A deep thinker in the corner

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Inside the enormous glass case that is the office of telecommunications company TelstraClear there are staff sitting at their desks balanced on big coloured balls. The dress code is smart casual. There are mountain bikes and an espresso machine in the lobby. You are encouraged to take a bike ride at lunchtime.

You are encouraged to take the stairs instead of the lift. There are no stairwells, so you climb to the top floor through a glass cube, through what feels like empty space. You can be seen breathing hard.

Rosemary Howard, the chief executive who leads by example, is not breathing hard. Up she goes in her red boots with stiletto heels and toes so pointed they make your own toes ache in sympathy. Up to the top floor and walkway which floats above her transparent empire, where she flashes smiles as dazzling as her diamond ring for the camera.

She likes it up here, she says. She likes to look out over Smales Farm in Takapuna and see the cows. She likes nature. She especially likes nature when it presents the opportunity for sporty things. She likes jogging and tramping and sailing and kayaking. She loves wine but doesn't drink it because she likes to feel fit and good.

She describes her management style as egalitarian. If you work for her, she would like you to feel fit and good too.

This much you quickly learn about Howard. When I phoned TelstraClear spokesman Mathew Bolland to ask for an interview with the chief executive I said that we knew a lot about Telecom head Theresa Gattung but little about Howard.

For example, I said, doing my best impersonation of a business reporter, we didn't know whether Howard had her hair done every day like Theresa Gattung. He said, he didn't think so. "I think Rosemary would be far too busy."

Was that the sound of a little, loyal miaow? CEOs don't, of course, get into cat fights. Last week Telecom and Telstra finally resolved a long-running dispute over call billing which would more accurately be called a stoush.

Howard says it is "just a coincidence" that, at this point in the history of New Zealand's telecommunications industry there happens to be two women in the same industry at the top of their game. But, yes, people do make the inevitable comparison between her and Gattung - men, mostly.

When I said, "Here's my last Theresa Gattung question", she said, grinning, "I haven't got time for that".

"If Theresa Gattung got paid $1.6 million last year, how much do you get paid?"

"Not," emphatically, "that much."

And, by the way, she doesn't get her hair done every day: "Hopefully I don't look too shambolic, but, no, I don't have a lot of time to go to beauty parlours."

On the way out of the building - we took the lift - she says, "I hope I didn't say anything uncomplimentary about Theresa. I'm hugely supportive of other women in the industry."

"Oh I was just teasing."

"Yeah," she says, "but I hope I wasn't teased." Well, not for lack of trying.

She is loath too to count the resolution of the billing row between the two companies as a victory. If she and Gattung haven't been out for a drink, it's because Howard doesn't. She prefers to call the resolution "a sensible outcome. Clear and Telecom had billing disagreements back to 1996, and that's just unproductive really".

She does hang out with other high-powered women, she says, but she won't tell me who. That would be personal.

Although she is at pains to tell me that she does, by the way, like to do absolutely nothing occasionally, it is hard to imagine catching the "fifty-ish" Howard lounging on a couch watching soaps, thinking nothing, looking shambolic.

Partly, I suspect, it's iron will (loves wine, doesn't drink) and partly her early education. Howard was born in England, and moved to Sydney with her Australian parents when she was a child. She went, as did her grandmother and mother before her and her daughter after her, to Ascham girls school, a private school known for its progressive model of teaching and for its roll call of the wealthy and influential, the Packers, the Fairfaxes and the Howards.

Despite that progressive model - students learn by what Howard calls "self-pacing" - Ascham is known for its emphasis on self-discipline. Locals set their watches by what they call Ascham Mean Time. After university, where she graduated MSc, she married John, her American architect husband. They lived in England and America before deciding to make Sydney home.

A LL that travelling accounts for Howard's curious hybridised accent, the voice of the global corporate citizen.

You could put Rosemary Howard down in a large corporation anywhere on Earth and she would colonise it. When she arrived in New Zealand last November her job was to oversee the restructuring of TelstraSaturn with Clear Communications.

Ask her the toughest thing she's done and she will say: 650 redundancies. Well, sort of. What she actually says is "rationalising". She speaks in that other language called corporate-speak. She talks about "interfaces with other people". Howard doesn't have staff. "We work together." TelstraClear offices are not open plan, they are "inter-working office accommodation".

She tells me a story about a staff member recovering from a serious illness who could "rejoin the working environment from home", and I say, "He was recovering from an illness and you had him working from home". She tells me off. "No, no. He had himself working from home." Inside the glass building it can feel a bit like being Alice through the Looking Glass, a tale updated for corporate times.

Here is Howard's philosophy of post-colonial corporations: rip the walls down. She got rid of mahogany row, and head office now exists only as a "virtual" office. Howard doesn't have an office, she has a corner. You might call it a philosopher's corner.

She is known for her pet subjects. I had been warned not to get her going on cross-Tasman business dealings. Because She Would Never Stop. This is easier said than done. She is a genius at staying on message (to employ a bit of corporate speak).

To paraphrase wildly, this particular pet subject involves her hopes for a cessation of what she calls "jostling" between the two countries. She is fond of talking about the telecommunications business as a "21st- century railway". To stop a train you sometimes have to resort to throwing a crazy question on the track. Is she, I ask, a secret agent for the Australian Government? "No." Is she related to John Howard? "No." She laughs loudly and quickly - she does everything, including talking, quickly - and in the next breath says, "I guess if I'm a secret agent for anything it's for a thing called Australasia ... "

I had been told Howard was writing a philosophy book. She is described, in her biography notes, as "a keen amateur philosopher". Her book will be about "choices and values. I think it's a philosophy of enablement".

It's a self-help book, then? "I hope it will have that effect but it isn't meant to be a happy-happy self-help book. It's meant to be a more thoughtful one. Most philosophy is written to be beyond the reach of people; it's too academically written. This is trying to be more accessible."

She says she "makes time" to write, that she has never felt "constrained" by anything. She certainly gives every appearance of perfect restraint.

She has no idea if she has ever done anything crazy. If she has, she says, it wouldn't have been crazy because if she did anything she would have done it because she believed in doing it therefore it wouldn't have been crazy. Or something like that. I've never been very good at philosophy.