Bird on a Wire by Theresa Gattung

Author:Theresa Gattung [Theresa Gattung]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869792947
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2010-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Things were definitely changing for me personally at this stage. Simon Moutter and his family had come to stay with me for an enjoyable few days at Waihi Beach over the 2005–2006 New Year period. One day we were walking along the beach talking about what we needed to do in terms of reorganising the company to meet the challenges ahead of us, and for the first time I realised that I didn’t have my previous enthusiasm. At the time I became CEO and again a couple of years later, I had publicly said that I saw my timeframe in the role as five to seven years, and I was now coming up to my seventh year. The issues were becoming repetitive and felt unsolvable — how to increase profits when margins were already high, how to satisfy customers who wanted faster broadband at lower prices when the economics of deploying it were so poor, and how to extract value from the Australian business.

At a regular board meeting early in 2006 we discussed succession planning. I informed the board that I saw myself in the CEO role for only another one to two years at the most. There’s no doubt that at that time the view was that my most likely successor would be an internal one — either Marko or Simon.

Meanwhile the rhythm of my weeks in both New Zealand and Australia continued. Some time after Fairfax bought Trade Me in March 2006, Chris Anderson, formerly CEO of Optus but then at Australian media company PBL, called me to ask if I’d come and meet him and James Packer, PBL’s chairman. Marko and I went to their digs at Park Street, Sydney, to be met by James, Chris and John Alexander — the entire top brass of PBL — whereupon they started to aggressively question us about why we hadn’t bid for Trade Me. We pointed out that Fairfax had paid an absolute fortune for it. During the course of the meeting James accused me of being aggressive. You could have knocked me down with a feather!

Marko and I were left none the wiser about the purpose of the meeting, although we thought it may have been to suss out whether we would be interested in buying PBL’s New Zealand media assets. If that was the agenda it was covert rather than overt. Anyway, we had a good giggle walking back about James Packer asserting that I was aggressive, as did Roderick when I relayed the story to him. I’d actually met James before, at an earlier lunch with Peter Yates when Peter was CEO of PBL.

I well remember dining with Peter the week in April 2001 that his appointment as CEO of PBL had been announced. The media couldn’t get enough of the story of how an investment banker had become a publicly listed company CEO. I’d first met Peter when he was at investment bank Macquarie with whom Telecom was working, and we’d stayed in touch. I expected Peter to be delighted about his appointment as CEO, which he was.

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