From multinationals to family business: Liam Nagle’s boardroom journey
When Liam Nagle talks about leadership, he does not reach for soundbites.
Instead, he draws on a career that has taken him from Apple and Intel to Nortel and Bookham, from family-owned SISK Group to the Haughey family’s Norbrook Laboratories.
It is a journey that spans nearly four decades, multiple industries, and a striking mix of multinational and family business experience.
So, when the Institute of Directors Ireland (IoD) nominated a member to discuss the changing role of boards and the evolution of corporate culture, Nagle was an obvious choice.
Now non-executive chair of Norbrook Laboratories, Nagle is in reflective mode when he makes his way to the offices of The Currency.
Nagle has been an IoD Ireland member for years. Reflecting on his membership, he notes: “If you want to access expertise and insight on what good governance is, they have the material and know-how. They’ve also got some good governance and leadership events and workshops that I attend, which are invaluable for getting the experience, but also connections to future opportunities,” he says.
It is also a place to find talent. “If you want to get access to good non-exec directors (NEDs), IoD Ireland is the first place I would start, because typically that’s where people go to.”
Nagle’s views on the role of boards are shaped by his own experience and his own journey. And, by his own admission, it has been quite a journey.
Sitting back, he divides his career neatly into two halves: the first 20 years spent in global multinationals, the second 20 in Irish family-owned businesses.
The lessons, he says, are about people, values, and clarity.
“I’ve been working for nearly 40 years, so I summarise it currently into two buckets of 20. The first 20 were mainly multinationals,” he says. “My first job when I was going to secondary school was working in Golden Vale Co-Op. During the summers, I did cover for the weighbridge, which was great fun and great craic.”
After school, he went to the accounts department at the co-op. “A couple of us were working in the process of paying farmers for their milk and netting off whatever feed and fertiliser they bought. So that was a great experience and great fun.”
Shortly after he turned 20, he applied for a position with Apple in Cork, joining the company in 1983. “I was the 200-and-something-th employee, and so it was a great time to join Apple,” he says.
From Cork to California and Singapore, Apple gave him his first exposure to international business. “I was the youngest fella in the finance group. Bottom of the ladder. I spent eight great years in Apple. Did my first travel with them,” he says.
“I remember doing my first trip ever out of the country as a young finance guy. So I did that for eight years, travelling with Apple in the US, in California, went with them to Singapore. It was a great experience.”
College never featured in his story. “No, never went, couldn’t afford it,” he says simply.
But the on-the-job education was more than enough supported with time at IoD Ireland, and leading international business schools, such as INSEAD.
If Apple was an education, Intel was the university. In 1991, he joined the American giant’s new Irish manufacturing operation in Leixlip.
“So the first business Intel had in Leixlip was a business that made motherboards, controller boards for computers. We actually assembled PC computers and servers. So I joined that business in 1991,” he says.
He joined as a financial controller and quickly became a general manager at the plant. He was still in his late twenties. “To this day, and it’s 30-something years later, I still remember Intel’s values and how they did stuff and their culture,” he says.
The company was at a pivotal moment, transitioning from the 486 to the Pentium processor. “So that business went from hundreds of people to literally 2,000 people in about two years. Phenomenal experience. I still look back on Intel as a huge place of learning,” he says.
Family considerations kept him in Ireland when international assignments beckoned, but another opportunity arose.
US hardware firm Bay Networks was establishing a European manufacturing base in Co Limerick. Nagle became the first employee, building a team and supply chain from scratch. Then came Nortel’s acquisition of Bay Networks, the dotcom boom, and promotion to a series of global roles.
At Nortel, he experienced both hypergrowth and brutal contraction. “Over a period of two or three years, there was a huge transformation. We took the organisation from 12,000 people to 1,800 people while still supporting the customer and making and shipping product.”
That led to Bookham Technology, where he became president and COO, integrating acquisitions across three continents. It was a demanding role, one that required constant travel. By 2004, with three young children at home, something had to give.
“It wasn’t sustainable,” he recalls.
An advertisement in The Irish Times changed the direction of his career. Sicon, the holding company of the SISK Group, the construction giant, was seeking an executive chair for its non-construction activities.
“It was completely different from what I was doing. The most interesting aspect of the job, which wasn’t clear in the advert in The Irish Times, was that the family wanted to diversify into something else – but they didn’t know what it was. Obviously, the economy was doing well, the construction business was generating a lot of cash and profit.”
He helped the family diversify into healthcare, acquiring seven businesses in a short period and creating SISK Healthcare. In 2008, he was appointed the group’s first CEO, just as the Celtic Tiger collapsed.
“So we had to deal with that. The construction turnover obviously declined,” he says, adding that revenues fell heavily.
“We had to deal with that. The business began to travel internationally. Some of that worked well, some of that didn’t work so well. The healthcare business was a key part of keeping the overall group positive and moving forward,” he says.
The experience was formative. “George Sisk said to me… We were sitting in the office one day talking, and he said, ‘Liam, remember you’re building a business for my grandchildren’, so, if you reflect on that, it’s a phenomenal, huge responsibility to be given.”
In 2015, after the sudden death of founder Eddie Haughey (Lord Ballyedmond), the Haughey family sought a new leader for Norbrook Laboratories, the global veterinary pharmaceutical business in Newry, Co Down. Nagle, with his blend of multinational and family business experience, was chosen.
“It was a big change, but I was probably personally ready to do something different,” he says.
“I knew nothing about pharmaceuticals, I knew nothing about the veterinary sector, but it was a family business, we embarked on a journey… a multi-year journey of significant investment. In the last 10 years, the business has invested almost £130 million (€149 million) in capex, so it’s in a very strong position right now from a capability point of view.”
The portfolio shifted from being 80 per cent large animal products to a more balanced 60/40 with companion animals. He stayed longer than intended, through Covid, before handing over the CEO role in 2023 and moving to non-executive chair.
Again, it came back to people: “If there’s a common theme from my perspective, it’s about people. You need to understand the sector, and you need to understand what’s good, what’s bad, what the challenges are, but I think over my time, I would say there are three to four things that I’ve fine-tuned or developed. One is people… people development. Always upgrading people, upskilling people. Always have lots of good people around you, develop those people, manage performance.”
At this stage of his career, Nagle is focused on what makes boards effective. He stresses clarity, communication, and trust.
“When you become a non-executive director, you really have to make sure that you don’t try to act like you would as an executive, it’s a different role. However, it is essential to have good communication and engagement between the board and the executive. You do that by talking to people regularly. It’s about communication. It’s about spending time together,” he says.
He cites a recent Norbrook board off-site course at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. “We spent the day in class, understanding what a family business governance process looks like, and then we spent the day working together from a board perspective, what programme of work did we want, separate to the management team,” he says.
“So I would say first of all, any board has to spend time together. The most effective boards I’ve worked on are ones that spend time together,” he says.
The way Nagle views it, it is not simply a matter of turning up at the boardroom and reviewing PowerPoint charts. Instead, it is about spending time and building relationships with colleagues.
“The best boards for me are ones that spend time together and just build relationships, build trust – trust is hugely important. The CEO is the CEO; the chair is the chair,” he says.
“The CEO leads from the front, typically. The chair has to lead from behind. You can’t be the first person to comment on a particular topic at the board. Let the rest of the room talk about it, and encourage that.”
Culture, he argues, is inseparable from values. “People talk about culture, and culture is hugely important, but to have a good culture, you have to know what your values are. So, for me, the important aspect of culture is the values that you have in an organisation. The behaviours you expect, but also the behaviours that you don’t expect, are what support your culture or not, and that has to start not just with the executive, but with the board.”
He recalls one non-executive in particular: “He would say very little at a board meeting, and he didn’t… He wasn’t very loud, he was quite low in his voice, but when Sir Ian Gisbon spoke, everybody listened, because they knew there was a gem coming… Whereas I’ve also seen non-executive directors come in with a calculator and they’re checking the tots on the board pack. For me, director behaviour and the values of the board and organisation are critical to success.”
Succession is a constant concern. “Your typical succession process with the executives is every year you look at it and you look at who’s coming through… In terms of board succession, the process is pretty straightforward with term limits allowing you to plan, but again, the important thing is the person, the person you’re looking for,” Nagle says.
“If we were interviewing for particular NEDs, you can almost tell when you meet the person whether they’re going to fit into the culture and fit into the team.”
Nagle adds that the key to board succession is doing the basics right, your skills matrix and assessing what the board will need in the next 10 years, not what you needed in the past. He also encourages the use of an independent body to help with recruitment, like IoD Ireland’s Board Recruitment service. This helps to widen your scope of talent and enhances the network of the board.
What about when things go wrong?
Transparency is his watchword for governance. “You have to set an expectation of your executive for no surprises, good or bad. Give the board time if there’s an issue. The sooner we know about it, the better we can work together on it,” he says.
For Nagle, preparation and honesty are key. “If you need to have a hard conversation with somebody, you need to make sure you’re properly prepared, you’ve got the data, you’ve understood what the issue is, and you’re not going in there in an accusatory manner; you’re going in there with ‘Look, here’s the problem. How are we going to solve it? What can you do for this?’ … You’ve to be honest with people, you’ve to put yourself in a position of strength that you know what you’re talking about, and then you can have the conversation. It is: Don’t confront the person, confront the issue.”
The best advice he ever received came from a fellow non-executive, Ian Gibson, who passed away this year. “One of the things Ian said to me over the years is, ‘If you’re going to be a chair, be happy with the CEO’, and that’s the best piece of advice he gave me.”
For aspiring chairs and directors, Nagle notes the importance of building your director network, like with IoD Ireland, and being open to continued learning and development. The learning as a director does not end, he adds.
Fundamentally, Nagle’s message is simple: Focus on people, values, and clarity. “I have no regrets. I tell people I have been phenomenally lucky to have worked in great companies with great people… I’ve worked in great universities like Intel, like Apple, the experience in Nortel, experience with the Sisk family, and now the experience with the Haughey family.”
This is commercial content and has been produced in association with the Institute of Directors Ireland. For further information, click here.