KEY POINTS:
Over the past four-and-a-half years Ann Sherry has carved a swathe through Auckland business with her big smile, cool clothes, adventurous taste in art and books, firm opinions - and her massive salary. In any company, male or female (but especially female) Sherry's annual $3 million stands out. The only woman bank chief in New Zealand, she has often made headlines.
She has also achieved some significant milestones for Westpac which, when she arrived, was just another Australian bank. During Sherry's watch it has moved head office from Wellington to Auckland (not her initiative), introduced probably the most generous maternity leave in the country (three months on full pay for mother, father or both), is about to roll out an employees' child-care scheme, and managed the intensely bureaucratic process of taking Westpac from an Australian branch to a New Zealand incorporated bank - a process required by our Reserve Bank to combat criticisms about Australian banks creaming off New Zealanders' hard-won savings.
She has also taken some harsh criticism for her handling of the banking side of the business. The Independent Business Weekly in November, called her tenure here a "relative disaster" and although it is impossible to find an Australian analyst prepared to openly criticise her, off-the-record comment suggests most analysts "didn't think that highly of her financial performance".
What has not made the headlines is that Sherry has built her brilliant career while raising her son, Nick, now 30, who has Down syndrome.
Despite circulating rumours about her future, despite being zealously guarded by two PR managers, one of whom tapes our interview, 52-year-old Sherry is relaxed, smart and inclusive. She laughs a lot and admits her mistakes.
She also speaks candidly about Nick and the struggle she and her husband, Michael Hogan, went through after he was born. The couple, "surfing buddies since we were tiny tots" and then in their 20s, didn't want him to go into an institution as was then the norm. They also struggled with the decision about whether or not to have another baby. "We had genetic testing," explains Sherry, "and although neither of us carried any recessive genes the odds [of another compromised baby] stepped up quite a lot. In the end we decided 'why don't we just help Nick be the best he can be'."
Which, right now, means a return to Westpac Head Office, Sydney. Although Nick has a full-time job with Harris Farm fruit markets in Sydney, a girlfriend, and places in Special Olympics swim (New South Wales) and basketball teams, the minder who has lived with him while his parents have been in New Zealand has to return south. Their son needs them home.
"He's come over three or four times a year," says Sherry. "He's jumped off everything in New Zealand - the Sky Tower, the harbour bridge, done the luge in Rotorua ... " But, she adds with a smile, while he could probably get a job in Auckland, the girlfriend "is not replicable here, easily.
"You do what you do," she continues. "We made a choice very early: having a child with a disability doesn't mean you give up on your life. We've had compromises along the way but you work out what you want your life to look like - then make it happen."
All of which suggests that Sherry always imagined herself in this gracious office, the size of a small city apartment, with a view over the waterfront so close you could almost take a dip in the Sapphire Princess' swimming pool. But she never wanted to be a banker, which, as a girl, she thought was the ultimate in dull: an industry full of dreary older men in cardigans. "I'd grown up in an extended family with a medical or paramedical slant," she says. Her parents were both pharmacists in Gympie, Queensland, and she trained as a radiologist.
Next came university, marriage to Michael and the birth of Nick. Within a month Sherry was back at her lectures in politics and economics, with carrycot and her appetite for bucking against Joh Bjelke-Petersen's right-wing policies as strong as ever. A decade later, after backpacking through Africa and India with Michael and Nick, a stint working in London in industrial relations ("I got jobs for people coming out of prison"), she joined the Status of Women Department of the Prime Minister and a year after that, in 1994, took on human resources for Westpac.
Sherry soon pushed the bank into offering paid maternity leave, which resulted in the number of women returning to the bank to rise from just over 50 per cent to 94 per cent. In 2000, she was appointed chief executive of Westpac Melbourne and two years later was promoted to CEO of Westpac New Zealand. At the time, Westpac chief David Morgan called her "a great agent for change" who set an excellent example to other staff on achieving a work life balance.
Another major achievement at Westpac Melbourne suggests the kind of backbone she developed while insisting that Nick was accepted into mainstream schooling. When she arrived, the culture included company Christmas parties dominated by men who took their pants off and slipped sex toys into the Christmas present pile. "You can change a culture three ways," says Sherry. "One, behaving differently yourself. Two, addressing individuals who are icons of bad behaviour. Three, celebrating success in the new way."
She chose option two and sacked one of the ringleaders. Things changed very quickly.
Along the way Sherry collected the Order of Australia for corporate governance and diversity management and an Australian Government Centenary Medal for expanding banking services to the Aborigines of Cape York whom she helped via hundreds of Westpac staff who were dispatched to the Cape to help with things such as business plans and family budgets.
She is, says former Australian High Commissioner to New Zealand Allan Hawke, an Australian role model and a brilliant public speaker. "I remember her standing up in front of 230 of the top leadership in defence wearing a bright orange dress. She looked at them towards the end and asked: 'You work it out for yourselves. Who are they going to work for - you or me?' It smacked them right between the eyes."
By the time the New Zealand job came up, Michael, who works in public relations and communications, was happy for his wife's career taking precedence. He set up the New Zealand offices of CPR (Corporate Public Relations), she set up Westpac's new head office.
The day we meet, Sherry wears a beautifully fitting, supple, grey-on-grey pinstriped suit, large pearl-and-diamond drop earrings echoed by another, even bigger pearl on a gold chain around her neck and a small silver Westpac fern on her lapel. Although she seems to be hiding rather than flashing them, she also wears two chunky diamond rings on either side of her wedding band.
But it's the personality, the sky-blue eyes, the easy way with words that is most arresting. As Michael Moynihan, CEO of Random House and member of Sherry's bookclub says, "she has a really lively mind and has genuinely engaged in New Zealand. Over the years we've made sure we've given her the kind of things she should read - it's one of the ways you can come up to speed about a country."
Only two questions make her uncomfortable: Her immense, often quoted, pay packet and her failure to get into the mortgage wars of 2004. As she says, "I was brought up not to talk about your own money." She then points out that her $3 million is linked to the earnings of her Australian-based colleagues and is not what she's paid. "What I cost - rent, travel and superannuation come out of that" - and a third of her remuneration is in shares "which means I only get value if the shares perform well."
You mean you don't get a dividend but you do get the shares?"
"No, I don't get anything."
As for the mortgage wars, she readily admits they made a mistake. While their major competitors were cutting rates to the bone to win more customers, Westpac stood on the sidelines. At the time, Sherry admits, she did not realise just how price-sensitive the New Zealand market is. The misjudgment cost Westpac dearly. Although the policy was hastily reversed, the bank took a big drop in mortgage sales. It took several years to recover.
It is this stumble, say banking analysts, that may have upset Sherry's chances of going back to the top job at Westpac Australia when David Morgan retires at the end of the year. Indeed, one rumour suggests she was fired.
"Hah, no!" yelps Henry Ford, Westpac's general manager of consumer banking. "I haven't heard it and I wouldn't entertain it if I had. If she'd been fired she certainly wouldn't have had a leading hand in choosing the next CEO. She wouldn't have announced her departure six months before she left, she wouldn't be a significant part of the transition process - and she certainly wouldn't be going back to Westpac in Australia."
Why did Sherry take the job in New Zealand in the first place? "Plenty of challenges," she says with a gleam in her eyes. Westpac wasn't doing that well, it had issues with the regulators, was moving head office from Wellington to Auckland. She loves the idea of living and working in different countries - and her family responsibilities would have prevented her moving too far.
"There's a lot of learning, energy, excitement - though a lot of my colleagues didn't think that about New Zealand but ... " another huge laugh. And although people questioned her endlessly about the move to what they called "Starship New Zealand", she is glad she did it. "I said I loved going to the land run by women."
She leaves more women on the Westpac executive (three out of seven including her). A quarter of senior management and 60 per cent of all management are women. The bank itself has moved from being one of the two least-satisfactory banks in the country (with ANZ) to our overall favourite bank/financial provider (with ASB).
She remains on the Australian/New Zealand leadership Forum and VISA Asia Pacific, but she will "unfortunately" leave her roles with The New Zealand Institute and as chair of the Sir Peter Blake Trust which she helped set up.
Her new role with Westpac will be announced in the next couple of weeks.
However, it is Nick who dictates where, and for how long, Sherry works: where her huge energy is spent. One week at a health farm "to detox" and she will take up her responsibilities again.
"You do what you do, but it doesn't mean you give up your life."
