"I am a frog researcher," she says. Having graduated from the Victoria University in Wellington with a degree in zoology, she met her husband Colin Johnson when they were doing research on the native frog Leiopelma Archeyi (Archey's Frog), an endangered species, in the Coromandel Peninsula.

McBride started a career in the technology industry through IBM's graduate programme. She moved to SAP after 10 years, holding a series of executive roles including president and CEO of the Asia Pacific Region and senior vice president and general manager in North America. She moved to Dell as vice president and global head for the Applications and BPO Services business and rejoined SAP in May as president of its North America region.

Her offshore assignments meant McBride has based her family (she has a daughter now in university) in more than five countries.

"I am culturally flexible," she says, and credits this to growing up in New Zealand. "You grow up as a child looking out of your island to the rest of the world with a great deal of interest.

"We are so far away from everybody," she says. This encourages "disobedient thinking" and a "creative way of looking at problems".