KEY POINTS:
The philanthropist behind Auckland University's new business school has bold ideas for New Zealand's future.
Owen Glenn romps through the story of his life - the career and money, the wives and girlfriends, the race horses and yachts, the near-death experience that were all part of the ride. Then he settles down, listens to the questions and answers candidly, even when it probably won't do his reputation much good.
And last, being a big-hearted, olive-skinned, Indian-born Irish/English/French roguish Catholic, he gets upset when people attack him - as they did when he accepted a gong from the Labour Party after he donated half a million dollars to its election campaign.
Since he started the Glenn Family Foundation 27 years ago, when he had little to give away, Glenn has helped dozens of organisations and individuals. Early on it was in Macau in Southern China, working through the Caritas Catholic Association, cleaning up water and sanitation; in remote Indian villages with the French Cluny order to reverse child trafficking. He helped to establish 130 leper colonies in South China; worked with Ed Hillary's Foundation; and, most recently, donated $7.5 million to the business school.
Meanwhile, Glenn amassed a fortune estimated at $1.1 billion by the NBR Rich List (2005) on the back of OTS Logistics, a company with a turnover of US$595 ($758) million in 2007. His business is transport: moving tonnes of freight around the globe as fast and smoothly as a godwit, and he is brilliant at it.
The secret, he says is IT. He plans to double his $5 million IT budget next year.
Glenn is full of contradictions. Although he was born in New Zealand and loves it here, he is an ardent citizen of the world. His official home is in Monaco, "where you don't pay tax if you sell a company" (and his is on the market). He has a house in Chelsea, London and a newly acquired villa on Malolo Lailai island, Fiji, where he recently invited his family - two ex-wives, six children, nine grandchildren and hangers-on if they all turned up- for a holiday.
"There were 30-odd, I do it every year."
He supports the Labour Party but is critical of some of its business policies. He ranges round the stunning, half-empty, business school which bears his name, like the dominant male he is, explaining first how touched he was when they named a meeting room after his mother, Decima Glenn (she was the 10th child), who died on October 13, 2005, and then how the rest of the world is moving 10 times as fast as we are here.
Although he left Mt Roskill Grammar at 15 and became one of the most successful businessmen New Zealand has produced, he has now donated millions to a university. It all goes back, he says, to "looking with envy at the students wandering back and forth across the campus" when he was on the trolley bus on his way to a boring job at the bank, because his accountant father was too ill to support him at university.
Much later he did a course at Harvard Business School. It was nine weeks over three years plus homework, and it made him realise what he'd missed. "It was as though I had all these pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and [Harvard] allowed me to put them together."
"But to answer your question," he continues, "It's an even deeper question for New Zealand. What are you going to do with all these bright minds, 2000 of them a year? Because New Zealand hasn't got the infrastructure [to employ them] 20 per cent, like me, are overseas. And you don't do enough to encourage them back."
He points out we suffer from introverted thinking, and although "New Zealand's done well and we produce wonderful products, there are not enough of them. And frankly we're not nearly as aggressive as the Aussies."
Glenn, a member of the business school advisory board, suggests finding opportunities for global work experience. "Our finest product could be the brains of our brightest people. We could say to, say, Pfizer, 'What can we do in terms of research?' and have a condition that [graduates] represent the Auckland Business School. Then you will not lose these people . It'll also attract major companies to take out the atlas and say, 'Where is this place?"'
When he choppered to Leigh and the chair in marine science he helped establish, he was thrilled and dismayed. "The snapper were huge," he says. But when he asked what the centre had done in the last few years: "Oh we're waiting for the Government."
"Why?" he says. "They should go overseas and try and attract funds. But they're still waiting for the Government to warm up to the idea that we have products to sell [to countries like Taiwan and Japan to help them increase the production of the sea round them]."
He's talking fish farming - "instead of having these drift fishermen destroying marine life. You can see I'd be hopeless in politics!"
The other thing Glenn learned at Harvard (he lived in America for 23 years) was philanthropy. Older graduates use their "harvesting years", to help the next generation, by teaching and donating money.
The message hit home to Glenn who nearly died six months ago. "I fell over," he says. "My pulse was down to 40, they gave me too much beta block." He collapsed in LA and spent three days in hospital. After clinicians declared "nothing wrong" he landed in emergency in Hong Kong, where they diagnosed a subdural haematoma. "They put two boreholes in my head to release the pressure," he says. "I stayed there three weeks, then they told me I was free to fly. Another MRI and my head was full of blood again."
He had wanted to sail his yacht, Ubiquitous, to Valencia. Instead he was flown to London, his skull peeled back and he was in a critical condition. "I lost my speech - everything, it took me a while." Now, after a dizzy spell 10 days ago in Singapore, he is off for another MRI. Just, you understand, "to see if I'll be around for Thursday."
Soon he plans to sell the company, return to Sydney and concentrate on the Foundation. When he turns 68 next Tuesday he is hosting a bash at the Soul Bar for 130. On June 11 he has arranged to receive his New Zealand Order of Merit from the Queen at Buckingham Palace, rather than from Anand Satanyand in Wellington.
Not satisfied with the third, ninth, 12th, 14th "and second-last last year" he wants to win the Melbourne Cup. "It's only a matter of time."
Then there's the OTS Logistics 30th anniversary party. He's planning a Moroccan night for 280 complete with elephants, camels, monkeys, snake-charmers - and his all-time favourite, Neil Diamond.
"I thought I'd give myself a present. There'll be a magnificent mixture of people - a polyglot of every country in the world - and I'm encouraging them all to wear their native dress. It'll be quite a party."
