Fletcher saga makes an engrossing read

Friday 7th September 2001

INVESTORS' BOOKSHELF

Battle of the Titans, by Bruce Wallace. Penguin, $34.95

Reviewed by Nick Stride

As a former Fletcher Challenge insider Bruce Wallace's strengths as a chronicler of the empire's fall are also his weaknesses.

Those looking for easy answers to the question "who wrecked Fletchers?" will be disappointed. Wallace adroitly avoids finger-pointing, managing a good word for pretty well everybody mentioned.

That's probably an unavoidable trade-off for gaining access to the company's papers and to its former directors and senior management. And whether any individual or group was "responsible" for the group's mistakes and breakup is debatable.

Nor is Wallace's book likely to make management school curricula. It's more a study in boardroom dynamics than in business dynamics. That's just as well. Had he tried to do both his 246-pages would have ballooned into unmanageable proportions.

He contents himself with recognising what is already well-known: Fletcher's many successes were in the end outweighed by the enormity of its three big mistakes - Australian housebuilder Jennings, UK Paper and the Central North Island forests.

What Wallace does provide is a wealth of material that any writer lacking an inside track would have been very hard put to get hold of.

Board minutes detail how each director felt at the defining meetings of Fletcher history. His fly-on-the-wall accounts of conversations between individuals have credibility, even though one wonders how anyone can recall exact words after so many years.

Not all readers will be attracted by his John Grisham-style chapter lead-ins but there are detailed insights into some of the tensions within the group that outsiders have always suspected, and some they have not.

An account of the arm-wrestling between Fletchers and former finance minister Bill Birch over the price the government could extract for the CNI forests reveals the company in 1996 paid $2 billion for assets it could have bought in 1990 for half that amount.

Also revealing is the story of how Fletchers failed to capture Telecom, an asset that would almost certainly have changed the company's fortunes.

Wallace's book is an engaging read that will upset nobody.

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