WILDGEESE: EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERS ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROAD:Dermot O'Grady, Head of operations in Brazil for ADM
NOT ALL Irish graduates who went abroad in the grim pre-Celtic Tiger days did so looking for work. For some, forces far more powerful than economics helped shape life-altering decisions.
On his graduation from UCD in 1991, chemical engineer Dermot O’Grady was one of the lucky ones who actually landed a job offer in Ireland.
“It was from De Beers down in Shannon. But the day I went down for the second interview was the most miserable day you could imagine, with horizontal rain coming in off the Atlantic,” he remembers.
It was enough to help him make up his mind and head off instead to the United States to take up a job offer with global agricultural processor Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM).
“I had done a J1 in Martha’s Vineyard and I suppose you could say that I had caught the travel bug. Things were less cosmopolitan back home than they are today. It seemed like Ireland was too small, too parochial and I wanted to see the bigger world,” he says now, sitting in a packed restaurant in Brazil’s vibrant, cosmopolitan business capital.
The road to São Paulo started with a year’s traineeship at ADM headquarters in Decatur, Illinois, followed by a six-year stint as an engineer in charge of the speciality proteins processing plants in Rotterdam. All the time he was rising rapidly through the ranks.
In 1998, eager for a new challenge, he moved to Rondonópolis in Brazil’s grain belt, the fastest growing food producing region in the world and the key to the future of companies like ADM.
There O’Grady spent a decade on the frontline of the campaign to supply the increasingly sophisticated diets of the world’s ballooning population. Though it has fingers in many pies – oilseeds, corn, wheat, cocoa – the company’s core business in South America is transforming soybeans into animal feed and products for the food industry. It is through companies like ADM that Brazil is helping to feed China’s booming urban centres.
At just 41, O’Grady is now ADM’s operations head in South America. From his base in São Paulo, he is responsible for plants in Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay as well as Brazil itself, where ADM is the country’s fifth biggest exporter, with its own terminal in Santos, Latin America’s biggest port. It is no exaggeration to say this son of a 250-acre mixed farm outside Kilcullen is now a major player in the global food industry.
So what would his advice be for new graduates seeking to follow in his footsteps? “Being open to other cultures, humility and respect,” he says, a business creed that chimes with someone who clearly eschews the flashier lifestyles of many successful Brazilian executives.
O’Grady thinks the Irish have an advantage when working abroad as we are good at fitting in and getting on, but says you have to recognise it will be different to home.
“We tend to be critical of what is not our own culture but instead we need to accept it. People everywhere are different. You have the good and the bad parts of every culture. Ireland has its good and bad parts as well.
“We have to accept that is how people are and that is how a culture is. You always need to look at the positive things whether living in Brazil, in the Netherlands, in the US or wherever. You laugh at the idiosyncrasies of different cultures but you cannot let it bother you.”
For Irish people coming out to Brazil he says getting the language is important, but so is patience with the country’s frustrating bureaucracy.
“You are going to have a rough six months or maybe a year but then you will pass the hump and you will enjoy it. Brazilian people are great, they are friendly and receiving. Learn the culture and people will respect you and you will understand people more when you learn their culture.”
He has not just learnt the culture – his midlands accent switched effortlessly from English into his fluent Portuguese – he has married into it. He met his wife Rosângela during his time in Rondonópolis and they now have three children. This perhaps helps explain his lack of enthusiasm for another move.
“Our headquarters is located in the US and I suppose you could say that is where you graduate to, but it is not as exciting as Brazil, and in western Europe this is a mature industry; you are not going to see a lot of growth there.
“For our business the opportunities down here are huge, there are no borders. To be within an agricultural company in South America at this time is just fantastic.”
Though he says ADM would be unlikely to recruit Irish graduates directly into its operations in South America, preferring instead to hire them into its European operations first, he does think it is a region that young Irish people need to consider when thinking of finding work abroad.
“I think in Brazil there are a lot of openings. Whether it is commodities, trading, financial or software, Brazil is booming at the moment. All you read in Brazilian newspapers is good news. The pessimism you read about in Europe and the US? You do not see that in Brazil. It is all sunshine.”
