REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE PRICE WATERHOUSE COOPER/INSTITUTE OF DIRECTORS EVENT
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE TO THE PRICE WATERHOUSE COOPER/INSTITUTE OF DIRECTORS ‘BUSINESS LEADERSHIP IN IRELAND OF TODAY’
Dia dhíbh a chairde, it is a great pleasure to be here this evening. I’d particularly like to thank Rónán Murphy of Price Waterhouse Cooper and Ann Riordan of the Institute of Directors for the kind invitation to join you here today.
You certainly didn’t pick an easy time to talk about business leadership in Ireland but maybe you chose the right time, for business leadership is currently being interrogated and is interrogating itself in an unfamiliar language that is more searching and censorious than it is affirming and reassuring. A sensible woman once said that the only safe ship in a storm is leadership and we are surely in a severe economic storm. This is when we discover the skills, wisdom and resilience of those who are out front and their preparedness for this spell of bad weather. Some jobs diligently prepare people for the very worst eventualities even though the odds of them happening are minimal. That is how Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who retired yesterday, was able to safely land an Airbus A320 on the Hudson river after it flew into a flock of geese on takeoff. Among the many questions he was asked after the so-called Miracle on the Hudson was whether he prayed in the thirty seconds he had to decide on a course of action now that his plane had no functioning engine. His reply was interesting. He said, “No, I hoped the people down the back were doing that.” In other words he was utterly focussed on bringing every bit of nerve, creativity and skill to bear on the worst and most potentially devastating moment in his flying career.
There are a lot of people down the back in Ireland praying that those crewing our economic ship have just such a reservoir of nerve, ingenuity and skill to bring Ireland safely through this very exacting time of trial. The middle of a storm would be a bad time to discover that the ship has only a fair-weather crew. What it needs are people who have a depth of experience and distilled wisdom and the courage to give leadership. Napoleon memorably said that “a leader is a dealer in hope.” But as his subsequent career marooned in ignominy on Saint Helena proved, hope has to be soundly rooted. Mock bravado won’t do. Pollyanna and Micawber won’t do either. The hope offered has to be credible. The leadership offered has to be credible.
A few short years ago our business leadership was in strong self-congratulatory mode, but those giddy highs of the Celtic Tiger era rapidly gave way to the chastening lows of a national and global recession whose baleful effects were soberingly swift. We have had to change register very dramatically and every single thing we do in this hole that is largely of our own making will impact significantly on the next chapter in the story of Ireland. Will it be a story of a remarkable bounce back from adversity? I believe it can be and will be if we see Ireland as the ship in which we all sail and not as a scattered convoy. Our business leaders are a very important part of the ship’s crew. For you are key to developing a successful, wealth-creating, sustainable, equitable economy that translates into jobs and opportunities and hope for Ireland’s citizens.
Your leadership is a crucial enabler of recovery. Research has shown that CEO leadership style has a direct impact on the profitability of an enterprise. It also tells us that the more uncertain the environment, the more important the leader. Nothing shapes an organisation’s culture more than the ‘visible behaviour’ of its leaders. Your positive influence is especially crucial at a time when many are paralysed by negativity. It’s a mood that is fully understandable, given what we now know of unacceptable and reckless business practices in some quarters. However rather than conducing to a draining fatalism, it should provoke an energising determination within the business sector to rapidly restore trust and get momentum back into our economy.
Finding the energy to be the generators of momentum in this crisis is, I know, far from easy, for the business environment is currently very cruel. But everything is relative. We could be the generation facing civil war, or either of two world wars, we could be the generation that faced economic isolation, or mass emigration, or high infant mortality, or that couldn’t afford universal primary education or that depended on remittances from its scattered children. We are the generation that benefitted from free first, second and third level education, from good health care, from membership of the European Union, from the growth of human rights and democracy. We are the generation which turned history on its head by ending widespread endemic poverty, reversing the tide of mass emigration, attracting massive inward investment especially in the high tech sector, creating an indigenous entrepreneurial sector, a multi-cultural Ireland and constructing a peace which had eluded every other generation. We were racing two steps forward rewriting Irish history at a feverish pace when we were shoved unceremoniously one step backwards. Not three steps backwards, not back to Ireland of the ceann faoi, but one step backwards to that new can-do Ireland which had the confidence that comes from having greatly improved its quality of life, the wisdom that comes from having made mistakes and learnt from them and the determination that comes from wanting to be defined by how we got out of this mess and not how we got into it.
We know that things will have to change. We have to become competitive again, we have to be ideas driven, knowledge and innovation driven, not greed driven but rather people centred. Our economy has to be greener, more sustainable, infrastructurally advanced, technologically sophisticated, entrepreneurial, problem-solving not problem generating, capable of upping our game globally and upping our quality of life locally. It’s a big ask but it’s the only ask we can make of ourselves and of the coming generation.
The young people in our schools and colleges have grown up during the heady days of super-confidence and linear growth. They anticipated fair weather ahead and have been ill-prepared for the adversity they are facing. Every generation before them knew little else except adversity. Every generation before them faced into it and faced it down as best they could. There are legions out there who like Captain Sullenberger have in their deepest being the experience and the courage to cope, to adapt and innovate when things go badly wrong. We are not as badly prepared as we fancy. Whatismore, we have many pluses and potentials that are yet to be fully harvested, most notably in a youthful, well-educated and ambitious population, a strong presence in the global marketplace and an historic peace with its growing scope for new partnerships. Our government has taken strong action and our people have taken considerable personal financial pain to help stabilise our national finances. Notwithstanding these sacrifices, our traditional resource of community and social solidarity remains as strong as ever.
If ever there was a time for sound strategic leadership and for excellence in management, it is now as we work to develop the smart economy and the sensible competitively priced economy and to ensure that Ireland is optimally placed to benefit from the global upturn. It is important to remember that not all the news is bad – falling costs make our businesses more competitive, recent months have seen an increase in our export orders, productivity is growing and we remain one of the easiest countries in the world in which to do business. High calibre management and leadership are the key skills that will bring companies through the current economic difficulties, and equally importantly, will prepare companies to take advantage of the new opportunities which will emerge.
As strategists, people who look to the future, one of your key concerns has to be the next generation of business leaders. It has been said that leaders don’t create followers; they create more leaders. We have suffered from a culture of unquestioning followers, an altogether different phenomenon from intelligent communal solidarity and that has huge implications for the next generation of leaders and for all here this evening, for you are uniquely placed to ensure measuredness, integrity and ethics are embedded deep within our business culture and its future ambassadors. There is truth in the saying that if you want the crowd to follow you, don’t follow the crowd. Leaders have to be prepared to maintain lonely vigils, to be sole voices, to be misunderstood, to be tough enough to stand up to the second guessers, carpetbaggers, the corrupt and the armchair experts.
At a time when we are confronted with the daily litany of business failures, it is worth being reminded by you that the vast majority of our businesses are successes, that they are holding on through hard times by their ingenuity, resourcefulness and adaptability and that they are every day showing the leadership that is already guiding us through the storm to calmer waters. When we have weathered this storm as we will and when we have defied the odds to become the most talked-about small successful nation again for all the right reasons, you will be able to tell your children that you were among the people who stepped up and did their best, not among the people who sat back and sneered cynically at those who tried to make things better.
I wish you well with this and I hope that this evening’s event is an opportunity to combine your collective wisdom to help chart our course to recovery. I congratulate all those involved in bringing this event together. Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.