A Return to Two CEOs?

Cowan’s ‘hands on’ approach to rugby league saw him step into the role of rugby league CEO a number of times. He was involved in some monumental rugby league decisions in the club’s history, including engaging some very successful coaches.

Strangely though, he says his passion about rugby league resulted in him sometimes being less tolerant of people than he should have been. This brought him into conflict with people,

I should have been able to handle the rugby league issues better than I did. The number of people who think I was anti-rugby-league is an indication that I was not communicating well. There is plenty of evidence to show that I was passionate about having a successful team. But I resented seeing waste arising from irresponsible decisions.

I could also never cope with people who kept prattling on about the Club not putting enough money into rugby league to make it successful. To my way of thinking they were just ratbags who did not have the common sense to see that if we put unlimited money into rugby league it would only last a few years and then there would be none. To me all this was obvious. The most important thing was good management of the resources that we had, rather than having to spend our way out of trouble because of poor management. It frustrated me that some people just couldn’t see it, and there were probably many times I showed how I felt — which is not the way to win friends and influence…

But when people suggested initiatives that presented a chance to build success, I was never opposed to spending the money. On one occasion I had a call from rugby league commentator Frank Hyde, suggesting we consider getting players from South Africa. His rationale seemed very logical, and the idea looked promising. The Board agreed to my recommendation to try it, despite the expense.

FROM THE ARCHIVES
Looking Further Afield — Penrith’s South African Recruitment Mission
In 1972, a four-man Panthers delegation travelled to South Africa looking for players who might strengthen the struggling first-grade team. The venture became a rather more unusual recruitment story than that simple description suggests.
Read the original account

Another time Alan Clarkson told me of a terrific English player who would probably come to Australia if invited. His name was Bill Ashurst. I reached an agreement with Bill, and we agreed to pay a very large transfer fee to his club. When another club tried to get under our guard, we sent two directors to England to make sure we clinched the deal. The two directors rang from England saying that we could also get the English captain, Mick Stephenson, if we were willing to pay another large transfer fee. We paid record money for those players, and I supported it all the way. The success of those two choices is part of Panthers’ folklore.¹

The fact is that I cannot recall one occasion when a request for money to fund a well-thought-out rugby league initiative was refused by the board or opposed by me. In addition to that, the criticism that I would not give rugby league enough money shows an ignorance of the procedure. The football club would present a budget to the board of the licensed club at the beginning of each season. On most occasions it was approved. But sometimes – and particularly in the Cartwright era – we would be confronted with a huge deficit at the end of the season, and that’s when I would go off my brain.

After ‘one board, one CEO’ became reality in 1984, Cowan led or participated in most of the important plans and decisions for coaching the Panthers.

The change was followed by a much more deliberate approach to football development. Among the initiatives was the Five-by-Five Plan, which set the ambitious goal of having five locally developed players representing Australia within five years. Within six years of the structural change, Penrith reached its first Grand Final; a year later, the Panthers won their first premiership.²

Those decisions also included included the eventual decision to replace Royce Simmons and the contract Cowan negotiated with John Lang, who would take the club to its second premiership. At this time Cowan had once again taken over responsibility for rugby league after a major restructure that saw most of the club’s rugby football staff depart, including rugby league CEO Mark Levy.

Although there had been a number of dramatic rugby league upheavals over the years, Cowan says that, until the Simmons episode, major changes had generally been made with minimal adverse publicity. He attributed much of that to the club’s participative approach to decision-making.

It all seemed to operate quite smoothly, and a lot of that could be attributed to our participative style of management. Any changes were thoroughly discussed and explored before they were made. For example, the final meeting with Ron Willey was preceded by a meeting of the rugby league chief executive and about six other managers. Their brief was to help me analyse the problem, and decide what should be done about it, and how adverse publicity could be avoided. The Board Executive was also brought in before any action was taken.

Similarly, the decision to join Super League followed months of analysis and discussion involving key staff and the Board.

Cowan strongly rejected claims that he ran the Club as a dictatorship.

He maintained that the five directors who later complained about his management had themselves participated for years in the Club’s consultative decision-making processes. His involvement in the departure of some high-profile rugby league personalities nevertheless provided further ammunition for his critics.

Around 1999, the Board began to become more directly involved in the management of rugby league — a development Cowan regarded as a backward step.

It started with a very simple request from the board that Simmons and Levy should attend the start of every second meeting to deliver a football report.

The Simmons/Levy visits soon moved beyond their rugby league reports. What had begun as a straightforward reporting arrangement gradually altered the decision-making structure. In Cowan’s view, it was a step back towards the arrangement of the Charlie Gibson years: one Board dealing directly with separate executives responsible for the registered club and rugby league.

It was a subtle shift away from the model of discussion and analysis that had operated for about fifteen years, towards more direct decision-making structure by the Board.

Cowan cites an example:

At one meeting, Simmons proposed a payment of $100,000 to a player who was exempted from the salary cap.  It took all of one minute for the Board to agree, despite a couple of strong dissenters.  Previously, something like this would have been analysed carefully by a team. Only then would it have been referred to the board. It was a very poor decision, and fortunately – because of other reasons – it did not happen.

A decision by the Board early in 2001 had massive repercussions.

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1. More details on the Ashurst and Stephenson signings can be found in Beyond the Book: Looking Abroad — Bringing Stephenson and Ashurst To Penrith. ↩︎
2. For more details on this see Beyond the Book — The 1983 Strategic Reset and its companiion post The 1983 Strategic Reset — Did it Work? ↩︎

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