In Wellington, the players need to change

The below was written on April 22, 2013, in response to an article in The Dominion Post. It was offered to the newspaper as an op–ed, then to The Wellingtonian, but it was eventually declined. The Dominion Post’s headline on April 22 confirmed what many of us knew after numerous friends and colleagues left Wellington […]

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Small is beautiful, whether it’s a company or a country

My friend Summer Rayne Oakes at Source4Style put me on to an article in The Guardian by Ilaria Pasquinelli, on how small firms drive innovation. If the fashion industry is to survive, she says, it must team up with the small players where innovation takes place, thanks to the visionaries who drive those firms.   […]

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Getting Wellington out of debt—by growing the right businesses

In plain English, when a city is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt—depending on who you believe, the figure is between $200 million and $400 million—how do you get out of the hole?    1. You can sell the family jewels, and there’s water left. We tried this in the 1980s, and now so […]

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What we need from leaders in the new decade: creativity leads the list

My friend and colleague at the Medinge Group, Ava Hakim, passed on a few papers from her day job at IBM. The first is the latest edition of a biennial global CEO survey, while the second asks the next generation of leaders—Generation Y. The aim: to find out what these groups think about the challenges […]

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A spoof ‘Wellywood’ sign seems out of touch to me

I was interested to see a Tweet today (via Daniel Spector) asking if I would object to the erection of a ‘Wellywood’ sign in Miramar that would parody the ‘Hollywood’ one in the Hollywood Hills, Calif. The answer is: yes, I would.    For numerous reasons. First, it’s naff and tacky.    Secondly, why do […]

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I do not stand for John Key’s defeatist talk

I’ve heard it all before. In the 1980s, the New Zealand Government promised that, with the introduction of Goods and Services’ Tax (GST), people would be better off, because it would mean more money in our pockets.    With the proposal to hike GST to 15 per cent under the current government, Prime Minister John […]

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