I attended an interview with Denis O’Brien in UCD on the 4th of February, 2010 and here follows some notes I took which may be of interest to work-searchers.
He started reading the business pages of the Irish newspapers & Irish business magazines at 12 years of age. At the age of 15 he started following the career of Tony Ryan in these publications. Ryan co-founded Ryanair and before that formed Guinness Peat Aviation (GPA). After graduating from UCD in 1980 with a B.A. in History & Politics he wrote to Tony Ryan and told him that he had been following his career for a number of years and that he would like to work for him. He added that he could meet him anytime & anywhere. He ended up meeting him off a flight from Italy to Shannon at 6am one wet, cold & windy Monday morning! The “interview” lasted about a minute & he started work more or less straight away! He lived on Ryan’s country estate and did everything & anything, at one stage doing veterinary surgeon duties at the birth of some calves!
One good business habit that he picked up from Tony Ryan was list-making & he extolled the importance of this for efficient work.
O’Brien made his initial fortune from the sale of Esat Digifone to British Telecom but it wasn’t all plain sailing with Esat. The company went within a whisker of going under at one stage and in order to keep the show on the road a loan with an interest rate of a whopping 40% was entered into. O’Brien knew that the return on this investment would be greater than this percentage!
He was asked at one point about his work style and he gave these three tips:
• Have a sense of urgency about your work to make the best use of your time. Instil urgency into company culture.
• Feedback on employee performance is essential. It’s ok to make mistakes once but mistakes shouldn’t be repeated if feedback has been given.
• Avoid tiredness at work. It will lead to bad decisions & irritability with colleagues, clients, etc which is obviously not good for business.
He mentioned at one point that he thinks that there will be massive telecoms opportunities, especially with regard to the internet, in Africa in about 3 years time when technology has moved on a certain amount.
As regards employment creation in Ireland, he sees third & fourth level “education tourism” as being the number one opportunity for the country. He thinks that the Irish Colleges have some existing capacity and also should expand somewhat to cater for the increased numbers of international students that would come if the idea was marketed properly by the Government. Our Unique Selling Propositions in this regard would be the high quality of the education itself and indeed the Irish lifestyle also. He added that he doesn’t think that green technologies or cleantech will be as big in this country as some people are leading us to believe.
Noel Broderick
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