Christine Baird

"THE CAREER SUCCESS of Christine Baird is illustrative of both Dobbin’s insight into an employee’s potential and his ability to exploit that potential for his own and the subject’s benefit. Hired as secretary to Sealand’s then-president Al Soutar, Baird impressed J.C. Jones when he arrived to fill Soutar’s role. “I was doing a lot of travelling at the time,” Jones says, “and I would call back to the office to check on things, see if this helicopter had been serviced on time or that flight had left as scheduled. When I would ask to speak to the ops manager or the service manager, Christine would say, ‘What do you want to know?’ I would tell her, and she would have the answer right there at her fingertips. In my opinion, and this includes everybody, vice-presidents and all, she was the sharpest person in the cHc building. An amazing woman.”"

"Of all cc executives, past and present, none generates more open admiration from her peers than Christine Baird. “She handled all international marketing for the company during the 1990s,” one former CHC executive says, shaking his head. “Here’s this attractive young woman travelling by herself to some very nasty places in the world, including the most dangerous regions of Africa and Azerbaijan, places you and I might not go in a group, and she’s all alone. Christine would enter government offices in countries where women were not permitted to vote or drive cars and negotiate deals with power and authority. She was able to get in-country, make the contacts, get the business and come out alive. She was absolutely tenacious, able to target key players.”"