Engineering the future

Don’t bet against Simon Moutter. He may be a ‘‘terrible choker’’ who gets teary at movies and occasionally even embarrasses his wife. But if the heart is sometimes worn on the sleeve, the brain of Spark NZ’s chief executive is continually engaged in an unerring engineer’s logic that sees all, remembers a great deal and cleverly balances risk and reward.

And that inquiring mind doesn’t get a lot wrong. Even when there is so much at stake.

Like now.

Spark has just secured the local rights to broadcast international hockey across various platforms; the announcement follows similar deals for English football, Formula One and even the Rugby World Cup.

It has hinted that other, even bigger, sports may be in its sights.

Jason Paris, a Moutter protege now running Vodafone NZ, has said content is a ‘‘mug’s game’’. Other commentators have questioned the move.

It’s a bold, risky strategy, they say.

But that’s why Moutter took it.

‘‘Just being the low-cost connectivity provider would have been a safer, lower risk strategy,’’ he says, ‘‘but the higher value, if you can pull it off, is to play a role in digital services.’’

It’s tempting to draw certain conclusions from Moutter’s previous role on the New Zealand Racing Board, his love of, strong interest in and ownership of racehorses, and his occasional bet.

But the potentially game-changing move into sports broadcasting is no idle flutter.

‘‘I’m not a big gambler; I’m a calculated risk-taker

. . . if you’re framing options and there’s a riskier but bolder, bigger benefit I will typically go for that, but I’ll have done a lot of work assessing it.’’

And then he’ll stare down the critics. There were many of them when Moutter and his team pursued a controversial rebranding of Telecom in 2014.

Again, the safer option would have been to stick with the old moniker, especially when the company revealed the preferred option as Spark and the backlash ignited.

‘‘All of the feedback, without exception, was ridicule; it was what a ridiculous thing to do, what a stupid name, what a waste of money, lipstick on a pig. Hundreds of thousands of people made that comment.

‘‘But we’d done the work, we knew we needed to move . . . and today it’s an extremely successful rebranding of a company and has made a huge difference for business momentum, market share gains, share price, everything.’’

It’s not the first time he’s beaten the odds and defied expectations. He’s been doing that since he was a boy growing up in some of the tougher neighbourhoods of Palmerston North.

Moutter was an ‘‘average Palmy kid’’ who played a lot of sport and did ‘‘lots of stuff outside’’; he did reasonably well at school, excelled at maths and science but was not the brainiest student.

Family was ‘‘blue collar’’. Dad worked in the toll exchange at the Post Office and then in the early days of Telecom, the business his son would later run; mum worked part-time in retail and factory jobs.

A big day in the weekend involved Moutter, his two brothers and sister piling ‘‘into Mum and Dad’s car with half the neighbours, as you did those days, 10 in the car and off to Himatangi Beach and Foxton Beach’’.

In the hard-scrabble suburbs of Highbury and Cloverlea he rubbed shoulders with ‘‘tough individuals and bullies . . . you worked for everything you got, what effort you put in always related to what you got out of it, nothing came easy, and you learnt to get on with a very wide range of people’’.

That great effort soon brought great reward. After graduating from Massey University with a Bachelor of Science and then a Masters in Engineering at Canterbury he began his first job in 1983 as an electrical engineer at New Plymouth Power Station. Just a few years later, still in his early 20s and driven by a ‘‘sense of wanting to have a better life than the tough life my parents and family had’’, he started his own company, Electrotech Consultants.

The business was successful: ‘‘My income within a couple of years in that small business was several times what I would have been able to earn if I stayed in the job I was.’’

And all without any formal qualification in business or management.

‘‘I was very much a self-learner,’’ he says. ‘‘I don’t find the leap from science and mathematics to economics particularly hard.’’

His classroom was the boardroom and the shop floor. He watched ‘‘other people and how they operate and what they do and how they talk about things and think about things.

‘‘I absorb that . . . I’ve got this stuff slotted away and over time you end up becoming more broadly capable. And I relish the opportunity to apply my mind to things that stretch me, so I’ve learned business as I’ve gone.’’

Gone he was: at 29 he was managing the power station; at 31 he was appointed chief executive of Powerco. Like business, leadership seemed to come naturally. ‘‘As far back as I can remember I was the sports team captain, the Scout leader, the house captain at school; obviously it was an attribute that was inherent in me, I didn’t necessarily seek them out, they just sort of came to me.’’

But it didn’t all come easily; effort was not always reciprocated with reward.

Having built up Powerco ‘‘through a series of acquisitions and mergers’’ to create a ‘‘larger vertically integrated business that was extremely value creating’’ he watched on helplessly as the National government of the late 1990s tore it apart through deregulation of the electricity sector.

‘‘I got the huffy with the changes in the energy game.’’ So he turned to another industry, eyeing opportunities in telecommunications, joining Telecom in what others regarded as a backward step but which the logic of the engineer calculated as an ‘‘apprenticeship’’ to bigger and better things.

That was almost 20 years ago. He worked his way up the ladder at Telecom, spent four years running Auckland Airport, before returning to the telco in 2012 as the boss.

He had unfinished business. Like Powerco, Telecom’s business had been broken up by deregulation. Moutter was part of an ‘‘old guard’’ seen by others as a handbrake on development of the rapidly growing industry.

‘‘I didn’t like that, when I left, I left with the company on the outer, offside with New Zealand, [there was] that sense of making a positive difference and to re-earn the support of New Zealanders.

‘‘That’s why I came back, and I love the tech; I’m an engineer, I’m a tech guy. I love the role we play in New Zealand, underpinning the modern economy.’’

He says that with a passion and emotion that ‘‘I’ve tried for years to stop showing up but it just does.

‘‘I’ve got a very emotional edge to me, feel very embarrassed about it.’’

It slipped the leash recently during a speech on diversity, when Moutter was forced to acknowledge his company’s failings.

‘‘There was a deep sense that I’d got it wrong and it wasn’t fair,’’ he says. ‘‘If there’s one thing growing up in Palmy teaches you, it’s about fairness . . . it made me really upset that I’d not acted on it earlier. It’s my job to be aware.’’

Others are aware that he has been leading Spark for six years; there have been rumours about the top job at Fonterra.

Moutter suggests the odds are pretty slim, not worth a punt. ‘‘When my time is up I’ll know it and it will be obvious,’’ he says.

Wherever he ends up, the odds are he’ll prove a winner.