From CEO to sole trader
Air New Zealand is just one business focus for Tony Carter, writes John Anthony.
DESPITE NEVER using his engineering degree, Tony Carter says the discipline he learnt from a university education has been incredibly useful.
For nearly two decades, Carter worked as chief executive and managing director at Foodstuffs companies – New Zealand’s largest retail organisation.
He has extensive retail experience, having joined Foodstuffs in 1994, and before that, owning and operating a Mitre 10 hardware store. He was also a director and later chairman of Mitre 10 New Zealand.
He now divides his time between being chairman of Air New Zealand, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and the Blues super rugby franchise, as well as being a director of Fletcher Building and ANZ Bank New Zealand.
Carter graduated from the University of Canterbury with a bachelor in engineering with honours and, despite never practising as an engineer, believed his university training had helped his career.
‘‘I think the engineering discipline has been incredibly useful for me in terms of thinking quite logically,’’ Carter said.
He also graduated from Loughborough University of Technology in the United Kingdom with a master of philosophy degree, and believed the discipline he learnt from gaining a university education had helped shaped his career, he said.
‘‘Any university training is useful basically in helping you think in a logical and coherent way.
‘‘The exact discipline that you are trained in is less important than the fact that you have been trained.’’
After retiring in 2010 and stepping back from the day to day running of a company, Carter wanted to be more involved in business governance, he said.
‘‘I was very fortunate to be appointed to some really good boards and equally fortunate to be asked to chair a couple of them.’’
Having been both a chief executive reporting to a board and a chairman having the chief executive report to the board, Carter has a good understanding of how the interface between a company’s board and management should work.
The key role of the chair was to manage the relationship between the board and the management, he said.
As chairman, it was also his role to mentor and guide the chief executive while managing and coordinating the activities of the board, he said.
Leadership was an essential quality needed from a chairman as was the ability to listen and understand all sides of an argument.
Chairs also needed to ‘‘be a bit courageous’’ and make some hard calls, he said
All of those traits were developed through
‘I think the engineering discipline has been incredibly useful for me in terms of thinking quite logically.’
experience, he said.
‘‘You do learn from your mistakes and if you haven’t made mistakes you’re not trying hard enough.’’
Carter said Air New Zealand took up about a third of his time and Fisher Paykel Healthcare slightly less then that.
Both companies have been star performers for shareholders in recent years.
Fisher and Paykel Healthcare shares soaring 70 per cent in the