One thing that marketing teaches you is that you need to have a market orientation: put yourselves in the shoes of the consumer and figure out what they want, rather than force something on them. And one thing that leadership teaches you is owning up to when you’ve got it wrong, and making the necessary […]
Category: New Zealand
Posts relating to New Zealand.
Personal thoughts about my friend, Merrill J. Fernando
Above: Amanda and me with Merrill in 2016. I was saddened to learn of the passing of my friend Merrill J. Fernando, founder of Dilmah Tea and the MJF Foundation. I’ve written an obit over at Lucire, since he was very much a friend of the magazine, too, and his values of social responsibility […]
Read More… from Personal thoughts about my friend, Merrill J. Fernando
Company founders, talk about your businesses and the great work they do
When I launched Lucire into print in 2004, it brought with it some unwelcome elements. On the plus side, it raised the company’s profile and no doubt that helped sales. No one had ever taken a website into print before, with the exception of Yahoo Internet Life, as far as I know. Certainly no one […]
Read More… from Company founders, talk about your businesses and the great work they do
The state of play of the internet
From Zero Janitor on Tumblr (and found as an image on Mastodon): Sums up the state of play on the internet nicely. I can’t believe how badly the Reddit situation has been handled, but will leave that to others. A lot has already been written about it, and here’s a good piece in […]
Twenty years ago, Lucire and United Nations Environment Programme teamed up for a first
Twenty years ago, the United Nations Environment Programme and Lucire announced their partnership. I look back at how the arrangement came about in 2002–3. At the time, it was unheard of for a mainstream fashion title to make this sort of a commitment to sustainability, but I felt we couldn’t afford not to. Even […]
Paging Kiwi magazine licensors
I was surprised to learn that Lucire might be the only magazine brand being licensed from Aotearoa New Zealand at the moment. Unless the search engines are all equally poor at finding local colleagues doing the same thing. There are other publishers I know here—I had a great yarn with a Christchurch colleague in […]
A new website goes up—and Yandex beats them all
Authentically You, a life and career coaching business in Wellington, New Zealand, has just launched. We’ve had a hand in the design and website development (where it had to be Wordpress and easy to manage), and it’s also been our task to get it on to the search engines. I was very surprised that […]
Read More… from A new website goes up—and Yandex beats them all
Suspension might expose Mastodon’s following bugs
Mastodon continues to be buggy, and it reminds me of the failures I have seen on other platforms. As detailed earlier, spammers hit Mastodon.social (and, eventually, others), causing admins to limit their own instances’ connections with it. Two, Mastodon.nz and Koletiva.social, went further and suspended the connections. Due to poor documentation, as far as I […]
Read More… from Suspension might expose Mastodon’s following bugs
Business Book Awards on Panos: the official review
I’m still pinching myself as I realize that Panos and I managed to win an award for our book, Panos: My Life, My Odyssey, on our first go. Ketan Makwana, who has a mutual friend, commented on my Linkedin: ‘congratulations Jack and Panos—your book really grew on us … my fellow judges in the […]
Read More… from Business Book Awards on Panos: the official review
Panos: My Life, My Odyssey wins commendation at Business Book Awards 2023

I might not have made it to London for the Business Book Awards 2023, but my mug did, as Panos: My Life, My Odyssey won a Highly Commended in the Business Journey category. The organizers were kind enough to include me on the screen as Panos picked up the prize for his autobiography. It was […]
Read More… from Panos: My Life, My Odyssey wins commendation at Business Book Awards 2023