It is 1993 and Peter Dew, today CIO of the Linde Group, has just
arrived in Sydney. He has been sent there by BOC, the industrial
gas supplier acquired by Linde in 2006, to shut down a failed
systems replacement project and start a £25m SAP installation.
In later years, Sumatra Ghoshal, the INSEAD management guru,
will counsel Dew that most leaders have to deal with sweet and sour
projects - work they like and work they do not. In Australia, Dew
has just been handed the biggest plate of sweet and sour IT he has
ever been asked to digest. And at the moment, it looks mostly
sour.
Dew recalls, "The plane landed and I went to the apartment I was
staying in and closed the door. On the second night I was there, I
had never felt so lonely in my whole life. The nearest person I
knew lived in Johannesburg and I did not quite know what I had
signed up to."
Shutting the failed project was clearly a sour job, but even the
SAP installation did not look that sweet. "It was a vast project
with complex business issues. Everything was horrendous. I was
totally out of my depth," says Dew.
That night in the Sydney apartment was the bleakest in Dew's
career, but it also marked a turning point. Through the long
watches of the night, he started to think deeply about what he
needed to achieve. And as he did so, he discovered something about
himself that proved critical in advancing his future career.
"The starting point was that there was nobody in Australia who I
knew," he recalls. "So I formulated two or three slides of what I
believed success would look like if we pulled off the new project
and then focused my mind on it."
He was doing something that he had not articulated so clearly in
any of his previous jobs. He was creating a vision to which his new
team could aspire - something to aim for. That vision, he
discovered, as the project moved forward to a triumphant
conclusion, was the magic ingredient that motivated - even inspired
- the team he built around him.
It was a lesson in leadership that he now cheerfully admits he
learnt the hard way. Two years earlier, aged 31, he had moved back
to the UK from South Africa to head an 80-person systems
development team at BOC.
"On my first day in the office, somebody told me the staff were
having a communication session and suggested I go and address
them," he says. "I remember looking at the sea of faces and I
thought I might be one of the youngest people in the room. I
probably gave the worst speech of my life.
"In the next couple of years, I got the job done, but I was
uncomfortable with my style. I now realise that I was slightly in
awe of the people who worked for me because I thought they were
much smarter and had been doing the work for longer."
Dew adds, "In short, I realised afterwards that I was managing
that environment, and what was needed was leadership." After that
experience, Dew gained a new confidence, although he claims that he
sometimes feels "slightly inadequate, slightly overwhelmed,
slightly unqualified, slightly confused" in any new post - a claim,
incidentally, that is always belied by his performance.
So when Dew was summoned back from Australia in 1998 by then BOC
chief executive Danny Rozenkerantz for a talk about the general
state of IT in the company, he marched into the meeting without
that sense of awe that had marred his speech to the systems
developers.
"The risk I took was that I had prepared a very in-depth view of
what I would do with IT in the company," Dew says. The discussion
turned into a job interview. But Dew was wary. "I did not want to
take on a job where I could not make the changes I had
outlined."
He says. "I think I made it clear in a subtle way to Danny that
if I did not have his mandate, I did not want the job. I think it
was the first time I had had the confidence of my convictions and I
was prepared to stand my ground with somebody who was in a more
elevated position than me."
Dew's risk paid off - partly, perhaps, because he did not
realise he was going for what turned into a job interview. "I think
that made me braver. I thought I was the outsider and it turned out
that I was the insider. But I did not know that at the time and
felt that I had nothing to lose."
There are subtle lessons in the way that Dew has built his
career in IT that are often overlooked. His experience shows that
becoming successful in IT is not just about going on courses and
ticking boxes on a CV. There is also an inner spiritual journey
that is different for each individual, but no less important than
formal career building activity.
For Dew, that spiritual journey really has been about finding
the sweet and the sour, separating the one from the other and
dealing with each in the best way possible. Take, for example, his
transition from manager to leader - the key to unlocking his full
potential.
"Management is about orchestrating and organising tasks," he
says. "I is about making sure that people are working on the right
things in the right sequence to achieve a goal that everybody
believes in.
"Leadership is the ability to conceive a vision or a future
state and then inspire people to work towards it. I think good
leaders create an environment for others to be successful."
Then there is the ability to transform negative sours into
positive sweets - Dew's key in turning around the Australian
situation. "You have to seek out the positive in any situation," he
says. "My mind opens up in a positive space but closes down in a
negative space. If I can create a positive view, then I can build
on that to solve an issue.
"If I am down in a depressed negative state, I cannot be
creative. I think creativity is something IT people need and is a
core attribute of a CIO."
Finally, there is the willingness to take risks. Dew has always
taken risks, but he has done so in order to build a portfolio of
experience that enables him to move up a gear. But there are times
to move and times to stay put, and decisions about that, too, can
become part of the spiritual journey.
Dew has now been CIO at BOC and Linde for nine years - a lengthy
tenure for an IT professional in a top job. But he has stayed put
because being there fits in with his philosophy. "I like to see
things that I have started finished," he says. "When you are CIO of
a large, diverse and successful enterprise, what you decide today
may not produce any results that you can see over an extended
period of time.
"But having been here so long, I get a tremendous sense of
achievement from seeing strategies that I have put in place come to
fruition. I can tell you what my team's contribution has been to
the success of this enterprise. To me, that is a phenomenal thing
to be able to say."
With positive thinking, the sweet will always overwhelm the
sour.
CV: Peter Dew
• 1980 Graduated in computer science from Portsmouth Polytechnic
(now University of Portsmouth).
• 1980 Joined Plessey as management trainee. Plessey ran ICL
computers, so Dew was able to gain broader experience.
• 1981 Joined Cyanamid, agricultural products and
pharmaceuticals company which ran IBM, as a systems analyst.
• 1983 Answered advertisement for systems analysts and project
managers from Acer Electric, Pretoria, South Africa.
• 1986 Headhunted by Afrox, BOC's subsidiary company in South
Africa. Worked on developing bespoke systems and also responsible
for some operations.
• 1991 Back in UK, became manager of systems development
implementation at BOC.
• 1993 Moved to BOC Australia and became IT director Australia
and New Zealand.
• 1998 Back in the UK, became global CIO for BOC.
• 2006 Became group CIO for Linde Group following takeover of
BOC.
Dew's current role
• Peter Dew heads a global IT operation with 1,200 employees.
Most of them are located in Guildford, Surrey and Munich. There is
also a Linde Group (originally BOC) "captive" operation in Calcutta
employing 100 people, as well as a number of smaller sites.
• Dew reports direct to Wolfgang Reitzle, the chief executive
officer of the Linde Group.
• Dew has five direct reports. They are a head of business
consulting and service management, who is responsible for the
interface between IT and the rest of the business a head of
enterprise systems who is responsible for all enterprise systems
from analysis through design to operation, as well as datacentres
and SAP a head of personal and communications services who is in
charge of personal computing, desktops, laptops and
telecommunications a head of project services who runs a global
pool of project managers and a head of strategy services who runs a
small team focused on future IT strategy. Dew also has two "dotted
line" reports: the CIO of Linde Engineering and the CIO of BOC's
Gist logistics business.