Triumphs on the corporate battlefield AICD Review

If any director in Australia needs to have a life and business-affirming tale of how to succeed after the banks pull the plug on your business and send you into receivership then talk to Robert Clifford, founder and chairman of Tasmanian-based Incat Australia.

Triumphs on the corporate battlefield

If any director in Australia needs to have a life and business-affirming tale of how to succeed after the banks pull the plug on your business and send you into receivership then talk to Robert Clifford, founder and chairman of Tasmanian-based Incat Australia.

His is a tale from the corporate battlefield of triumph over adversity. It is also a tale, often told, of the insular, insecure and narrow-minded approach that some banks and the business community in general have toward the term, "Made In Australia".

Clifford recounted the history of his company that included having one of his boats run aground and having the bank with which he had been using all of his life pull the plug on his company.

He even had to fight with the receivers who did not want him to keep producing his corporate newsletter but he defied them and did so anyway in the believe that his customers needed to maintain confidence that the company would come through this period.

The recent wars and heightened concern about security has created an atmosphere for the high speed Incats of world demand by military authorities in countries such as the US. Clifford can still only build a limited number of boats a year at his Tasmanian company but orders for hundreds are rolling in.

He has paid back the banks, the government and his creditors. His determination, his doggedness and now his good luck has created an Australian company and an Australian technology which is the envy of the world.

If Clifford's tale was re-affirming, Simon Hickey's story of how Bovis Lend Lease, an Australian company, was in charge of the ground-zero clean-up project in New York following the September 11 destruction of the World Trade Centre.

Hickey, CFO of Bovis Lend Lease in the US, provided a dramatic tale of how the post-9/11 clean-up and recovery happened. It was a mammoth achievement in co-ordination, communication and absolute focus on what needed to be done and when to do it.

It was also a chilling account of what happens when human tragedy and emotion are inseparable from the practical task of cleaning up the result of a disaster.

The Australian public would not readily recognise the name Peter Dexter. But when he received the phone call while he was relaxing at Port Douglas that one his company's ships had gone to the rescue of a boat off the coast of Western Australia, he needed to push the crisis management button.

The boat was the Tampa and as regional director for Wallenius Wilhelmsen Lines Oceania, Dexter had to balance the interest of his company, the cargo of the Tampa (other than the refugees) and the politics this situation generated.

While the Government may have deceived the Australian people about the children overboard affair, Dexter and especially the captain of the Tampa came away from the incident with reputations not only intact but enhanced.

His was a tale of crisis management and the need to have processes and procedures in place. It was also a tale of having confidence in your people and the proud history of a company that takes precedence over the demands of a nation's political expediency.

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The purpose of this database is to provide a full-text record of all articles that have appeared in the CDJ since February 1997. It is aimed to assist in the research and reference process. The database has a full-text index and will enable articles to be easily retrieved.It should be noted that information contained in this database is in pre-publication format only - IT IS NOT THE FINAL PRINTED VERSION OF THE CDJ - therefore there might be slight discrepancies between the contents of this database and the printed CDJ.