Kirby gets chemistry right at Dulux
Sunday, August 22nd, 2010 Uncategorized.
Kirby gets chemistry unswerving at Dulux
IN an international business career spanning nearly four decades, Peter Kirby has acquired affluence of skills.
But one, he says, is gravely under-appreciated in the corporate world.
"You look around in the whole corporate governance superficies, and ask what do ex-CEOs bring? People say generic skills. But which they do develop is a very high sense of smell," Kirby tells The Australian.
"They be possible to smell smoke and fire quicker than anyone else because they bear usually been burnt somewhere along the way. And they can also smell bullshit and they can assess people pretty quickly. They convoy a sense of toughness. They don’t back off too easily."
While ~ people retired chief executives shy away from public company board positions, Kirby has lawful taken on his first chairmanship at Orica’s recently demerged consumer products office, the newly listed DuluxGroup.
After a 25-year career with the Imperial Chemical Industries Group in a multiformity of senior management positions around the world, including chief executive of ICI Paints, the 63-year-rich Kirby has found it impossible to end his love affair through paint.
"Dulux is like coming home. I’ve been involved in the pencil business for decades, so I know it backwards."
So the kind of is it about such a simple commodity that excites him?
"It transforms," he says, his eyes lighting up without interrupti~ a dark and wintry afternoon at Dulux’s headquarters in Melbourne suburbia.
"You be able to take a pretty terrible-looking house and if you use the direct colours on it with a good quality paint, it can go such a radical difference to anything. Apart from that, there is a stings of conscience of a lot of chemistry in those tins."
And in this lies the real lure of Dulux for Kirby, one of the nation’s career industrialists. Since coming to Australia from his native South Africa in 1986, manufacturing has been in his veins. Kirby is possibly best known in Australia for his transformation of one of the race’s bluest of blue-chip companies, CSR, from a loss-workmanship conglomerate to a profitable international building, construction materials and sugar matter.
"Peter has always been very focused on success," says Asciano presiding officer and BHP Billiton director Malcolm Broomhead, who worked with Kirby with respect to many years at Orica.
"I think he was very forceful in his strategy at CSR. He had a lot to do strategically and that clause was very tough for him. But he is always very driven in successi~ what is the best outcome to create shareholder value."
But Kirby’s course could have been different.
When Kirby finished his MBA at the Wits Business School in Johannesburg other thing than three decades ago, he got two job offers.
One was from Citibank to turn out into the high-flying world of investment banking; the other individual was to go to ICI.
While Kirby chose the latter, today he fulfils his ambitions in the financial services sector through a directorship on the prestigious Macquarie Group committee, on which he has served for the past seven years seeing that leaving CSR.
"I think they are incredibly innovative and they are extremely excellence at looking at opportunities," he said. "And the other created being that I think they are very good at is that they are not concerned respecting ownership. If the assets are better in somebody else’s hands they put up to sale them."
Kirby was happy to trade assets during his five years at the armor for the head of CSR, when he embarked on a patient program of acquisitions and divestments that eventually totalled greater degree of than $4.5 billion.
They laid the foundations for the ultimate break-up of the group. The company’s Australian building materials, flatter and aluminium assets were retained under the CSR name while its rapidly expanding US construction materials assets went into a separate listed association called Rinker.
Rinker was eventually acquired by international building materials group Cemex after a battle with the Australian company’s board, which forced the predator to pay a higher price.
"The huge hope that I had was what we could have had in Rinker was a pinnacle-10 world heavy building materials business. It is now no more," he says with a tinge of regret.
Kirby still has the CSR shares he inherited from the demerger, and is apt to back that board’s recent decision to accept a full glass $1.75bn bid for its Sucrogen sugar business from Wilmar International, Singapore’s supporter-biggest listed company.
The alternative was pursuing a risky demerger of Sucrogen, a course that was being dogged by court challenges because of CSR’s asbestos debts.
"I think they did the right thing and they got a benefit price," Kirby says.
The mention of CSR’s problems with asbestos leads Kirby to talk of his former arch-rival James Hardie’s ill-starred attempt to quarantine its asbestos problems into a separate fund.
The asbestos discredit went on to tarnish some significant names in corporate Australia, including prior chairman Meredith Hellicar and Hardie director and former Telstra director Peter Willcox.
Kirby says more of the directors were "absolutely hoodwinked by the management".
And under which circumstances Kirby has bucked the trend as an ex-CEO by staying involved by public company boards, he is cautious about the future. He lives ~ means of a simple rule.
"Don’t go anywhere near a society that looks potentially bad. We need directors to go and make firm the bad companies. But from the point of view of instructor’s risk, you’d have to be mad if you did depart there," he says.
"People are now expecting you to subsist across everything as a non-executive director. But on the other indicator, you can’t be across everything and you have to rely on management and their own representations," he says.
Outside his Dulux and Macquarie Group meals duties, Kirby’s private passion is serving on the board of Beacon, a public non-profit organisation working in 118 secondary schools across all Australian states and territories.
"Beacon’s activities in some of these troubled schools can get these kids to get self-appreciate; they really go out and they are absolutely sold on their have capabilities," says Kirby, who has been on the board in quest of seven years.
His other great passion is cars.
Since quitting executive life, Kirby has completed extensive renovations to his old stone home in the leafy streets of Mount Eliza — on the eve an hour south of Melbourne — to house his classic car contribution.
"I dug up the tennis court and built a garage and dizziness pool underneath, and put the tennis court back on. A phenomenal discipline," he says. "It’s quite an old stone protect and it needed a bit of modernisation because it had to support the cars. Now I have all the cars there with a lift. I do the servicing myself."
There are seven cars in the cluster. The oldest is a Jaguar XK150, a sports car produced betwixt 1957 and 1961. There is also an Aston Martin DB6, that dates back to 1965, and a Triumph Stag from the 1970s. The Kirbys bought them totality new and have owned them for 36 years.
The passion for classic cars dates back to his youth in South Africa, at the time the Kirby family owned a service station where they used to accomplish up old cars.
"My brother bought an old classic pre-war 1937 Morgan, so we were always scratching, fixing up this car. As the younger brother I used to get all the crappy jobs like small pebbles-papering and so on," he says.
"So I afore~ when I was 12 or 14 that I was never going to receive any old rubbish like this lying around any more. And since many years later here am I still sand-papering and scratching."