Today, the mental side of elite sport is taken for granted. Professional teams employ sports psychologists and mental skills coaches. Visualisation, relaxation techniques, controlled breathing and the management of anxiety and confidence have become familiar parts of preparing athletes to perform under pressure.
It was rather different in 1978.
More than four decades later, Phil Gould recalled one of his earliest encounters with those ideas — at Penrith, through Roger Cowan.
Gould told the story during an episode of Six Tackles with Gus in September 2021. The discussion had turned to Parramatta’s use of a mental skills coach during the NRL finals and to the relative importance of the physical and mental sides of elite sport.
For Gould, there was little doubt. At the highest level, he suggested, the mental component accounted for perhaps 95 per cent of performance. Players needed to learn how to control their thinking under pressure, he said, and that was a skill that took time to develop.
Then he remembered Roger.
An Experiment at Penrith
Gould described Cowan as the man who ran the Leagues Club and someone who read widely about self-improvement. Roger had long been particularly interested in hypnosis and in techniques, he believed could help people get the best out of themselves.
In May 1978, he decided to try some of those ideas with the Penrith first-grade team.
Gould’s memory of the occasion, 43 years later, compressed the chronology a little. He recalled the match as only his second game in first grade. In fact, he had debuted for Penrith in 1976.
But the match was a significant first for the young Gould.
It was his first game as captain of the Penrith Panthers.
The previous Sunday, 30 April, club captain Mick Stephenson had played his final match. Mounting injuries had finally brought his career to an end, but he went out with a remarkable performance. Penrith had lost its first five matches of the 1978 season; against North Sydney, Stephenson scored two tries as the Panthers recorded their first win, 17–16.
The following week, the captaincy passed to Gould.
He was just 19.
Penrith’s opponents on Sunday, 7 May were Eastern Suburbs. Gould recalls Bob Fulton being captain-coach of Easts that year but it was Arthur Beetson However, for this game at the Sydney Sports Ground Beetson did not play and Fulton was the captain.
Gould remembers the young Panthers being given virtually no chance.
Roger decided to try something different.
Shoes Off, Lie on the Floor
Before the game, Gould recalls, the Penrith players walked from the Sports Ground to a nearby hotel. Pubs were closed on Sundays in those days, but Roger knew someone who allowed the team inside.
The players removed their shoes and lay on the floor.
Roger began what Gould describes as a relaxation and hypnotherapy session.
He asked the players to relax, control their breathing and then visualise the match ahead. Gould remembers Roger asking them to imagine themselves playing the perfect game — making tackles, kicking well, scoring tries and seeing everything they did producing a positive result.
Gould, reflecting on this in 43 yers later, could see parallels with techniques that had become commonplace in professional sport.
At the time, however, this was something very different.
As the players lay quietly imagining their perfect performances, one of Penrith’s front-rowers1 suddenly cried out:
“Oh No!”
Everyone sat up.
As Gould remembered it, that rather killed the mood.
Then they beat Easts.
Whatever contribution Roger’s experiment made, something went right that afternoon.
Penrith beat Eastern Suburbs 15–13.
Inevitably, Gould recalled, everyone credited the victory to Roger having hypnotised the team.
So they did it again.
Before the following match against St George at Kogarah on Saturday, 13 May, Roger arranged another session. This time, however, there was a practical problem.
At the Sports Ground the previous week, the hotel had been only a short walk away. Roger didn’t know the St George area nearly as well. The venue he found was down towards Blakehurst — much further from the ground than he had appreciated.
The players walked there, went through another session and then had to walk all the way back to Kogarah. They arrived late, rushed their preparation and St George beat them 26–9.
Gould’s conclusion was succinct:
That was the end of the hypnotherapy.
HEAR PHIL GOULD TELL THE STORY
In this 12-minute extract from Six Tackles with Gus (September 2012), Phil Gould recalls Roger Cowan’s experiments with hypnotherapy and visualisation at Penrith in 1978 — and explains the lasting influence the experience had on his own interest in sports psychology.
Excerpt from Six Tackles with Gus courtesy of Nine Network Australia
It would be easy to leave the story there — an entertaining glimpse of a very different era of rugby league.
But Gould didn’t.
Something Stayed With Gus.
Despite the scepticism of some of the players, and despite the somewhat chaotic end to Roger’s experiment, Gould says he personally got something from it.
More importantly, he says:
“It piqued my interest in sports psychology.”
That interest stayed with him.
When Gould eventually moved into coaching, he became, in his words, “a very strong believer” in the psychological side of preparation and incorporated it into his coaching programs. He sought out sports psychologists, learned from them, and developed ways of helping players understand their own thought processes, motivation, preparation and performance.
Gould’s approach was not about a few minutes of emotional motivation before a match. His 2021 explanation is much broader: self-appraisal, goal setting, preparation, communication, trust, relationships between players and understanding how an individual’s role affects those around him.
And he traced the beginning of his interest back to those early experiences at Penrith.
“That Sort of Stuff Was Unheard of Back Then”
There is an interesting echo to Gould’s recollection.
Many years later, Ivan Cleary encountered Gould as a young player at the Sydney Roosters.
In his book Not Everything Counts … But Everything Matters, Cleary recall being struck by the way Gould thought about football:
From the very start, I was blown away by the way Gus saw the game.
Cleary remembers Gould’s tactics and strategy, but specifically mentions “the mental side of the footy”.
On one occasion Gould brought a psychologist in to speak to the players.
Cleary’s recollection is telling:
That sort of stuff was unheard of back then.
Perhaps it was to Cleary.
But it wasn’t to Gould.
Nearly two decades earlier, a teenage Phil Gould had been lying on the floor of a closed Sydney hotel while Roger Cowan asked him to relax, control his breathing and visualise himself playing the perfect game.
More Than an Eccentric Experiment
In Part 43 of Panthers, Passion & Politics, Roger talks about his longstanding fascination with what he called “the power of the unconscious to affect performance”.
He explored meditation, hypnosis, NLP and other approaches to changing patterns of thought. At various times he worked directly with Panthers players who were struggling with confidence or performance.
Read in isolation, Roger’s recollections might sound like the unusual interests of an unconventional chief executive.
Gould’s story adds something important.
It independently confirms that Roger was actually experimenting with these ideas in the Panthers football environment as early as 1978.
Care needs to be taken about claiming any more than that. There may have been others in rugby league experimenting with psychological preparation at the time, and there is no need to claim that Roger Cowan invented or pioneered sports psychology in the game.
But it is interesting enough that Roger was exploring the mental dimensions of sporting performance at a time when such ideas were far from commonplace in rugby league.
Intersting enough because he had plenty on his plate with the entire Panthers enterprise. Interesting enough given the label “anti-rugby-league” tat had been applied by some.
The first experiment produced a memorable win.
The second produced a long walk and a 26–9 defeat.
And the hypnotherapy sessions stopped for then.
But for one 19-year-old player, something remained.
More than forty years later, Phil Gould could still trace his interest in sports psychology back to those unusual afternoons at Penrith — an interest he would eventually carry into his own highly successful coaching career.
Perhaps Roger’s experiment achieved something after all.
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Unfortunately Gould does not name the player. The front-rowers on the day were John Farragher and Ross Cale. In the second row were Paul Merlo and Tas Batieri. ↩︎
For Roger Cowan, a problem was rarely just the incident that brought it to attention.
His instinct was to pull it apart. What was actually going wrong? Who was affected? What outcome was required? And, most importantly, could a system be designed that would produce that outcome more consistently?
It was an approach to problem-solving and decision-making he was embedding across the Panthers organisation throughout the 1990s — and one he believed was important to its continuing success.
Few examples illustrate that approach better than his work on rugby league’s judiciary.
The problem had bothered him for decades.
“Sit down, Mr Cowan”
As Roger recalled in Panthers, Passion & Politics, when he served on the NSW Rugby League executive committee in the early 1970s, judiciary decisions regularly created controversy. Penalties appeared inconsistent and clubs sometimes believed others were receiving more favourable treatment.
Eventually he tried to raise the issue at an executive meeting.
“I want to make a suggestion about the judiciary system,” he told chairman Bill Buckley.
“Sit down, Mr Cowan, you’re not here to talk about judiciary.”
Roger tried again.
“Sit down Mr Cowan or leave the meeting. You are out of order.”
That was the end of the discussion.
More than twenty years later, rugby league had changed dramatically — and was in the process of changing even more.
During the planning for Super League, the judiciary came up for discussion. Roger said he had “always had a passion for judiciary” and offered to prepare a paper.
This time the response was different.
“Terrific! Go ahead, do it.”
So he did.
Start with the outcome
The surviving working paper is dated 24 November 1995.
Its opening is revealing.
Roger did not begin by deciding who should sit on the judiciary or what punishment should apply to a high tackle.
He began by identifying what a better judiciary system should achieve. What is the outcome — what evidence will demonstrate the system is a success?
Among a list of outcomes were: reduced levels of public criticism of judiciary decisions; elimination of the perception that penalties were inconsistent or favoured particular clubs; less involvement of solicitors; reduced number of hearings and shorter duration; and elimination of appeals based simply on the severity of a sentence.
Before designing the machinery, he defined what the machinery was supposed to accomplish.
That changed the nature of the problem.
It wasn’t simply a question of whether an individual judiciary panel made the right or wrong decision. A system could produce perfectly defensible individual decisions and still create inconsistency, expense, delay and a perception of unfairness.
Roger’s proposal therefore attempted to move responsibility for consistency away from the discretion of whichever individuals happened to be sitting on a particular night and place much more of it within the system itself.
Separate guilt from penalty
At the centre of the proposal was a relatively simple distinction.
The judiciary should determine whether a player was guilty and, if so, what offence had been committed.
Ordinarily, it should not then decide the penalty from scratch.
Offences would instead be divided into clearly defined categories carrying predetermined penalties. Discounts and additional penalties could be applied according to defined circumstances.
A player whose guilt was clear could plead guilty, receive the appropriate discount and avoid a hearing altogether. A player maintaining innocence retained the right to have the case heard.
By January 1996, when Roger presented the proposal to Super League, the concept had been distilled into five principal elements:
experts should be used where necessary;
a Head of Judiciary should control the process;
there should be incentives for guilty pleas;
penalties should be predetermined, with the judiciary principally deciding guilt rather than sentence; and
hearings should generally occur only where a player pleaded not guilty.
The objective was not simply tougher or softer penalties.
It was greater consistency.
Design the process, not just the idea
Roger’s November paper went well beyond the broad concept.
It worked through what should happen from the time an incident occurred.
The Head of Judiciary would identify an appropriate charge and notify the player. Where necessary, expert analysis could be obtained. If that evidence exonerated the player, the matter ended. If it supported the charge, the player had another opportunity to plead guilty. If the player continued to maintain innocence, a judiciary hearing followed.
The proposal dealt with who should pay for expert evidence. It considered appeals and appeal fees. It provided for records of previous offences, discounts for guilty pleas and additional penalties in defined circumstances.
Roger even tried to anticipate the objections to what he was proposing.
One obvious objection to predetermined penalties was that no two incidents were exactly alike.
Surely a judiciary panel needed discretion to recognise the difference?
Roger’s answer wasn’t to ignore those differences and he produced the principle that offences a more precisely defined and graded.
A high tackle, for example, might be divided into 20 or more categories, each carrying its own penalty.
He also recognised the potential danger in relying upon expert analysis. If a new system placed greater weight on expert evidence and that evidence was subsequently shown to be wrong, confidence in the entire system could be damaged.
One proposed safeguard was a second expert opinion in controversial cases.
Even the media were considered part of the process.
Journalists and editors should have access to the schedules of offences, penalties, discounts and additions. Expert reports should be available and journalists invited to see the video evidence supporting them.
Public understanding wasn’t something to worry about after a decision had been made.
It was part of the system.
From weeks to points
Perhaps one of the most interesting ideas appears under the rather modest heading “Future Considerations.”
Roger had identified another problem.
If suspensions were expressed only in whole weeks, a carefully graded series of offences could still end up producing the same penalty. Several different levels of seriousness might all result in a one-week suspension.
So he considered a points system.
One hundred points could represent a one-week suspension. A penalty of 275 points could produce an immediate two-week suspension, with 75 points carried forward. Discounts and additions could also be expressed as points.
It allowed much finer distinctions between offences and circumstances.
The significance for this story is not simply the points themselves.
The working paper captures Roger’s thought process while it was happening:
If we solve this problem, what new problem might our solution create? And how might we solve that?
Not entirely Roger’s system
The proposal did not simply emerge from Roger’s office and become the Super League judiciary unchanged.
Roger himself was quite clear about that.
Many people became involved in developing the final system and compromises were made. His original submission was not adopted in its entirety, although he believed most of its principles survived.
That distinction becomes particularly important when the story reaches 1998.
By then Super League and the Australian Rugby League had come together in the new National Rugby League, and a decision had to be made about which judiciary system the unified competition would use.
The two systems were fundamentally different.
Roger attended meetings between representatives of the ARL and Super League attempting to reach agreement. According to his later account, those meetings achieved little and the question was eventually referred to the chief executives of the 20 clubs.
They heard submissions supporting both alternatives.
The result, Roger recorded, was 18 votes to two in favour of the Super League system — including support from 10 of the 12 former ARL clubs.
It appeared that the argument had been won.
Roger soon became convinced that something very different had happened.
The system meets the real world
By June 1998, the new NRL judiciary was attracting considerable public criticism.
This was the first season of the unified competition and the clubs had overwhelmingly chosen the Super League judiciary model. Yet some early decisions were already raising questions about whether the system being implemented was actually operating according to the principles the clubs had endorsed.
Two cases involving prominent players became particularly contentious.
Glenn Lazarus, playing for the Melbourne Storm on the eve of a State of Origin match, had received 130 points for a high tackle. With 100 points producing an automatic one-match suspension, the penalty would have ruled him out of State of Origin. The penalty was reduced to 99 points — allowing Lazarus to play Origin, leaving the 99 points to be carried forward.
Geoff Toovey’s circumstances were different. Due to his past judicial recorded any offences attracted a loading on a standard penalty. He — again enough for an automatic one-match suspension. Toovey’s points were reduced back to 75 Concerned that suspending a prominent and respected captain for such a minor offence would appear unreasonable, the authorities reduced his points to 75.2
Whatever the merits of either decision, both exposed a problem at the heart of a system intended to produce consistency.
If Lazarus’s circumstances justified reducing 130 points to 99, what would happen when the next player accumulated 130 points but did not have a State of Origin match approaching?
If Toovey’s standing in the game, or the relatively minor nature of the offence that triggered his suspension, justified reducing his accumulated points, would the same consideration be available to a less prominent player?
These were among the controversies being discussed publicly by radio broadcaster Ray Hadley.
Roger had been listening.
On 15 June 1998, he wrote Hadley a five-page letter. He agreed that a number of decisions during the season appeared “absurd from the public’s point of view”.
But Roger believed the controversy was being blamed on the wrong thing.
The problem, as he saw it, was not that the principles developed for the Super League judiciary had failed. It was that the NRL judiciary had departed from what he regarded as the most fundamental of those principles.
The difference came down to a deceptively simple question:
Who was responsible for consistency?
Under the old system, that responsibility rested substantially with the judiciary panel. Change the people and the interpretation — and potentially the outcomes — could change with them.
The Super League philosophy put much greater responsibility upon the administrators of the game.
The judiciary determined guilt. The rules and schedules provided consistency in penalty.
Those rules could be changed.
But when they changed, they changed for everyone.
Learn from the bad decision
This is where the Hadley letter perhaps reveals more about Roger’s thinking than the original proposal.
He did not suggest that his system would prevent every bad or controversial outcome.
Quite the opposite:
“No judiciary system will ever be perfect.”
What mattered was what happened when an imperfection became apparent.
A good system, he wrote, should produce greater consistency and generate its own improvements.
If a particular case exposed an unfair penalty, the administrators could change the schedule.
The next player committing the same or a closely comparable offence would then receive the new penalty.
The lesson from the controversial decision had been captured by the system.
That was fundamentally different from allowing a panel to produce a different result next time simply because its members regarded the circumstances differently.
The first approach changed the rule for everyone.
The second changed the decision for one person.
Lazarus, Toovey — and the next player
Roger’s response to the Lazarus and Toovey controversies was revealing.
He was not necessarily arguing that the concessions made to either player were wrong.
His concern was what happened the next time.
If there was a legitimate reason why Lazarus’s 130-point penalty should be reduced to 99, that reason should be identified and incorporated into the rules. Every future player satisfying the same conditions should then receive the same treatment.
The same principle applied to Toovey. If there was a legitimate reason why his circumstances warranted reducing the points that would otherwise have resulted in suspension, define that circumstance and make the concession available to every player who subsequently qualified for it.
The individual decision therefore became evidence.
If it revealed something wrong with the existing rules, fix the rules.
If it revealed a legitimate circumstance that had not previously been anticipated, incorporate that circumstance into the rules.
Either way, the system became better.
But not a system without judgement
Roger was not arguing for a completely mechanical judiciary.
His letter makes that clear.
Under the Super League system, the judiciary retained discretion to alter a penalty where it considered the circumstances of a particular case genuinely unusual. As far as Roger knew, that discretion had not been used during the Super League season.
The distinction is important.
His objective was not to eliminate judgement.
It was to prevent routine decisions from depending unnecessarily upon individual judgement — while retaining discretion for the genuinely exceptional case.
Consistency was the default.
Departure from it needed a reason.
Who cares what the system is?
Another surviving set of Roger’s notes from 1998 approaches the same issue from a different direction.
At the top of the page he posed a simple question:
Players cared. They wanted less time spent travelling to and attending hearings, equal treatment and a safer game.
Coaches cared. Judiciary appearances interfered with training; they wanted their players treated fairly and protected from dangerous play.
Chief executives cared about the time consumed by judiciary matters and the treatment of their players.
Financial managers cared about the cost of solicitors, witnesses and travel.
Supporters wanted confidence that their team was being treated equally. They also wanted the game’s best players playing rather than injured or suspended.
And the media?
Roger’s assessment was characteristically dry:
“As many opportunities as possible to create controversy.”
There is humour in the line, but the exercise itself is revealing.
Before judging whether a system was working, Roger was asking what the different people affected by it actually required from it.
Don’t fix the decision. Fix the system.
The surviving judiciary papers stretch from the original Super League proposal in November 1995, through its presentation and development in 1996, to Roger’s defence of its underlying principles in 1998.
Together they provide something more interesting than a claim about who devised rugby league’s judiciary.
They provide a small window into how Roger Cowan approached a problem.
Start by defining what you are trying to achieve.
Identify who is affected.
Separate the problem from the personalities involved.
Design a process rather than relying upon good intentions.
Build incentives into that process.
Anticipate objections.
Allow for exceptional circumstances.
And when the system produces an outcome that exposes a weakness, don’t simply correct the outcome.
Learn from it.
Change the system.
Then apply the improvement consistently to everyone who comes next.
It was an approach Roger applied repeatedly during his years at Panthers — to organisational structures, financial controls, strategic planning and football administration.
The judiciary happens to leave behind an unusually clear documentary trail showing that approach at work.
There is also a certain symmetry to the story.
In the early 1970s, Roger tried to suggest there might be a better way to administer rugby league’s judiciary.
He was told to sit down.
More than twenty years later, he was finally invited to develop the idea.
And when the new National Rugby League had to choose between two fundamentally different approaches, 18 of its 20 clubs voted for the system that had grown from that proposal.
For Roger, however, winning that argument was never quite the point.
The system still had to work.
And if it didn’t, the answer was not to abandon the principles behind it.
It was to find out why — and make the system better.
From the Panthers Passion Politics Digital Archives
The surviving documents behind this story provide an unusual opportunity to follow the development of Roger Cowan’s thinking about the rugby league judiciary — from his original proposal, through its presentation to Super League, to his response when he believed the principles behind the system were being compromised.
November 1995 — The Original Judiciary Proposal
Roger Cowan, 24 November 1995
Roger’s original working paper setting out the objectives of a proposed Super League judiciary system, its procedures and safeguards, and the problems it was intended to overcome. The document also includes his early consideration of replacing suspensions expressed solely in weeks with a points-based system.
The presentation prepared from the earlier working paper, distilling the proposal into its principal elements for consideration by Super League. It shows how the more detailed November proposal was developed into a practical model for discussion and implementation.
These working notes approach the judiciary from another direction: who is affected by the system, and what does each group need from it? Roger considers the interests of players, coaches, chief executives, financial managers, supporters, administrators and the media.
Written during controversy surrounding the judiciary in the first NRL season, this five-page letter explains Roger’s concern that the system being implemented had departed from a fundamental principle of the Super League model: consistency should reside principally in the rules and procedures rather than depend upon individual decisions. The letter discusses the Glenn Lazarus and Geoff Toovey cases and explains how Roger believed apparent anomalies should be used to improve the system.
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This was another technique Roger encouraged in the decision-making process throughout Panthers — this took various forms and names depending on the specific circumstance. One was use deBono’s “Six Hat Thinking” where the Black Hat was engaged to argue against the idea. Using the process developed by Mike Basch of Federal Express, there was a section title “Things We Must Overcome” where the challenges were listed and anything that “killed” the diea identified. ↩︎
In Round 1 of the 1998 unified season Brisbane played Manly in Brisbane. Bill Harrigan was the referee. Early in the match Harrigan sent Toovey to the sin-bin for dissent about a decision. In the last 30 seconds of the game John Hopoate was sent of for referee abuse. Wtin seconds Toovey was also sent and the charge was also abuse. ↩︎
People who worked with Cowan, or dealt with him through rugby league administration over the years, saw the anti-rugby league tag very differently.
Greg Mitchell, rugby league general manager at Parramatta,1 was a contemporary of Cowan during the NSWRL days. They attended many meetings together.
If there was some issue facing the game at the time, Roger always had a paper to present to provide a new perspective. He was certainly always current and relevant in terms of rugby league issues.
David Gallop says the fact that Cowan was on the Board of Super League is evidence of his reputation as a leader among football club CEOs.
I’ve always found him to be a deep thinker about rugby league and how to improve the game. For instance, his role in the judiciary concept and the amount of written material that he put together in relation to that – shows that he was very interested in the future of rugby league.
Roger Cowan was the original architect of the judiciary system introduced by Super League in 1997 and subsequently adopted by the NRL. In a 2003 paper, academics Ian Dobinson and David Thorpe described the system as a “benchmark or exemplar for how sports … should deal with on-field violence”.
Cowan says the way the rugby league judiciary worked had long been a problem in his mind.
Even back in the early seventies, when I was on the NSWRL executive committee, there was always controversy about the way the judiciary worked. Often there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the decisions, and some teams appeared to be getting more favourable treatment than others. One night I decided to suggest an improvement to the system.
Bill Buckley was the chairman at the time. I waited till general business, then stood up and said,
“I want to make a suggestion about the judiciary system”.
Buckley said,
“Sit down, Mr Cowan, you’re not here to talk about judiciary”.
“But I just want to suggest an improvement.”
“Sit down, Mr Cowan or leave the meeting. You are out of order”.
That was it. He was going to throw me out of the meeting rather than listen to a suggestion. The culture of rugby league was always pretty closed in its early days. There was that inner circle, and they were fixed in their ways. It was very much a closed environment for ideas. It was an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of atmosphere. “We’ve been doing it this way since nineteen hundred and nothing …”.’ It took around twenty years for it to change.
At a Super League meeting one night, we started talking about judiciary, and I said, “I’ve always had a passion for judiciary, I’d like to write a paper on it.” They said, “Terrific! Go ahead, do it”. It was such an open and participative environment. Everyone worked together in a great spirit of cooperation to get things done.
I wrote a proposal, and we worked on it as a team. There were a number of modifications, and it came into operation in time for the commencement of the Super League competition. When the NRL competition started there was great debate about which system to use for judiciary – the Super League or the ARL system. They agreed to use the Super League system, but to my horror and frustration they started to use it incorrectly. It was going back to being more like the ARL system. Fortunately, someone must have seen what a mess they were making of it and made the necessary changes.
Cowan says his original system was refined by the input of others on the Super League planning group, and since then there have been some minor modifications but the basic principles remain the same. Thorpe and Dobinson agree that the previous NSWRL judiciary procedure was viewed as arbitrary and inconsistent. Their research also found that it ‘was not written down anywhere and varied from chairman to chairman’.
The NRL system was also adopted by the Australian Football League at the beginning of the 2005 season. In an article in a sports law journal, The Commentator, Andrew Stops, a partner in Piper Alderman’s Dispute Resolution Group, Melbourne, made the following comment:
The tribunal system is a great credit to the AFL. It is transparent, predictable and flexible enough to deal with a wide variety of incidents that can and do occur in our national game.
Beyond the Book: Roger’s original judiciary papers survive, providing an unusual opportunity to follow the way he approached the problem — from defining the desired outcomes to designing the system and later defending its principles. Read: Don’t Fix the Decision. Fix the System.
At the time he was interviewed for the book, David Costello was CEO of ClubsNSW, having previously held the same role with the Leagues Club Association. He had a long association with Roger Cowan. He laughs at the suggestion that Cowan was “not a rugby league man”.
I don’t believe that myth. Roger is an absolute supporter of rugby league, I’ve seen it personally, in the support that he extends to junior rugby league and so many other areas.
I think more than anything else, he’s encouraged better professionalism on the football club side of things – as opposed to the leagues clubs side. I don’t believe that Roger ever had anything but absolute regard for rugby league, and the need to promote it and propagate it. But he was also very mindful of the costs associated with supporting a professional rugby league team. He would have liked the football club to be able to fully fund rugby league at some stage, given the pressures that we’re now seeing with government taxation levels.
So, to suggest that he’s not passionate about it – that’s a joke.
Roy Masters says Roger Cowan’s ‘anti-rugby league’ tag is paradoxical.
There were many times that he had to pull himself away from rugby league, because people were saying he was too hands-on. He played rugby league. He’s always been fascinated by the game and quite a few times he was involved at the administration level.
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Greg Mitchell left Parramatta Eels in 2005 and joined the NSW Rugby League Western Academy. ↩︎
The companion article explained how Panthers changed the way it thought. This article asks the obvious next question: did that change in thinking actually change the club’s fortunes?
One of the earliest outcomes of the strategic reset was the appointment of Tim Sheens as Manager-Coach
The “Coach” part of Sheens’ role delivered quickly, the team performance in the 1984 season was in stark contrast to the seasons before. His impact was roundly recognised and applauded by all, including his peers.
Sydney Morning Herald 20 Sep 1984 — click to read
But the “Manager” part of the Manager-Coach role was more strategic, as was the role of the Five by Five Committee.
The stated goal — to have five local juniors named as Kangaroos within 5 years — was really about something far more valuable: to shift the Club’s trajectory.
Was it successful?
Let’s look first at that main goal.
Player
Representative Team
First Chosen
Penrith Junior
Royce Simmons
Australia
1986
No
Greg Alexander
Australia
1986
Yes
John Cartwright
Australia
1990
Yes
Mark Geyer
Australia
1990
Yes
Brad Fittler
Australia
1990
Yes
Brad Izzard*
NSW
1990
Yes
Steve Carter
NSW
1992
No
Graham Mackay
Australia
1992
No
*Brad Izzard had represented NSW in 1982 — before the strategic reset.
The Committee narrowly missed its stated target. More importantly, however, the effort reflected a broader ambition—to create a football club that the district could believe in and one capable of producing representative players consistently rather than occasionally.
Winning Games
The following table shows the results of the regular season games for the 10 seasons before and after the 1983 strategic reset. The Panthers won almost twice as many regular-season games during the decade following the strategic reset as they had during the preceding decade.
1974-1983
1984-1993
Games Played
228
228
Games Won
66
123
Win Percentage
29%
54%
Attack and Defence (Tries Scored & Tries Against)
The following table shows the tries scored and conceded during the regular season for the 10 seasons before and after the 1983 strategic reset. Note: I’ve used tries rather than points here because the value of the try changed from 3 to 4 in 1983.
The Panthers attack improved by 4% which is inconsequential. More importantly defence improved by 38%.
1974-1983
1984-1993
Games Played
228
228
Total Tries Scored
614
638
Total Tries Against
872
539
Tries For – Tries Against
-258
+99
The improvement in defence is extremely important – Strong defensive records are widely regarded as one of the defining characteristics of premiership-winning teams. Defence speaks volumes about the character and culture of a club – the change represents a distinct shift in both for the Penrith Panthers.
Overall, the Panthers’ tries-for-and-against differential moved from –258 to +99—a turnaround of 357 tries. In other words, they went from consistently being outscored to consistently outscoring their opponents.
Final Ladder Position
The numbers above suggest a big difference in performance of Penrith team before and after the changes put in place between the 1983 and 1984 seasons.
As to the trajectory. The graph below shows the finishing position of the Panthers for the 10 years before (red) and the 10 years after (blue) the late 1983 changes.
There is a distinct and positive difference between the two decades in being compared.
A further consequence of the change …
The following table shows average home crowd for regular season games, comparing the 10 seasons before and after the 1983 strategic reset. Crowds increased by 20%.
Home Games
1974-1983
1984-1993
Played
114
114
Total Attendance
871,042
1,047,261
Average Crowd
7,641
9,187
Conclusion
No single committee, coach or governance reform can claim sole responsibility for the transformation of Penrith Panthers during the 1980s. However, the evidence strongly suggests that the strategic reset undertaken in late 1983 fundamentally altered the club’s direction. The Five by Five Committee did not achieve its headline target exactly as written, but the broader ambition—to reshape the football club’s future—was overwhelmingly realised.
In the 2001 publication Hooked On League: Royce Simmons1, Royce tells the story of Darryl Brohman asking his advice, at the end of 1983, about an offer he’d received to move to Canterbury-Bankstown. Royce’s advice paints a clear picture of the state of the Penrith Panthers at that time:
… thanks for thinking of us but right now we’ve got five players on contract and you’re a free agent being chased by probably the best club in the world.
The reasoning behind Royce’s that advice is also telling:
I don’t think he wanted to leave us high and dry but we told him that we were high and dry whether he stayed or not.
Simmons’ view was that “things were looking bleak” for Penrith.
In fact, things were so bleak, even the independently run Panthers Supporters Club had dissolved at the end of 1983 and needed its own reset. The supporter’s club had two Panther diehard supporters — Cathy O’Kane and Berryl Moss who took on the task of whipping up wider support for the 1984 Season and beyond.
Penrith Press 12 Oct 1983 — click to read
And Panthers had Roger Cowan who had finally been granted the governance structure he’d so long been advocating.
The Change
One of Cowan’s first steps under the new One Board, One CEO structure was to involve more people in finding solutions to serious problems. Problems like the performance of the rugby league team.
Royce had been weighing up whether to leave Penrith when he was invited to join the effort to find those solutions. He described that first step to a reset of football fortunes.
Prior to the start of the 1984 season Roger Cowan organised a series of seminars at Penrith Leagues Club — a ‘think-tank’ involving prominent Penrith business people, junior rugby league administrators, past and present players, and local community leaders. In one of the groups, Tim Sheens’ name came up as a possible coach.
It was an approach that mirrored what he had done with the licensed club in the early days of his tenure.
This symposium produced a range of strategies and goals, two of the goals had a significant impact on Panthers football performance.
The first, most immediate, goal was to secure Sheens for the coaching position — it was late in 1983, training for the 1984 season needed to begin soon yet Penrith had few players and no coach. This was a pressing need. And it was a challenging task given the fact Sheens had sold his real estate business and was preparing up to move his family to Queensland.
Royce worked in the background to get Sheens to stay, but says:
I’m sure Roger Cowan worked the hardest to convince Tim to take on the job.
[He] really went out of the way to chase hard and talk Tim out of going. The players played a supporting role in letting Tim know that we’d support him.
Tim signed on as the club’s first Manager-Coach.
Appointing a Manager-Coach was unusual in the rugby league world — although it was a pressing short-term need to appoint Sheens as coach, expanding the role was a strategic move.
The second goal was more long-term and strategic — to have 5 Penrith juniors selected for the Kangaroos — the Australian Rugby League team. A Five by Five Committee was established to take responsibility for developing initiatives to achieve this goal.
Penrith Press Front Page 26 October 1983 — click to read
Don Feltis was a member of this Committee:
We talked about strategies and all the rugby league development issues … like making sure our best juniors were selected into representative squads; to set up development squads — age groups between the representative squads — like 13s, 15s and 17s and give them personalised coaching; panels to interview possible coaches and to have only the best coaches — and to have all our coaching techniques standardised so that all our juniors from 13s to 19s were getting similar tuition … under the guidance of Tim Sheens.
It was a great exercise and made a lot of difference to the future development of our club. … it made us all wake up and realise all the things we had to do to be successful. Roger had always been a dreamer … a visionary. He realised we had to lift our club up from the level we were performing at.
A Different Way of Thinking — from Goals to Outcomes
The stated goal of the Five-by-Five Committee was to have five home-grown players represent Australia within five years.
Looking back, this appears to have been an early example of a planning philosophy Roger Cowan would later apply much more broadly throughout the Panthers organisation. That philosophy centred around “outcomes thinking“.
This goal was an outcome – a description of a future that would be proof of a successful project. During the 90s at Panthers this would have been framed:
In November 1999 (5 Seasons away) the Australian Kangaroos have included five representatives from Panthers who were developed in the Penrith Junior Rugby League District.
Working backwards from that future enabled a more creative approach to uncovering the initiatives, programs and strategies that would have a positive effect on creating that future. Initiatives like those described by Don Feltis above.
The Five-by-Five goal was never intended as a prediction. It was a deliberately ambitious picture of what success would look like if the club fundamentally changed the way it developed players in their huge junior catchment area.
Quite quickly early indicators drove some optimism — the governance model reduced conflict, Cathy and Berryl re-launched the supporters’ club, Tim Sheens had players wanting to stay, and the team began making its way up the competition ladder.2
Sydney Morning Herald 28 May 1984
Continue:The 1983 Strategic Reset — Did It Work? examines whether the strategic changes introduced in late 1983 produced measurable improvements in the Panthers’ football performance over the following decade.
Hooked On League: Royce Simmons with Alan Whiticker published 2001. Chapter 19. ↩︎
The headline in the SMH clipping is dramatic but not accurate – Penrith had been in the top 5 before, a few times but only once before had they been there after at least 5 rounds of a season. ↩︎
In 1991, Glenn Matthews decided that he wanted one day to be CEO of Panthers. He says that while he was never promised the job, he was always given enormous encouragement and support in his growth with the company. ‘There’s always been an atmosphere of “anything’s possible” at Panthers’, he says. ‘It’s an environment that nurtures self- belief.’
When Roger Cowan retired in 2005, Glenn Matthews was able to step comfortably into the position of CEO.
The flat structure replaced the ‘us and them’ culture that still existed in some sections of the Club, with an atmosphere of co-operation — both within each business unit and between team leaders. Glenn Matthews says,
‘Teamwork is important and you need to be comfortable with ambiguity. You need to be able to say to yourself, this is my role, but it might work better if someone else comes to assist me with this. Also, if you see something that needs to be done, and it’s not in your area, do it. But the people in that department also need to accept that and not feel threatened.
The leaders of the new small business groups had stepped into a whole new world, according to Bob Adamson.
We’d taken a bunch of young, enthusiastic, energetic supervisors who were now leading a team. We then had to start training those people, to give them some business acumen, and the skills to run a business. So we framed a scheme called Business Unit Development. We ran that for eight or nine months, took every group through it. There were regular sessions, and each of the team leaders brought along different members of their teams each time.
But it was much more complicated than that. There always seemed to be another step to take. We were never satisfied. The overall structure had to support what we were doing. We regularly held one or two day workshops to go over it all and do some fine tuning or make changes. If we brought another book into our management library we would discuss how it might add improvements. For example, The Empty Raincoat by Charles Handy inspired some change in our attitudes, so we looked at other books he had written.
Panthers was probably the first registered club to embrace official quality assurance, moving towards ISO 9000 accreditation with Standards Australia. The incentive increased when the NSW government’s purchasing arm let it be known that the Government would only deal with companies that had qualified through ISO 9000.
Since the move to Mulgoa Road, with its new space and improved facilities, the conference and banquet business had become a lucrative part of club activity. Panthers’ thinking was that there would be very few others in the conference business that would go to the trouble and expense involved in quality accreditation, so there would be significant commercial benefit in taking it forward. Eventually, after management compared the annual expense of Standards Australia re-auditing to the commercial return, it decided not to proceed with the accreditation. However, they elected to retain the stringent quality control measures and systems that were part of the process.
We removed a few items that were there to make it easy for Standards Australia to audit a company, but left the rest in place. We felt we were in a good position to take advantage of the valuable tools in such a system, but without spending the money.
People have asked, what’s the point of having all these systems when we’re a service industry? Much of what we sell is intangible — so how can we monitor the quality? Basically, the general idea of all that documentation is that we can look at our customer — whether it’s an internal or external customer — and ask ourselves, what does this customer want from us? Is it good entertainment? A comfortable environment? Good food? Or just excellent service? Having identified that, then in the preparation of that product, we have to ask “what does ‘good’ look like?” And if we can define what good looks like, we have to write it down so that everybody knows. When a keg of beer is delivered to the dock, how do we guarantee its quality from the time it arrives till the time it’s poured into a glass? There has to be a system in place to ensure the quality through all the stages. The same applies to a leg of lamb. Who ordered it, was it from the right supplier, what did we do with it when it got here, did we store it properly, did we cook it properly, serve it properly — slice it, put it on a plate, present it to the customer?
Adamson recalls that some people, particularly those who saw themselves in creative roles, found it hard to embrace the concept of systems written down to do everything. He gave an experience with a chef as an example.
I asked him, ‘What goes wrong most in the kitchen?’ ‘Well, we don’t get the right information from the people in the functions department.’
So, if we could fix that by putting a system in place that ensured that you did get the right information, that would give you more time, less stress, to get on with being creative in the kitchen? Once we identified the quality control that was most important to the chef, it was simple to get his commitment.
If you have all the basic mechanisms in place, that leaves the creative person free to be creative.
Peter Sheridan is Panthers’ Group Internal Auditor.1 He began work in the early 90s, and was very impressed with the systems that were in place when he arrived.
There was a quality system that documented all the policies and procedures for the majority of operational areas. This is very important from an auditor’s perspective, because you have something to audit against — that’s the standard. You can easily see how a department is performing against that standard. It was a very different environment, and a different culture from other places that I’d worked. Most of my experience had been with large corporations or government departments which were much more regimented. I hadn’t worked in a flattened organisation before, but there were still policies and procedures in place to temper that and make it easy to adapt to.
I came to the club soon after the structural changes, into what was now a decentralised organisation. When an organisation goes flat, a lot of the normal controls can get a bit wishy-washy. I believe that Roger foresaw this and decided to put something in place to temper any falling down in controls. It would give them a way of monitoring the functions to see that the business controls remained in place, allow them to keep an eye on things.
Cowan’s motives in appointing an internal auditor were exactly as Sheridan said.
I was concerned about the tendency for good systems to degenerate into chaos if not constantly checked. People look for short cuts and sometimes they even think they are making improvements, but they are not seeing the full picture.
A small change by one person, then another one by a different person, a bit later a slight improvement by someone else, and after a few months the system is nothing like what was intended.
We were still working to overcome some significant problems brought about through rapid growth and I could not afford to have systems deviating from the plan.
When I appointed Peter Sheridan, he was given authority to look into every nook and cranny.
Panthers was probably the first club to appoint an auditor as a permanent member of staff. The internal auditor had the authority to investigate any matter that came to his attention except one. There was an agreement that all management salaries would be confidential, known only to the executive of the Board and the external auditors.2 On Cowan’s recommendation, the Club also implemented a Board Audit Committee in 1997, although there is no regulation under corporate law requiring it.
It was also the first club to implement total quality management systems. The results are evident in the recognition it receives through awards and government subsidies in such areas as energy and risk management.
Over the ten years leading up to the interview with Glenn Matthews for this publication, the Club has been looking at the possibility of having its own property trust. Management had presented a number of papers to the Board advocating such a move, but a company needs to have substantial financial resources to pursue the concept.
The timing is now right for us. The experts tell us that the critical mass is a total property value of $200 million, so at more than $500 million, we’re now in a great position. Our assets grew as a result of strict governance policies over the years, and our very successful amalgamation strategy. Major companies like Woolworths and Bunnings all invest in property trusts.
In 2006, the Board and the members approved a proposal for the management to begin pursuing such a venture. Matthews says the Club will always retain at least 51 per cent interest in any trust, but it will open up enormous opportunities for the company and its 14 properties. It will enable Panthers to convert part of its equity in property into working capital.
It’s another transition for the small business that Roger Cowan took on in 1965, and left forty years later, which is now positioned to take its place as one of Australia’s leading property trusts.
It almost lost that chance. At one stage the Club was on the brink of losing half the potential of the property trust. The amalgamation story involves allegations of management lies, broken promises, back door takeover fears and preservation of power bases. The ensuing conflict could have put a very large part of that future value at risk.
In a way, the ailment began with the fiery difference of opinion discussed in the next chapter – the possibility of a rugby league merger between Parramatta and Penrith.
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Peter Sheridan left Panthers in the early 2010s. ↩︎
The exception that prevented the Internal Auditor from having access to management salaries was driven by the same respect for confidentiality that would become significant in later controversy. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Growth is not always smooth. There are so many roads that must be paved and most of them start as rough tracks. A good management team seeks improvements continually, every day. Some aspects of the business are given priority; others are set aside until there is time. It is never finished, and it is never perfect.
One of the biggest milestones in the history of the Penrith Leagues Club was the relocation to its new site on Mulgoa Road in 1984. In the years immediately following the move, the club experienced phenomenal growth.
The growth rate had been consistent from the time that Cowan started as manager in 1965. There were some flat spots, and a few years of concern about lower-than-expected profit levels, but they had always been able to overcome them.
In the years after the purchase of the property in 1971, they had spent vast amounts of time planning the transfer from Station St to Mulgoa Rd. When they left the old Station Street premises in April 1984, Panthers had about 200 employees and annual sales income of around $12 million.
The success of the intensive preparation for the move was certainly reflected in the sales. In the first year, sales increased to $16 million, and staff numbers jumped to 300. Most of the systems that had been in place in Station Street were easily transferred. Despite the issues raised due to Mulgoa Rd being a much bigger building, by and large, the transfer went smoothly.
What they had not anticipated in all the forward planning was the rate of growth.
Within four years, annual sales more than quadrupled, to $65 million. The Club now had 850 staff. Cowan remembers it was an exciting time.
Everyone was highly motivated. It was one of the most enjoyable periods I remember. The new location was successful beyond our hopes. For years we had listened to the knockers saying what a bad move it was, and that our Station Street customers would not follow us that far out of town. 1984 was also a year of significant personal satisfaction. It was the first year of a new administration system for rugby league.1 We narrowly missed the final series that year but made it in ‘85.
Amidst the euphoria there were problems behind the scenes. Apart from a split in the Board and the stress of the misguided police investigation, there was something the matter with the business.
The fact was that while sales were going up, profit was going down. So, something was wrong. It should have been basic maths. Increasing sales, if managed properly, should lead to more profit, but that was just not happening. For more than twenty years we had been managing growth successfully, so what was different now?
In 1990, a chance discussion, a painful back and the Panther’s first grand final combined in a way that would lead to a dramatic change in the management style at Panthers. It would also lay the foundations that have allowed the company to move well beyond what most people ever envisaged.
David O’Keeffe was CEO of the Penrith Lakes Development and a very experienced administrator. He and Cowan were attending a function and their conversation got around to the club. O’Keeffe talked about its growth and asked about the number of employees. When told the staff had grown to 850, he said to Cowan, ‘I’ll bet you are having trouble keeping your thumbs on all of that.’ ‘Unbelievable difficulty’, was Cowan’s response.
‘I’ll send you something that will explain why you are having difficulties’, O’Keeffe promised.
The next day Cowan received an article entitled Evolution and Revolution as Organisations Grow, published by Harvard University and written by Larry E Greiner in 1972.
1990 was our first year in a rugby league grand final. We were to play Canberra on the Sunday afternoon, and coach Phil Gould decided to take the players to Sydney on Saturday and stay overnight. It was one of the times when I was CEO of both organisations and Phil asked me to join them.
For several weeks I had been suffering from a back problem that was giving me pain right down one arm. I had been having physiotherapy, but nothing was working. On Saturday afternoon the pain was driving me crazy. Instead of joining the players for dinner, I decided to go to bed and see if rest would help. I had brought a copy of the Greiner article with me and it was a good chance to read it carefully.
The article explains five evolutionary phases in the growth of an organisation. Greiner says that moving from one phase into the next is never smooth. Each transition is a revolutionary stage with periods of crisis that must be managed and overcome.
Cowan realised that Panthers had already been through some of those evolutionary phases, and had been able to solve some of the revolution crises as they arose. He found himself remembering periods when growth seemed to stall, followed by a struggle to find solutions. Then the feeling that there was a sudden breaking of the chains that were holding the club down, followed by another period of smooth growth.
Somehow the management team had made the right cultural and structural adjustments to get over each hurdle.
Greiner advises that the critical task for management in each revolutionary period is to find a new set of practices. They must then become the basis for managing the next period of evolutionary growth. He warns that many companies fail during the periods of crisis. Companies that are unable to abandon past practices and effect major organisational changes will either level off in their growth rates, or fold.
Reading the article was one of those ‘Aha!’ experiences for Cowan. He was now understanding things that he had never even considered before.
Readers interested in the management theory that produced this moment of insight can explore it further in the accompanying Beyond the Book article, The Article That Changed Panthers’ Thinking.
I suddenly began to see that the Panthers business employing 850 people with sales of $65 million was not a bigger business than the Panthers with 300 employees and sales of $16 million. It was a different business. Systems and management styles that worked for one would not necessarily work for the other. We had to change. We were in one of Greiner’s periods of crisis. Methodologies that had achieved growth in the past had to be re-examined, to see if they would continue to be effective.
That article had more effect on my attitudes towards management than anything else I ever read. It made me realise that I did not know enough to get Panthers through its crisis. I had been operating on the false premise that what we had done in the past would be suitable for the future. It set me off on a discovery path. I read voraciously until I had a picture in my mind of the new direction.
Introducing change is difficult and takes a long time. It causes tension in the organisation. Some find it difficult, even impossible, to adapt. But from that point we were a different organisation, constantly looking for change. We became students of authors on management, and devoted students of a few of them.
It all started with a rugby league grand final and that casual conversation. Strange to say, there was a medical lesson in it for me, too.
We returned to Panthers as losers of our first grand final, but to a heroes’ welcome. The club was packed to the rafters. The celebrations continued right through the night and I probably had a bit too much to drink. By the time I got to bed, the sun was way up and the pain in my arm and shoulder was gone. It did not return. It seems that I was tensing my back to compensate for the pain, which just made it worse. The total relaxation of that celebration let muscles, tendons, and everything else slip into their rightful places and I was cured. That’s my theory anyway! Had I listened to earlier advice to take painkillers, I might have been fixed much sooner.
The Greiner theory placed Panthers in the revolutionary stage he called “Red Tape”, when bureaucratic needs start to take precedence, dominating decision making and slowing down progress. The next evolutionary stage should be growth through collaboration requiring a high level of democratic management, combining teams across functions, flexibility of teams, frequent conferences of key personnel, educational programs, and more. Moving from one stage to the next was the challenge.
The Greiner article was just the tip of the iceberg for Cowan. Now he was on a mission of discovery.
He had always been a reader of books and articles on management theory, but it was done as an interest without any pressure other than to absorb any good ideas he found. Now he felt it was a matter of urgency. He was missing something, and he had to find it.
At that time, he was President of the Registered Clubs of NSW and Chairman of the Licensed Clubs of Australia. Once a month he had to attend meetings on the mornings of three consecutive days and stayed in a self-contained unit in Sydney. He remembers having books spread all over the floor of the living room, cross referencing notes on what might be applicable in a restructure of Panthers.
As the big picture started to take shape, Cowan saw another obstacle. The ideas had to be compiled into a coherent form, communicated to managers, and then filtered through the staff. Implementing change was no small order, even if the changes themselves had been simple. And the big picture in Cowan’s mind was far from simple. He needed help of an unusual kind.
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Phil Morehead was a partner in Thomas Marsden Advertising the advertising agency and design studio that supported Panthers for many years. Phil also was a long-time active member and President of the Penrith Valley Chamber of Commerce. In this contribution he recalls how Penrith P Panther came into existence and became a recognisable community figure.
All images courtesy of Phil Morehead and Thomas Marsden Advertising.
I believe Penrith P. Panther was one of the first mascots to represent a rugby league team in Australia.
I am not sure of the exact year, but I think it was probably in the late 1970s. Ron Workman was the football manager at the time, and he was a little difficult to convince that a mascot would be a good promotional tool.
Years later, at a function, Ron took full credit for Penrith P.’s creation, saying it was an idea he picked up when they went to America on an excursion looking at promotional ideas. I think the cheer girls may have been one idea adapted from America, but Penrith P. was home birthed.
The idea came to me from watching Humphrey B. Bear with my young son
Certificate of Registration of Design for Penrith P. Panther — click to enlarge.
At the time I was doing Max Wright’s Kingswood advertising — new Holdens, used cars and later Viscount Caravans. Max financed the project as part of his advertising.
I negotiated with Stafford Bullen to supply free kids’ passes to Bullen’s Animal World and Warragamba African Lion Safari, which Penrith P. would distribute at home games. Panthers’ contribution was to allow Penrith P. to parade at half-time and give out the tickets.
At the first game, we had Penrith P. distributing the passes from the back of a Max Wright sign-written ute, driving around the inside perimeter of the ground.
It turned into a nightmare.
We also brought 2KA into the partnership and did various pranks at games, with Frank Ley calling them live and promoting Max Wright, Bullens and the others involved.
Most of it was contra. Effectively, all parties were building community goodwill while getting promotional value at the same time.
When Max Wright passed away, 2KA took over ownership of Penrith P., which I think soon came under the control of the football club.
Later, Penrith P. was discarded due to the intellectual property disputes between the ARL and Super League. During the Super League year (1997), Super League came up with Penelope Panther but the suit was too difficult for the person wearing it. When the NRL formed they financed the development of club mascots and Paws and Claws. Claws are still active.
But the O.G. was Penrith P. Panther.
Max’s Note: Reggie Rabbit, with help from TV star Don Lane, debuted for South Sydney at the 1968 Grand Final. Despite Reggie preceding Penrith P. by some years, Penrith P was still one of the first mascots to take the field in Australian Rugbu League.
In the winter of 1973, Penrith found itself searching for answers.
The club had entered the first-grade competition only six years earlier and was struggling badly. Results were poor, confidence was low and the future looked uncertain. The low point came when Manly-Warringah inflicted a humiliating 70–7 defeat on the Panthers. The result became part of club folklore and reinforced the belief that dramatic action was needed.
Penrith’s response was bold. Rather than look only within Australia, the club turned its attention to England.
Club president Wally Ward and director Bruce Welladsen travelled to England with a clear objective: find experienced players who could strengthen the team and help establish a culture of professionalism. Their first target was Bill Ashurst, one of Britain’s leading second-row forwards. Negotiations were successful and Penrith secured his signature for what was reported at the time as a record rugby league transfer fee. Contemporary reports noted that Penrith had committed more than $27,000 to secure Ashurst’s services.
But Penrith wanted more than a forward. They also wanted leadership.
While in England, Ward and Welladsen turned their attention to Mike Stephenson, captain of the English champions, Dewsbury. Stephenson later recalled receiving an unexpected approach while working on a building site in Yorkshire. A workmate shouted up a ladder asking whether he was Mike Stephenson. When he answered yes, he was told that visitors from Australia wanted to speak with him.
The meeting that followed would change the course of Stephenson’s career.
Ward and Welladsen outlined their vision for Penrith and offered Stephenson a long-term contract. At first he was uncertain. Penrith sat at the bottom of the premiership table and had just suffered one of the heaviest defeats in its history. Yet the honesty of the approach impressed him. Rather than paint an unrealistic picture, the Penrith representatives openly explained the club’s position and their plans for the future.
Stephenson later said that this honesty was one of the decisive factors in his decision. The club was struggling, but it had ambition. Just as importantly, it had a strong junior base and a growing district. He believed there was an opportunity to help build something meaningful rather than simply join an established powerhouse.
Penrith eventually secured Stephenson’s release after complex negotiations with Dewsbury. The reported transfer fee of almost $40,000 established a new benchmark and attracted national attention. The press described the signing as a record-breaking deal and evidence of Penrith’s determination to improve its fortunes.
The arrival of Ashurst and Stephenson generated enormous excitement. Two of Britain’s finest players were heading to Penrith. Expectations rose accordingly.
The results, however, were mixed. Despite the quality and commitment of both men, rugby league success remained elusive. Penrith finished with the wooden spoon in 1973 and continued to struggle for consistency. Yet the significance of the signings went beyond wins and losses. They demonstrated that Penrith was prepared to think differently, act boldly and invest in its future.
Those qualities would become recurring themes throughout the Roger Cowan years.
Panthers, Passion & Politics - The Roger Cowan Years 