Being a building company, you would think that the Board and Executive team on Fletcher Building was packed full of civil engineers. After all, that is what the company does, right? Wrong. In fact, its hard to find a single one there, apart from CEO Ross Taylor, who has a Bachelor's in Engineering from Queensland, and he's says he's going, which appears to now leave a big fat zero. Reminds me of the Reserve Bank of NZ that has no economists, outside the Governor and his side-kick Deputy, on its Senior Executive Team. It also reminds me of a former head of Stats NZ who had never studied statistics.
What on earth is going on at Kiwi companies and government departments? Seems like a bunch of managers has taken over, put themselves on outrageous salaries, and thrown folks who actually know how the ship works onto pittance remuneration and stuffed them down into the engine room of the Titanic, while the manager-captain steers toward an iceberg whilst he's asleep in his cabin. If you don't believe me - here goes:
Fletcher Building Board and Executive Team:
Fletcher Building Board and Executive Team:
Claire Carroll: Bachelor of Commerce (i.e., not an engineer)
Barbara Chapman: Bachelor of Commerce (i.e., not an engineer)
Rob MacDonald: Bachelor of Commerce (i.e., not an engineer)
Bruce Hassall: Bachelor of Commerce, Accountant (i.e., not an engineer)
Bruce McEwen: Bachelor of Commerce, Accountant (i.e., not an engineer)
Sandra Dodds: Bachelor of Commerce (i.e., not an engineer)
Joe Locando: Bachelor of Commerce and Economics (i.e., not an engineer)
Dean Fradgley: Business Management / Strategy (i.e., not an engineer)
Hamish McBeath: MBA-Operations Management (i.e., not an engineer)
Peter Crowley: Bachelor of Arts / Economics (i.e., not an engineer)
Doug McKay: Bachelor of Arts (i.e., not an engineer)
Bevan McKenzie: Master of Arts in Political Science (i.e., not an engineer)
Nick Traber: Economics Qualification (i.e., not an engineer)
Cathy Quinn: Lawyer (i.e., not an engineer)
Andrew Clarke, Lawyer (i.e., not an engineer)
Wendi Croft: BSc (i.e., not an engineer)
Martin Brydon: Diploma, Electrical Engineering (diploma, not a degree? not a civil engineer)
Phil Boylen: Qualifications not stated on Company Website
Steve Evans: Qualifications not stated on Company Website
Ross Taylor: Bachelor of Engineering (What? An engineer? How dare he. And he's resigned)
It takes the cake that there is only one university qualified civil engineer on this list of 20 people on the Board & Exec Team and he's resigned !? What is it with the Bachelor of Commerce qualifications? Nearly half of them hold that degree. It's what I teach and assure you the students don't have a clue about how to build a building. Could low productivity in NZ be due to an entrenched management class of commerce graduates dominating Kiwi boards who don't have any significant knowledge about the actual good or service that the company is producing? Have we become a country like the old Soviet Union where people just create rules, monitor rules, do health & safety checks, measure outputs, measure inputs, write legal documents, produce accounts, discuss accounts, but where none of the managers actually knows how the factory works? Bring back the engineers, I say.
Sources:
https://fletcherbuilding.com/about-us/board-and-management/
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
6 comments:
What about those with a Bachelor of Arts degree?, what do they know about anything, other than go to university to do a degree, the easiest of ones to do, and to do what with it? Oh thats right, get a position on a board they know nothing about what the company does. Who puts these people in these positions?
where are the academics on your university management team? when was the last time they published anything relevant? or taught a course that changed a student's life? your vc doesn't even have a google scholar profile! let's agree that the universe is awash in mediocrity.
The FletcherConstruction contribution to total T/O is about 15%. It is hardly accurate to be classifying the company as a constructor. Manufacturering and retail would fit better.
This article could have been written by Mayor Wayne Brown.
Robert Arthur, only if the taxpayer paid for it.
In Japanese engineering companies many of the senior executives have engineering and commerce degrees.
Would you have an economist build your house or a builder?
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