Not shell shocked
Pausing to straighten a picture frame whose skewness is evident only to her own sunglass-shielded eyes, HP`s Lynette Chen emerges momentarily from “merger mania”.Orchestrating the South African publicity side of the biggest IT merger in world history has left little time for sleep, hence the dark glasses. “To hide the bags,” says the perfectionist Chen, whipping the shades off to reveal eyes so alert they could – and apparently do – impale suppliers caught napping.Chen herself was fast asleep, literally, when news of HP`s plans to merge with Compaq first broke last September, just days before the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in the United States. “I was awoken at 6.30 am by an SMS from a friend asking, ‘Have you seen CNN? HP`s buying Compaq.` My first thought was: ‘This is a joke.` Then my phone started ringing and it didn`t stop for 24 hours.”Fielding the fallout from this kind of bombshell is not an enviable position for a marketing person to be in. Far from resenting the secretiveness of HP head office, which played the merger cards close to its chest right up to May this year, Chen says: “It was the industry`s best-kept secret; it had to be. Until the deal was actually done, it made business sense to say less rather than more. Look how many IT mergers have flopped before the legalities were even completed.” Survival course in TaiwanChen is not easily shell-shocked by life`s little surprises. If you can survive in Taiwan, you can survive pretty much anything, she reckons.Living and working in Taiwan for four years was a baptism of fire for a sheltered South African who had been to a Catholic convent until the age of 12 (Chinese South Africans not being welcome at government schools in those days) and matriculated at Parktown Girls` High in Johannesburg, where she was known as the ‘absent-minded professor`. “I was the kind of pupil who did my homework but then left it at home,” recalls Chen.Her working experience before she headed for the Far East was also on the safe side, first at a PR agency servicing industrial and mining clients and then at the Turffontein race course, with its lavish budgets and spare-no-expense events. One of the most intimidating marketing challenges she`d faced in South Africa was trying to make sewerage look exciting.So Taiwan was a culture shock, despite Chen`s fluent Cantonese and Mandarin. “It`s incredibly fast-paced, incredibly competitive, one of the harshest environments you can imagine. People there work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Living conditions are extremely cramped, and you`re always surrounded by thousands of people. After Taiwan, nothing much scares me and I`m not afraid to try anything new, even if I don`t have a clue how to do it. I`m a fast learner.”Take her forays into commercial shipping and radio show deejaying.Chen learnt the ropes of Taiwanese shipping so quickly that her employer soon had her hiring crew for the country`s first commercial oil tanker. After two and a half years of tankers, trawlers and tuna-fishing, eager to get back into marketing, she joined a Taiwanese record company that was bravely but futilely backing the New Bandits – a group of brilliant rock musicians whose age (35-plus) and looks were against them.“To make it in Taiwan`s music scene, you have to be young, vibey and very good-looking,” says Chen, whose command of English and Chinese made her a shoo-in as DJ of a nightly radio show to boost the aging Bandits` album sales.After four years in Taiwan, Europe was calling. Chen spent a year backpacking across the continent, lugging a 20-kilogram rucksack, staying in crummy hostels and soaking up local colour at cafés from Athens and Budapest to Florence and Istanbul. “I`m an explorer and I loved it, but I remember walking past all those beautiful hotels and looking at them longingly.”Returning to Johannesburg three years ago, she joined HP`s enterprise division – although she could only guess at what a server was. Within 18 months, she was handling all of HP`s local marketing and PR and, to her delight, staying in some of the very same hotels she had dreamt of while backpacking through Europe. “If you travel with HP, especially with the press, you`re treated like kings.”Now, merger mission accomplished, she`s been given a new, bigger job. Appointed to the new HP`s global Government and Public Affairs team, Chen will be working with the South African government and communities on projects aimed at speeding up the arrival of the digital village.It`s new territory, but then, with Chen, that`s nothing new. Stepping out of the corporate comfort zoneAnother merger veteran, Dorothy Haggard, formerly of MGX, has left her (relative) corporate comfort zone to test the waters of private business.And it is not for the first time. At the age of seven, Haggard had a thriving small business in her hometown of Uitenhage, selling second-hand razor blades (her father`s). “I would clean them up and polish them until they looked brilliant, and then use the money I earned to buy things like Mother`s Day presents,” says Haggard. “Of course the blades worked and they had to look as good as new, because my customers had to keep coming back – and they did. That`s the key: your customers have got to come back.”This early entrepreneurial streak was no flash in the pan. Haggard - as an adult, of course - joined the sales and marketing team at Systems Publishing, working on ComputerWeek, launching InformationWeek and kicking off ComputerWeek`s annual Most Admired survey. “Tenacious and a lateral thinker, she was extremely persuasive,” says Jo Melville, the person who hired Haggard at Systems and now Managing Director of Reed Exhibitions. “I don`t think even today that she understands the word ‘no`.”Five years later, head-hunters lured her into marketing at Computer Configurations, which became CCH in March last year, being absorbed into MGX.That three-step evolution took Haggard on an interesting, sometimes bumpy ride, which included preparing for a listing (“Computer Configurations was 57 times oversubscribed on the day”), countering insider-trading allegations against CCH after the global markets crash of 1998, and integrating two distinctly different company cultures when CCH merged with MGX.Having been there, done that, Haggard got the urge to spread her wings and see if she could fly in the “big wide world out there”. (We`re talking business now, not the 45-plus freefall sky jumps she has under her belt.) So, in mid-May this year, she and former Systems colleague James Sey teamed up to start Third Eye Marketing, one of the newest full-service agencies on the technology landscape.They made their move against a backdrop of shrinking corporate marketing spend and razor-sharp (no pun intended) competition in what could be seen as an already crowded business space.“An overcrowded market? Not really,” says Haggard, who has a marketing degree, an estate agent`s certificate and is doing her MBA through Henley. “I believe the old style of PR is dead, the kind which concentrated on counting column centimetres, but there`s a niche in the market for good people with good skills, who can add strategic value and grow relationships based on trust and a service ethic.“We would never take on any project that we couldn`t handle. We insist on setting measurable performance standards from the outset and if I thought a plan wouldn`t work, I would fight it to the death.”That approach had already attracted six clients within two weeks of Third Eye setting up shop, although MGX, her former employer, is the only one Haggard feels comfortable about mentioning at this stage. “Ethics,” she says. Less glitz, more thoughtBring on the thumbscrews – this PR person won`t talk about herself. Actually, it`s not that she won`t co-operate, it`s just that she`s so un-PR-ishly understated. She was an exchange student in America after matriculating … has a journalism degree from Rhodes has been solidly married for over 19 years … has two daughters … has been in business for herself for 14 years … prefers one-on-one interaction to glitzy parties…Where Kerry Botha, of Kerry Botha PR, is concerned, expect some discreet violin playing, maybe (she started taking lessons about four years ago). But trumpet-blowing? No.“Some people are made to be in front of a camera selling themselves, others aren`t. For me, being behind the scenes means exactly that: you stay in the background and promote other people.”What her clients will tell you, even if Botha doesn`t, is that while she may be short on schmooze, she`s long on delivery – 20 column kilometres long, in some cases. According to Johan Roets of the IQ Business Group, that`s the amount of media space in which the company was meaningfully mentioned over two years.“We didn`t flood the press with gunk, either,” says Roets. “Over the years, Kerry`s taught us that, to be effective with the press, we have to have something substantial to say to them.”Botha`s relationship with the IQ group goes right back to its roots four years ago, when IQ, now valued at over R400 million, was still a four-person operation.“At the time, we were looking for someone who would reflect our spirit as a company built for the long-term, that`s new and young and different but delivers what it promises,” says Roets. “Although I can`t pin down in rands and cents how valuable Kerry has been to us, she`s contributed hugely to perceptions of our brand in the market. She knows us. She was with us when the IQ baby was conceived and today, four years later, she loves and lives the business as much as the four founding members. You could almost say she`s the fifth founding member.”When IQ was looking for a PR agency in Australia, Roets despatched Botha Down Under to vet prospective candidates. “Our challenge in every country we go into is to find a PR person just like Kerry,” says Roets.For the IQ Group`s first birthday party, Botha dug up jugglers, trapeze artists and acrobats. “They weren`t there as arbitrary nice-to-haves,” she says, “but to illustrate in an alternative way the mental and intellectual agility of the IQ Group.”Botha, who dreams of doing an English degree at Oxford, says her approach to PR “might break the mould slightly”. “But I`ve found my space where I can develop deeply fulfilling relationships that translate into solid deliverables and enable me to find personal meaning and depth.”
07 July 2002
Pausing to straighten a picture frame whose skewness is evident only to her own sunglass-shielded eyes, HP`s Lynette Chen emerges momentarily from “merger mania”.
Orchestrating the South African publicity side of the biggest IT merger in world history has left little time for sleep, hence the dark glasses. “To hide the bags,” says the perfectionist Chen, whipping the shades off to reveal eyes so alert they could – and apparently do – impale suppliers caught napping.
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