Fine to be liked but respect's better

At high school she told her principal how better to organise prizegiving. Today she is at the helm of one of New Zealand's top firms. Theresa Gattung, Telecom CEO, says "sometimes just being me takes quite a lot of courage".

Body1: WHEN Theresa Gattung, chief executive of Telecom, went back to her old school, McKillop College in Rotorua, to talk to the seventh-form girls about success, a friend advised her to think of her 17-year-old self.

That way, the 40-year-old Gattung was told, the girls would be able to relate to her as she was then - rather than the grown-up, scary CEO she is today.

In truth, it doesn't take much to imagine the bubbling Gattung in her smart, black Adrienne Winkelman suit, with her smart CV and her corporate smarts, as the 17-year-old she once was. It is easy to picture her wobbling along gaily on her old bike, strawberry blond hair streaming behind her, brain ticking over summing up the ways in which the principal had failed to plan the perfect prizegiving.

The teachers at McKillop were, by Gattung's admission, not universally enamoured of their undoubtedly bright student. She has fond memories of the school "because women ran things", but "I got on with some of them and some of them didn't like me at all".

She still speaks in a girly, breathless voice. And boy, can she talk. She tells me that at school she discovered she was "only good at a few things. I've had to make the most of things. I'm quite good at talking. I'm very disciplined. I'm quite determined. I'm not very rhythmic."

Hang on a minute. Quite good at talking? She is a pathological talker. She could talk for her country.

She laughs almost as much as she talks. She has a peculiar laugh, like the bark of an excited puppy. She says her staff sometimes hear her laughing in her office and come in to see what's wrong.

She says she laughs at herself a lot. You could certainly not accuse her of being precious. She tells me, laughing, that her partner, John Savage, got straight As for his recently completed photography course, except for his portraiture portfolio. He got a B because, said his tutor, the model's skin wasn't the greatest. Gattung was the model.

She can hardly complain about other people being outspoken. Because she really did tell the principal she thought the prizegiving wasn't being organised properly. "I really wanted to say, 'Look, it could be done so much better.' So I told her. She didn't like it very much."

Gattung says she wasn't the sort of girl who talked back - feel free to put her in the goody-goody basket, she says - but "I was and still can be at times insensitive".

IN 1979 she was dux: a mark of academic excellence. She was not head girl: a role voted for by the sixth and seventh-formers.

This would not have bothered Gattung. Then, as now, it's the marks that count, not the popularity contest.

In her first year as CEO, she told an employee who asked a critical question at a sales conference that "that was a career-limiting question". She looks a little taken aback to be reminded of her scariness. "It was firmly tongue in cheek." Although, she concedes, "It wasn't clear to everyone who didn't know me."

She prefers to answer a question about being liked with this: "I think it's important not to be disliked by Telecom people. ButI think it's probably most important tobe respected, and for people to feel theyhave confidence in you."

Gattung's confidence, you might imagine, has taken a bit of a knock lately. In late 2002 the CEO was described as "embattled". And in mid-January Herald columnist Brian Gaynor gave her the sort of report card she would never have carried home from school. He wrote: "Her position is under serious threat unless the company's performance improves substantially." He gave her a mark of five out for 15 for performance.

"It's horrible. I mean that was the end of my holiday ... " But telcos worldwide are having a bad time, she says. Her determined chin goes up: "And Telecom was the second-best-performing telco in the world last year. As reported in the Herald."

When you're a grown-up, you get to decide which marks matter.

The day Gaynor's column appeared "I still went on to have a wonderful day". She went gliding for the first time with her partner.

She's not scared of much. She had a bad fall from a horse five years ago. She got back on - "but not that horse."

What does frighten her? "You know, sometimes just being me takes quite a lot of courage."

When she was 20 "I think a lot of people were scared of me - but I never realised it".

THE difference between the tough CEO and the private Theresa Gattung is not great, she says. Except for this: "Sometimes I am conscious that the CEO should not talk as fast." Now I think she was talking to me as CEO - although she has certainly offered much more about her personal life and her early life than most CEOs - and I can't imagine how she could talk any faster. On the tape she sounds as if she has been recorded with the fast speed button on.

That's the way she lives. She has always been impatient (she thinks she's got a bit better since she turned 40). She has always wanted it all, as fast as possible.

When she was in her 20s she was working fulltime and studying fulltime for her law degree - and she got very sick. She had chronic back pain and chronic toothache. She was in pain for a year. Her toothache was undiagnosed even after having several teeth pulled and root-canal work done. Finally, she saw the head of dental surgery at Wellington Hospital. "He tried to tell me it was triggered by stress."

Most people would have been relieved to at last have a diagnosis. Gattung "didn't want to believe him. Because I was determined that I was going to forge this marvellous career and I was going to finish my law degree and I was going to finish it all in record time."

She did. Of course, she did. But not without making some changes to her life. She swims every day, whether she's in Auckland, Wellington or Sydney. She gets a weekly massage. She rides her horse, called Pride - "which comes before a fall. I didn't name it." For fun she buys clothes and art and racehorses.

SHE thinks she's now got shares - "a nose of one, the tail of another" - in five nags. Bramble Rose, raced by a syndicate which includes Gattung, Paul Holmes and Mark Todd, won the New Zealand Oaks in January. The same day, another horse she part-owned had to be put down after a race. Owning racehorses is, she says "a metaphor for life. It's a marathon, not a sprint, and you never know what's going to happen [or] when."

She won't tell me how many more horse's noses she invested in at the recent Karaka sales. She earns, including her stock options, $1.6 million a year. She squirrels a lot away. The shelf on which the working life of a CEO perches is precarious.

Ambitious people are partly born, partly made, she believes. She is the eldest girl of four - like Helen Clark, she points out. Her working-class English parents came to New Zealand to give their then unborn children a better life. Her father, Rotorua's town planner, invested in property. Her mother made souvenirs which Gattung sold around hotels from the age of 15. Her parents retired to Ohope when her father was 48.

It is tempting to suppose that they were able to do so from the proceeds of the souvenirs a young Theresa Gattung talked the tourists into buying.