Defining Moments: Ann Sherry’s bold vision

From bureaucrat to banker to cruise-line chief: Ann Sherry’s career motto is “full steam ahead”.

Two ships passing in the night: Queen Mary 2, the unfathomably large 151,000-tonne flagship of the Carnival-owned Cunard cruise line, and her younger sister ship, Queen Victoria, all 90,000 tonnes of her. It was a grand spectacle, an awesome display of ­maritime grace and power marked by fireworks and cheering crowds. Presiding over the historic meeting on Sydney Harbour last month was another indomitable force, Carnival Australia’s go-getting CEO Ann Sherry. “Organisations that aren’t bold can never imagine being bold,” says Sherry, 61, the morning after the Cunard event. “And ones that start doing bold things make boldness part of what they do.”

Over a diverse career, Sherry’s full-steam-ahead progress through Australia’s public and private sectors has been marked by bold visions and big statements. As head of the Office of the Status of Women during Paul Keating’s government, she developed a national policy on ­women’s superannuation and pushed hard for a paid maternity leave scheme. Later, as chief of human resources at Westpac, Sherry made that a reality and the bank’s introduction of paid maternity leave became a game-changer for ­corporate Australia.

When she took the helm at Carnival, the local arm of the world’s largest cruise operator, in 2007, cruising, she says, was considered “unfashionable”. She set about changing its image, inviting celebrity chef Luke Mangan to open fine-dining restaurants on P&O ships, installing adrenalin-pumping waterslides on Carnival ships’ decks, and vastly expanding Princess Cruises’ Australian operations. ­Cruising has since enjoyed double-digit growth each year and Carnival is the principal player.

“I’m not incrementalist by nature,” Sherry says. “I’ll always make the choice to do bold things. I’m about grabbing a big, thorny problem and trying to crack it.” She describes herself as a risk-taker, “which causes you to do things that maybe everybody else says are not doable”.

Sherry stepped out of her comfort zone in 1994 when she left her federal government position to become a corporate leader in the banking industry. “Very few people make the move from the public sector to private,” she says. “The cultures are so different, so it required a much bigger adaptation than it looked like from the outside. In government, you talk about ­policy and public impact … whereas at Westpac, it was much more bottom-line driven. But it gave me the opportunity to put my money where my mouth was because I’d been very critical of ­corporate Australia from inside government.”

Whether delivering public policy or business outcomes, Sherry’s leadership style has always been people-powered and skewed to the promotion of diversity. “Ultimately, leadership is about motivating people, getting them to deliver amazing things,” she says. “There’s no point giving people directions without giving them context for what they’re doing; for me it’s about getting people to exercise their own ­judgment, not just doing what you say.”

When Sherry was 21, her son Nick was born with Down syndrome. She and her husband Michael fought to give him the best life possible, while the discrimination her son faced fired up her instincts for social justice. “Having a child with a disability is a grounding experience – your humanity is writ large every day,” she says. Living with Nick has brought an awareness of what life is like for outsiders and ultimately affected the way she leads. “It’s made me think a lot more about inclusion and having a more diverse range of people around me,” she says.

“It’s not that hard to include diversity, to include people if they have disabilities, or they have a completely different set of experiences and view of the world. Ending up with group-think in your organisation is no good – you miss lots of the issues, the nuances; you miss your customers.”

TURNING POINTS

Can you name a defining moment in your career? Moving from the public to the private sector – from head of the Office of the Status of Women to Westpac.

What’s the best advice you would give someone starting out? Be true to yourself, which is quite challenging in environments where people want to mould you. I think it’s hard for women – you look at what you should be like and often that’s a male model.

Who has inspired you? [The late public sector reformer] John Paterson, who hired me when he was running health and community services in Victoria. I watched him being bold and doing the things that everybody else said couldn’t be done and I took inspiration from that.