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David Palmer talks to Brian Souness on the eve of his joining engineering consultancy Beca after a decade at the helm of the country’s most mature engineering cluster group.
He was with British Gas when in 1988 the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster struck, killing 165 of the 226 men aboard. “That changed the industry,” he says. “In fact it changed all industries. Certainly that’s when my passion for workplace health and safety began. Although the standards for the petroleum industry in New Zealand have historically been high, I was a bit concerned when I came here, to be honest, regarding Kiwi health and safety culture. The ‘she’ll be right’ attitude was a little too prevalent.” Used the right way it’s a great asset, he adds, but it can be dangerous, especially in industries like oil and gas. “Thankfully things have improved a great deal since then.” Souness is particularly proud of the role Engineering Taranaki has played in this improvement, particularly through the collaborative health and safety centre at Waiwhakaiho and the Taranaki Industries CEO forum. The Engineering Taranaki Consortium was formed in 2000 with Souness appointed its first chief executive, and was initiated in 1999 when Venture Taranaki began approaching engineering companies to gauge interest in forming an engineering cluster. Gaining positive feedback, the agency whittled down the almost 60 organisations it had originally approached to a dozen that showed a flexible and cooperative mindset to work as one for the good of the local, project-driven, economy. Souness first visited Taranaki in 1997 while on holiday to visit a cousin who was working on the Maui project. While he tends to refer to his new home as “out here”, he says he fell in love with the country the moment he arrived. “I really took to the place. I spoke to a few people, and I thought, well, I could live here – especially in New Plymouth, since with my background in oil and gas it was an obvious place for me to work. I was interviewed for a couple of positions before I flew back home to work. Then a call came offering me a job.” Souness with his wife and son had no trouble fitting in to the new environs. “I think the Scottish and Kiwi psyches are very similar. It’s easy to get on with people here, and I find a comfort in doing business with Kiwis.” The family lives on a three-acre lifestyle block outside New Plymouth, and Souness still says he almost has to pinch himself sometimes to confirm it isn’t a dream. “It’s a fantastic lifestyle. My own land, some sheep, a rural setting – yet it allows me to get to work eight minutes after I jump in the car. When I moved here I didn’t know the front end of a sheep from the back end – in fact, I still don’t. But it’s my escape.” That and a game of golf, when he has the time. Souness has become Kiwified enough to feel comfortable going to work in an open-necked shirt, though admits that he reverts to a more pukka suit and tie at any prospect of high-powered meetings. During his first three years here he worked as a business services manager with an electrical engineering company, but the job of Engineering Taranaki’s first chief was the big break. “It was great; it was more or less a blank page. ‘Well, Brian, what are you going to do with this?’” A decade later Engineering Taranaki is still going strong. Of the eleven companies in the cluster, eight have been members from day one. “The reason why it has kept going – because a lot of clusters die off – is partly the desire of the member companies. But more importantly, we always took a view in the consortium that every decision was on a commercial basis – it had to generate revenue.” Souness took what some might view as a negative aspect and pushed the benefits of Taranaki’s provincial society. Yes, the provinces can be insular and parochial, he agrees, but their people are loyal, they know how to work together, and like a small nation making its way in a big world, they learn how to make limited resources work to best effect. “The guys running the companies started off as tradesmen. They’ve realised helping each other is a good way to grow their own business,” he says. “I’ve often been asked, what are the tangible benefits of being in a cluster? Actually, it’s the intangibles that are the biggest win. There’s a comradeship that develops – the guys often work with each other outside the cluster. They get more relaxed; they share market intelligence.” But it’s not always chummy. “A lot of the reason why cluster groups don’t move forward is that they don’t take a step back and see what’s needed to pre-empt issues that inevitably come up. You’ll always get disagreement around the table, but you can talk people through it. I used to refer to it sometimes as like herding cats. But if there are structures in place, and a code of conduct, so everyone knows what they should be doing and what everyone else should be doing, disagreements are resolved fairly quickly.” A critical step for the group was appointing an independent chair, he adds. “The chair has the final say on some issues, which made life a lot easier for me as the chief executive. Normally I reported to the board, but on certain issues I reported to the chair. The dynamics around the table were driven by the chair, and I was there as the board’s representative.” The chair has always been an interested party but not an engineering competitor and the last one Souness worked with was Roy Weaver, chief executive of the Taranaki Port Authority, an important organisation in terms of the group’s export aspirations, but not in competition with any member. The different sizes of the member companies has also proved an asset, he says. “The big companies help give the small companies a competitive edge, for example by helping with procuring to enable a smaller company to quote at a better price. On the other hand, the smaller operations are lighter on their feet and more adaptable.” Souness joined engineering consultancy Beca, as its Taranaki business director in September this year. “What I’ll be doing for Beca is what I was doing with Engineering Taranaki: fulfilling contracts by building relationships with suppliers and contractors.” As he defines it, Engineering Taranaki is a funnel, able to pour a range of services onto the client, while Beca is a pyramid, a single entity overseeing a portfolio of services. Souness is a born networker. “The collaborative side of things is close to my heart.”
Energy NZ Vol.4 No.6 November-December 2010 |
Souness (pictured) can’t say two words without revealing he’s from Scotland. Joining British Gas (Scotland) in Edinburgh some 30 years ago with a degree in business, he participated in the company’s graduate trainee programme, which allowed him to, “Move around among the various divisions of British Gas and get a feel for what being a corporate entity means and how it can progress.”