Opinion Some bye week reading: The Shape Our Board Is In

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Oct 12, 2007
30,505
52,056
The Hills
AFL Club
Port Adelaide
No, I want someone competent in boardroom and competing entity politics, eastern seaboard savvy, and with a record in getting her own way in the business sphere.

Darren can be her heavy and masses communicator :)
I disagree wholeheartedly.

We need a Pres who gets how to win on field. Surround them with the bean counters, the marketers and the sponsor schmoozers. But foe our long term sustainability on all fronts we need flags.

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Re-develop Alberton into midsize stadium 25-30k similar to Geelong's and play all our home games there.

Even if that was logistically possible, it could never happen.

The revolution that saw the SANFL invalidate its ironclad Affiliation Agreement, sell its licenses and open up the Adelaide Oval redevelopment, means we’ll be sucked dry at that ground until the sun burns out.
 
Even if that was logistically possible, it could never happen.

The revolution that saw the SANFL invalidate its ironclad Affiliation Agreement, sell its licenses and open up the Adelaide Oval redevelopment, means we’ll be sucked dry at that ground until the sun burns out.
Kind of like listing your Christmas gifts on eBay on December 26.
 

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Tibbs

The Bearded ZERK!
Sep 9, 2013
7,580
18,842
Melbourne
AFL Club
Port Adelaide
The Shape Our Board Is In




The Club board of directors is in better shape than it was back in 2012 when it was reconstructed by the AFL. It still has squares, but less guise and more curves.

The 2020 vicissitude

Indeed we still have Chairman Moi as helmsman, but he seems to be a somewhat different Moi these days - thanks to Richo, who brought him in line for our 150th Year in general, for his measured speech on Gala Night in particular. If our chairman had not complied, had not made necessary adjustments to his behaviour, choice of verbiage, tone and his persona, we would not have Richo as CEO, or as anything. And we would be worse off as a consequence.

In fact the 150 Gala night was a huge success in many directions; it not only brought home to our chairman and board members just how meagre has been their contribution to 150 years of PAFC Identity, it had our senior coach sucking on humble straw, with subsequent positive effect on field in 2020. Let’s hope the 150 Gala night vicissitude is no temporary one.

Indeed we still have COI Cardone filling a chair as close to Moi as he can manoeuvre. But he, too, seems to have pulled his head in - the upshot of a few grenades of home truth being lobbed in his lap by one or three other directors and/or executives. Our Cos seems - I say again: seems - less destructive, less corrosive, less self-focused than he was, even appearing to contribute to the Bars project, despite its recent setback, plus other Club:AFL matters. But he still comes, in the last year of his third three-year term, with his McGuire Media conflict of interest intact and the least lines to his c.v. of all our directors. Well aware nowadays is Cos that eyes are upon ‘im.

Generally-accepted practices

Personally, I reckon nine years is long enough for any director to serve, bad or good, conflicted or not. Cardone should be gone, by rights, come one year more. Whether this generally-accepted and generally-practised exercise in corporate governance applies to chairman / deputy chairman is subject to debate. Perhaps it does on a case by case basis. Or not.

There are two others from October 2012 or soon after: Legal Eagle Restas and ... oh wait a minute ... yes, no ... Trevor Thiele, qualified accountant, director of international energy corporations, was unseated at the recent poll by Kathy Nagle. Now someone else on the board should be doing the off-duty number-crunching. This is not an evolution the Club was pleased about when it occurred; their involvement was akin to DBJ hanging back ball-watching as his direct opponent goes for the Sherrin and gets it. I heavily suspect that Trevor is nevertheless continuing with his Club work as if he remains a director. Such people in a footy club are priceless.

Looking good

Having Kathy elected, and Christine Zeitz appointed, looks good ... even better now that a serious play is under construction for a Port Adelaide AFLW side. It sure does look good, having two women on the board at such a juncture. But, actually, we have three. A feminine triumvirate. Holly has been there since 2016, is serving her second term (on our board, not in clink); she travelled up to China via HK that year, one of the Club gang heading to Shanghai for the function organised to officially recognise Gui Guojie as our Off-Field Messiah. Tom Jonas came up, too. He was serving time, real time, six weeks of it, for shaking Gaff by the back of the neck in preference to the hand. At the HKFC reception Tom, unmarried and still on the hunt at that time, paid new girl in town Holly close attention, as if she was an opposition forward, not unreasonable considering her status as a Weaglet. He’s captain now, is Tom, proudly wearing No. 1. It might appear that the close attention he paid that evening in June 2016 wasn’t wasted.

Holly was appointed by Moi to replace Richard Ryan, whom I had met in May 2014 when he flew up to HK for PAFC’s first international business luncheon and board meeting, both staged at the HKFC. I thought Richard was a great bloke, the raconteur sort of great bloke. We sat at the same table and discovered much in common: same age, same whitening hair, super-dry wit, intolerance of fools and posers, even ex-Army (Richard went to Duntroon to learn how to be an officer, gave up when he decided he was being trained by fools and posers). Moi didn’t like him and Richard didn’t like Moi. They were not on, or from, the same planet. See how much we two had in common? Replacing Richard Ryan with Holly Ransom could be compared to swapping Chips Rafferty with Kylie Minogue on the eve of filming 10,000 Horsemen.

Looking better

Getting back to looking good, this also applies to Club legends, on-field legends specifically, sitting on the board as much as it does females of the yet-to-become-legendary type. Gavin Wanganeen looks photogenic at the directors’ table ... just as he looked good, make that outstanding, when he presented the artwork he’d drawn and had framed for China’s visiting Premier Li Keqiang, prior to the first-round SCG match versus the Swans in March 2017. This was, you will recall, part of the lead-up to the inaugural AFL match at Jiangwan Stadium. Such moments are not just historical, they are one-offs, they are unique. Only Gav could’ve pulled that one off.

When it comes to electing directors, one wins and one loses. In gaining Gavin we lost George. Looking good (not that George is ugly) and keeping quiet took over from interrupting hours-long monologues from the head of the table. It replaced speaking up and speaking out for the Club. This was a tragedy, in fact, as George Fiacchi’s track record as a player, a private businessman and one of two One Club reconstructors and thus one of two Club saviours, when rolled into one, is self-evident, second to none. George was / is never afraid to make noise. Very likely he made too much of it for Chairman Moi’s upper-class ears (make that pseudo one-o’-the-boys ears) to withstand. There exists a rumour that George had an eye on KT’s job. There may be a second rumour: that our chairman personally coaxed a super-coy Gavin Wanganeen to run for election, knowing that the vote would see Gav displacing anyone, even George Fiacchi. The current system by which two directors are elected at three-year intervals is fragile.

Bar nun

Darren Cahill came on the board care-of our chairman and COI Cos. Good on ‘em. Darren was installed as their conduit to the coaching panel, the senior coach in particular. Darren surprised them. He instantly became more than their coach conduit. He became Killer Cahill. He is his father’s son, after all. We are so damn fortunate to have him as an appointed director. Imagine Killer and George pairing up versus the AFL on the Prison Bars. Imagine Killer Cahill and George Fiacchi on Footy Classified the week before the Collingwood game at Adelaide Oval. Taking on Eddie the Ex and Ross Lyin’ ... taking off their ties, ripping open their shirts to reveal one wearing underneath the Prison Bars, the other the 1914 Invincibles livery ... they’ll make Kane Cornes look like a nun.

This leaves Andrew Day. Not a lot is known about Andrew, and that’s fine considering his responsibility is international revenue particularly China. You never know when Peter Dutton is listening in, watching, rubbing his non-existent eyebrows up against the keyhole. We have discovered that China is more than China when it comes to partnerships, with MG / SAIC as the perfect example. I had a little to do with Andrew’s appointment. My colleague and I had been pressing Andrew Hunter for some time to get Andrew Day on the board as ‘China expert’. It didn’t look good, we kept preaching, to be involved in China, to be seeking revenue streams with a China connection, yet not have someone on our board that we could point to as representing our commitment to the marketplace. Just as it took us until the end of 2015 to get KT physically into China for the first time, it took us twice as long to get the then CEO to take his lead boots off and persuade our chairman to appoint Andrew Day as director.

Deep streams

Today of course China is a vastly different story, but it’s a story that even though it has gone sour it has yet to end. Any China story is inherently longer than any other. Beijing per the Chinese Communist Party has done stuff that makes me sad, even though I can read into it because I am, thanks to personal experience, more familiar than the average with China’s history and its patriotic determination to be taken seriously, to be acknowledged as equal at a bare minimum. I know I’m understating it, but this is not the Politics thread.

For our Club the key is to ensure our focus on China between 2013 and 2019 inclusive is taken advantage of, not wasted. China has many footholds in Australia via such corporates as SAIC et al. There are several others we have our sights on as partners for mutual benefit, one being ElectraNet, the SA power transmission utility 46% owned by China, which will build our UHV interconnector with NSW and was the vehicle by which we met up with Andrew Day in early 2015. We have discovered a winning style of dealing with these corporates by thinking laterally, and pooling assets at board and executive level. We won’t be able to ever construct the deep revenue streams we need from wholly Australian sources, streams that we should’ve created years ago instead of treading on eggshells while our board continued to eye China with suspicion and a petty cash frame of mind when investment was needed, then deciding the polar opposite when it wasn’t.

These deep revenue streams are crucial to the Club’s future, its very existence, by filling the coffers of Richo’s Chasing Greatness Fund, by financing our AFLW side ... also - hear this - by financing a third men’s team when the inevitable decision is taken sooner rather than later against retaining our AFL reserves in a state competition dictated to by tiny minds dead set against us playing among them with any sort of comfort let alone on-field victory.

Sensational read, as always LR. It just frustrates the hell out of me that we are hobbled at one end by the AFL regarding out our autonomy of BOD choices, and on the other send by the SANFL leach firmly planted on our derrière, sucking us dry at every turn, while counterintuitively still constantly placing roadblocks in front of us.

Port fighting & overcoming the odds with backs against the wall! .... Nothing has changed in 150 years!
 
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Kind of like listing your Christmas gifts on eBay on December 26.

It’s a terrific grift. Get Port to pay for it in the first place ($4,000,000+), then buy it from you at an inflated price ($6,900,000+).
 
Thanks LR.

Christine Zeitz - I was most impressed when researching her background and skill set.

Might she possibly become our new President upon Kochie's leaving?
To me one of many interesting developments is that we now have names tossed up, whether seriously or semi-seriously, for our next chairman / president, whereas previously it has been Koch no contest.

As things stand, the admirable work that Richo has put in to remodelling David Koch as a more humble and reality-minded PAFC chairman has extended his tenure, Kochie’s, minus argument or stress for at least a fourth term, taking him to end 2024. Then we may see change. Or we may not, of course, depending on how we are performing on- and off-field. Depending, also, on who the competition is, whether Darren, Christine, or A.N. Other.

When Richo was first appointed as CEO last year I had in mind a three-year term, part of which would be invested grooming his successor while the Club rose again, this time from the ruins of covid. But now Richo himself speaks in terms of five years, a la the Chasing Greatness Fund, during which Club debt will be a priority target, as it should.

Club debt is something Kochie should have dealt with long ago. He used to give off such Gordon Gecko vibes, and noise, that you would’ve thought he could fix our debt with a snap of his fingers and a nifty IPO or equivalent. But, no, debt didn’t improve, China got more expensive than it should’ve, and we started to see a reinterpretation of the accounts, negative stuff being put back one financial year, positive stuff being brought forward, also previously anonymous assets suddenly being capitalised and reappropriated. But where was the cold hard cash, the revenue, the debt-eradicating revenue? 2018, the year of one Joint Major Sponsor, Oak on the front and Oak jointly on the back, was a rotten year, never to be repeated.

The next five years are planned to not only get rid of old rusted-on debt and new covid debt but also to bring home three premierships. Ambitious, yes, but not impossible. Richo and CD are working together, humming along together, as a two-pronged down-to-earth dead serious senior executive team. CD is highly respected at AFL House, where he speaks for PAFC on the Competition Committee. Shane Smith is a most competent CFO, a workaholic to boot.

So not only do we, per the OP, have a different shape to our board of directors, we have a different tempo, focus and confidence being generated by our Club executive.

What we don’t want to see happen now is for one of the forthcoming vacancies on the AFL Commission to be filled by the likes of Rob Chapman. Even Rowey was energetically talking up Bucky Cunningham with Caro yesterday.
 
The Shape Our Board Is In
......
For our Club the key is to ensure our focus on China between 2013 and 2019 inclusive is taken advantage of, not wasted. China has many footholds in Australia via such corporates as SAIC et al. There are several others we have our sights on as partners for mutual benefit, one being ElectraNet, the SA power transmission utility 46% owned by China, which will build our UHV interconnector with NSW and was the vehicle by which we met up with Andrew Day in early 2015. We have discovered a winning style of dealing with these corporates by thinking laterally, and pooling assets at board and executive level. We won’t be able to ever construct the deep revenue streams we need from wholly Australian sources, streams that we should’ve created years ago instead of treading on eggshells while our board continued to eye China with suspicion and a petty cash frame of mind when investment was needed, then deciding the polar opposite when it wasn’t.

These deep revenue streams are crucial to the Club’s future, its very existence, by filling the coffers of Richo’s Chasing Greatness Fund, by financing our AFLW side ... also - hear this - by financing a third men’s team when the inevitable decision is taken sooner rather than later against retaining our AFL reserves in a state competition dictated to by tiny minds dead set against us playing among them with any sort of comfort let alone on-field victory.
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This popped up on my LinkedIn feed. Christine Zeitz has some impressive contacts and her role is super-strategic.

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