Sound business move

Introducing Professor Robin Gauld

brown guitar

From musician to management, the new Executive Dean of the Bond Business School took an unconventional path into academia.

Managing a band can be a fine preparation for higher office - just ask Paul Keating. The new Executive Dean of the Bond Business School, Professor Robin Gauld, even tasted the success that eluded Keating’s Ramrods, the band the former Australian prime minister took “from nowhere to obscurity”.

The group Prof Gauld formed in high school in Palmerston North, New Zealand, would go on to become The Skeptics, release records and open for Nick Cave’s The Birthday Party. Their sound has been described as "avantgarde" and "industrial post-punk".

Prof Gauld takes a more modest view. “It was our own sound because we couldn't play,” he says. “We just sort of did our own thing.”

But his five-year stint in The Skeptics as guitarist and manager during the early 1980s did set the stage for a foray into the study of business.

"It was a different era and incredibly difficult to do anything in the music industry if you weren't middle of the road,” he says.

“But it was a time in my life when I honed entrepreneurial skills.

"We had to get ourselves around the country. We were playing in pubs and clubs, so I was doing all of that, managing the band, interacting with the venues, trying to deal with the cashflow.

"We managed to get two 12-inch records made which are very rare now. If you can find one, you'll pay quite a lot for it.”

Robin Gauld performing with The Skeptics.

Robin Gauld performing with The Skeptics.

Few gap years rival the adventure Prof Gauld had between school and university. Tour with a band. Drive across the US, twice. Live in London. See Europe.

Returning to New Zealand at the age of 23 and with an interest in politics and public policy, he studied public administration at Victoria University of Wellington, a pathway to leadership roles in the civil service. It was quite the transition from thrashing a guitar to produce music one reviewer called “a streak of profound strangeness a mile wide”.

An academic who was supervising his Honours dissertation steered him toward a specialisation at the intersection of healthcare, management and policy.

Professor Robin Gauld.

Professor Robin Gauld.

“He told me, ‘You should look at healthcare — it’s very interesting right now'."

“Interesting” was an understatement. In the early 1990s the NZ health system was in crisis. The government had set out to reform the system by introducing market principles to improve efficiency and reduce costs. It was a lesson in the perils of treating healthcare as a commodity, often at the cost of patient care.

“The whole thing was a disaster,” Prof Gauld says. “It was a political disaster and an administrative disaster as well. And so I started studying those reforms. And then my Masters thesis was looking at those reforms as well.”

Prof Gauld secured a scholarship to the University of Hong Kong to complete his PhD which examined reforms in the Hong Kong healthcare system, leading to a job at the City University of Hong Kong.

Then it was back to New Zealand and the University of Otago in Dunedin where he would remain for 27 years.

aerial photography of city, body of water, and forest

Starting as a lecturer in health policy in the Otago Medical School, he rose through the ranks, becoming Professor and then Head of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine. He was a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Healthcare Policy and Practice at Harvard Business and Medical Schools and Boston University Health Policy Institute in 2008-09 and then NZ-UK Link Foundation Visiting Professor at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London in 2014.

In 2016 he became a Pro Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Otago Business School, cementing his reputation of being able to straddle healthcare and business. In 2018, he was awarded a Doctor of Commerce degree from Victoria University of Wellington for published work on healthcare governance. From 2020-22, he was President of the 150-member Association of Asia Pacific Business Schools.

More recently he has been Co-Director of the Centre for Health Systems and Technology that spans Otago’s medical and business schools.

"The business of health is a huge global industry,” says Prof Gauld, who has published 11 books, 45 chapters and almost 200 journal articles in the field.

“You’ve got the health workforce, the infrastructure that sits around it, the technology industry - devices and so forth – and drugs.

“There's huge potential in the study of the business of health and you could probably count on one hand the number of universities that are focused on it.”

Prof Gauld says his work is motivated by the desire to elevate healthcare management to the same level as medical expertise.

“Our doctors and nurses in Australia and New Zealand are really well-trained and well-regulated but they work in a system that lets them down every day,” he says. “This is where business schools everywhere can help with healthcare – with the leadership, the management, the financing, information systems, patient engagement. Healthcare needs all the help it can get.”

Prof Gauld says he had known Bond University by reputation and as a member of a peer review team that accredited the Bond Business School.

“Bond has a terrific global reputation. In such a short time, it's developed itself as a high quality, highly reputable institution that produces probably the best graduates in Australia. When the role came up I thought, that's something I would really love to have a go at. And the rest is history.”

Outside of work, Prof Gauld enjoys walking, good food, film, and theatre — another of his youthful passions as a young set builder, manager of professional actors and occasional bit-part actor. He is moving to the Gold Coast with his wife Ina Bercinskas, a humanities and performing arts teacher, while their son, a software engineer, lives in Sydney. Their daughter, a psychology graduate and manager of hospital theatre assistants, lives in Melbourne.

Prof Gauld takes over as Executive Dean of the Bond Business School from Professor Emeritus Terry O’Neill who retired at the end of 2024. But don’t expect the new guy to front a Skeptics tribute band at Don’s Tavern on a future Thursday night. Prof Gauld says he’s still “mad about music” and his treasured left-handed Gibson Les Paul is making the trip to Australia. However, he hasn’t struck a chord in anger for a long time. These days, it’s strictly business.

Published on 29 January, 2025.