Get Carter

The recently retired head of Titan Cranes has been in demand for many years as a high-level administrator. And it’s not over yet.   BY GAVIN RILEY

At the age of 64 and in a restless era characterised by social mobility, John Carter belongs to an increasingly rare species. He still lives in the area where he was born, spent nearly 40 years working for one company, and his entire adult life has been marked by service to others – much of it at a high level.

Carter is known in the construction industry as the long-term general manager of Titan Cranes, a position he recently relinquished prematurely. He is equally well known for his work on behalf of the crane industry. He helped his Titan boss Max Whiley found the Power Crane Association in 1975, served as its president from 1983-85 and 1994-97, and was made a life member in 1999.

He says the achievements of the Crane Association of NZ (as the PCA was renamed last year) are immense – “being recognised by government officials as the channel for all crane-related issues; crane operator training; significant membership growth particularly in recent years; the crane safety manual, recognised around the world as one of the best publications of its kind; and a uniting of the industry on an annual basis to discuss areas of common concern, to name a few. 

“I’ve formed some great friendships through the association, as no doubt others also have, and I’ve seen people grow in confidence and stature solely through being members of the Crane Association.”

Despite this fervour, there has been much more to Carter’s life than cranes.

Born in Lower Hutt, he attended St Bernard’s College, a Marist Brothers school, where he says he not only received a good education but learned the meaning of discipline, timeliness and Christian values.

At school he played rugby, softball, cricket and was an outstanding athlete, representing the Wellington centre in sprints and hurdles and placing in the latter event at the national junior championships.

After leaving college he enjoyed club rugby and played on the wing for the Wellington senior second division representative team.

Persistent injuries ended his sporting career at the age of only 22 (though he was later a member of the Mitchell Park squash team that won the national C grade championship).

However, by that time Carter was already channelling his energies into what he describes as “the world of committees”.

He had no sooner left school than he was elected secretary of the newly established St Bernard’s College Old Boys’ Association. Much later, as a parent, he was a member of the college’s board of governors/board of trustees for 10 years and was there when “tomorrow’s schools” was launched.

During one of his rugby-injury breaks he also became secretary of the newly formed Wellington Rugby Supporters’ Club. That led him into taking on the role of Leo the Lion, the Wellington team mascot, at a time when the staid and very amateur rugby union did not want a bar of such antics on their revered Athletic Park.

“I certainly had some fun around some of the country’s rugby grounds disguised in that outfit,” Carter recalls.

In 1980 his life gained an extra dimension when he took up bowls. Though he plays at Wellington premier division level for the Hutt club and has reached the last eight and beyond in a number of Wellington centre events, it is as an administrator that he has really made his mark.

Starting at club then moving up to centre-level administration, he became the first president of the Bowls Wellington Centre, formed when the men’s and women’s organisations merged. In 2006 he was made a life member and has also had stints as manager and selector of the senior men’s representative teams.

For a number of years he was the Bowls NZ councillor for Wellington, which culminated in his being elected Bowls NZ president for a two-year term, during which he attended both the men’s and women’s world championships in the UK in 2004. He was subsequently elected to the board of Bowls NZ and has been chairman since September 2006.

He is also a director of the company set up to run the recently held world men’s and women’s bowls championships (World Bowls 2008) in Christchurch, as well as being president of his club.

“Over the years I found bowls to be a great diversion from work, as once out on the green there was no time to ponder the problems back in the office,” Carter says.

He doubtless needed the comfort of that diversion recently when, following the death of founder Max Whiley in mid-2007, the Titan organisation decided to sell Titan Cranes and he parted company with the group that had employed him for nearly four decades.

“I certainly expected to work through to at least age 65 with Titan and maybe beyond, so it was with a degree of sadness and maybe a little anger that I departed prematurely under the guise of ‘early retirement’,” Carter says.

“Having now had time to reflect on life after Titan, I’m certainly at ease and surprisingly have not missed going to work at all.”

Carter never planned a career in the crane industry. His first job was in the Wellington office of the national public accountancy firm, Watkins Hull Wheeler and Johnston, now known as Deloitte after a number of mergers and name changes. The partner who was his immediate boss, David Kay, assumed responsibility for the Titan Plant Services account in 1967 (and eventually became a Titan director, a position from which he retired in 2006).

Consequently, Carter himself became progressively involved with the then fledgling company and in 1968 suggested to Whiley that Titan needed a full-time accountant and that he was the man for the job. Despite opposition from chairman Bob Burnett, who believed all accounting work should be left in the hands of a public accountant, Carter was taken on – and 10 years later Burnett admitted he’d been wrong.

Carter was appointed company secretary in 1976 and to the Titan board as an executive director in 1985 (where he remained till board restructuring in 1998). In 1987 he was made general manager of Titan Cranes.

“I had a number of titles over the years – accountant, company secretary, assistant to the managing director, general manager among them,” Carter explains.

“Although I was employed as the accountant, in a small developing organisation prone to employing only a minimum of people, I got to become something of a jack of all trades and I ended up on a pretty steep learning curve.”

Under his leadership, Titan Cranes enjoyed steady growth, including several company acquisitions, and eventually owned some $25 million worth of cranes and employed 90-100 staff. Particularly lucrative and exciting for the company were the Think Big projects in the early to mid 1980s, especially the Taranaki synthetic fuels plant at Motunui.

“A significant factor in latter years was that, in the main, Max Whiley left me alone to run the crane company as I saw fit, and I ran it as if it was my own company, aided by some very good staff over the years, in particular my two ‘lieutenants’, Gordon Stone and Russell Richardson,” Carter says.

“I lasted almost 40 years working for Max so that suggests there was a pretty good rapport between us. I believe the Christian values we shared was probably a factor.

“However, at times Max was not the easiest of men to work for. He had a real thing about ‘bean counters’, of which I was one, and he liked to remind me of this when it suited him, but he would temper this on most occasions by telling me I was different from most.  

“Max always wanted to argue a subject, no matter what, prior to coming to a decision, even if I and my fellow workers considered the decision to be an open-and-shut case, and this at times became very frustrating, particularly when the odd business opportunity or two was lost as a result. 

“It has been said of Max that there were only two ways of doing things – Max’s way or the wrong way.  Time also meant nothing to Max and he frequently expected staff to stay on at night either to discuss an issue he had not made time for earlier in the day or just simply to keep him company.    

“I learned to keep my distance and would sometimes go several days without making contact with Max despite the fact he was virtually in the next office, which for me was a bit of a survival technique. 

“Max, however, always had to have the last say when it came to purchasing anything with wheels and this was very frustrating to the Titan Cranes management team when he would purchase in particular ‘bargain’ cranes against the wishes of the team.

“While we generally made the cranes work, these bargain-crane purchases in my opinion eventually became counter productive and resulted in Titan Cranes over the past couple of years being knocked off its perch as New Zealand’s premier crane-hire company due to not purchasing new-generation cranes like our competitors.

“Although some of this might sound critical of Max, I had the utmost respect for what he had achieved, and despite the many frustrations he continually won his staff over, I guess, by his sheer presence. I was also very appreciative of the freedom and confidence he gave me to manage the crane company.

“Max was a very generous person, especially with his time and he was the epitome of the ‘open door’ policy, never refusing anybody who wished to speak with him regardless of what he was doing at the time.”

When Titan turned 40 in 2005, Carter organised a series of celebrations round the country and produced a potted history of the organisation, aware that his ailing boss was unlikely to see the company’s 50th birthday. And when Whiley died in the early hours of the second Saturday in June last year, Carter spent much of that weekend phoning the news to people he believed needed to know.

“It was a job which had to be done,” he says simply. “Despite my criticisms and frustrations with Max, I was loyal to him. He had a disarming nature about him which always won me back over in the end.”

Carter will occupy his retirement with his beloved bowls and writing a history of the crane industry in this country for the Crane Association of New Zealand. He also intends to devote more time to his family – partner Adrienne, two adult sons and a daughter, and four grandchildren (with a fifth expected this month).

Perhaps surprisingly, if he could have his time over again he might choose a career quite different from the one he had.

“Sport has featured rather prominently in my life and there are now numerous opportunities to be employed in the wider sports industry – something that was never the case when I left college,” he says.

“Going down this track would have to be a consideration if I was starting all over again.”