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 and goals for CEOs.
Unsurprisingly, both studies (involving thousands of respondents) had commonalities, though Generation Y placed global awareness and sustainability more highly on their list. Creativity, however, is ranked as the most valuable leadership trait. What society doesn’t need, they tell us, is the same-again thinking if we are to make progress in the 2010s. The old top values of ‘operational excellence’ or ‘engineering big deals’ no longer come up top in this new decade.
Or, as I heard from one gentleman yesterday, we can’t afford to have the sort of ‘experience’ certain people tout, for they do not have 25 years’ experience—they just have one year’s experience, over and over again, 25 times.
You know I’m going to say it, so I might as well: this sounds like the sort of ‘experience’ some of my political opponents have had, day in, day out. Groundhog Day comes to mind.
Indeed, the studies indicate that we have a far more complex world, and same-again thinking isn’t going to cut it.
In the first study (emphasis in original):
Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number-one priority.
Later:
Facing a world becoming dramatically more complex, it is interesting that CEOs selected creativity as the most important leadership attribute. Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles, particularly to engage with a new generation of employees, partners and customers.
And:
Creative leaders consider previously unheard-of ways to drastically change the enterprise for the better, setting the stage for innovation that helps them engage more effectively with today’s customers, partners and employees.
The study also highlights an increase in globalization, especially in developing markets, leading to greater complexity. It also says the most successful leaders are prepared to change the business models under which they operate.
In fact, the world we now live in demands that our leaders are globally aware, and see the need to compete in a global market-place.
The implications for this city are that Wellington can no longer afford to see itself as merely the capital of New Zealand or the geographic centre. It is one of many cities that must compete for attention and resources at a global level—which means creating world-class centres of excellence for our industries. Creating such clusters can even help them stay domestically owned.
The study indicates that the style of leadership is going to be, necessarily, internationalist—which means we can’t afford to have leaders who are monocultural, and fake multiculturalism. This, like any aspect of a brand, must be embodied for real. It doesn’t mean giving up what ‘being a New Zealander’ is; it does, however, mean that we have to be able to communicate with other nations and cultures, seeking advantages for ourselves.
Innovation is a driver both in terms of internal processes and as a core competence—so leaders had better be prepared to do this. And being closer and more transparent with customers—or in the case of a city, citizens—is something practised by the most successful leaders, says the study. It reminds me of the topics in the first book I contributed to, Beyond Branding—where integrity and transparency were at the core.
When it comes to the Generation Y study, the results were similar. This table summarizes the two quite well, and notes how the two groups differ:
I don’t want to be giving the impression that the second study is less important, but realize that some of you are sorely tempted to see me wrap up this post.
I will say, quickly, that the lessons are clear: the next generation expects leaders to be globally minded and sustainable.
Chinese respondents in the second study, in fact, valued global thinking ahead of creativity. This perhaps highlights where the People’s Republic, above the other Chinese territories, is heading: looking outwardly first and delivering what customers in export markets want.
As creativity is naturally a trait among Wellington businesses, it’s nice to know that many are already prepared for the challenges of the 2010s. And some of our most successful names would not have got to where they are without global thinking, even if some have been acquired by overseas companies: 42 Below, Weta, and Silverstripe come to mind.
However, I can’t see these traits being reflected in politics—and that’s something I hope we can change in the local body elections, for starters.
There have been a few times in the history of this blog where I stepped away from writing regularly. At the end of 2006, I had a pretty good excuse: I was in France. This time, my reasons for stepping away for a few weeks do not include: (a) I was spending too much time with the Miss Universe New Zealand contestants; (b) laziness; (c) being trapped in 1983 and discovering that DCI Gene Hunt controls the Lost island.
I was, however, chatting to a few more of the parties that we needed to realize some of my election promises. And doing a few media interviews. And looking at more ways Wellington could get nearer balancing its budget, as our deficit has ballooned over the last decade.
On May 15, I joined my opponent, Councillor Celia Wade-Brown, on Access Radio’s Espace Français, in what was my first political interview in French. I expected a nice-natured chat till our hosts said they wanted a political debate. So the Councillor and I gave the audience one, coming from very different angles. I believe we are the only two Francophone candidates. And I don’t think Access does a Cantonese programme.
You can listen to the interview here, though they only store the programmes for six weeks. You can also download from this link.
I kept Leauna Zheng waiting for weeks while I prepared my emailed responses to her interview for Skykiwi, the leading Chinese expats’ site in New Zealand. Despite her wait, she wrote a marvellous article (in Chinese, here), and for those of you relying on Google Translate, please note that the term Chinese expatriate is not translated correctly. (I believe this is the first Chinese-language interview to include my name in Chinese ideographs.)
And, finally, my interview with Bharat Jamnadas on Asia Down Under aired last Sunday. He’s very kindly put it on YouTube, though the aspect ratio is a tad off and I look thinner than usual. There are very nice comments from two members of the Wellington business community, Laurie Foon of Starfish and Brent Wong of Soi, to whom I am extremely grateful.
The conversation at the end about Wellington v. Auckland was a good laugh, but there were some serious bits.
And this Tuesday just gone, it was a pleasure to play a “dragon” in a Dragon’s Den-style setting analysing some of New Zealand’s entrepreneurs for New Zealand Trade & Enterprise.
My thanks to Bharat, Leauna, Kenneth Leong, Laura Daly at Access Radio, Jean-Louis Durand and Arlette Bilounga, and Maria Gray and David Powell.
Funny how a media article can inspire you to send out a release, especially when you’re a ratepayer and you wonder if our City Council of élites understands how hard it was for us to make that money. In today’s case, it was Lindsay Shelton’s Scoop Wellington op-ed about Wellington City Council going nuts with its spending. Lindsay highlighted not only a $350,000 sculpture for the World Cup—money which I reckon we could use to boost the central city’s wifi coverage—but Dave Burgess’s report in The Dominion Post that WCC spends six times as much as Porirua’s council on food and drink.
I’m not sure how we can justify those sorts of numbers, but I do have an aim to balance the budget if elected. As I wrote today, if we can grow our creative and technological clusters in Wellington—and get free wifi up and running (initially in the centre of the city, expanding outward)—we can grow the local economy and create jobs. After that we can look at partying—but not till we earn Wellingtonians’ respect by doing a bloody good job.
A city that supports its clusters strategically will be able to balance the budget—and so far, it seems I’m the only candidate who is even willing to talk about this issue.
We can start improving those communities through the new jobs we’ll be creating, and deal a blow to inner-city crime.
If we fall behind on the tech side of things, consider this: we will lose the Sevens and any other event because our visitors will be asking, ‘Why can’t I get on to Google Maps on my iPhone without paying for it?’ It’s very simple, and when a mayor and council miss out on the simplest things, then it is time for a change.
I would have thought a divided council—a complaint of the incumbent, Kerry Prendergast—would mean that we would not be spending massive amounts on things because there would be a lack of agreement. Spending ratepayers’ money, for some reason, seems to get rapid accord in this council—which tells me that when we vote in our mayor and council later in the year, we should have a far greater change than even I would have expected when I began my campaign.
We have a divided council that needs firm direction on how to grow the economy, and a mayor who understands what ‘world-class city’ means.
World-class does not mean big. World-class means nimble, modern and transparent.
In 2010, we don’t need the same old, tired voices. Or the same old élites. The direction Wellington needs is a fresh one that brings new promises.
Incidentally, we have added a Facebook widget for my campaign page on this blog. It’s been placed at a few locations on my sites. Also, as of today, backjack2010.com redirects to jackyanformayor.org—it’s important to have the consistency in the domain name and the campaign graphic (thanks to Demian Rosenblatt).
As of tonight, the Beyond Branding Blog, where I first cut my teeth blogging, is no more.
The posts are still there, but no further comments can be entered on to the site. The nearly four years of posts remain as an archive of some of our branding thought of that period.
The blog had a huge number of fans in its day, but as each one of us went to our own blogs, there seemed little need to keep it going. Chris Macrae and I were the last two holding the fort in late 2005. Since January 2006, no new posts have been entered on to the site. No new comments have come in a year.
Google’s announcement that it would end FTP support for blogs in May spurred me into action, and I advised the Medinge Group’s membership this morning that I would take it off the Blogger service.
I altered the opening message to reflect the latest change.
I was very proud of the blog, because it was the first one I was involved in. It was also the first I customized to match the look and feel of the rest of the Beyond Branding site, which I designed in 2003. While the design is one from the early 2000s, it has not dated as much as I had expected. Beyond Branding’s core message of transparency and integrity remains valid, so while the blog is no longer updated, I think the book remains relevant to the 2010s.
While I’ve been a LinkedIn member for many years—my LinkedIn ID has six digits, which gives you an idea of how long ago—I have to confess that I did not browse the brilliant Wellington, New Zealand group till quite recently.
And free wifi is being talked up there, too, as something Wellingtonians genuinely want.
We hear from expats who feel Wellington needs this as a major city, from Wellingtonians who believe this would be great for growing business, and from some concerned citizens who wonder where the money comes from.
Fortunately, two of the posters there have experience in the wifi space, and can attest to the fact that the infrastructure already exists. As mentioned on my mayoral campaign site, we can make this profitable for the city. Secondly, it will provide an additional avenue for Wellington businesses to be found.
Indeed, one of these experts notes that it was exceedingly rare for anyone to go mental over downloading things; in any case, I propose there will be a daily data cap on the service.
When I made wifi one of my core issues last year, I knew instinctively it would be right for Wellington.
I don’t live in a bubble, and I’m not part of the political élite. Which means I haven’t learned how to distance myself from the needs of Wellingtonians. I’ve been engaging with people for a long time with an eye on this campaign. Anyone with one’s pulse on the city knows that free wifi and new jobs are things that a world-class city needs—and I firmly believe Wellington is potentially world-class. I would hate for us to miss the opportunities that are before us right now, which can catapult us into the big league to become one of the world’s great cities.
As those of you who came out to the two Asian Events’ Trust shows at TSB Arena in Wellington over the weekend know, I have returned to our shores after a wonderful trip to Europe. The warmest it got, I should note, was 2°C, which makes even a foggy, overcast day like today seem dreamy. (The coldest was –15°C.)
Some of the conversations I had in Sweden still can’t be revealed yet (this isn’t about transparency—this is about legality), but I was there studying some benchmarks for transportation and the environment. I want Wellingtonians to know I travel on my money and I use the opportunity to benefit my city. I don’t miss these opportunities. (And yes, I was in København, too.)
As some of you who have followed my career know, I am not talking about incremental improvements.
After all, as early as 2001 I was talking about Fair Trade and social responsibility. By 2003, I had talked to the United Nations Environment Programme and convinced them that the best way of making environmental issues cool was to mainstream them through the world of fashion and celebrity—and Lucire’s partnership with them was born. The same year, we at the Medinge Group decided that Beyond Branding should be a Carbon Neutral book. The previous decade I was doing everything from web publishing (1993) to launching the country’s longest running online fashion title (1997).
So when I talk about these ideas in Sweden, I am talking about game-changers that can benefit Wellington.
You have to be a few years ahead of your time, given what politics is like. No one who seeks public office can afford to be reactive or behind the times. And I hope that in the last 23 years, I’ve managed to demonstrate a fairly good record of identifying the next big thing.
And I owe a debt of gratitude to my good friend (and one of Sweden’s outside-the-box marketing thinkers) Stefan Engeseth for arranging my speeches and meetings. Thank you for entrusting me, Stefan, for being your first speaker in your Unplugged Speeches session—it was an extremely good, interactive morning. It’s not every day I get to interact with someone who works for NASA. (If you thought I was good, you should see speaker number two, who has a Ph.D. and is very easy on the eyes.) But mostly, thank you for inspiring me even more, because you, too, always seem to be a few years ahead of the game.
As to France, the other country I spent heaps of time in on this trip, it was an honour to talk at the Sorbonne–CELSA campus with my colleagues at Medinge.
While part of the Paris trip was occupied by a board meeting and with the 2010 Brands with a Conscience awards, I had the opportunity to discuss my mayoral campaign with the world’s leading brand thinkers in a meaningful, collegial presentation. Medinge, too, is filled with those forward-thinking from people who are nearly always right about their predictions of how the world would look in three to ten years’ time.
And the session at La Sorbonne was, in my mind, a true highlight—where, again, Wellington got plenty of promotion, and I was able to share some thoughts with a smart, young audience.
I’ll be letting voters know ahead of time what else was discussed with the Swedish companies, so you can be even better armed when you fill out your ballot forms for the local elections later this year.
In the meantime, let me give my Facebook campaign page another little plug: click here for more. My heartfelt thanks to all those who have joined and have given me amazing encouragement for this campaign.
Four years ago, I asked readers of the Beyond Branding Blog if they wanted to see me blog at my own space. The responses were all positive, and this blog was born.
Earlier tonight, after being egged on by two friends, I posed the question on Twitter and Facebook: should there be a ‘Jack Yan for Mayor’ fan page on Facebook?
Thirteen of you said yes, unopposed.
As of now, not only is there a Facebook page to which you can show your support for my candidacy, but a site about my mayoral campaign.
The latter is a bit more of a conventional take on a mayoral site, and I felt that Your Wellington wasn’t resonating so far out from the election. Your Wellington was set up as a site where civic issues were to be discussed and debated—sort of a prototype to how I expect to get your views should I be elected mayor. Since people do not have the time to attend council meetings, and fewer and fewer will peruse the public notices in a metropolitan newspaper, a blog is the ideal way to get feedback from citizens about issues that concern us.
It’s also an ideal medium on to which we can put spending requests and other uses of ratepayers’ money, so there are no surprises. It encourages those causes that require the ratepayers’ help to put up much better arguments.
I want to re-create transparency, adjusted for the modern era, and I can’t see any of my opponents even attempting to do this.
The reality is that it is too early in the piece to be getting hard and heavy on the issues, and it’s more important for my campaign to focus on getting some traction and word of mouth right now.
I was originally opposed to the idea of a fan page when it was raised. I said that if I got 5,000 friends, my Facebook page would become a fan page, anyway. What I really didn’t like was the wank of it all.
I was also opposed to the idea of separating the person from the job: if I were to interact with people, it would always be as me. I didn’t want the mayoralty to change my accessibility or hide behind a separate page.
But as was explained to me this afternoon, a Facebook fan page is not about me specifically. It is more about the practicality of putting all mayoral information in one place, and as there are a lot of Facebookers, why not meet them where they are?
My campaign, after all, is about recognizing how we use media and the internet, and if I were to ignore Facebook users’ preferences, then I would be a big hypocrite.
Thus, the fan page was born—as was the campaign site, which complements it.
So now there are three sites: this one, which you already visit, with my regular thoughts; one specifically about my mayoral candidacy, which might be thought of as an extension to this one; and one about Wellington City’s issues, which we’ll continue building as we head toward election time.
They tie together, I promise.
Enjoy the new site and fan page. Please join if you see fit, and, if you feel so inclined, check out the latest downloadable graphics for the campaign (now including code so you can easily put it on to your blogs and websites).
The Fairfax Press has been talking about how Wellingtonians are expected to bail out some loss-makers, such as the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. And that the decision to do this has been made behind closed doors. The city’s debt is over $200 million—we were looking at very similar numbers at the time of the 2007 local body elections.
I’m curious now that it is election year why most of my opponents have not talked about job creation. There has, instead, been some easy talk about pedestrianizing, which might give a short-term boost to contractors. That’s all well and good, but we need bigger change.
It’s why I’ve talked about free wifi for some time. It’s not a whim. Open it up and creative and tech businesses will come here. There is plenty of evidence to show that if you can create industry clusters, you can find success. And what are Wellington’s most likely clusters that we can build quickly and create jobs with? Creative and tech.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if we attract more new businesses here, we will collect more rates, which means the burden on ratepayers is spread more fairly.
Clusters can be created easily if there’s a will—and Sir Peter Jackson and his work in the film industry have reminded us this much.
As to funding our loss-makers, it incenses me that this was all done behind closed doors, in what the Fairfax Press calls secret meetings.
No more. My term, if you elect me, will be about transparency. Decisions like this will be put, openly, on to a city blog—the prototype of which is Your Wellington. You can’t make a council meeting? No worries: you can comment online and have your say.
By being transparent about everything, we’ll force the groups that want city aid to put up a heck of a business case, and convince us that they won’t repeat the same mistakes and come cap-in-hand to us again in a few years’ time.
The 2010 mayoral election is not about the same old élites, but about understanding that Wellington is on the cusp of something great. The best person for the job is someone who represents us and realizes our potential—not someone who will land us in the same old funk again.
PS.: Please feel free to use the new campaign graphic. Props to Maree Hoare for the slogan. Bigger ones are below.—JY
