Aymever Days - a Xmas shot

Over on Facebook I added the following photo. Comments follow.

This is what I wrote on Facebook. I think that it helps explain in part where I am coming from.

"Aymever Christmas Party 1989. One of the big industry development issues at the time was the way in which clustering, the grouping of start-ups around a node, could create growth and grow new skills. This photo is a case in point, if on a small scale.

From left to right Scott Williams, Philip and Susan Mendes.

After Scott left us he went on co-found Petals, growing the business to become the fourth largest global competitor to Interflora within three years. Petals was sold last year to Teleflora, bit is still Armidale headquartered. Scott is now Deputy Chancellor at UNE.

Philip had just set up as an Armidale solicitor. We put him on retainer. He is now a successful IP lawyer in Brisbane providing highly specialised advice. Years later, I used Philip on complex patent issues for a Sydney client.

By Xmas 1989, there were more than twelve Armidale based high tech start-ups employing directly and indirectly several hundred people, all on growth trajectories. Growth had started to become self-feeding, Aymever itself had a staff of seventeen with a much larger global network of associates, including a dozen UNE academics. By the mid nineties, much of this was gone.

There were particular local factors at play, including instability in UNE and the difficulties we all experienced in breaking through in an environment where to be non-metro based was to be classified as second rate. You had to be better just to survive. But there were also broader national issues, for the same pattern was replicated elsewhere in Australia. Burned by the recession that struck Australia and by a hostile environment that denied that Australia could do this type of thing, the large entrepreneurial flowering of the 1980s diminished like flowers caught by frost.

In a comment, I added:

"This photo is one of a series. I am adding linked material on my personal blog. While the scars of our failure are still unhealed, I haven't forgotten our dream and still campaign for improvement as best I can. I am not alone, for the knowledge of what is possible still drives many of us."

I think the last is a key point.

Postscript

Briefly amplifying my last point, its not so much that scars are unhealed in regard to particular successes or failures. Rather, it's a feeling that many of us have of a lost general opportunity, of having come so close collectively to breaking through. I will discuss this in more detail later, for it is relevant to some of the material I have been writing. 

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Aymever Days 2 - getting started

Continuing the story from Aymever Days 1 - genesis, Denise came up to Armidale first, while I sorted out a few things in Canberra.

Based on my policy experience, I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to achieve.

One of my complaints in Canberra lay in the impact of fragmentation, what we would now call siloing. There were two common approaches then adopted.

The first focused on small individual sectors, so that we had things with names like the room air conditioner industry. It was quite impossible to have sensible policies at this level of disaggregation because  there were so few real policy instruments available.

The second approach was the deal with big lumps such as manufacturing as a whole. I found this approach inadequate for two reasons.

The first lay in the variety across such a huge slab. Policy always has differential on-ground effects because people and firms respond to Government actions depending on their circumstances. The greater the variety in circumstance, the greater the divergence in actual outcomes. If you base policy on averages without taking variety into account, you will always get perverse results. 

The second reason was convergence. The old models then (and now) deeply entrenched in thinking go back to the industrial revolution and a now ancient industrial past. We have primary, secondary and tertiary. We have people who make or grow things, those who provide services to them.

Dealing with the electronics, aerospace and information industries, it was already clear that  convergence meant that the old models and the policies and statistical constructs based on those models were becoming increasingly irrelevant. A new approach was required that would allow for better integration.

The following diagram taken from the Aymever brochure shows our industry structure model. Further comments follow the diagram.

If you look at the diagram, you can see how we tried to integrate sectors around common relationships. Remember, the brochure was published around August 1989 and incorporated earlier thinking. If you look at the block containing broadcasting and television, you can see how we are already integrating that sector with information and communications services.

We began operating out of the family home at 202 Marsh Street, using one bedroom, the study and front verandah as space.

That immediate period is wrapped in nostalgia in my mind. I remember taking Denise to the hospital to have Helen and then coming back when it was clear that the birth would be delayed. I had a sleep in our bedroom just off the study while our people worked away.

Soon after Helen's birth, Denise and I went out to dinner. Coming back, the fax was spitting out pages. We were working on a large space bid in conjunction with a UK firm and had sent them material during the day. Now the responses were coming back. There was something wonderfully exciting about this, and I settled down to do a quick response.

It's one thing to have an industry model in mind, but how do you make money out of it?

The next graphic shows our services diagram.

We centred our services around the sector as defined with a sufficiently wide range of services to give us a chance of commercial viability. I believed in research and depth of knowledge, so we needed a basic research function. If we were to have that, then we might be able to sell research and contract information services. Information services as such were just coming into vogue. Later, we would add training services.

In growing a new business like this, you have to define who to recruit. I chose a mixed model.

Because there were few people in Australia with the generic skills we needed, we would recruit core staff young and train them up. We would then combine them with experienced associates who had the very specific skill sets we needed to complete particular tasks. 

We started with part time research and industry analysts, with the initial training sessions around the dining room table. Because we were industry specialists, the initial training focused on the electronics, aerospace and information industries. I then added product knowledge. All training had to be done from scratch.

Every staff member whether administrative of professional had to have a core knowledge. This included a detailed understanding of the workings of government.

I remember talking to Kathy Hall's dad at her wedding.

The wedding stands out in my mind not just because it was Kathy's wedding, but because of the links with then young Helen. To let Denise sleep, baby Helen and I used to watch Rage together. By the time of Kathy's wedding, I knew every one of the current songs. Most were played at the wedding!

At the wedding, Kathy's dad commented about her growth in knowledge, about the way she could talk about things that he struggled to understand. What did we actually do?    

The company grew like topsy. In 1987-1988 we generated over $250,000 in fees. By the time the brochure was printed in August 1989, monthly fees had passed $75,000 and were growing steadily.

The next photo shows part of the team at work in our new board/conference room. The caption reads:

The Company's approach to undertaking any assignment is to assemble from its Staff and Associates a team of specialised personnel with the mix of expertise and experience most appropriate to the client's needs. Here a group is working on the Australian Industry Involvement Package of a major defence project bid.    

Further comments follow the photo.     Pretty obviously, there is a degree of puff in the caption. But it's also true.

One of our big projects was the development of the industry component of Telecom Defence Systems bid for JORN, the Jindalee Operational Radar Network. This is an over the horizon radar system still central to Australia's defence.

This was pre-email days. Our Armidale team was working with teams in Adelaide and Melbourne. Material came in by fax and went out by fax. We prepared material and faxed it. It then had to be re-keyed at the other end.

The bid was successful. One side effect was that a key staff member included in the above photo, Andrew Davis, left us to join Telecom as the JORN industry program manager. We had trained Andrew from scratch, and it was a loss. Mind you, that's not a criticism of Andrew, just a reflection on the standard of our training!

Everything seemed great, but problems were about to emerge.    

Aymever Days 1 - genesis

This post is the start of a story of dreams faded, a memory of a past now diminished. Yet those dreams remain and drive me in my present writing. The posts have been triggered by Carolyn Heinemann, a former staff member, who found and copied the old company brochure to send to me.

This first reproduction shows part of our head office in Armidale. We occupied most of the top floor of this building, including the tower.

Some elements of the story will be familiar to regular readers of this blog, others will not. But I wish to record the story as a tribute to those who joined us in the dream. I still hold the faith that began with what Bob Quiggin came to describe as the Belshaviks, those of us who wanted to reshape Australia's industrial future.

Today when we live in world of narrow performance indicators and a locked-in past, it is helpful to remember that dreams do have an effect even in failure. In the story that follows I am not giving detailed links to my writing. This post is a personal indulgence,  a story that I remember even as the dark clouds sometimes swirl around me.

I am now a writer, someone who uses his pen as his primary weapon. Yet I remember when I did, when the doing was central. Even now in my daily work, in my striving, I try to bring improvement.

The focus may be different. Just at the moment my immediate concern is Aboriginal housing, something far removed from the story in this post. But despite the differences, the drivers remain the same.

The year is 1980. It's a Friday afternoon, about six o'clock.

I had just come across from Treasury to head up the Department of Industry and Commerce's Economic Analysis Branch. In Treasury I had made it a practice always to go to the Social Club Happy Hour - Friday afternoon drinks - because I enjoyed it and it kept me in touch across areas. I was determined to do the same thing in my new Department even though I had noticed that, unlike Treasury, few senior staff attended.

I was interrupted by John Martin, then Director of the Finance and Tax Section in my Branch, Keith Purcell, the First Assistant Secretary in charge of the Policy Division, had received an urgent call from the Minister (Sir Philip Lynch) and wanted to see me at once.

Keith explained to me that Prime Minster Fraser was very worried about the decline in Australian manufacturing and had asked our Minister for urgent advice not just on the causes, but on what might be done. We had to have advice on the Minster's desk first thing Monday morning. So we started calling staff in setting up for a weekend's work.

Quite frankly, this was one of the least satisfying experiences of my professional life. A week end to try to provide sensible advice on this issue was bad enough. But we also lacked the policy framework and supporting analytical tools required to say anything new and useful. So in the end we provided statistics with some fairly superficial supporting analysis. I swore that I would never put myself in this position again.

This next photo shows Liz (not Lis) Noble and John Nightingale on the stairs leading up to the flag tower in the first photo. Liz was Senior Research Officer with our information services business with a special interest in the media. John, then a senior lecturer at the University of New England, was especially interested in technology and the way that one technology replaced another. I still use his concept of competing technology regimes.

At the end of 1980 I went back to the University of New England on leave to work on my PhD. My topic was a biography of my grandfather, David Henry Drummond.

In my posts, I have spoken often of DHD and the influence he had on me. I absorbed many of his views, but by the time I returned to UNE the influence of those views was greatly reduced. They just didn't seem relevant any more.

A funny thing then happened. As I sat in my small office working my way through the papers or worked in my old bedroom at home, my old views re-ignited. Suddenly, I saw the things that had interested me as relevant once more.

Part of the reason for this lay in my renewed residence in the area that I loved. Part, too, lay in my recent experience as senior Commonwealth public servant, for I now filtered Drummond's views and experiences through the prism set by experience. I found myself nodding and saying that's right.

You can see the continuing influence of that experience in my writing today. For example, I describe myself as a New England populist. I would not have done so in 1980. Indeed, I would have been hard pressed to define what the term meant. It just wouldn't have seemed especially relevant.

This next graphic shows a New England new state car sticker. This was one of the two new state stickers on my bedroom window as I wrote. My renewed support for New England self-government was another linked element in my rediscovery of my own past.

I returned to Canberra early in 1983. Later in that year I was given responsibility for the creation of a new branch, the Electronics, Aerospace and Information Industries Branch, to provide a new focus on the high technology industries. This reflected a Departmental worry that too many resources were tied up in declining industries, too few were committed to new industries.

Drawing on my experiences including that episode I described earlier, I tried to develop new policy approaches. I described this in Case studies in public administration.

On 15 March 1987 Denise and I married. Denise was pregnant with Helen, and it seemed an appropriate time to chart new directions.

I had become increasingly frustrated at the early stage impact of what we now call managerialism because the combination of the reassertion of control by the central coordinating agencies with new hierarchical structures in my own department just made it so much harder to get anything new done. Again, you can see the influence on my present writing.

I decided to start a new consulting business in Armidale centred on the electronics, aerospace and information industries. Essentially, I was putting my personal money where my professional mouth had been. The Armidale location reflected my family and New England interests. My contribution to New England development would be the creation of a new high tech node.

I had made a decision in principle, but was still very undecided.

I had a good job and a career path. I was also very comfortably of financially, indeed quite wealthy with guaranteed superannuation, four houses plus a share portfolio. All I had to do was to sit and let compound interest work its miracles. I also met with opposition from my industry colleagues who wanted me just where I was.

A few weeks back I went to farewell drinks with Brian and Irene Lovelock. At the time we are talking about, Brian was a senior executive with Computer Sciences Australia (CSA). Later, he would become an Aymever client, while Irene became one of our associates on the training side.

Bob Cassell was at the drinks. Bob was CEO of CSA at the time Brian was there. The year before the events I am talking about, I organised a group of industry people to go to Armidale for the Picnic Races. Bob flew up in his private plane. Then, and this was something Bob's wife remembered, I took them all sapphire shopping before the races.

Bob was adamant. I must not resign. I had started something worthwhile, and I must try to drive it through despite the growing difficulties.   

In the end, it was a small thing that triggered my move. I had not been especially secret in my musings about new directions. David Charles as head of the Department called me in. What were my intentions?

I started to explain my dilemmas. Then David said: "I don't care what you feel. I am only interested in the impact on the Department." The die was set. That day I gave notice.

In my next post in this series, I will talk about Aymever's early days.