Chamber woman connects Irish and US business

Mary Ainscough, the American Chamber of Commerce chief executive, says she was headhunted for the post after the board decided it needed "an injection to rejuvenate it". In the process, it appointed one of the few women chief executives in Irish business - and a woman who has always worked in predominantly male environments.

That Ms Ainscough worked for the IDA and then the Irish Management Insitute (IMI) before she took on the job is a measure of how the role she now fills has had to change to meet the demands of a rapidly changing business environment.

"I have been working for 20 years. I do not believe it has become any easier for women to succeed in organisations. If anything, I think the barriers to women's success have become more subtle than what they used to be," she says.

Mary Ainscough refers to her training as a solicitor as an invaluable asset in meeting the challenges facing her - quoting Tony O'Reilly on the worth of a legal training for business. She also values her BA in English and Philosophy, saying that those disciplines give one a profound ability to think laterally, and to be flexible. "It does require divergent thinking to solve the changes facing business today."

When Ms Ainscough was appointed chief executive in early 1966, she set about a programme to transform the Chamber's role from one that was a membership organisation and "that may have depended more on patronage".

Massive investment by US information technology companies, as well as expansion by established companies have been the backdrop to her work in the past 18 months. She has concentrated on "reintroducing" the Chamber to existing members and prospective members.

"What the Chamber does, which can be a real benefit to American companies operating in Ireland, is it provides a unity and a collective voice for those companies," Ms Ainscough says.

"My job involves an enormous amount of personal interaction with people. It can be on the telephone, talking to people about what opportunities there are for partnerships or joint ventures with American companies. . ."

"One of the things which I think is very important for the Chamber is that we are very much an independent organisation. We are simply the voice of the American companies.

"So we give a very independent view to people who are interested in knowing the real story about Ireland, and that can be American industrialists, people who want to sell into Ireland, maybe looking for a job in Ireland. We get quite a number of queries on that score."

The 36-year-old Chamber has 350 members made up of US companies, Irish companies which have strategic alliances with US counterparts or with US investment interests, and companies supplying products and services to US corporate clients.

Originally from South Circular Road in Dublin, from a family of brewers, she skims over "a number of convent schools" she went to, saying her education "began in earnest" in Trinity College, Dublin, where she followed up her BA with an MSc in Management.

She subsequently became a solicitor through the Law Society, practising for a short time with the firm William Fry & Sons.

She joined the IDA in New York in the late 1970s an experience she regards as tremendous. "The current boom in inward investment is no overnight success. I like to think that I was some part of it almost 20 years ago, when people in the IDA in Northern America were trying to introduce to business the concept of Ireland."

And while she is passionate about what she does, she does not take herself too seriously. "I do not regard myself as hard-nosed or ambitious," she said.

"What is very important is that women who do succeed in getting through to senior levels should not pull up the ladder after them, because it is very important for senior women to help younger women coming on. There is nothing particularly insightful in saying that because men have always done that for each other."

She warns about the European models of "highly-regulated working times, highly-regulated holiday times, highly-regulated around part-time work".

"When I am in meetings with my fellow members of the European association of American chambers, members from Germany, France and Italy - which are suffering from a certain level of economic stagnation at the moment - would say to me, `We are trying to lobby our governments to be more like Ireland and you must resist becoming more like us'.

"They are very much talking about the highly-regulated nature of labour in those countries."

Promoting a friendly corporate image of the Chamber's members, she cites the back-towork programmes run by some US companies which have resulted in people who have not had "the benefits of full-time education at primary level" being employed and the response to the Chamber's Community Partnership Awards.

"The upshot is that they get extremely motivated people into the company. . . the employees see themselves as stakeholders in the success of the company."

Irish people are eager to work and have impressed their employers with their enthusiasm. "We are actually starting to see that our emphasis on entrepreneurial activities in Ireland is starting to come through now."