Building better systems and giving back
Article from University of Otago Alumni & Friends News and Events – Grant Bowie (1976 BCom Accounting and Information Science)
Connectivity has been a key concept throughout Grant Bowie’s successful 40-year career managing large multinational corporations. And it all started at Otago in the late 1970s.
Arriving at university in 1976, two things set Grant onto the path of his future success. Firstly, he says that because he was dyslexic, university teaching methods and learning systems worked for him. “I finally found a way to learn that suited the way my mind worked.”
Secondly, as a Commerce student who didn’t want to be an accountant, Grant had timed his degree perfectly.
“The Commerce department was going through a transition from effectively generating accountants, to creating opportunities to discover a much broader business context,” he says.
“So one of the great opportunities I had, but which also meant that I ended up spending an extra year [at university], was that I wanted to do Marketing, I wanted to do Management, I liked Industrial Relations and I wanted to do Information systems.”
He says his lecturers, including Dr Hank Wolfe in Information Science, opened his eyes to all the other areas outside Accounting.
“Probably the greatest highlight for me was when the Information Science Department got the first mini-computer outside the Computer Centre. It was a digital PDP1134. We as a class – I was in third year then – actually managed the computer. For the first time we weren’t dependent on the Computer Centre, we weren’t constrained by the restrictions of the centralised mainframe computer facilities anymore, and so it showed me a pathway to my future.
