Pig founder for hire

Tuesday 1st May 2001

After bailing out of the crashing FlyingPig, Stanford-educated brainiac and Pacific Retail director Stefan Preston was cornered by Deborah Hill Cone at the coffee shop in Auckland's Queen Street Whitcoulls

On flying swine

DHC: We haven't heard much from you since you stopped being the man behind FlyingPig - what happened there?

SP: Well, FlyingPig got sold to IT Media and they're carrying on with it. As a director of PRG [Pacific Retail Group] I was asked to be interim chief executive, with the objective to turn its profitability around, put a vision and strategy in place and leave it with a management team who can take it into the future - which I have done.

DHC: You don't feel pissed off about the FlyingPig experience?

SP: Not at all. Every shareholder is ultimately in business to make money, and I put my own money into it. But the assumptions we used did not bear out.

DHC: In other words, it was a failure?

SP: Well, it's still going and it's still the number one retail site in New Zealand. I don't think anything that exciting can ever be called a failure.

On stacking shelves

DHC: Does it feel strange coming back to Whitcoulls today, considering you ran the place for three years?

SP: Yeah, I always have an emotive connection to the businesses I get involved with.

DHC: Can you restrain yourself from jumping up and tidying the book displays?

SP: I can leave it alone, although I am still interested in how Whitcoulls is going.

DHC: You miss retail?

SP: No, I look at everything I do as a project. I enter the project with a great deal of enthusiasm, then I leave it and move on to the next thing.

DHC: So what is the next thing?

SP: You know I met my wife at Stanford ...

DHC: Sorry to interrupt, but how did you end up going there?

SP: I was working at Fletcher Challenge and I had a lot of mentorship and support from John Hood [former Fletcher's executive and Auckland University vice-chancellor]. He encouraged me to go to a Northern Hemisphere business school, combined with the fact that Hugh Fletcher went there ...

DHC: Had you thought of yourself as the sort of person who would go Stanford, being the crème de la crème of universities and all?

SP: Actually, if it wasn't for people saying why don't you apply, I never would have done it.

DHC: You're not the head boy type?

SP: No way. I came from nothing; my family was a working family. My parents split when I was 10, so I had the solo mother situation going on, but the best thing my parents gave me was making sure I had great education opportunities. I was one of those out-of-zone students at Auckland Grammar; one of the ones the Labour government doesn't want to go there anymore.

On girls

DHC: You don't think MBAs have lost their cachet? I suppose yours must have changed your life, with meeting your wife ...

SP: I only went there to date women!

DHC: You like brainy women, then.

SP: Absolutely. But seriously, it led to amazing experiences. When we studied entrepreneurship we presented business plans to Silicon Valley venture capitalists - some of them actually got funded, which makes it feel a bit more real.

DHC: You must have made great contacts.

SP: My wife Lesley, she's a New Yorker, she's got a real blue-chip resumé but she likes being in New Zealand, and loves the lifestyle here. We both face the challenge of how to carve out interesting careers in a very small economy.

On Ingenio

DHC: So, what are you doing now?

SP: Lesley and I have created a consulting business, Ingenio, which has two faces. It focuses on the discontinuity in new economy things like mobile, data and internet that are threatening the stability of earlier business models. But we don't just go in and do a report to be put on the shelf - we implement our report.

DHC: But aren't consultants a load of bunk? I remember [late INL boss] Mike Robson saying he wouldn't let them in the building because consultants are brought in to do the job a chief executive should be doing.

SP: I am very cynical about the whole practice of consulting. As a chief executive I try to avoid consultants as much as possible, but the reality is that technology is changing so fast and business is so dynamic, it is very hard to have the best skills in-house all the time. It's inefficient to have our skills applied to one company.

DHC: So you haven't set this up just because you couldn't find the right chief executive job?

SP: Oh no.

DHC: Uh-huh.

On Eric

DHC: You've worked quite closely with Eric Watson.

SP: He's my biggest client - I love working with Eric and his group, mainly because they are very dynamic and very aggressive; they're also completely different from me. I have an academic approach, building things up from first principles, while they're just very, very fast moving.

DHC: Some people would say he's good at being rip, shit and bust, but not so hot on detail.

SP: I think you could describe me as a piece of the detail for that group. It's easy to sit in an armchair and criticise other people's approaches. You can play the game all "blue chip", dot all the i's and cross all the t's, like the Fletcher model where you analyse everything 50 times before anything gets done. Eric Watson's at the other end of the spectrum. If it looks like a good story he'll put some money into it.

On and on about the Forum

DHC: So what business philosophies do you get into?

SP: I'm not a voracious business book reader - going to Stanford weans you off a bit - but one source of tremendous inspiration for me, in terms of the people side of management, is doing the Landmark Forum.

DHC: Oh god, not you too! You're only about the 100th person who has gone on about the Forum to me lately ...

SP: It was an absolutely amazing experience.

DHC: But it does change people and make some people go wonky.

SP: Well, some people do turn into zealots about it - that's going to happen to anyone who has a major door open to them.

DHC: But they always want to convert other people.

SP: My mother did it, and I said if you want me to do it then I'll do it. I'll do anything that will give me an opportunity to learn. Lesley did it, all my family did it ...

DHC: Gosh! Is that the time?

Deborah Hill Cone is the news editor of The National Business Review

Deborah Hill Cone

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