Part 27 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 9: An Urgent Need for Research and Change
This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.
Norm Bowers1 had been a close friend of Cowan’s for twenty years. He ran a small but extremely successful coaching school in Sydney. The results he has achieved for students in the Higher School Certificate have been extraordinary. He also coached university students.
Cowan phoned him.
Norm, I need help to put some concepts together, research the latest information on management and communicate it to all the key staff so that I can implement change. Do you have two tutors you could lend me for six months? I think I can finish it in that time and you can have them back again. They don’t need to know anything at all about club management. In fact, it would be an advantage if they didn’t. I want fresh minds and fresh approaches. But they have to be quick learners and good, logical thinkers who can analyse concepts.
Norm’s reply was that he had two very good tutors he was prepared to lend. One of his suggestions was Max Cowan, Roger’s son, who was coaching university students in statistics. Cowan had no doubt about Max’s ability to do the job but was reluctant. He had always avoided employing family in the club. But the need was greater than the principle and Max started2 with Joel Dehe, another tutor with academic research experience and a creative bent.
Behind this seemingly straightforward appointment lay a series of private events that profoundly shaped 1991 for Roger Cowan and his family. See: Reflections — Shadows Behind the Story.
The collation of information, theories and ideas propagated by the gurus of the day was one part of the job. Testing the best parts of them against what Cowan believed would fit into the Panthers environment was the more difficult part.
In 1991, he came across The E-Myth by Michael E Gerber. It was primarily aimed at small business, but as it turned out, it was what was needed.
W Edwards Deming, the author of Out of the Crisis, was another big influence on the developing picture. His major focus was on quality, change and the ability to embrace a new philosophy.
Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.
He said that a business must ‘cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality’. It must be built into the product in the first place. The system of production and service needs to be constantly improved to ensure quality.
Both books talked about systems, but from a different perspective. And both became a part of the Panthers ethos in the early 90s.
The theories of Charles Handy who wrote The Empty Raincoat seemed to be an excellent fit for the next stage of evolution according to Greiner and had a significant influence on modifications to the cultural objectives.
When interviewed, Bob Adamson was the CEO of Panthers ClubNova in Newcastle. In 1991, he arrived at Panthers – newly out of the military – in the midst of a period of great change. The frenzy for seeking change was in full swing, and Adamson says it was a very stimulating environment.
Adamson began with the club in a middle management role as maintenance manager. But he had skills and experience that would be needed in the transformation of the business, and his role would soon grow.
We were doing a lot of work on the evolution, revolution thinking at the time, and what came out of that was that we were not one big business. We were a collection of small businesses, and we had a hierarchical structure that may not have been working for us. It had become too bureaucratic and had lost that fast moving dynamism of small businesses with just a few employees. Greiner talked about finding the solutions to each of those revolutions, and we began to start thinking about having someone to lead each of those sections. The emphasis was on leadership and the leaders would be responsible for their own small business – say, a bar or a restaurant. They would be like a number of little shops in one big shopping centre
Such a dramatic restructure meant the elimination of whole levels of middle management, including Adamson’s own position. He says that this group was largely redeployed into other areas.
Steve Van Zwieten is another Panthers CEO who came up through the ranks. He started in 1988 as what was then a ‘bouncer’, but he came with some innovative ideas about what the role of security personnel should be. Within the nurturing Panthers environment he was quickly able to move into the position of security manager. He is now the chief executive of the Penrith site.3 He recalls the restructuring period:
It was a shock to some people. We certainly had a hierarchy there, and there were too many layers of management. I think that one of Roger’s strengths is that he can see things before others see them. So he was always out in front, looking at the business and saying, “now’s the time for change“.
Panthers Group General Manager, Glenn Matthews, agrees.4 He started as an assistant accountant in 1984 and says that some people thrived under the new flattened structure, while others did not.
Matthews came to Penrith Rugby League Club with a personal belief that an employee shouldn’t stay in the one place for more than five years. ‘That belief hasn’t changed,’ he says. ‘But every time I thought about that, there was another opportunity.’
I’ve been really lucky over the years, seeing the organisation grow, and having the opportunity to venture anywhere that you wanted to have a go at. While I was financial controller, I also managed the ski park for a period. I spent a year in marketing at another time. All this gave me an opportunity to see all the facets of the business. So while I’ve been here a long time, it doesn’t seem that long because the role changed and evolved so much.
The period in marketing was typical of the entrepreneurial spirit in the club at that time. Roger wanted a strong focus on creativity and he selected a team to work together closely and do whatever they thought appropriate to come up with ideas and strategies to grow the business and to make recommendations to the full management team. The team had a good balance. I came from the financial side, Peter Morath had a catering background, and Tony Lackey was a creative thinker. Max Cowan was a good mathematician and had been involved in all the research for restructure of the business and change implementation. We worked really well together.
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- Norm Bowers passed away in 2013, aged 84. He was a unique character – he and Roger were very close. Norm is the father of Steve Bowers who plays a critical role in this history. ↩︎
- This engagement was considerably more complex than appears here. One of the complexities came from Cowan’s principle about not employing relations. In an unusual step for an unusual circumstance he sought Board approval for Max’s appointment – approval was unanimous. For more on the events surrounding this move see Beyond the Book — Reflections — Shadows Behind the Story. ↩︎
- Steve Van Zwieten left Panthers in 2006. He is now Managing Director of Exact Security, a successful security services company started by him and Roger Cowan in 2009. ↩︎
- Glenn Matthews left Panthers in 2010. He is now CEO of the Australian Racing Drivers’ Club. ↩︎
Panthers, Passion & Politics - The Roger Cowan Years 