THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

I don't know where in life I started to become a problem solver. Perhaps it was brought home to me accidentally when in my last year at school I was forced to attend a selection day while for the Royal Military College Duntroon in Canberra. This was during the school holidays and I had planned to spend the afternoon on the beach with my then girlfriend, Sue Finnis. Instead my father sent me off to Keswick Barracks, where we had to fill out all these MPI questionnaires, so when asked "If you stand on top of a tall cliff, do you often feel like jumping off?", I responded flippantly "Only when asks questions like this", I felt assured I would not be selected.

From there the selection process moved us in the teams of about a dozen applicants, being given some ropes and ladders and told we had to get over this radioactive patch without killing ourselves, then left to get on with it. After the second of these exercises, the seargent in charge took me aside and asked why I always took over organizing the others, telling me in the future to just stand by and watch. I complained, saying that if this was such a serious radioactive danger we were facing, I take the lead simply because I want to protect myself and have no idea what all these strangers know about the problem. Apparently going outside the box as in this event it proves to be successful where consequently I was one of the four selected from the State that year out of some 400 applicants.

Of course, then later having left the army to the displeasure of my father, when I returned to my hometown my father said he would no longer support me, so again, I had to come up with something to keep me eating whilst I managed to get through university. This I somehow managed to become the manager of a block of 72 home units in Bondi with an apartment included. During this time, various owners asked me to show people around their units, either to rent or for sale, until one day someone suggested "Why don't I become an estate agent and get paid for it?" So, in those days, to become a Real Estate Agent, one had two options: either to do a three-year course or to apply to the court. The court option seemed to be the quickest way out but I couldn't find anyone who had actually gone that path, yet decided to have a go anyway. Fronting in court, I produced as my star witness, an old Greek ex real estate agent who had completed a successful career and retired. I asked him to relate what does a real estate agent do? In his still heavy accent, he told the court "You fin_da the property, you find_ da the buyer, you bring together, get them agree price and then take_ a them to the lawyers. When it was then my turn, the real estate people had three barristers trying to trip me up but where they asked these complicated legal questions, I simply said that as my witness had told the court, I would just bring the buyer and sell it together and then let the lawyers work out these complicated legal issues. The final result was that I was granted the full real estate license.

And so the pathway towards the improbable continued, where I followed on a strategy of aiming for things that other people didn't seem to want to do or have the ability to achieve. Such as, at the time when they were trying to establish the Australian newspaper, I organised a group of people together to come up with a strategy to attract support selling the idea of running this promo like I would have a political campaign. It helped. This concept I used later as an example of success by advising other political parties on strategy for the elections.

In the early days, just out of university, I manage to get involved with establishing Weyerhauser Australia Proprietary Limited, this the subsidiary of America's largest temper firm. I'd actually met their new MD, helping him unload his rubbish from a trailer at the local tip. He asked me what job I wanted after Uni. I told him anything where I was just given a job and told to report back when done. He asked when could I start? In this, the challenge was how to establish a profitable timber importer into Sydney at that time, against five separate timber firms in Australia importing timber. I came up with the solution of undercutting all of their transport fees by using one Weyerhauser chartered vessel. After the first year by having the larger volume, it covered our costs and we had cornered the market.

By this time I'd managed to get through my chartered accounting qualifications, along with my economics degree, so was approached by Webster Ltd, the largest pastoral company in Tasmania to set up a forerunner of Climate Change through rotating forestry. Since I had no clue what this was all about, when asked for a salary, I tripled what I had been getting in Sydney only to find I'd won the job. Afterward one of the directors told me how my confidence and attitude had achieved this, as when asked what I knew about the subject, I'd said absolutely nothing - which was true - but Jim Nichols said the rest of the board were impressed by my sendup since obviously working for the largest timber firm in the world, I must have considered there's a stupid question.

Anyway eventually deciding I needed to get global exposure, I applied to the UN for the Food and Agriculture Organization and was offered a job in Tanzania revising the structure of Kalimo Parastatals. I went to great lengths to find out what on earth a Kalimo Parastatals was with little success; similarly for parastatal. I applied, saying that I would be great at doing the job, which was then awarded to me on a two-year tax-free UN contract where in due course, I learned that Kalimo meant agricultural and the parastatal was the government-owned body that ran one.

From there, I spent the next 40 years running projects in some 50 countries overall, often where others had failed to deliver or where, as with the largest project the EU had across China, I'd had to restructure to make these successful. Included with this were some complicated issues such as covering post Soviet era countries such as Poland to bring them into a privatized rather than government owned economy, restucturing the financial system of the Philippines and Bangladesh, while at the same time running my own consulting company. Following a friend's request to win a car franchise, no one else had - this I did, going to Russia and obtaining the Moskvitch to show I could do it. And so it goes on.

The point of this is that because of my start in life through necessity, most of my major achievements involved having to think outside that box. This meant really looking at a problem, ignoring the box, and defining what a desirable solution would be. The important thing here is that it involves people at both ends, on the one side and the people asking you to achieve something which could be either the owners or the managers which are often not the same. Then looking at the results and who they should be directed to. Achieving a balance here becomes complicated because owners will want to maximise their returns which might not match what managers might want, yet again, the important point is getting that balance right, as we recently saw with a Qantas CEO having bonus packages reduced.

Anyway, as with the bear always having to look at the challenge perhaps offered on the other side of the mountain, for me, that has been what life is all about. Consequently, should anyone have any commercial problems on which they need advice, I am always available to offer a free consultation with no strings attached unless later contracted for specific help.

P J Nelson & Co. Pty ---- [email protected]