And it's how the big phone company plans to make the $150 million it just spent for 4G spectrum (for the latest smartphones) pay off. That's the infrastructure business, he says - you build massive networks, put all the money up front, in the ground or across oceans and then the whole job is to encourage use. The trick is to appeal to everyone; have a $10 a month product for a teenager and a $100 a month one for the sophisticated user and everything in between.
He's most comfortable talking shop (though his is an impressive story about gritty neighbourhoods and chip shops, which we will get to) and chats speedily whenever he can steer the conversation that way. Naturally, he wants Telecom to again be a great company that's relevant to the country, not just shareholders. It's been a busy couple of weeks of announcements. A music deal with Spotify, $20 million to be spent launching a new Netflix-style television service called ShowmeTV, and a name change from Telecom to Spark.
Traditionalists and the likes of smallish electrical companies already using the name groaned and grumbled. Moutter said that's to be expected. Acceptance would come. The universe of ownable straightforward words is small and they've had to acquire a few rights.
Did some image company make a fortune coming up with the name?
Nope. Turns out it was an inside job but he'd asked and no one seemed to know the who and how of it. Spark became company speak for the logo created in 2009 and it just rose to the top of name options. So, it cost hardly any money. It came to make perfect sense because Telecom means phones, landlines. "But our world, our business is very different now - broadband, mobile, applications, data, TV, cloud IT services. How would you ever make that name mean something different?"
He said, it's not just them. The world leader in mobile phones is called Horizon, France Telecom is now Orange, the UK's biggest mobile phone operator is O2.
Deutsche Telekom?
Bit different, he said. No one calls his company by its full name, Telecom New Zealand. The Telecom name came with corporatisation 28 years ago. Before that it was the New Zealand Post Office, and before that P&T, Post and Telegraph.
His father worked for the Post Office. Both his father and mother were hard workers who took on more than one job to reach savings goals. He grew up in the Palmerston North suburb of Highbury, cut his teeth scrubbing deep fryers in the town's fish 'n chippy, Captain Delicious, a job that helped pay his way through the first of three degrees (physics and engineering). He learned young about the value of graft. If his parents couldn't afford something, they made it or took second jobs.
"Dad mowed lawns at the weekends, Mum laboured in factories."
Consequently, he said, he never felt his options were limited.
A defining moment came towards the end of his physics degree when a lecturer saw potential and steered Moutter towards engineering. The lecturer was a bit special. Later on he became famous as Sir Paul Callaghan, the 2011 New Zealander of the Year and one of the most influential of the country's scientists for his enthusiastic conviction that New Zealand could do much better if we could combine science, innovation and export-focused entrepreneurship.
It's quite a trajectory from chip vat scrubber to the head of our biggest telco. There are pinch-me moments such as seeing himself on mainstream television in China where he'd gone to publicise new flights from Guangzhou to Auckland, or chatting for a couple of hours about technology with Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
"I never saw myself doing anything like that growing up in Palmy," he texted his parents from China when he was airport boss. His Mum messaged back: "We did, son".
He told that story a couple of years ago at a Massey University ceremony for business graduates, point being that anything is possible. Within two years of leaving university he started his own business which grew to employ 20 people, by 29 he was manager of a major power station, in his 30s he built the company known as Powerco through mergers and takeovers, in his 40s he was chief operating officer of Telecom, by 50 he ran Auckland Airport, one of the country's biggest listed companies. Now, aged 53, he heads Telecom. He's paid $1.35 million plus performance incentives.
He's a pretty good combination, then, of ambition, determination and confidence but is happy to admit to being a nervous public speaker, something he said practice hadn't much helped. And, he's not one for the social pages. He thinks he's appeared once in a visitor-from-Hawkes Bay support role, probably with former Telecom boss Theresa Gattung who would have been the photographer's target.
These days he's known where it matters, which he reckons took some getting used to.
"Sometimes I still walk into things without realising others would view me as more important than I see myself."
When Julia Gillard arrived on her first visit as Australia's Premier, Moutter, who was in the airport job, was asked by the Prime Minister's office to get over to the VIP terminal. Moutter took that to mean he was to make sure everything was ready for her arrival, which he did.
"John Key says, 'no no, you're coming out to the plane with me'. And then, there I am at the bottom of the steps, the Prime Minister and me!" and he laughs like the guy next door rather than the boss on the top floor.
Just when you pick him as a sober, science and evidence type who carefully plans his every step, he tells you about the fortune teller.
"I'm a guy who was never going to have more than two children, so not everything in my life is planned."
He has five, three from his first marriage and two from his current one. He tells of a palm-reader in a Hong Kong market predicting that he'd have five kids.
"So there you go. I thought he was wacko!"
The three older children all went to, or are at, university, while the second batch are seven and four. Does he tell his kids that anything is possible and nudge them along in their studies? (Welcome to the parenting section of the interview.) "Well, you hope so (but) I regard myself as a highly fallible father."
He tries, he said, to make it seem like a logical progression. He'll say, "when you go on to university", and he tells them the most important thing to him is that they do their best at school, not whether or not they top the class.
"And usually my first question is 'what's the best thing that happened at school today? I try to put the positive on it. I never say how was school? A typical Kiwi thing would be to then tell you what went wrong."
When I comment that that is good advice, he quickly says it was a tip someone once gave him. That bit of humility doesn't mean he's not driven. He raced dirt bikes until he busted his foot and will still do his damnedest, he said, to win a game of tennis even if he hadn't played for yonks.
He doesn't "over stress" or "sweat" business decisions he's made, which you might think makes him a cool customer considering Telecom is a five-billion-dollar company that employs about 8,000 and has an army of shareholders. And then he explained what sounded to me like the gambler's ethos. Of any five big moves, he said, chances are one will tank, two will go so-so and two will boom. The trick was to pull out of the poor options and double up on the winners.
We talked about New Zealand's business prospects and he mentioned he doesn't like the term Kiwi any more.
"Too much of the No8 wire, which we used to be proud of and was once good enough. I find the term Kiwi almost a way of making it okay to not be advanced or confident or ambitious. I stand for a modern, confident, ambitious New Zealand."
And so, he said, will Spark.
A recent road trip to some of the world's top businesses, confirmed to him that New Zealand wasn't missing a trick in terms of business talent.
"I realised it was just focus, ambition process and relentless execution that made them what they are, not that they were a cut above or had more brilliant insights."
Back in business mode, he was off. More ambition and investment in businesses was the way forward.
His body language loosened through the interview. He unfolded his arms and a few times laughed his head off.
And after an hour and a bit, I shook his hand warmly because it was pleasant and maybe a surprise to chat so easily to a bigwig who seemed like the (smartly attired, well-heeled) guy next door. He smiled a nice smile and said: "Don't make me look like a tosser otherwise I'll never talk to you again."
Later, I recalled what he said about doubling up on the wins and cutting the losses and I thought, surely not!
• Michele Hewitson returns next week.
