Paul Goldsmith

"Being a simple Kiwi guy, I was enraged. I didn’t give a damn if we lost the deal. I stood up and said, ‘You bloody bastards are trying to renegotiate; you gave us your word two days ago and now you’re chiselling.’ I swore and walked out. It wasn’t intended, but it was the perfect thing to do. My partner, who was more used to the Aussie rules, had the nous to hang around. He said to Lend Lease, ‘You’re stuffed; my partner won’t have anything to do with you.’ Then they started to beg; they wanted the site and wanted it badly. So I came back into the room and laid down all these things they had to do by four o’clock. The greatest satisfaction of the deal was to see this director grunting up the stairs after half an hour running around getting signatures, with great sweat rings under his arms, gasping, ‘Am I on time?’"

"Even at the darkest moments I never had negativity from Gibbs. He’d ask if we were doing it the most efficient way and whether we could do it quicker, for less cost, but he never threw his hands up. In terms of tenacity and determination, I’ve never met anyone like him."

"Men do not quit playing because they grow old, They grow old because they quit playing. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES"

"Gibbs preferred the geneticist JBS Haldane’s line: ‘My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we *can* suppose.’[5](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477309-807254973-5)"

"TN Gibbs exemplified the Protestant work ethic. One of his favourite aphorisms was ‘Pray as if everything depended on God and act, or work, as if everything depended on you’."

"The Taoist philosophy, as it filtered through to me, was about power; how the emperor can best control his country. One of the principles was that if the people know the law, the people are strong; if they don’t know the law, the emperor is strong. I later understood that this idea formed the basis of the communist system; if the law was whatever the leaders said it was on the day, the people lived in terror. The Chinese, meantime, had a great civilisation yet it never crossed their minds to give people a vote or to worry about the opinions of the peasants; it was all about power and running empires. Coming from a normal Western environment, where democracy was everything and giving voters what they wanted seemed to be our only purpose on earth, this was a fantastic awakening; it opened my mind. I loved political science."

"The reality is, however, that TN Gibbs had sent mixed messages over a longer period. Alan didn’t receive any financial assets from his father, but he had gained something more valuable. As he puts it, ‘I gained the benefit of seeing Dad being successful in business. He didn’t talk about it much, but watching him gave me the feel for it, it gave me the confidence that business wasn’t a great mystery, but rather something I could master.’"

"It has extended into a 17-year quest that so far owes him US$200 million and has thrown up a seemingly inexhaustible supply of complex problems to solve. In the process his business, Gibbs Amphibians, has made stunning technological advances, registered dozens of patents and produced something in the Aquada that captured the public’s imagination internationally when it appeared in 2003."

"Everything was so dug in that import licences had become property rights. Because the incumbents had a guaranteed place in the market, there was no genuine competition. The New Zealand economy had become feudal; you were born with licences or you were a serf. The lucky families with lucrative licences made millions; the rest of us paid crazy prices for their products. It was a corrupting system in the sense that importers naturally spent an awful lot of time being nice to civil servants and politicians, giving them holidays, tickets to the theatre and lunches, although I never saw any evidence of corruption involving wads of cash."

"*Dad used to swear that the primary object was water safety training. He’d capsize periodically so I’d get used to righting the boat and get out from under it. But I learnt quickly that if you were winning a race or doing well, he wouldn’t try the water safety exercise. It was simple, if you were winning you didn’t get dumped; though Dad claims that wasn’t the lesson he was trying to teach me*.[2](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477196-607209396-2)"

"Then, people had to take whatever you served them up and the core skill of a businessman was being well connected. The wonder of genuine capitalism is that it is biodegradable. No one can monopolise anything for long. The whole of society benefits from crazy bastards who push ahead into uncertainty. I may get a patent for 20 years, but if it takes 20 years to get there, everyone else will be able to copy me for nothing. And that’s the essence of entrepreneurship; it’s nutty people who are prepared to take risks relying on instinct. I don’t know if people will buy my amphibians until they hit the market. All I know is that these products wouldn’t appear anytime soon without me being around, and the struggle to create them has, by a long way, been the most satisfying thing I’ve done."

"I didn’t want to spend my days working for my children, carefully accumulating and preserving every penny to pass on a legacy. And I don’t believe in children and grandchildren being super rich. It creates nothing but a burden and is particularly bad for young men. A large part of the satisfaction in my life is that I’ve been able to kid myself that I made my own dough. To inherit a vast sum robs a man of that satisfaction. So I settled on my children a more modest sum years ago, which they can use to help their lives or do whatever they like. They’ll also inherit The Farm, which will be here for a long time. They’ve become partners in the exercise."

"The beauty is that whatever is left is mine to spend as I like. That has freed me up to do the crazy things I do. And spending millions on sculptures on some paddocks in the Kaipara is aberrant behaviour from an economic point of view, the money is written off and gone, like buying an ice-cream, there’s no way I could recoup it by selling The Farm. That seems to upset some of my contemporaries, but to me it is the essence of freedom."

"*I think global warming is the best possible thing for mankind. Its effect will be mainly in the northern hemisphere from 50 degrees north and all those countries are freezing, miserable dumps most of the year. There’s no clear evidence that cyclones are caused by global warming, the earth’s temperature is always changing. Is it good or bad, who knows? But I can’t see why anyone who lives in the cold parts of the earth wouldn’t* *see higher temperatures as better … I’ve always said that New Zealand would be best if it was dragged north halfway to Fiji. Even the most radical projections of global warming wouldn’t get New Zealand warm enough.*[5](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477353-680641757-5)"

"Seeing the world from a helicopter is phenomenal. You’re like a voyeur, looking over the neighbour’s fence, and then you come down and mix with locals. From 500 feet, you gain a grasp of the landscape and the geography. Then as you cover more ground, I think I’ve been to 130 countries so far, you get a real understanding of the earth. The first thing you realise is that it’s nonsense when people worry that the earth won’t be able to feed a growing human population. I’ve flown over millions and millions of acres of unused or underused productive land, particularly in the Ukraine and Russia, South America and Africa, where the most obvious example is in Zimbabwe. And the world’s certainly not crowded."

"The stories and pictures went worldwide through network stations and the web. In Britain all the major dailies carried pictures of the Aquada: the ‘ultimate boy’s toy’. One declared that the launch ‘resembled an action sequence from a James Bond film’.[10](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477408-606132179-10) Gibbs couldn’t have dreamed of a better product launch. Back home in New Zealand, the local media adopted the story with gusto, celebrating a Kiwi entrepreneur’s success on the world stage. A *New Zealand Herald* reporter immediately tracked down Terry Roycroft to see if he’d been treated well and reported that he was ‘chuffed’ with the breakthrough and felt himself very well looked after by Gibbs.[11](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477408-606132179-11)"

"Try to avoid concentrated investments with your own money, it’s too dangerous. My investment philosophy for a long time had been to avoid putting my own money into a deal. It wasn’t an absolute rule, I’d put money into Sky in 1990, but it was my temperament. Unless you can structure a deal in such a way that you don’t have to put money in and no financial guarantees, it’s generally not very good. Having to convince and persuade other people to fund you 100 per cent provides a good discipline. You really have to work hard and have a sound proposition. Whereas, if you’re just wandering around like we were after 1997 with cash in our pockets, looking for somewhere to invest some of it, you’re likely to get into trouble. You don’t take as much care; you don’t do half as much homework and more often than not, you get burned."

"The result of four years’ work surpassed Serra’s hopes. ‘I could not have imagined that the piece would come in as well as it did,’ he concluded.[9](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477365-869846975-9) New Zealand art critics were intrigued. Hamish Keith wrote, ‘The rural backblocks of Kaukapakapa are not a setting in which the casual traveller would expect to encounter one of this century’s great works of sculpture, but there it is.… On a fine north Auckland day with scudding clouds, sunlight rolls across the face of *Te Tuhirangi Contour,* painting its rolling curves with light. Seldom have I seen anything as fine or as moving.’[10](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477365-869846975-10) It forcibly struck Keith as an artwork that had required considerable courage to commission; so unlike anything that could have been undertaken by a public arts committee.[11](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477365-869846975-11) The work now features prominently in international surveys of Serra’s work.[12](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477365-869846975-12)"

"They thought it was possible, but that it would be pretty hard. Importantly, however, they couldn’t see any complete show-stoppers. I thought, bugger it, my marriage is finished, I’ve got nothing much to do with my time, oh heck, I may as well have a decent go at this. If this invention is going to be useful anywhere, the obvious place is America. They’ve got the money, plenty of water and a love of freedom. So, almost straight away, in early April 1997, I hopped on a plane and flew to Detroit. I pulled out the Yellow Pages, found a joker who knew something about the car industry to be my guide and spent three months interviewing engineering consulting firms to develop this thing."

"*I’d just read a book about the Iban tribe, who used to be renowned as head-hunters, so I told this guide that we wanted to go and find this tribe. He got hold of someone, who knew someone else and within a couple of days we were on a chopper going way up a river. There was no helicopter pad, so while we hovered the local men hacked back the foliage to clear a space for us to land. Most of the villagers had never seen a helicopter and were soon throwing blood all over the ground for reasons that were unclear. We lived in one of their longhouses for a couple of days and it was magical. Alan was twice as tall as anyone there, but these guys were wiry. In their canoes a couple of wrinkly men pulled us upstream with incredible strength. We ate fish on the banks, but midway through our meal had to leap into the river to avoid a swarm of bees coming through.* *We lay fully submerged breathing through pieces of bamboo. At the dinner that night in the longhouse Alan was given 50 bowls of food, since* *he was the top man. I got 20. Every now and then Alan would look at me and say, ‘I can’t believe I pay you a salary to do this.’ And he had a point; I’ve never laughed as much as when I’ve been with Alan. He’d have me on: ‘David, if ever we get into a situation where it’s life and death, you know you’re the sacrifice. I’ll be nice to your parents.’ We never ran into serious trouble. He was a young 56, cutting loose with energy to burn and such a passion to extract everything possible from life. We’d have an incredible experience and then a few minutes later I’d hear the inevitable, ‘OK, what’s next?’*[12](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477351-409220225-12)"

"Gibbs struggled to work out the consequences for Iran of having four exchange rates operating in parallel: the official one, a favoured rate for exporters, a higher rate for tourists and the black market rate, which was something else again. The originally good rail system, meanwhile, was totally neglected since its rates were too expensive, while the roads were cluttered with lorries that paid no road charges and used subsidised fuel. Such blind spots in the logic of a national economy, though, were nothing new for someone who had lived in pre-1984 New Zealand."

"Hayek explains that this is because human instincts evolved over the millions of years man spent in small family groups as a hunter-gatherer. In that setting he’d developed powerful instincts of sharing, altruism and cooperation. The market, which has developed rapidly over only the past few thousand years and which enabled explosive population growth far beyond small family groups, has utterly transformed everyday life for most humans. Now, through the market, they enjoy goods and services from people they’ve never seen and about whom they know nothing. Success depends on abstract rules and traditions that don’t necessarily marry with inherited instincts. The evolution of our instincts couldn’t keep pace with the rapid development of civilisation."

"[31](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477309-807254973-31). Goldsmith, *Fletchers*, pp. 281–2."

"[20](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477309-807254973-20). ‘The Changing Face of NZ’s Power Elite’, *Independent*, 16 August 1996."

"[22](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477309-807254973-22). See Goldsmith, *We Won, You Lost. Eat That!* pp. 315ff for details on the Winebox Inquiry."

"[21](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477309-807254973-21). Jesson, *To Build a Nation*, p. 280."

"[15](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477309-807254973-15). See R Hide, *My Year of Living Dangerously,* Auckland: Random House, 2007, for Hide’s background."

"‘Unless I’ve got superior information,’ he says, ‘and I know it’s superior because I’ve developed it, investing in particular stocks and bonds is just punting.’ Gibbs continued to put most of his money in the bank. When people asked for advice on shares, he told them to invest in funds that followed the market index. Picking winners, he argued, was futile for most people."

"*I never found Alan easy to chat to; his intelligence was so ferocious that if you got into a conversation with him, within two or three minutes you were conscious of this enormous challenge being hurled at you. But Trevor handled it easily. He could say, ‘Oh bullshit, Gibbs,’ when he was overstating his case and that would get things back on track. I never saw anyone else do it; I certainly didn’t.*[34](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477309-807254973-34)"

"*I see [New Zealand] as an extremely exciting place. I see New Zealand as able to be part of the real world. There is now nothing you can’t do in New Zealand that you could do anywhere else. The communications are rapid; you’re plugged into the world not just in terms of talking to people but in terms of exchanging services with them. People with enterprise in New Zealand can now undertake activities that would have been impossible in the old economy and … some of the most exciting business ventures that I’ve ever seen have arisen in these circumstances.*[26](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477309-807254973-26)"

"Gibbs’ style was an object lesson. ‘Alan would hit on only a couple of things during Freightways board meetings and they would always be of substance,’ he says. ‘While I’d think a little bit about everything, Alan would have thought deeply about a few things, the things that mattered, which on reflection is a better approach.’"

"With Alan everything is done with such intensity that he wears you out. You can’t make a flippant comment and not be prepared to defend it for an hour. And he has no idea how demanding he is on people — he just keeps piling new projects and ideas on top of the current ones. After a few months the stress was so much that I ended up being stuck in my bed for three days unable to move. They diagnosed stress and I knew where it was coming from. So I thought, ‘No bastard’s going to give me a bad back’ and returned with a different attitude. Later on I remember Alan seeking my advice on something, which I gave. He then said in his usual way, ‘Are you absolutely certain?’, which in the past caused me much anxiety. I said, ‘Well, if it doesn’t work out you can take it out on me.’ He said, ‘The trouble with that is it’s like water off a duck’s back.’ And I knew I was in the right space. Alan Gibbs is the guy who made me tough."

"[1](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477273-050103421-1). See M and J Bassett, *Roderick Deane,* p. 190 for background."

"*We agreed on $108 million, a bloody good price, and they said, ‘Well, we have to refer to our HQs and consult before we give you the final answer,* *but basically we’ve got a deal.’ Then they came back with the classic tack and said, ‘Oh dear, the due diligence was not as thorough as it should have been and our boards have told us we can’t go that far.’ So they offered us 20 per cent less. I knew that they really wanted it, but they were just trying it on. I said to Craig, ‘No way!’ Then I dictated a letter from our lawyer responding to the offer, which had only one line: ‘Your offer is of no interest whatsoever to our clients.’ We were losing money and they were still offering us $80 odd million. Craig was a bit nervous, but, sure enough, the phone line began to buzz a few hours later and we got the full amount.* Heatley concedes that Gibbs was a much better bluffer. ‘We were in a weak position,’ he says, ‘and Alan convinced them we were as strong as an ox; he knew they were just being bullies, trying to chisel us, and that they’d give way if we held firm.’"

"‘It was an example of Alan saying, “Stuff it, everyone says go left; I’ll go right”,’ says Heatley."

"For Gibbs, the art of business is doing a few big things in a concentrated way. Just as the lion doesn’t waste its energy catching 100 rabbits when one zebra provides as much meat, leaving plenty of time for lying about in the sun, Gibbs’ approach to deal making was low-volume, high-yield. But he wasn’t the type to fritter away the lengthy downtimes between jobs."

"[38](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477346-006497775-38). For details, see P Goldsmith, *Fletchers: A centennial history of Fletcher Building,* Auckland: David Ling, 2009, p. 258."

"[24](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477346-006497775-24). Private offering of equity 12 July 1988, quoted in J Kelsey, *Reclaiming the Future: New Zealand and the global economy*, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999."

"[5](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477346-006497775-5). *Metro*, December 1986; also in B Jesson, *To Build a Nation,* Auckland: Penguin, 2005, p. 190."

"[6](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477346-006497775-6). Goldsmith/Roger Douglas, October 2009; S Sheppard, *Broken Circle: The decline and fall of the Fourth Labour Government,* Wellington: PSL Press, p. 13, refers to a wager between Gibbs and Douglas over a couple of beers that he could trim 33 per cent off health costs."

"*My whole business experience has driven me to free markets … Over the years in running businesses in a highly regulated New Zealand society we found the great majority of one’s energy was spent either running up and down to Wellington to get permits or licences, or alternatively it was spent with one’s lawyers trying to find ways and means around the regulations. The net effect of that was probably over half of the most creative energies in New Zealand were frustrated.*[29](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-29)"

"Alan was always pushing the envelope; that’s what I liked about him. He always had new ideas and was restless. What we’d done might be good, but he didn’t want to dwell on it; instead he focused on what remained to be done. And he always had a slightly different way of looking at things. Generally, I’d have several ideas flung at me; I’d need to discard most of them, but invariably I’d go away with at least one good idea."

"His experience at Ceramco, and at St Martins Properties, a much smaller company which had floated just before the crash and had suffered accordingly, taught Gibbs that he didn’t enjoy being a chairman of public companies. Regulations were onerous and he was forever obliged to explain himself in the press. As well, he felt particularly responsible when friends and family had put their money in, relying on his abilities; people like Jill Holt, the widow of his old friend Jim. She’d invested in St Martins and after the crash stood to lose most of her investment. She recalls that much to her relief Gibbs bought the shares back off her at the listing price, as he did with others she knew. ‘Some people,’ she says, ‘said that it was nothing to him, he was rich, but the fact is that most men in his situation don’t do what he did. It was very nice of him.’[37](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477346-006497775-37) Having done the rounds, Gibbs concluded that chairing a private company where only the principals had shares, such as Freightways, was much simpler."

"Lead & Feathers: The history of Freightways,"

"Gibbs tried to keep a low profile,[53](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-53) but like most businessmen he was interested in the progress of his peers. Later he said, ‘Business is like a yacht race: the only enjoyable place to be is in front and if you’re going to be a businessman, you judge yourself by how many bucks you’ve got in the bank.’[54](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-54)"

"He hopped on the plane, was taken downtown, and shown the sights; saw flash offices and men in suits working long hours. Then on the weekend, the hotel boss invited him up to his holiday home. The car picks up the chief, drives for hours on Long Island until he comes to a little beach house, tucked away. And here’s this guy who ran a large hotel organisation digging in the front garden with a straw hat, bare feet and a T-shirt. He tells the Samoan, this is wonderful, this is how I’m going to retire. The Samoan goes home saying the Americans are nuts, they work their arses off day and night so they can retire and live like us. That was the truth of it. These guys were already living in paradise; food dropped from the trees, they never needed any serious clothes."

"Gibbs lived by a rule that if he couldn’t demonstrate the deal was successful on an A4 sheet of paper, it wasn’t any good."

"The new Forestry Corporation was originally going to start functioning in September 1986, but it was held up by parallel work being done in other parts of the public service. The ideas in Gibbs’ model of a state-owned enterprise, operating under the Companies Act with staff who weren’t civil servants, fed into work also under way at the Treasury, led by Rob Cameron, Graham Scott and other officers, and at the State Services Commission, particularly after Roderick Deane took over as chairman on 1 April 1986.[42](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-42) It made sense to handle the state’s other commercial activities — such as electricity, Telecom and State Coal — in the same way.[43](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-43) Complicated legislative changes were required, which set back the new dawn until 1 April 1987."

"Goldsmith, *We Won, You Lost. Eat That!*"

"Goldsmith and Bassett, *The Myers,* pp. 255ff."

"Blackburn, *The Shoestring Pirates,* p. 166."

"He could certainly upset people; anyone who wasn’t of fairly strong character would fold fairly quickly. I eventually realised that it stems not from a desire on his part to be aggressive, but from a personality and an intellect that makes him want to challenge everything. He’s very unusual in that his intellect is so inquiring. My experience has been that a lot of very intellectual people are quite blinkered; going down a line that they’re good at. Alan’s the opposite; his thought processes go outward, incorporating everything, well beyond any one specialty. This gives him a unique perspective on many topics. Even if a matter was black and white, he’d want to challenge it in some way to find an element of greyness. We’d debate something until we’d reached a point when I’d think, that’s all clear, it’s black and white, and then he’d come back on another angle, to challenge it. It could be frustrating, but you knew that your ideas were fully tested."

"One of the joys of Gibbs’ style of operation — carrying out a relatively small number of large deals, then stepping back from ongoing management, interspersing business with frequent travel, and always allowing plenty of time for thinking and reading — was that he was free to pick up projects that interested him."

"The Tappenden deal ultimately proved a great financial success. Gibbs had said in the 1978 television documentary on takeovers that the ambition to obtain valuable assets cheaply was, very sensibly, the object of takeovers. He’d given a good demonstration. By late 1981 Gibbs had made a capital gain of around $2.5 million (around $9 million in today’s terms), his first ‘decent swag of dough’. Just past 40, he was a millionaire."

"Gibbs was ‘always searching, searching, searching; he was that sort of person, wherever he’d got to up to that point didn’t rest his soul’."

"He is the greatest entrepreneurial businessman I’ve come across, head and shoulders above everyone else, with a very clear vision of what needs to be done. And though it may have looked from the outside as if he took great risks, he was actually very risk-averse; in fact he basically eliminated risk. He did his homework carefully, so that even though Tappendens was the biggest transaction that any of us had been involved with, we didn’t see it as a huge gamble."

"In December 1984, he and Jenny took the family to Mexico, where they had many adventures in an old van driven by a hairy old local the girls dubbed ‘Catweasel’. He also rediscovered the joys of skiing. Warren and Sally Paine were frequent partners in mountain excursions. A typical adventure, in Paine’s memory, started with an exclamation from a wrung-out Gibbs: ‘For heaven’s sake, Jenny, let’s have some fun.’ She’d arrange a ski trip to Aspen in Colorado or Courchevel in France with the Paines and the Reynolds. Gibbs found his release through competition. ‘There was only one speed with Alan,’ says Paine, ‘flat out. Being in front of him was like being in front of a freight train, he was always trying to pass, arms and legs were flying and he was yelling and cursing; it was great fun.’ As it was with business, so it was with entertainment: Gibbs threw himself into whatever he was doing as if the fate of the world hinged on the result and by the end of the day he was spent."

"*When they made the offer, we said, ‘How do we know that you’ll document this deal and sign it off by Friday?’ The Lend Lease guy said, ‘You have the word of a director of Lend Lease that we’ll complete this transaction. The word of a Lend Lease director is not given lightly.’ ‘OK,’ I said. Well, we got the documents in on Thursday and they started to have all sorts of little problems with the details, then trouble getting the directors available for signing. Eventually they agreed to meet at 3pm on Friday to square it away. We met and they were still fluffing around. Finally, the penny dropped. They were stalling us, calling our bluff that we had another offer and trying to lower the price at the last moment.* *Being a simple Kiwi guy, I was enraged. I didn’t give a damn if we lost the deal. I stood up and said, ‘You bloody bastards are trying to renegotiate; you gave us*"

"The failed MSI takeover, meanwhile, was useful to Gibbs primarily in that it reconfirmed what he had already learnt about the art of successful takeover defences. He’d seen more of the psychology that came into play. He told a television documentary on takeovers that ran in the middle of the MSI attempt, ‘In takeover strategy personality is about 75 per cent of the consideration.’ Men put a lot of energy into building up a business and naturally had a lot of pride at stake. When they were under threat they frequently resisted beyond rational grounds.[8](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477272-550134397-8) He’d be more aware next time. MSI’s response, with its clear and simple booklet, had also been very effective."

"There was bugger all reason to get out of bed. No one to play with, everyone else was working. I went off to see a psychiatrist who pumped me full of an LSD-type drug to make me relax. He wanted to find out all the problems I had; what my parents had done to me. I said, my parents were great; my father could have watched me play sport a couple more times, but there was no problem. I’m just feeling depressed."