfully.

He singles out Bowden's decision to switch to continuous working in 1994, minimising the time the huge costly machines were left idle, as a defining change.

"The culture shock that created was enormous. We went from working three-and-a-half shifts to working five, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 51-and-a-half weeks of the year, and by so doing over the last 14 years we have increased productivity fourfold," says the rugby fan, who has been fascinated by the question of leadership since he captained the first XV at Heriot's school.

Asked to explain Tullis's success, he says the company is set apart from many of its rivals by the fact that it has a very clear idea of what it should be doing and how it can differentiate itself.

Parr, who joined Tullis as chief accountant in 1994, speaks fluently about the failings that have been all too common in an industry which had been characterised for decades by a seemingly dependable cycle in which booms were followed by slowdowns which were followed by booms.

"People were thinking that because it had been cyclical it would always be," he said. "You had a lot of businesses that were, essentially, trying to do the same thing without a defined strategy.

"You looked at the peak of the market and pulp producers would commission more capacity, and by the time that capacity had been built they were back in a trough and there was over-capacity in the market. You know, it was really not a very impressive way to run a railway."

The unprecedented coincidence of factors that triggered the slump in 2000 effectively meant the rules of the game had changed. While the ripples are still spreading through the industry, many firms have still not adapted.

Parr, who has spent much of the last year ensuring the strategy is clearly articulated to all stakeholders, explains that Tullis has prospered by focusing on defined niches.

The Markinch plant produces board and coated papers which are targeted at users in businesses like premium packaging and greetings cards. The company's smaller plants in Cheshire and South Korea produce specialist papers used for things like stamps and transfers.

Having spent all his 14 years at Tullis helping the firm fight tough conditions, Parr is confident that the company is in good shape to take advantage of an improvement in conditions that he expects to occur.

Lots of capacity has come out of the UK industry, while Parr is pleased that Europeans are now having to deal with swingeing increases in the price of power from which they have been insulated for years by the peculiar workings of the continental energy market.

Against that background, he is preparing to draw on the entrepreneurial qualities which he developed in four years working for David Murray's metals-to-Rangers Football Club empire and is ready to sanction bold moves.

While many rivals hang on for dear life in the face of the current slowdown, Parr says Tullis is planning to hit the acquisition trail. Through the purchase of a series of relatively small specialist paper businesses, at around £5m a time, Parr hopes to make that trade a much bigger part of Tullis's business. As specialist papermaking uses smaller machines than coated paper production, it is much less capital intensive.

Having adopted what he laughingly describes as a "Presbyterian" attitude to borrowing, Tullis is debt free, meaning the constraints imposed by the credit crunch are not a concern.

Meanwhile, Parr insists that having been slimmed down to focus on sustainable niches, the papermaking operations in Markinch, where 550 of the firm's 750 employees work, has a long, prosperous future ahead.

He is also adamant that the firm will remain an employee-owned business, explaining that common ownership helps to ensure continuity and helps Tullis to win genuine commitment to things like efficiency drives. Where employees do not have such a direct interest in a firm's success, Parr reckons the passionate aversion to waste he preaches might be met with a lukewarm response at best.

"But we have always made it very clear that employee ownership will not be a softies' charter and it won't be something that stops us from making hard decisions," he added.

In Parr's time at Tullis, the Markinch headcount has been reduced by around 200, with generous redundancy packages to soften the blow.

Parr admits he only left the employ of David Murray, whose drive and vision he greatly admires, when the appointment of near contemporary Donald Wilson to be finance director of Murray International put a road block in his career path. Nevertheless he insists that he feels absolutely no envy for those who work in industries like finance, where the rewards can be colossal.

Disdaining what he terms the "wealth of avarice", the father of two says he is much more concerned to feel he is making a difference at somewhere worthwhile.

Proof that he is doing just that came as Tullis recently clinched a deal under which a £100m biomass heat and power plant will be built on its Markinch site by giant utility RWE npower. The plant's output will be split between Tullis and the national grid. It will allow the firm to avoid the vagaries of the power market while reducing its carbon emissions by 250,000 tonnes, lowering its annual carbon footprint by 70%. This matters to a firm that partly tries to differentiate itself from rivals by emphasising its ability to source pulp from sustainable sources and to supply recycled grades.

Whatever sceptics might say, Parr says being seen to be green matters hugely. In a recent poll, activists and executives of Greenpeace and WWF were named among the 50 most influential figures in the pulp, paper and forest products industries.

For his own part, Parr hopes to be able to continue honing his teamwork skills at Tullis for many years.

"It's back to this thing where there are 15 individuals there in a team who on paper are inferior to the opposition but they go out there and beat them. How does that happen?

"It's the ability for people to play together genuinely as a team and for the whole to be much greater than the sum of the parts."