Santiago

"Complementing these executives and staff was a truly distinctive breed of AIG executive, epitomized by John Roberts, called the “mobile overseas personnel” or MOP. This group did service stints in numerous countries during their career, as many as 10 to 15, taking two-to-three year terms in each place. It was almost like the foreign service of the United States. They were corporate ambassadors who became legends within AIG. An experienced MOP could walk into any AIG office in the world, from Taiwan to Santiago, and know just about everyone. Having traveled widely, he could troubleshoot the thorniest problem successfully anywhere in the world, whether obtaining the release of colleagues captured by hostile governments or negotiating with customers perceived to have fabricated claims. The personality type could vary, from the diplomatic to the irascible, the elegant to the brusque. But they tended all to be wise, urbane, and multilingual—cowboys, pioneers, Indians, a cadre of colorful actors that made the company tick."

"Much of his historical and biographical reading is directed by his travel. A favourite Gibbs aphorism is, ‘The more interests you have, the more interesting life is.’ ‘To see Yugoslavia, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan after the Taliban fell over, the copper mines north of Santiago, or to travel with the kids through areas of north India where they were fighting,’ he argues, ‘is a great source of stimulus. The consequence is that whenever you see anything about those places in the news, you’re interested.’ A biography of the great Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley is much more interesting when you’re just about to visit the Congo."

"Mobile telecoms was a sector I knew well, having grown Play, my start-up in Poland, into a top-four independent challenger brand, and although Chile was on the other side of the Atlantic, it did bear some similarities to Play’s Polish homeland. Both were Catholic cultures with a high degree of conservatism. Another element they had in common was their domination by international behemoths. While Play in Poland was up against France’s Orange, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and Polkomtel, whose Plus brand was 24 per cent owned by Britain’s Vodafone, Nextel Chile had to contend with Entel, the former nationalised Chilean telecoms company whose 127-metre Torre Entel literally towers over central Santiago. Entel controlled about 30 per cent of the Chilean mobile telecoms market. Then there were Movistar, owned by Spanish giant Telefonica, which held a market share of around 28 per cent, and Claro, part of the America Movil telecoms giant, famously fronted by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, which had 23 per cent. Nextel Chile had possessed about 2 per cent of the market as a total underdog, and even that was falling steadily. However, we had grown Play from nothing into the leading mobile telecoms company in Poland with a 27 per cent market share, and we saw a similar potential growth trajectory for this Chilean minnow. The financial elements of a deal had to be put together very quickly. We completed the whole transaction in about two months and it was only later that we learned how close Nextel Chile had actually been to bankruptcy wipe-out. We refinanced the company with $400 million of equity and $420 million of debt and set about finding a way to rebrand and reposition it as a vibrant independent challenger brand – a far cry from its previous image as a distant South American offshoot of a major US carrier."