He is best known as the coach of the 1999 World Cup-winning Wallabies, the first team in history to win the tournament twice.
During his time as Australian rugby coach, the Wallabies also added the Bledisloe Cup, the Tri Nations trophy and the Tom Richards Cup to their silverware collection.
And ahead of their crucial quarter-final clash with Scotland tomorrow, Rod Macqueen reckons the Wallabies could go all the way again this year.
“The World Cup is all about peaking at the right time and timing. Of all the teams, they are looking like they timed it really well. There is no doubt (current coach) Michael Cheika has done a really good job in a small period of time,’’ Macqueen tells The Weekend Australian.
“He has a really good mindset within the team. They are working really well together. The team seems to have a real self-belief.’’
Yet for the past decade Macqueen has been quietly doing his best work for the country far away from the rugby field. Instead it has been in the executive suites and boardrooms of some of the nation’s biggest companies in the mining, banking and manufacturing sectors.
“Most of it is confidential. I’m not in it for the money. I am happy to be paid, don’t get me wrong. But I am ready to retire. I do it because I enjoy it,’’ he says.
The deeply private 65-year-old has long been loathe to talk about the work of his consultancy, Macqueen Management. And he won’t name his past and present star clients. Except one, a US-listed, Singapore-headquartered $2 billion oil and gas exploration and production company known as InterOil.
Its assets include one of Asia’s largest undeveloped gasfields, Elk-Antelope in the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea. And Macqueen is genuinely excited about InterOil’s future ability to create thousands of jobs in PNG as Elk-Antelope fuels a future two-train LNG project called Papua LNG run by French oil super-major Total.
“It is different. It is a challenge. One of the things I do like about this is that you can make a difference,’’ Macqueen says of his work with InterOil’s rugby-loving chief executiveMichael Hession.
“Michael has a real vision. InterOil is at a stage where it is about to go into a revolutionary process in changing its direction.’’ Macqueen’s work also comes at a critical juncture for InterOil and PNG as Oil Search — a 21 per cent shareholder in Antelope — fends off a takeover bid from Woodside. Allegations have also emerged that PNG landholders are not receiving their due benefits from Exxon and Oil Search’s $US19 billion ($26bn) PNG LNG project.
“PNG is an emerging nation; we are an emerging company. We will move the GDP dial 20 per cent in PNG. We will create tens of thousands of jobs. So we have effectively a team PNG — from the Prime Minister to the communities,’’ Hession says, noting that InterOil has already put in place a range of community programs in PNG in education, health and sport. And he says Macqueen has been critical in helping the company plan ahead for a do-or-die period of its evolution.
“The key thing about Rod is it is not so much about the rugby, it is his philosophy in business and in life. In business and the Wallabies he’s always had his eyes on the horizon,’’ Hession says.
“The thing I like about this fellow is that he has walked in both worlds. I work with Rod Macqueen the businessman, Rod Macqueen the motivator of people. Maybe some sports people are stuck in the sporting world. It is a sports game but there are big elements of it you can extract for business.’’
A citizen of Australia and Ireland who was educated in Britain and France, Hession has over 25 years of international exploration, operation and commercial experience at BP, Woodside and now InterOil. But Macqueen, who he calls a friend, has clearly filled a void that had been missing in his career.
“When you are a CEO, it can be quite a lonely spot. Rod has been part psychologist, part mentor, part business adviser,’’ he says, noting Macqueen has also brought in former rugby league great Darren Lockyer to work with the company.
Macqueen is clearly not alone in helping transfer skills from the sporting arena into corporations in recent years, following in the footsteps of hockey legend Ric Charlesworth and former Australian cricket coach John Buchanan.
But the most interesting thing about Macqueen, who was awarded an Order of Australia for his services to sport, is that he has spent far more time in business than he ever did on or looking down on a rugby field. A commercial artist by trade, for almost 25 years he was chairman of Advantage Line, a point-of-sale and merchandising business that was recently purchased by its management team in a buyout.
Until five years ago he was chairman and a 10 per cent shareholder in STW Sports & Events, the sports management arm of John Singleton’s STW Group. He has also served on the board of several major corporations, including Mitsubishi Australia, and is a member of the IRB’s Rugby Committee.
His health has failed him three times in his life — once as a child when a bout of rheumatic fever left him bedridden for seven months; in 1987 when he was hit by chronic atypical pneumonia; and in 1989 when he had complex surgery for bleeding on the brain.
He is currently a patron of the Sargood Foundation, a charity focused on helping people with spinal cord injuries return to the community. In his role at InterOil Macqueen regularly accompanies Hession on visits to PNG, where the latter has an apartment and spends a third of his time. Macqueen has also been a regular in board meetings, management meetings and other day-to-day operations.
He says many boardroom issues can always be brought back to analogies that are the same as sport. “Being a team is all about we. And having everyone aligned to the same degree. Agreeing on the vision and following it through. It is about dumbing it down. It is pretty simple. It is about respecting each others’ qualities, their strengths and weaknesses. If you come together in an aligned group, you make it happen,’’ he says.
And Macqueen has always believed that good leadership starts at the top. “You can’t just say it. You have to believe in it and work at it. You look at the companies that have been successful, the CEOs believed in it and wholeheartedly,’’ he says.
Macqueen has a famous saying to describe too many decisions in the business world.
“I talk about a grey decision. If I get six or seven people in a room and get them to agree on a colour, the one they will always agree on is grey. It is an easy decision but not a dynamic one,’’ he says.
“So at InterOil we are using smaller groups and agreeing on things. Thinking ahead as to what is ahead and thinking outside the square. More and more companies are being led by small executive teams and if they can make a culture, and take a culture through to the rest, then they will be successful. That is in a nutshell what I think we are doing here.’’
Hession recalls one early management meeting Macqueen attended. “I was trying to bring everyone along. And Rod took me aside and said: ‘This team thing you’ve got, it is not about having 15 people make the decision. Get three to four people and you will avoid getting this decision by committee. Let them make the decision and get them to bring it back to the group and bring the group along’.’’
Macqueen, a master delegator in his time as a coach — in fact, he was criticised at times for being too hands-off — has also had to teach Hession the art of the practice.
“We had a crucial conversation 10 months ago in a board meeting. He pulled me aside afterwards and said, ‘Step back. Let them run with it. And maybe keep your mouth shut a bit more’,’’ Hession says with a smile. “He was quite brutal about it. I reckon if I had not taken notice of that, it would not have worked. I thought to myself, ‘the bugger is right’.’’ Hession has already changed the InterOil management team twice since he took over two years go. The most recent was in the past six weeks to take the company into the phase of marketing gas. He calls it “reaching the end of the beginning”. But it hasn’t been easy.
“I asked Rod, ‘how do I drop somebody?’’’ he says. Macqueen’s advice was brutally simple.
“I see business and sport and life are the same. The same principles apply. Part of that is being brutally honest. In business you have to be like that, to get the right skills set. People tend to put people in positions rather than having positions for people. I think about moving (former Wallaby champion) Stephen Larkham from full back to fly half. But putting him as fly half, everyone in the team benefited.’’ At InterOil, Hession says his boss of business operations in PNG, Thomas Nador, has become his “Larkham’’.
“Thomas is one of my best people. He is an enabler,’’ he says. Another challenge for Hession has been managing the acceptance of Macqueen internally across the organisation. He stresses the former coach is “not on a pedestal’’.
“He is not sitting there high and mighty. He speaks common sense. And I just let him go — he spends time with board members down to the operators. I couldn't stop him anyway,’’ he says.
Macqueen himself has been around long enough to know when he isn’t wanted. Or as he puts it, “Yeah you might think people in the board meeting would think, ‘Who is this prick? What is he doing here?’ I get that. But I am happy to say ‘I’ll speak when I’m asked to speak and ask politely before I make a point’. But I don't have anything to prove. I’m not a threat to anyone. You just have to observe what is happening and give examples of other ways of doing things. Some of them might be sports analogies, some might be business analogies,’’ he says.
Macqueen also remains at a loss as to why more businesses don’t borrow from the practices of modern-day, professional sport.
Despite his friendship with Hession and his passion for InterOil’s PNG mission, Macqueen knows he will always be hired help. Not that it worries him in the slightest. There will always be another challenge in corporate Australia.
