Talking Heads: When Super 12 is a great violin section

Lloyd Williams

Position: General manger, Auckland Philharmonia

Age: 52

What makes your day?

Potential audiences beating down the door or clogging the phone lines to buy tickets, and sponsors who offer to sponsor our events.

Why are you valuable to your organisation?

A question I often ask myself. I think of myself as a lubricant - oiling the really valuable parts of the organisation.

The Auckland Philharmonia is a remarkably complex company. It is owned by the 65 full-time players who make up the orchestra, supported by a Friends group, a Guild, an Endowment Trust, an Orchestral Trust and advised by a Board of Advisers which is presided over by a president. All those parts and many more sub-committees are connected by threads of various thicknesses.

I play the part of a thread.

What is your management style?

I hope it is consultative and open-door. I have to be fairly accessible with 65 bosses.

What is the work tool you can't do without?

Tool? Certainly not my computer. My most valuable resource is my administrative staff. Sixteen dedicated martyrs.

In the arts you are expected to work twice as hard for half as much - and they do. Most of them have twice the necessary qualifications to boot.

What was your biggest career break and why?

My working life has been a crazy, irrational mosaic. Student, educator, builder, property developer, musician, orchestra manager - who knows what is next?

Who was your most important mentor and why?

Rosanne Meo, without a doubt. Rosanne has been firmly welded to the orchestra since its infancy.

Her ability to make decisions and see them through has empowered others in the organisation to do the same. She has certainly given me the strength required to do this job.

What is the biggest challenge for your organisation? For the economy?

a) Funding. Because of the musician ownership, artistic achievement is very high and industrial problems simply do not occur.

b) To get people doing things again. Business says we've turned the corner - why aren't people following suit, spending money, buying tickets?

What do you do when you are not working?

Concerts, plays, ballet, opera, travel, sea fishing, good food and wine.

What skills do you wish you had?

Better skills at understanding New Zealand sport, to enable me to communicate with other chief executives. A Super 12 to me is a great first violin section.

* Lloyd Williams spoke with Susan Jennison.