Brian McNamee, mere mortal
Because the CSL chair is so revered, nobody will say the quiet part out loud.
If you ask me, my colleague Ivor Ries is a national living treasure. I'd nominate him for an Order of Australia if I didn't think our civic honours system was such a crock.
Ivor's latest piece on the unravelling of another national treasure, global blood products giant CSL, is a must-read (as was his earlier piece in the aftermath of the company's disastrous full-year result in August).
Ivor Ries
Ivor Ries
It's a vexed corporate situation, which I've been contemplating what to say about since at least the annual general meeting in October.
CSL's chairman Brian McNamee, who was chief executive for 23 years until 2013 before rejoining the board in 2018, is without qualification an Australian business legend – one of the nation's great communal wealth generators of the last 50 years in the company of Rupert Murdoch, Frank Lowy and Andrew Forrest.
In recent months, however, it has become difficult to avoid the conclusion that McNamee has depreciated to the status of mere mortal. This so often happens to extraordinary individuals. In other fields, such a decline can be perceptible in real time. Test cricket is apposite here.
Between 2001 and 2007, Ricky Ponting was imperious, averaging 65 with the bat over 75 Tests. In the final three years of his career, he averaged a pedestrian 37. This is what happens to the world's best batsmen and to the world's best businesspeople, but in business, the measure of an individual's performance is not always so incontrovertible.
Much has changed for CSL in the dozen years since McNamee retired as CEO. Having benefited for 25 years from an unduly favourable industry structure in its core blood products business, that industry structure has now deteriorated markedly. It was also mugged by American politics. With loopy Robert F Kennedy Jr let loose on US government health policy, there has scarcely been a less prosperous time to be in the vaccines business.
It is also now painfully apparent that when McNamee returned as chairman in 2018, he failed to adequately supervise his successor as CEO, Paul Perreault, who ran the company remotely from his Utah mountaintop and promised heroic margin expansion that was plainly undeliverable. This ensured that Perreault's successor, Paul McKenzie, was set up to fail and, indeed, when McNamee bulleted McKenzie two weeks ago, he'd lasted less than three years.
