South African expat Carolyn Esser talks to Andrew Thomas about luck, hard work and linguistics through her career in communications

Mealtimes in the childhood homes of Carolyn Esser could be heated affairs. Both her father and stepfather were passionate about politics, and so Esser, now head of European and Middle East communications for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, had to learn how to hold her own in a debate from an early age.

“South Africa went through this amazing transition while I was a teenager. Politics was built into the fabric of conversation and concern amongst my family, and probably among most middle class families,” says Esser.

Born in Munich, Esser and her family moved to Johannesburg before she was old enough for memories to last. Although apartheid’s steel grip was to soon see its fingers prised from the running of South Africa, life was still segregated by skin colour, and Esser’s state primary school had no non-white children. Her mother, however, ardently believed in the benefits of a private education and, as private schools were not bound by the same laws, Esser moved to a mixed liberal Johannesburg girls school at 13.

“My mother pushed me very hard. She always felt the one thing she could give me was a good education – and that nobody could take that away from me. I’m so grateful for that, because it made me who I am today,” she says. Her mother’s influence all but forced Esser to attend Afrikaans-speaking Stellenboch University. After three months she called her mother, distraught and desperate to go home, “The Afrikaans mentality was very different to my liberal upbringing. I had been brought up to believe that women could go out and conquer the world, and yet I found myself at an institution for many girls their only expectation of university was to find a husband.”

Esser persevered, and during her first year found not only other like-minded students but her academic niche. Esser had originally chosen law, but found the subject dry and unrewarding. Fortunately Stellenbosch had introduced a new course that year, an arts degree in value and policy studies. For Esser, this was the turning point at Stellenbosch. She loved the course and majored in politics, philosophy and economics.

Esser stayed on for an extra year to take a post-graduate journalism degree. Then, already in possession of a European passport, she took the well-travelled route of many South African graduates and headed to Britain. A friend put her in touch with an agency specialising in temporary work in PR, but the work was dull and repetitive. Frustrated at the lack opportunities in PR, Esser turned to the city, and landed a job in the credit risk department of UBS Warburg. This was 1999, and with the global Y2K saga unfolding, Esser was in a unique place to use her language skills to create a clear area of expertise. She didn’t know it at the time, but the eight months spent at UBS Warburg were to prove invaluable.

Esser briefly returned to South Africa where she met a friend from her course, then a journalist on the Financial Mail. Hearing her dilemma, he suggested she meet up with Brunswick, a financial PR agency, headquartered in London but with recently opened offices in Johannesburg. “I had absolutely no idea what financial PR was, genuinely none,” says Esser. “But as soon as I met them I just thought they were fantastic, but I had to say to them, ‘I’m thinking of staying in London, would you be able to put me in touch with your London office?’” Esser went back to London to be interviewed by the London Brunswick team. “To be honest, I didn’t really have a plan B. I knew nothing about the industry. I didn’t even know who Brunswick’s competitors were. I just knew it was where I wanted to work.” Brunswick was building a European team and recruiting linguists to work on transaction and project work, but it was Esser’s Warburg experience that helped her swing it. “They thought I had city experience because Warburg was on my CV.” Esser was hired.

It was a remarkable first career opportunity. Although still relatively junior, she was involved in hard and demanding work, working in crisis or M&A scenarios. The 23 year-old Esser would never have had that kind of experience anywhere else. She was there for five years, much of it spent in the hotel rooms of Europe’s financial centres. The turning point was when human resources firm Adecco discovered an accounting black hole and hastily convened a press conference. Asked 32 questions, Adecco’s CEO answered ‘no comment’ to 30. The share price dropped by a third.

“That’s when Brunswick was brought in,” says Esser. “I was in a team of two, operating in a small office park outside Zurich for six months. It was dreadful.” Esser had been with Brunswick for five years. She then felt it was time to do something else.

“I was new to management, I was new to being a senior member of the team, I was still learning the business, and we were still integrating through our recent acquisitions. I basically worked night and day”

Towards the end of her time in Zurich, she took a call about a role at Logica. An established tech firm, Logica had created most of the bank clearing systems and developed tech innovations such as the London Underground ticketing process and the premium bond winning number generator. It had recently merged with CMG, the Dutch consulting firm and needed a financial media relations manager. Esser again thinks they were looking for linguists, “I think they valued my transaction experience from my time at Brunswick, but I think that every job I’ve ever had has been because of my language skills.” Shortly after her arrival, Logica acquired French IT consultants Unilog and Swedish business WM-data.

It was just before Esser and her immediate boss were about to brief Logica CEO Martin Read for the Unilog acquisition communications campaign that her boss told her she was leaving. Esser was stunned; she’d only recently joined, was trying to carve out her role in her first in-house position and was about to undertake a massive integration challenge with the French organisation. Read made Esser run comms until he could find a successor. After a few months he asked Esser, “I’m going to interview someone today for the global comms director role, I think they’ll be fine but you’re doing a pretty good job so I’m wondering what you would say if I offered you the job?”

Esser looks back to that moment, “I was 29, just married and I felt totally overwhelmed. Obviously it was my ideal trajectory but I’d only been in the job just under a year. I said to Martin Read ‘Thank you very much, but I need to have a think about it.’ He said to me ‘If you were a man, you’d be chewing off my hand for this opportunity.’ I went and had coffee with my husband still feeling overwhelmed, thinking ‘I can’t do this!’ and he said, ‘Look, you have two choices: you take the job and get on with it or you have to leave because you can’t stay and not take the job.”

 Esser took the job. Her first six months, however, weren’t easy, “I was new to management, I was new to being a senior member of the team, I was still learning the business, and we were still integrating through our recent acquisitions. I basically worked night and day.” More transactions and two profit warnings followed and a shareholder revolt forced Read to stand down. By now Esser’s responsibility included media relations, internal communications, brand communications, corporate online comms, the annual report and public affairs. The year of global economic meltdown, 2008, made for an interesting year for Esser, “[New CEO] Andy Green came on board and he really understood the power of communications. He understood that he didn’t have much time. He was inheriting an organization with a battered and bruised morale, in a very tough financial situation. So we very quickly built an internal communications programme aimed at getting people to understand the new of vision for the organisation. This while also undertaking a strategic review of the business...It was very demanding, but to go through that corporate transition is not something everybody gets a chance to do and I feel very privileged to have had that experience and to have have learned so much.”

Sadly for Green, and for Esser, it wasn’t enough. The share price continued to decline and then in 2011, in her final week of maternity leave with her second child, Canadian services firm CGI bought Logica. She returned, knowing her seven years with Logica were soon to end. “I was happy, though. I’d done a lot; transactions, CEO changes, chairman changes, executive board changes, corporate strategy refreshes, brand revival – I felt I’d ticked boxes. The only box I hadn’t ticked was being bought.” Having seen through much of the initial transaction work, CGI asked her to stay on to help the final transition and the reorganisation of the communications team.

It was a useful six month transition, enabling her to have time to find the right next role. She had a few interviews and then came a phone call from a headhunter about a senior communications role in the London office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation running media relations in Europe. It wasn’t an instant decision for Esser. She had run a global communications function with a team of 30 or 40 people, working at the senior executive level. There was an element of pride swallowing, but the mix of the corporate sector, which Esser knew well, with a focused social purpose in line with her own value set made it an easy decision.

Esser joined the foundation just as the European office was starting to evolve. The team in London – the European and Middle East HQ – unlocks resources for international development. A large part of the role is about brand and reputation management for the organisation in those regions. “Unlike a listed company, we don’t have a product or a service and we don’t have shareholders. What we have is funding. Bill and Melinda have realised that although they have a lot of private money with $3bn a year goes on international development, it’s still relatively small when compared with the $135bn spent by donors around the world. What they do is use their influence to leverage more and better resources for international development from the big donors who are inevitably governments,” says Esser.

With 60% of international development spending coming from Europe, the role has potential. But it wasn’t an easy start, “When I came on board there was nothing, we didn’t even have a media distribution list. But I don’t miss financial communications at all. We have other issues and other crises that we have to deal with, but it’s given me the chance to look much more broadly at communications.” It is not dissimilar to working with the CEO of a listed company. Other than that the role is different. “In some ways it complements all I’ve done before with the addition of public affairs and government relations piece much more driving the overall agenda. We’re looking at how we influence political decision making on our issues as well as changing public perception on chunky issues like whether people care about the severely disadvantaged in other parts of the world,” she says.

Despite those teenage moments discussing politics around the kitchen table, Esser feels that it is luck that has driven her to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. There’s an element of disingenuousness about her claim of luck – her advice for those starting out in their comms careers is, “Work your ass off and be smart about the people that you align yourself with.