Never mind, we now had a connect, which is one of his favourite words. The PM has a "very good connect". He and God did not have a good connect. He and the previous chairman had "a very strong connect". He has a "very strong connect" with farmers. He has high EQ, which means "that you can really genuinely connect with people on an empathetic basis".
At Fonterra HQ, in Auckland, on Wednesday, he was wearing a nice, not overtly swish suit and an open-necked shirt. He represented a certain brand of CEO: Modern, reforming, not bound by process or ties. He believes in brands which he said, in all seriousness, are "living things". He has an MBA. MBAs talk like that. I said: Brands are not living things. "They are! Brands are alive." We were going to have to fail to connect on that, and a number of other matters.
I had wanted to see him because it is a bit hard to figure out what his brand is. That lack of tie? He's "accessible". Naturally? "I am."
So was that elephant, which made another appearance at Fonterra's annual meeting in Southland last week where he said that the botulism scare had been an "enormous elephant in the room" which needed to be tackled. (About which a business commentator of my acquaintance said his first thought was: "Dude, it's your elephant.")
Anyway, here we are at last, in a room with the damn elephant, a small rubber cow branded Fonterra on a desk, a strange light fitting made of glass milk bottles. This was the office of the former chairman, Sir Henry van der Heyden. I wanted to see his office so we went to look at it: "We have nothing to hide!" His office gives away as much about him as his suit. It is very tidy and there is a basket of healthy snacks. He doesn't eat butter. He eats that other stuff, the name of which he struggled to remember because his wife buys it. It was that stuff with the olive oil. If I was the CEO of Fonterra and didn't eat butter, I'd lie about it - so that people couldn't ask this question: Is butter bad for you? "I don't know! I don't think it's bad for you it's just ... I think it's more the whole calorie thing. I'm not the decision maker in the house."
He is the decision maker at Fonterra, for which he gets paid at least $3.5 million a year. He declined to help me out with how much he gets. "We don't have to talk about that, right?" Well, what did he get last year? "You know you can read it." I could, but he could save me the time (and it's not that easy to work out, beyond that $3.5 million, which is what the annual report says; there are no doubt share options and performance bonuses and so on.) "No. Ha, ha." He is accessible and transparent then, to a point. We can settle on it being A Lot. Is he worth A Lot? "Yeah. I think so ... I think what we delivered for the group and ... living through a few crises."
Of course people have asked if he should have resigned. His second-in-command Gary Romano did after an "open discussion ... between two professionals". He says the media asked him if he should go too, but nobody else did. He is obviously irritated by this question, which at a guess he thinks is stupid, but he is very good at keeping this irritation in check - mostly. I'd have thought that it would only be human to have considered himself fortunate to have kept his job, which is another reason I am not the CEO of anything. He said: "Never thought about it."
He does not take into account what people who "are not in any position to judge" think. "I leave the judgment to people who should do that and it's the board, right?"
He is Dutch which might mean, if you were to ask him what the stereotypes about the Dutch are, that he can be blunt, right? And a bit prone to putting a finger in the air and waggling it at people, autocratic in other words. He did waggle his finger at me, but only once which I thought showed remarkable restraint given what I said about his new-fangled light-reducing milk bottles. He of course thinks they are brilliant; I think they make the milk taste disgusting and refuse to buy them. We had a long wrangle about this which he decided would be resolved by him giving me five days worth of his milk, which I was to dutifully drink for five days, alongside milk which still comes in transparent bottles - after which I would be converted. But why would I drink milk I hate the taste of for five days? "Because you get something free from a Dutchman!" He said, to the photographer: "Is she always like this?" He said to his PR chap: "She likes oxidised fat!" I had the feeling he would like to have waggled his finger at me and made me drink the rotten milk. You don't get to be a CEO without coming to expect that people will do as they are told.
But he is the head of a co-operative, in which the stakeholders are farmers, so he has to, presumably, get on with farmers as well as make them money. (He seems to also get on well enough with media although he says he can be "bullish".) This getting on with farmers is a tricky act, and as he likes to say: Perception is reality. This is presumably partly why the annual meeting was held in a dairy factory warehouse this year. The props were trucks and pallets of milk powder. "The events team did a fantastic job and we went really country-style and rural." Goodness. Did they sit on hay bales? That was being silly. "No. But it's good to sit on one of your sites, with your people, rather than in these flashy town halls, or whatever. I think so." It might feel more New Zealand, perhaps. "It feels more New Zealand and it feels more Fonterra." But does it feel more him? "Yeah, I like that ... I think we are sometimes too ivory tower, far-away, distant." He is the CEO, not a farmer, so he has to be, to some extent, doesn't he? "Yeah, but the perception you read in the media: Fortress Fonterra. I don't really like that. It's not a fortress. We are the number one company of the country and we have a shared responsibility for this country. So we should be accessible."
That could sound like just talk and what the CEO of Fonterra should be saying but - despite the odd outbreak of finger-wagging, and those national characteristics and if you can get past all of the MBA talk - he probably is comparatively accessible.
He's young, for one thing; he's 49. He's the "number one" child of three (he has two sisters; one in HR, the other is a social worker.) His father was a school teacher, his mother a nurse. There was very little money when he was growing up in the Netherlands. He got his first degree in food technology but he didn't want to be stuck in a lab, wearing a white coat, so he got a loan from the bank to do his MBA. He worked in many places around the world, including Peru where he and his wife, a nurse, adopted their third child, and only daughter; they wanted a fourth, an African baby but it proved too complicated.
His family are left-wing Catholics. He is still left-wing but no longer a Catholic although he believes in something "bigger than us", he's not sure what. When the family arrived in the country in 2011, they rented a house in Remuera, but it wasn't his style. They now rent in Herne Bay which he says is more arty and "more me" and "what's the word?" He meant Bohemian? They live in Cremorne St, where the average house price is more than $5 million, so it is a fairly ritzy sort of bohemia.
He is a former head-banger who had long hair and who still likes Metallica and Black Sabbath and he sometimes pops down to the King's Arms to listen to bands. This was difficult to imagine. What on earth did he wear? "Oh, I am not acting like an 18-year-old. Just jeans and a black shirt."
He has never been drunk and has certainly never taken drugs. Of course he hasn't. He finds the idea of ever being out of control unimaginable, if not offensive.
He says money has not changed him. "No, money has not changed me and my values. It has not changed Theo." It goes without saying that he doesn't splash all of those millions about. He invests his money wisely in shares, mostly, and surely I do too? Er, no. He has a yacht, but he shares it with a mate. His second son wants to be a farmer. He could buy him a lovely big farm. He might, he said, buy himself a lovely big farm and his boy could work on it. He is very tickled with the idea of himself as a stingy Dutchman.
Is he really? Who knows. What he certainly is - high EQ and a leading role in a fiasco notwithstanding - is as tough as the hide on that old elephant in the picture he gave me.
