The CEO in Paradise (James Rice), interview with James Rice

Kristine Berry sat down with James Rice (the CEO in Paradise) to talk about his career and understand how he has become such an influential leader in his organisation. It is a very enlightening discussion about how James started his career and his experience working in Chinese food and beverage manufacturing as an expat.

Given the news James will be leaving PNG, the discussion about his career legacy is very timely. Most people will agree that the work he’s put into Paradise and PNG as whole won’t be forgotten, he truly has built a career legacy.

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Transcript

Kristine: I’m looking at your background, obviously huge manufacturing environments that you’ve worked in, but I’d love to sort of get an insight how you went about building this amazing successful career that you’ve had?

James: I really didn’t intend to, I had left the United States when I graduated from college and went to China and had some great opportunities, because I could speak Chinese, I am fluent in Chinese. I got moved around to different job roles at the companies that I was working at. So, I had a job role in sales, then finance then in HR and it was, and it was a big lesson for me. I didn’t realise that these experiences were all the building blocks for being a general management person, and eventually becoming a CEO. I spent a bulk of my time though in those that period in sales, so I think that when I tell younger people about building a career and they want to be a CEO, I think you have to be functional expert in something. You’ve got to have one silo that you’re truly an expert on, and then pick up these experiences from all these other silos. I call it a tour of duty through the finance department through manufacturing through marketing through something else that would work. So that’s what happened to me. I ended up as the CEO of a company, and the first one was essentially a kind of a turnaround start-up.  I was building brands, I was motivating people, I was building a sales team to understand manufacturing, and it just turned out for me those things I absolutely love. I’ve always thought if I ended up in a huge company that was really stable and, ?normal?, I would probably be bored.Also, I was looking for something where you could add value, making a change is really exciting to me and I really have always been driven by the fact that I could lead people.

Kristine: What took you to China, the first time around you, why did you learn Mandarin when you were back in California?

James: Those days, you could learn French or Spanish languages, China wasn’t open. When I was a student, there was an exchange. Well, they call it an exchange programme, but it was one way – Americans go to China but Chinese can’t get out. That was in 1987.  I saw that program and I thought, oh, why does nobody go! So I went and literally nobody had been there before. This was China before cell phones before anything had opened up, which is not unlike P&G today. I went, it was fun, and I went back to school, back to California to finish studies and that university asked me to come to China to teach marketing, and I went to the UCLA bookstore, and I bought the books of those classes. I stayed there teaching for three years and I learned Chinese.

That was really the very beginning of China on its move, we’re talking about a time when Pepsi was in Shenzhen building a factory, McDonald’s was going around recruiting farmers to grow potatoes it was really early days of China. There was always a job opportunity, something to do and I got hired by Kimberly Clark. The leader of Kimberly Clark Asia Pacific, he said to me ?you speak Chinese right? and I said ?yeah I’m fluent in Chinese, I can read and write?. He says, ?Oh, that’s great. We just bought a company in North China, and none of us speak Chinese and nobody that can speak the language?. ?I said well how do you talk to that company?, and he says, ?I have no idea. That’s why I’m going to hire you and send you there!?

Kristine: So what was the China and PNG, draw was it just the same sort of thing that drew you to China that drew your PNG?

James: For me personally it was an adventure, and it was different. I wanted to come out of China and there was and appeal of coming someplace new, someplace different, it was really exciting for me. What was very interesting was a decision made in this company by the Board of Directors, not to hire the usual person, and to find somebody that comes from a developing market that is like this situation PNG is in. So they used a search firm in Singapore, who started looking for CEOs that were in China.  It makes sense PNG today is China in 1994 and actually in a consumer products industry funnily enough, all retailers are Chinese. In fact, you won’t believe it but I could speak Chinese every day and I text our customers in Chinese. That’s phenomenal. It’s like the other language of the 812 languages, there’s a third, a third one more!

The experience of coming to a very different environment a PNG environment and as we were talking early on, if you haven’t lived in PNG you, it is very different. There’s no doubt it’s tough, is it is like China was early on. When I arrived in China, there were no toilet paper, my friends had been mailing me oreo cookies. It’s not that tough in PNG, but it is difficult as there’s only a few nice hotels, a few restaurants in the capital city. If you think of it as like I’m going camping and this is going to be a great adventure, then you’re okay. But if you want the exact same orange juice that you always had at home and certain kinds of towels and things like that it is not going to work for you. But if you can bear with it, then you get this incredible adventure. And I’ve been in parts of PNG, even two weeks ago, where electricity is not on, running waters is out and no phones. They live in grass huts and they go catch their food. This is almost mediaeval times you know but absolutely fabulous! I love to ride a motorcycle and Bougainville is the one place where there’s a local motorcycle club so I contacted them yesterday. And they said, Okay, we’d love to have you so I’m waiting for them to give me a date to fly and ride around with them, it is probably going to be insane.

They’re going to find somebody who’s got an extra one, and I’ll fly up there with my helmet and. And I’ll just ride with him and I, I guarantee I will not see a single tourist thing, and I won’t see a fancy hotel or fancy restaurant, but I will see the real Bougainville, and you know just be treated like one of them. That will be the best thing, it will be either be as if I walked into a National Geographic.

Kristine: So from a management perspective, what are pearls of wisdom or what guidance can you give someone in a leadership role, if they’ve never lived or never worked in PNG?

Jame: Yeah, well, I had a manufacturing leadership role, I was a plant manager in China for Kimberly Clark, and I was a political science major. So, what I did is I walked to the production line every day and talk to every single person on the line, and I really learned the process very well and I knew what people did. I think that that’s the first thing is to trust the frontline and meet them and talk to them. When I take on a new job and this is really the third sort of turnaround job I’ve done, I still walk a production lines to learn, but I also go out with the salespeople and meet all their customers and I think the lesson from that is to listen. And you’re talking about a cultural difference, you can’t violate the culture if you’re really polite and really courteous, you know the best you can do is learn by listening, watching and being polite. And people in PNG they really do respond to genuine kindness and openness, it took a while for them because you know I?m a foreigner by now in my company, they’re very used to me, and any employer can walk up and talk to me. I know a few local words like say hello in local dialect and good afternoon or whatever it disarms them and they’re comfortable and then, and then it goes what they tell me everything going on. They react very well to that and that was true in China, eso early in my career I worked for Tyson Foods. One time somebody complimented him on his employees, and he said, well, I take care of my employees, my employees take care of my customers, and my customers take care of my profit. I’ve always done it that way, and it always works and even today, you know, my customers compliment my salespeople. But also, I haven’t had as single quality complaint in a year, and the same at my previous job too. I know everybody on that production line and they know me, they know I’ve walked by them and I’ve talked to them. They know I’ve picked up things off the floor and when they think that the boss cares, I think they care.

Kristine: What are some of the frustrations that that a senior leader can have?

As I was saying quality, you can buy everything you want in the grocery store but that’s going to be tough. Moving around stuff is that the city’s is not always safe. But reports of danger are greatly exaggerated and, when you are out of the big city, the country is in fact very safe I travelled by myself to all those other provinces.

In terms of managing people, you have to be ready for something very unusual. That is people over 50 are very well educated because that’s before the independence of the country, people under about 25 or under 30 are very well educated because the education system has come back online and is sort of rebuilt. People in the middle of that grew up when the education system broke down and unravelled. So we have this big clump of people in the middle that are not very well educated, not very sophisticated and fine for manual labour out in the factory but for middle management finding people is really tough. We really had this problem of what Americans would call our backbench strain, I don’t have backups for my direct reports and there’s not really a backup for me either, so that’s going to be tough but we’ll have them in 10 years, because they’re coming up the ranks were. It means that these middle management roles that we have in a business they’re not done well, but as I tell my direct reports if it was easy, I wouldn’t need you.

Kristine: So we’re a strong believer in terms of mentoring, have you had mentors in your life and in your career.

Yes, I’ve had some great mentors I can think of three that I’ve just learned so much from, and even Don Tyson, he wasn’t my mentor, but he had these great one liner’s that just really explained business so I paid attention to that. I also watch what people do, and I learned a lot. I’ve also learned a lot from really bad bosses so don’t be disappointed. You learn what not to do so, so a collection of these two things is very important for me.

It’s very important for me to, to pay it forward so of course I’m a good coach and a boss to my employees I know I have to be, but on the side and most people don’t know this but there’s three young Papa New Guinea and entrepreneurs that I also coach. One of them comes every week and checks what she’s doing and I send her back out if she’s got the wrong price the wrong idea or she lose focus.

I think it’s really good to mentor people, because this generation is the first set of entrepreneurs in the country. So in fact they have no entrepreneurial role models or no mentors. I asked one of my metee’s, I said ?Can I mentor you? Let me help you and she was absolutely thrilled that.

Kristine: I am intrigued in terms of your career when you said you had all those different roles in terms of whether you worked in HR and that sort of thing. Did you have a vision around that or did you just sort of lend up moving into those different departments?

James: I wasn’t really sure what my what my purpose was what my passion was, and you know I had a job and I couldn’t speak English, and I was durable. I got moved around by my boss but at the time I didn’t realise that I was actually gathering the building blocks, for a career. I really started to know my field and it really happened by accident. It was only a few years ago, somebody said to me Oh, you were so smart to see that was going to happen to China and go there. I did actually land on the very day that you know their PowerPoint chart does this for economic growth. I was not that I smart, I mean I was just coming out of college and beer was cheaper than water and you know I had nothing to do so I went there. I learned it, and then I realised that my passion was making things we make cookies, and the toilet paper and beer, which is all consumer products. So making things and leading people. I realised later on the fact that when I grow a business we create jobs and we hire people, and I just thought to myself this is the greatest thing I could do. I can impact lives, if I can run a business, create jobs. Last year we added 175 new jobs, so I mean that’s 200 families with food on the table and you know the next week or so I go back and think, Oh God, I did something good. I tried to make a huge cultural change here, and I tell my employees all the time we don’t make biscuits we make a difference, that’s my thing I want to impact people’s lives and so the initiatives that we do, I think, I think they do and is resonated with the community and, and, much to my surprise, it has resulted in tremendously higher sales because I think what’s happening is the profit and getting communities is saying, I like that company I?m up 32% in sales. I think its because we’ve communicated a better mission and purpose.

Kristine: I think people know when they come to you, you’ve made some great initiatives in the business.

James: I think it’s a company people want to work and it’s tbe culture that I’ve created for my employees. People know the brand but and we’ve become the employer of choice we advertise our Graduate Development Programme this year and hhad about 150 applicants. This year we had over, 1000! In the morning coming to work, there’s about 50 people outside the front gate wanting to get a job here.

Last year at the beginning of COVID in March, where it looked like lockdowns were going to send people home. I actually said publicly I was not going to raise my price on any product at all this year, and our any employee that had to go home, I was going to pay their salary.

Kristine: So wrapping up, where to from here, where do you see your illustrious career going next?

James: Hopefully nowhere! I’ve always been a very consciousness saver and investor so I can afford to retire and that’s my intention is to retire young and, yeah, and I keep riding motorcycles and driving cars and going to crazy places and visiting people. I’ve been an expat all my life I got friends all over the world. So, yeah, I can probably show up anywhere for a couple of days.

Kristine: In terms of the legacy that you want to leave. What’s the legacy the final legacy of your career, do you think?

I want to leave a company on the rise and I want to know that the company culture that I created here, is one of respect and love, and the Christian values that we have here, and, and the happiness of the employees. I want that to say, I hope that lasts a long time and you know if you were here with me, wou will see all my employees smile everybody waves. It’s just really different. If we keep we keep that up with or without me, it’s just always going to be a great place to work.

Well, James, we salute you, you’ve done an amazing, amazing job in PNG and we know the people at Paradise love you and the community within PNG. So congratulations on an amazing, two and a half years that you’ve been there, you’ve done an incredible job and you have made a difference without a doubt, so congratulations on that.