Between the lines: Angry shareholders put the New Zealand Dairy Group on notice.

A new-look New Zealand Dairy Group board - smaller, less encumbered by reporting duties to shareholders, dynamic, sharp and focused on making the biggest dairy company the best - will be revealed this week.

At least, that is what shareholders, and many in the industry, would like to see.

A reduction of a board grown to an unwieldy 17 directors - 16 elected farmers and one commercial appointee - should be beneficial, providing the one-time-only internal selection process has, as promised, been done on the basis of skill and expertise and not old enmity.

By the anguished tones of many shareholders who spoke out at the company's annual meeting last week, change within the company that makes up 58 per cent of the country's biggest earning industry is wanted urgently.

Having bowed to the argument that fresh elections for a board was not the best move at the moment, the shareholders could only give a warning that if performance was not to their liking they would take their ire to the ballot box in a year.

Even chairman Henry Van Der Heyden acknowledged that Dairy Group was not a happy ship. Farmers had told him they were unhappy, felt that the company had lost its way and lacked leadership.

His response was to brand the comments "rubbish" and launch into a speech most unlike any other dry review of the year gone by shareholders had ever heard.

One supplier described it as "evangelical rather than a factual report of the past year" and it certainly did seem to owe more to the bombast of US presidential hopefuls Al Gore and George W. Bush than the familiar measured tones of the NZ Institute of Directors.

Mr Van Der Heyden went for the hearts and minds of his shareholders, vowing that Dairy Group had vision, strategy, leadership and direction and - despite a perception that the promised land was taking too long to reach - had been closing on a restructuring of the entire industry with unprecedented speed.

Mega co-op or no mega co-op, "we are not making headlines but we are making good headway," he said.

The ripple of laughter that greeted his re-statement of the company's vision to be the world's best dairy company suggested shareholders are keen for even more progress.

So did a number of questions about Dairy Board moves to partner overseas companies, and one that asked whether disagreement between Dairy Group and rival Kiwi had hamstrung the board.

Discussion on the Dairy Board was out of order at the manufacturing company's meeting, said Mr Van Der Heyden.

He went on to emphasise the necessity of integrating the industry's manufacturing and marketing arms.

Clearly, his shareholders thought discussing manufacturing products but not marketing them was a nonsense.

The pack is ahead of the leader and wants action, not words.

Mr Van Der Heyden's pared-down board needs to demonstrate its new-found decision-making prowess, and fast.