The high price of Theresa Gattung's success

Since quitting Telecom, Theresa Gattung has reconnected with her "feminine" side and flirted with Eastern values.

A self-described "feminist capitalist" Ms Gattung writes in her book Bird on a Wire that she is so optimistic people have commented she could be mistaken for a writer of self-help books.

But she writes that the price paid for corporate stardom was a high one, including the breakup of her relationship with long-term partner John Savage.

"There were three of us in the `marriage' all right – me, him and my job ... He told me he had been having an affair. I was devastated ... I think his support of me in the 22 years we'd been together was without precedent in terms of the support I'd ever seen any other woman receive."

She recalls wearing suits to lectures at university, with her first serious boyfriend, David, who later came out as gay. "Not surprisingly, we stood out!"

Her battle with stress-related illness pre-dated Telecom, dating back to her first job at financial services firm National Mutual. "I experienced a whole year of indescribable abscess-like pain in my teeth, an ache that never went away." After many of her teeth were root-filled, she was diagnosed with an inflammation of the jaw largely brought on by stress.

Ironically, the daily swim she rarely missed to cope with that stress was nearly her undoing in 2004, when she was hit by a car and flung over its bonnet while on the short walk back from Freyberg Pool to her Oriental Pde apartment. In hospital, she was visited by her assistant Chris Woodwiss who asked what underwear she was wearing. "I said none. I had just taken off my wet togs, put on my tracksuit and was going back home to get changed to go to work. So it's true, it is those times when you're wearing daggy clothes and no underwear that you have an accident!"

Talking to The Dominion Post, Ms Gattung, herself an avid reader, says she realised she would have to lift her kimono in Bird on a Wire and hasn't given too much thought to the consequences. The reaction, she says, "will fall where it falls".

She believes people are ready to approach her account of her rise and fall at Telecom with an open mind 2 1/2 years after she quit the company, especially because of what has since happened to Telecom and the broadband debate.

"In early 2007 we warned that there was a train wreck coming. I think it is pretty obvious that things are in a bad shape now. If you think a share price of $2.19, a profit drop of 25 per cent and multi-day [network] outages is not the train wreck turned up, then what is?

"A weakened Telecom is in no-one's interest," she says. "We haven't got a sustainable situation and I am still paying the same for broadband as I did when I left Telecom – we haven't reached a nirvana."

Meanwhile, she says, National has come round to her view that the government needs to invest $1.5 billion to have any chance of meeting its broadband agenda and that this was not the responsibility of any one company, though watching the Government decide how best to spend that money is "like watching paint dry".

Anyone leafing through Bird on a Wire expecting a revelation about a turning point in the battle over telecommunications regulation – such as a falling out with prime minister Helen Clark perhaps – will be disappointed.

"We were both strong feminists who understood how much harder it was for women than men to get to the top of their respective fields and stay there, and we respected each other for that," she writes. "The truth of the matter from my perspective was that we were never as close as some people believed at certain times, but nor did we fall out in the way that was later reported."

But she writes that she "regrets to this day" not defending herself against comments that were misconstrued as suggesting she condoned using confusion as a marketing tactic, and which were labelled "inappropriate" by Miss Clark.

Ms Gattung says she only realised that the Labour government was about to come down hard on Telecom early in 2006. At one point in Bird on a Wire, she invites readers to form their own conclusions on whether the messages she received from the communications minister, David Cunliffe, at the end of Labour's second term in office were transparent and straightforward.

"What I am really trying to address is the popular view that Telecom was warned repeatedly by the government and chose to ignore that, so it needed to be dealt to. That is not so," she says. Ms Gattung does not believe the Labour government was totally cynical, however, acknowledging that the National Party and even many Telecom staff backed the reforms. "I don't doubt there was a degree of genuineness in terms of believing it was the right thing.

"But I am saying it was wrong. It was a moment of collective madness to think that this one thing would solve all the complex issues of telecommunications regulation and investment and all the rest of it."

Writing on the future of business, she forecasts the rise of a "hybrid moral and ethical code" that incorporates Eastern religious principles, increasing environmental consciousness and a "rebalancing away from `male' principles" that include seeking permanent fixes to intractable problems.

- © Fairfax NZ News