One day while driving home in mid-1994, I had a wee altercation with one of Wellington’s famous hills: I turned uphill into the wrong street then found I couldn’t reverse straight back down. I flagged down a passing motorist to help me with my stranded car. My saviour turned out to be Tom Potrykus, then general manager – marketing at Telecom, an American who’d been with the company for a few years and was soon to go home. After chatting with him, I decided to go for his job. Being head of marketing at Telecom was an exciting prospect, as it was one of the few marketing jobs in New Zealand bigger than the one I had at the BNZ.
I tried without success through various contacts to get my name on the shortlist for the job, then I read in the business media that the company had concluded that there were no New Zealanders suitable for the role, so they were looking offshore. I decided I needed to take matters into my own hands, so I called up Telecom and asked to be put through to the office of the CEO, Roderick Deane. I had never met Roderick, and of course I wasn’t put through to him, but the woman who answered the phone had the presence of mind to pass my details on to the general manager of human resources, David Bedford. David called, and I went over to Telecom and met with him straight away.
David was an experienced, astute executive and a very measured person and he didn’t give much away at our meeting, so I was delighted when he called me at home that night and asked me to come and meet Roderick first thing the next morning. I was very nervous walking into Roderick’s office. Previously the chairman of the State Services Commission, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank and chief executive of the Electricity Corporation, Roderick’s reputation was formidable. It was hard not to be thrown when I first met Roderick because his intellect was obvious from the minute we started talking, and of course he knew lots about telecommunications and I knew nothing. He also knew a huge amount about banking, of course. About 15 minutes into our conversation he asked if I would like a cup of tea, which I took as a good sign and started to relax a little! Anyway, after interviews with David, Roderick, Ben McMillan (then Telecom’s chief operating officer) and the recruitment agency, and the normal amount of reference checking, I was offered the job of general manager – marketing in August 1994. I would report to McMillan, a very experienced American telecommunications operating executive. I was overjoyed and couldn’t wait to start.
I enjoyed my 18 months in this role immensely. Towards the end of my time at the BNZ I had started to feel quite stuck in a box, and at Telecom I felt freed up again. I had a large marketing budget, a lot of people in the marketing team and plenty of opportunity to make a difference.
These 18 months were a tumultuous period in terms of telecommunications pricing, as we drastically reduced international and national calling prices. I can clearly remember where I was when Bruce Parkes, my head of strategy, suggested the idea of customers paying no more than $5 to talk as long as they liked, to anyone, anywhere in New Zealand. I thought it was a brilliant idea and we drove the initiative through. People told us it changed their lives — getting in touch with old friends and relatives and rekindling relationships. Similar strategies were later adopted by telecommunications companies elsewhere in the world and it revolutionised the way people thought about calling long distance within New Zealand, which previously had nearly always been charged by the minute and was perceived as expensive.
After 18 months Ben McMillan retired and returned to the United States, and in early 1996 I became group general manager – services, reporting directly to Roderick. This was my big break. I was now responsible for revenues of over $3 billion, all sales as well as marketing and many of the company’s core services such as call centres and retail outlets, though not the network side of the business, which was managed by Ken Benson.
It was during this time that the focus of the business started to move away from calling towards data services. The internet began to go mainstream and we launched Xtra, Telecom’s internet service provider. We made the decision to invest in the Southern Cross cable — an undersea fibre cable linking Australia and New Zealand with North America — in order to access increased data capacity which we expected would be required over the next decade, and announced outsourcing deals to US company EDS for IT and French company Alcatel on the network side. Telecommunications is an economy-of-scale business and New Zealand isn’t big enough to have sufficient scale. We wanted to simulate scale by standardising and working with global partners.
I put a lot of time and focus into understanding the various parts of the business. I had previously had around 200 staff in marketing and I now had 3500! I spent time with a wide range of people, both at the coalface and in ‘skip level’ meetings, i.e. meetings with the people who reported to the people who directly reported to me. It’s very easy to get stuck in middle management, especially if you are a woman. I’d always been very focused on going further. I’d always tried to hire people smarter than me and build a good team so that I could be promoted. And I’d always sought to work in areas that really mattered to the company’s fortunes, which increases your visibility. I placed a premium on having a very strong team around me, created by a combination of promoting people already in the company who I felt were capable of bigger roles and bringing people in from the outside. One of the people I promoted several times during my period at Telecom was Mark Ratcliffe, a very capable all-round executive who I particularly valued, not just for his deep understanding of telecommunications and IT in general and Telecom processes in particular, but also for his common sense. He later became my chief information officer when I was chief executive. One of the people I brought in from outside was Peter Thompson, another experienced IT executive, who looked after our corporate business.
It was in this role that for the first time I experienced colleagues who were continually trying to put me off my stride: one a man, and one a woman. It was generally covert, but I learnt to expect a shot across my bows a couple of days before any important executive committee meeting. I was hurt by this and found it very unsettling, as it was intended to be. I think they both felt threatened by me, reasonably recently arrived on the scene and now having a plum role, and one of them at least had ambitions of becoming CEO. I experienced first-hand that women do not always support each other at the top of the corporate pyramid and I vowed that I would not be like that. I had a very loyal team, one or two of whom did point duty watching my back for me. I made sure I communicated directly with Roderick often and I cultivated my own sources who were close to him, so they could help represent my perspective.
During this period a good chunk of the company was still owned by the original cornerstone shareholders, American telecommunications companies Ameritech and Bell Atlantic. Telecom was established in 1987 as a state-owned enterprise to take over the telecommunications network services previously operated by the Post Office, and from April 1, 1989 all telecommunications markets in New Zealand had been open to competition. The process of fully privatising Telecom was completed in September 1990 by its sale for $4.25 billion to a consortium including Bell Atlantic and Ameritech, and these companies still had representatives on the board.
I attended several board meetings in America and found them rather formal affairs, marked by graciousness and good etiquette, but there was no mistaking the underlying message: the only thing that mattered was the bottom line. Executives in these companies, and by extension companies which they wholly or partially owned, either made their budget numbers or were swiftly exited. There were absolutely no points for trying or being nice.
I am not saying that such a single-minded focus on the short-term bottom line is necessarily a good strategy for business success — I don’t think it is — but that’s how it was, and if you took a role as a senior executive in those companies, those were the rules you had to play by. In deeply conservative, old-school corporate America, women seldom broke through to senior roles in these companies, and I desperately wanted to make it to the very top.
It was part-way through one rather grim board meeting in Chicago that Roderick passed me a note around the table. I thought it would be a message about something he wanted me to say — or, more likely, something he didn’t want me to say — but instead it was an advertisement he had torn out of a magazine about a clothes shop in California he thought I might like to visit on my way home! During this period he was generally very supportive of me and I chuckled to myself that he had correctly ‘read’ that one of the ways I was getting through the board meeting was thinking about what nice things I’d do next. Although I worked hard I hadn’t forgotten my lesson from many years earlier about managing my workload and always made sure I had time for friends and activities outside work.
Also, around the age of 30 I’d taken up horse riding and found I really enjoyed it. In October 1998 a horse I’d had for only a few months, Spy, bolted while I was riding him. It all happened in a split second, but as he took off I knew there was no way I could stay on. I put my right arm out to break my fall in order to protect my head and back, but as soon as I hit the ground I knew that I had badly smashed my right wrist. I was taken to hospital by ambulance and doped up with painkillers while the doctors decided what to do. They thought there was a reasonable chance they could fix my wrist by putting it in a cast and that I wouldn’t need an operation to have it pinned, but the first time they tried it didn’t set correctly, so they had to do it again. The second time the procedure was successful and I was sent home with a cast, but it was the old-fashioned style which meant I couldn’t get it wet.
It’s surprising how debilitating having a broken wrist is. Roderick was very kind and arranged for a car to pick me up each morning to bring me in to work because I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t dress myself, I couldn’t wash my hair, I couldn’t write and the painkillers made me feel a bit disoriented. But for me the worst thing was not being able to swim.
After eight weeks the cast was removed and though my wrist was very weak, it was bliss to get back in the water and do very gentle breaststroke. The doctors warned me that I might not get full mobility back in my wrist, but I credit a wonderful Chinese healer who I saw in Wellington with helping me restore the tendons after the bone had mended.
I never rode Spy again because I no longer trusted him, but a few months later I started riding a less spirited horse, Pride, who I have been riding ever since, more or less without incident. While the saying goes ‘Pride comes before a fall’, in my case Pride came after the fall!