Chairman's lounge
Richard Goyder and Hamish McLennan, members of Australia's cosy directors club, are both facing backlash from their failure to read the room.
The week in Australian business was bookended by two examples of bloody-minded chairman suffering the fallout from failing to read the room. And there are lessons in that for all of us.
Rugby Australia (RA) chairman Hamish McLennan and Qantas chair Richard Goyder are both members of the directors club, the cosy group that oversees the country's biggest companies, sporting bodies and philanthropic organisations and which is the closest thing we have to a national aristocracy.
McLennan chairs or sits on the boards of REA Group, ARN Media, Magellan Financial and RA while Goyder oversees Qantas, Woodside and the AFL. In their most high-profile board positions, both men backed key appointees to the hilt, to the extent that it seriously annoyed their key stakeholders and arguably hurt their organisations.
McLennan spearheaded the decision to appoint Eddie Jones as Wallabies coach in January, an appointment which, it must be said, created a lot of excitement at the time. To say it didn’t work out well would be an understatement though, with even diehard fans losing faith after the Wallabies’ crashed out of the Rugby World Cup before the knockout stages for the first time in the tournament’s history.
