T - 34: Bronze to New Zealand

I mentioned my company awards yesterday, but to be fair and balanced I need to mention a few of my less wonderful efforts.

There was, for example the launch of Computer Living Magazine. I could tell you how we set a local industry record by printing a million launch copies, but how the magazine never sold more than 20,000 copies a month. I could even tell you that I may have been just a little naive to be influenced to do this by our partner who - not surprisingly - ran the printing plant. Or I can just tell you about the time the owner of our company and I were alone in an elevator about two years after we had closed the magazine. He looked at me and smiled. "Computer Living," he said. "Don, we think of that as your million dollar training program."

Another open-and-shut case was the Australian edition of The Industry Standard, a newspaper about the Internet industry that we managed to launch the same week that the dot-com companies collapsed on Wall Street. This publication holds the distinction of spending more on its launch party than it made as a title.

I could mention the millions we lost on the launch of Australian Biotechnology News or the Home Entertainment Show or even my first-ever magazine launch named Profit - which, of course, never made one.

But these failed efforts are just dim memories. If I am to write about my biggest failures, there is one light that shines dimly atop the scrapheap of my career. And that was when I took over our operations in New Zealand.

Desperately in loss for several years, the NZ company was in danger of being closed if it didn't turn around quickly. "I'll save them," I said in my most heroic voice, and I took the Kiwis under my wing and merged them into our Australian business.

Thinking of myself more or less as Saint Donald of Sydney, I went to convert the Shaky Islanders to profitable capitalism. Regrettably, the natives more or less thought of me as an arrogant, power-grabbing, fat bastard interloper who didn't know half as much as they did about their business.

They were convinced my emphasis on profits would rip the heart out of their company and ruin the great business they were running. I soon concluded that they could not win a bronze medal in a two-horse race.

Well, no one needs the gory details. Suffice it to say that there are now only a few Kiwis whom I like and surely even fewer who like me. And of course the land of the All Blacks produced a company whose ink was All Red. At least I now understand how appropriate it is that New Zealand is home to more flightless birds than any other place.

As a footnote - if the true test of a person is to make lemonade out of life's lemons, I guess I ended up passing this exam. Rather than close the NZ operations, I started the discussions that led our chief Australian competitor to acquire them. It had no effect on our local business, but it has given me a warm feeling to know that Cloud Cuckooland is now their problem. From what I hear, they're not in the mood to thank me.