Mark Weldon, chief executive of the New Zealand Stock Exchange, had told me about Estancia La Paz, one of the many horse-riding ranches in Argentina, where he and his wife Sarah had got married. This sounded like a great place to decompress. Catherine Savage and I decided to go there that August, just over a month after I’d left Telecom. I flew down from holidaying in the United States and she flew across from New Zealand.
Our adventure actually started before we got to Argentina. During our flight from Chile to Argentina there was, we both agreed later, the worst turbulence we’d ever experienced. I am normally a very good traveller and have had many rocking and rolling flights in New Zealand caused by the sometimes unpredictable wind, but this was something else again. I was quite frightened — all I could think about was a plane crash in the Andes many years earlier where the survivors had eaten their dead companions in order to stay alive! At one point I must have turned white, because the nun who was sitting next to me put her hand on my arm and said not to worry, we would all be fine. Never have I been so pleased to descend in a plane as I was when we came into Córdoba airport, about 650 kilometres northwest of Buenos Aires, near the geographical centre of Argentina.
We were picked up and driven to Estancia La Paz, about 45 kilometres north of Córdoba. The place was wonderful; a landscape of rolling hills that went on for miles and reminded me of Australia, and architecture that was clearly of European heritage. There was also very friendly service from the bilingual Spanish-and English-speaking staff, including our waiter for the week, who was called Manuel. I mean, what else would he be called? There was no email because the one PC was broken and poor cellphone coverage. Bliss!
We were welcomed by the staff with big hugs as if they were greeting long-lost friends — very nice when you turn up in a strange place feeling somewhat jet-lagged. The food was delicious, a real meateater’s paradise. Meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner was the order of the day, topped off by the week’s highlight — a particular form of Argentinean barbecue which was one delicious cut of meat after another. And everywhere were the national flag, statues of horses, books about horses and of course the real thing: lots of horses.
Estancia La Paz was owned by four brothers who kept a team of over 50 polo ponies. The horses we rode each day were retired polo ponies. They were perfectly groomed and beautifully mannered. Each day we would get up, have a sumptuous breakfast (making sure we ingested much bran for fibre to offset the meat that lay ahead), then we would go down to where the horses were corralled and Marco the gaucho would select horses for the guests who were riding. Once we found horses that were right for us we stayed with them for the week. On the first day I was given a horse that was rather too slow for me, so on the second day I was given Indian. He and I complemented each other very well and I rode him every day after that.
I was totally in my element. Horse riding is great exercise. It’s much harder work than it looks, and a much more enjoyable workout than any other form of physical activity that I’ve ever tried. It is also the most incredible adrenalin buzz because you can never entirely control a 500 kilogram animal. You can send it messages from your brain and parts of your body, but it is quite special to be in sync together, cantering up a hill or executing difficult dressage movements. And then there’s the sheer ability to cover so much distance so quickly. You can be up in the hills looking down on the city within minutes. You can enjoy it by yourself or with other people, and you get a real sense of achievement as you learn and improve. No one ever knows everything about riding and I still enjoy having regular lessons, as well as cantering over the hilltops.
I used to do quite a bit of jumping, which is also a real adrenalin buzz, but a series of minor injuries to my groin and hand meant that I haven’t done it for over a year now. I am not quite ready to say that I won’t do it again, but it’s certainly true that as you get older your propensity to be comfortable leaving the ground on horseback does diminish — at least it has for me.
Animals can teach you a lot. I can tell within a few minutes of hopping on my horse Pride how he is feeling. Horse riding is never a mechanical thing. It is two living, breathing, sensing entities cooperating. And horses are dangerous because they’re so sensitive and when anxious their instinct is flight. They’re also pack animals and want to do what the other horses around them are doing.
Catherine had done less riding than me, but it didn’t matter because the horses at Estancia La Paz were so well mannered. The station was so big — 2000 hectares — that each day we rode out to a different part of it, sometimes just the two of us with either one of the owners or Marco, and sometimes in a bigger group. Pretty early on we discovered a full-size polo field a few minutes’ walk from the main building and we thought it would be fun to have a polo lesson. We asked the owner if he would give us one, and in halting English he asked us, ‘You can ride, yes?’
‘Yes,’ we said. ‘We’ve been riding.’
Then he said, ‘But you can’t play polo?’
‘No,’ we said, ‘we can’t play polo.’
Again he asked us, ‘Do you know how to ride?’
‘Yes, we can ride.’
‘But you can’t play polo?’
‘No,’ we repeated, ‘we don’t know how to play polo.’ It became clear that in this part of the world playing polo was a natural extension of riding, and the notion of being able to ride but having never played polo seemed as strange to him as the idea of having a licence to drive a car and not regularly driving seems to us.
So we took our ponies to the polo field. They were very patient; even when I hit Indian in the head with the mallet he didn’t bolt or jump sideways. As I suspected, polo was very difficult. The hand and eye coordination required to hit the ball when you’re moving at speed on a horse, combined with the strength required to hit it any distance, makes for quite hard work. Nevertheless, our instructor regularly called out ‘Very well, Catherine’ and ‘Very well, Theresa’, by which we assumed he meant very good!
Actually the two of us combined would have been quite good for a beginner. Because I’ve done more riding I was more comfortable on horseback and more often able to coordinate actually connecting the mallet with the ball. But Catherine is a formidable tennis and badminton player and much stronger than me, and when she did connect she managed to shift it quite a lot further than I could. I realised that I didn’t have quite the strength I’d had prior to breaking my wrist in that fall from my horse Spy, nearly 10 years earlier.
After riding in the mornings we’d go back to the hacienda for a late lunch and then a siesta, then we’d spend the afternoon exploring on foot or having treatments in the spa. There were a few other guests, but Catherine and I were the only people using the spa, so we had a delightful time moving backwards and forwards between the treatment rooms, having facials and massages, the spa bath and the sauna. Everything was very stylish.
It was exactly what my body needed. I was a lot more exhausted on leaving Telecom than I had realised. The stress of those last two years had caused my periods to stop. I thought I had gone into early menopause and was going to be one of approximately 20 per cent of women who have no menopausal symptoms at all, just one day their periods cease. It wasn’t till many months after I’d left Telecom that my body came back into balance and my periods started again. It wasn’t just the stress of the last year in the eye of the storm, or the last eight years as CEO, or the last 13 years at Telecom — it was the stress of the previous 25 years, from the time I joined TVNZ as assistant market research manager, fresh out of business school, and embarked on my rise up the corporate ladder.
Nobody in public life working under constant scrutiny is immune to stress and it eventually shows up in your body one way or another. As Bill Ralston wrote in The Listener, ‘Those who have not been at the centre of a media furore can’t understand the real tension and pressure that can be inspired by a single newspaper headline or sound grab on radio or television. When it is your life, your reputation, your career at stake, every nuance is analysed with alarm, especially when previously your celebrity status may have invited only praise not criticism.’37
There would be very few CEOs of public companies who ever get an untroubled, glorious run that attracts no criticism. Sometimes an individual’s timing can be immaculate but usually events — some within your control, some outside it — conspire to mean the journey of a company, and accordingly its CEO, has ups and downs. So you do have to develop an inner resilience that enables you just to carry on with whatever is in front of you, regardless of what the spectators in the stands are saying. However, the essence of what Bill wrote is very true.
I received a lot of support from all manner of people when John and I split up and a lot less support when I was part of the media furore around the regulation of Telecom. I think the different reactions were explained by the fact that most of us at some stage in our lives have major setbacks in relationships, so we know what it feels like, but very few people are subject to constant scrutiny in the media. I counted no less than eight opinion pieces in the May–June 2006 period blaming me, at least in part, for Telecom’s fall from grace, and saying it was time for me to go.
It had been a dreadful period in my life, especially being single and having no one at home to support me. One day I had gone to Margaret Doucas’s house and burst into tears. Chris Woodwiss had also been the most wonderful support at this time. Except for my very close friends I had felt very alone, perhaps the first time as CEO that I had felt this way. Sometimes one positive email in a day had made all the difference, and I got many of those from Telecom staff. I think most people are busy getting on with their own lives and don’t notice one or two isolated pieces of criticism about public figures in the media, but when someone is at the centre of a media storm that goes on for days or weeks it does register in the public consciousness. When it’s you being talked about or written about, it cuts to the very bone and you lose all sense of perspective and sometimes good judgement about how to handle the situation.
I’ve observed that people at the centre of a media furore usually choose flight, opting for saying little or nothing as the best way to have the story blow over and the news to move on to something else. Sometimes this works, although in a leadership position it’s very easy for this to be portrayed as cowardly behaviour or ineffective leadership. A minority of people don’t choose flight, they choose fight, and come out swinging in the media themselves. Occasionally this can work but it’s very easy for this behaviour to be seen as aggressive or unworthy of whatever position the person holds, and it’s particularly difficult for a woman to carry this off effectively as it goes against the grain of what’s acceptable female behaviour.
By and large, I think New Zealand has a very good news media. In my experience, Kiwi journalists are decent people going about their job writing things as they see them. But as Karyn Scherer, a very experienced and insightful journalist at the Herald who’s been written about herself a few times, observed to me recently, it’s a salutary lesson for all journalists to occasionally be on the other end of the microphone or dictaphone and understand how it feels to be worried about what is going to be written about them.
Two of the most interesting and entertaining journalists writing in the New Zealand media today, Paul Holmes and Bill Ralston, always go to the heart of the subjects they are talking about but are very rarely unkind about people. I wonder whether their own experience of having been written about or spoken about, at times critically, by their peers has something to do with that.
New Zealand is a small country and we must all live together, yet we’re often harder on our own people than those who come to our shores for a few years and then leave. I guess it’s part of our tall poppy syndrome.
After I left Telecom I missed my team terribly. The executive team gave me a photo of themselves raising a glass to me as a leaving gift and I kept it in my home office for many months, but every time I looked at it I felt unbearably sad and eventually put it away for many months until I could look at it without getting upset.
I spent most of those first few post-Telecom months overseas avoiding winter in New Zealand, although I did come back a couple of times, when both Waikato and Victoria universities honoured me with alumni awards. My mum, Marion, was delighted to accompany me to both award ceremonies and my sister Yvonne was also able to join us at the Waikato event. When I came back for good in late spring, the weather was beautiful and I wandered around trying to work out whether Wellington weather had always been so good or whether I’d just been so busy I’d never noticed.
But I also felt at a complete loss. I was so used to a very structured life with lots of support on the basics of life and organisation, including office support and diary support. I’d always been so goal-oriented and so focused, but now I didn’t know what I wanted to do next or where I wanted to do it. Some days I felt like I’d died, but of course I was still alive, it’s just that nothing was as it had been. I did something I never thought I’d do and went to see a counsellor. I only had a few sessions but I did find it quite useful in terms of getting unstuck.
The demands and challenges that must be met to attain a CEO role are insignificant compared with the mental and emotional stamina of staying in the position. It had taken almost all of me for 20 years to get there, and almost all of me for nearly eight years to stay there. I had had no idea how much I needed a rest and a change of pace.
I enjoyed a glorious summer in New Zealand. According to my father, it was a pleasure to spend time with me at the beach without my cellphone constantly ringing. I had a wonderfully relaxed time, full of friends and food and no stress. From the day I left Telecom I was able to indulge in my preferred nine hours’ sleep a night — not a luxury any CEO gets — and little by little I began to savour the flexibility and peace of my new life.
I really didn’t know what I wanted to do next. I had a hankering to do something entrepreneurial and had explored one or two opportunities in the United States, but ultimately they hadn’t seemed quite right. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to do anything in telecommunications, even apart from the fact that I’d signed a restraint of trade agreement.
I’d gone overseas with half a mind to living abroad, but come back to New Zealand and fallen in love with it all over again. I wanted to continue to have the sort of life I’d had — a life based in New Zealand, but with plenty of opportunities to spend time overseas in countries that I enjoyed, such as America and Australia.
Early in the summer, Margaret Doucas, who has been involved in animal welfare for most of her life, told me about the Wellington SPCA’s $6 million project to create a new animal care centre. I went with her to look at the existing premises and was shocked at how inadequate they were. Then I went to see the intended new premises, in Wellington’s old Fever Hospital, originally used to house tuberculosis and scarlet fever patients. Sitting on a superb site high on Mt Victoria at the edge of the Town Belt, it had been used until the 1980s for geriatric purposes and the exterior had been renovated by the city council. I believed that we must be able to do better for our animals than the existing cramped shelter and wanted to do everything I could to make the project happen, so I started out calling everybody I thought might be interested in helping and we organised a fundraising dinner for April. Margaret and I spent time with people who we identified might want to help in a substantial way, showing them around and talking about the project, and on the night we raised over $1 million in pledges from people who committed to sponsor different areas of the centre or to otherwise give donations. I embarked on this and worked hard for three months with no thought of anything other than the project itself, but I ended up getting so much out of it. I had given money to the SPCA for years, but it was a real pleasure to do something in a more practical, committed way.
Despite my enjoyment of this project, I had good days and bad days during this period. Sometimes I felt quite flat because I was struggling to envisage what future I wanted to create. Some people, after working hard in one direction for a long time, take time out and discover they have a talent for something they never realised, or a passion for art or something like that. In those first nine months I didn’t discover any long-lost talents or passions I didn’t realise I had, and while I did enjoy doing more of the things that I had previously done, such as riding my horse, I didn’t want to make a profession of it.
The week after our successful fundraising dinner Judy Weir, then CEO of the Wellington SPCA, and I took prospective donors up to the old Fever Hospital to show them around. We were met by the caretaker employed by the council, whose role would no longer be required once the SPCA moved in. He acted very aggressively towards us. A couple of days later I got a call from a senior staff member at the council saying that the caretaker had shown up at the council offices in a very agitated state and they had had to call the armed offenders squad to take him away! They served him with a trespass notice saying that he must not go within 100 metres of either me or the mayor, Kerry Prendergast, about whom he had also made threatening comments. We were asked not to go to the Fever Hospital until further notice.
So that was the end of those fundraising efforts for the time being. I did have a chuckle, though, about the irony of being a high-profile CEO for nearly eight years and never once feeling unsafe or physically threatened, then having someone threatening to physically harm me following a few months doing voluntary work for the SPCA!
Unfortunately after Judy Weir left the SPCA at the end of 2008, the conversion of the old Fever Hospital into a new animal care centre appeared to no longer be effectively managed and by August 2009 the project costs had blown out to $9 million. Craig Shepherd, who was an SPCA board member and long-time supporter, raised legitimate concerns about the cost overruns with the project and questioned how it would be funded. After raising concerns about this and other matters he was formally censured by a majority decision of the board on a motion moved by the chair, Simon Meikle. This led to major ructions within the board, with three board members ultimately resigning, including Craig and Margaret.
When it was obvious that the project costs had blown out, I was willing to join the board to help specifically with the project. The chair made it clear that the majority of the board did not want me to join and stated that they could replace my experience, donations and donor contacts.
Naturally I was hurt but, more to the point, I couldn’t see how this was in the best interests of the animals or Wellington in general. I considered it incredible that at the same time as the SPCA was calling for volunteers to stand on windy street corners for its annual appeal, the majority of the board had been instrumental in destroying the enthusiasm and commitment of three of its largest individual donors (myself, Margaret and Craig Shepherd). And this from an organisation that receives no government or direct local body funding and stands or falls on donations of its members and supporters.
The SPCA is a member-based society and I still believe it is a fantastic cause. I admire the work the SPCA staff and volunteers do. So it was with great sadness that I felt I had no choice but to write to the board and let them know that while I would continue to sponsor animals at the existing shelter, as I had done for the past 20 years, I could not, in good conscience, continue to promote the campaign for the new animal care centre when I no longer had confidence that it was a viable project, or in the judgement of the board. Not surprisingly, this all came to a head shortly afterwards at the AGM, where a motion of no confidence in the existing board was passed. The following week the board met with three new members and it was announced that the project would be reviewed with a view to bringing it into line with earlier cost estimates.
Just as you can find goodness anywhere, you can find ego and tactics used to suppress dissent anywhere too. It was a big learning curve for me that inside a charity like this you could find people in leadership positions who, in my view, were displaying ego-driven, bullying tactics and behaving in a way that was anything but charitable.
During 2008 I was approached about a few roles overseas, both in the IT sector and in other areas that interested me but in which I had no previous work experience. I was flown to Asia to meet with a CEO in a different industry who was looking for a successor, and I set up opportunities myself through mutual colleagues to meet with CEOs of industries I was interested in. But ultimately none of this went anywhere. I wasn’t clear enough in my own mind about what I would and would not do. All my life up until this point I had a really, really clear and strong career direction. It seemed to have left me, which has given me more empathy for those people who struggle to find vocational fulfilment, something that I’d always taken for granted.
Shortly after the SPCA fundraising dinner I went down to Queenstown for a week with John. We were very connected again as friends and of course he knew me very well and has always given me good advice. He thought I needed to do something that incorporated more of my feminine side.
I made plans to go to the United States in June to explore bringing great New Zealand fashion designers such as Trelise Cooper to California. I focused on Carmel-by-the-Sea, on the Monterey Peninsula and adjacent to Pebble Beach, the world-famous golf course. Salinas, the area referred to in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, is close by. It is a very fertile area, the fruit and vegetable bowl of the United States, leading out to the magnificent, rugged coastline of Big Sur. Carmel itself is cute as a button. Undertaking any development there is a planning nightmare, which is why the place has kept its charm. You won’t find a Starbucks, you won’t find a high-rise. Everybody moves at a leisurely pace. There are inns rather than hotels. It is a very special place. And it’s only two hours south of San Francisco, one of the coolest cities in the world.
The Monterey Peninsula is a very affluent part of the United States and many wealthy people have second homes in that area. Whenever I went there and wore Trelise Cooper, my favourite New Zealand designer, I was always complimented on my clothes. The bright colours and gaiety of her clothes suit the local vibe and sunny climate.
On one post-Telecom visit I was introduced by a friend of a friend to Sinda Mandurrago. She was a trained accountant managing her father’s construction company, but she longed to do something more creative. I met her on two separate trips to ascertain whether we could successfully start a business together in this area, showcasing New Zealand clothing designers and particularly Trelise. Both curvy, we had a vision of a place that would feel like Trelise’s stores in Auckland— a celebration of being a woman, whatever shape and size.
As an aside, I wear almost exclusively New Zealand designers. I do have a soft spot for shoe shopping overseas, but I am invariably disappointed when I purchase clothes outside New Zealand. My favourite designers are Adrienne Winkelmann for formal corporate wear and evening wear, and Trelise Cooper for day wear, whatever the situation, especially her gorgeous skirts and structured yet contemporary jackets and coats. I also have some treasured pieces from Liz Mitchell and Tanya Carlson, and over the last couple of years I have become quite a fan of some of the younger designers who are working with merino wool, such as Miranda Brown. When it’s summer and I want to feel like I’m not really in my forties, I sometimes pull on one of Kate Sylvester’s cool tops and shortish skirts. But Trelise is my all-time favourite: the beauty of the fabrics, the way the colours ‘pop’, the way the clothes feel on your body and the inspiring message sewn into every garment … I love them!
In February 2009 Sinda and I opened our store in Carmel, Charlotte Grace. Of course, our timing wasn’t the greatest; between conceiving the idea and designing the store — which had a gorgeous, sumptuous feel but was welcoming at the same time — and its opening, shoppers in the United States stopped spending. Nevertheless customers have been so overjoyed at finding beautiful clothes at something other than wafer-thin US sizes that they sometimes hug Sinda! Trelise herself came across for our opening and organised a fashion parade — she has been a very generous supporter.