Originally published in Scoop During our mid-year travels, I was surprised to learn that Aotearoa New Zealand doesn’t have the profile that we think it does. We’re not riding the wave of The Lord of the Rings: few abroad remember the connection two decades later. No one I encountered recalls 100% Pure, and if […]
Tag: innovation
Most of HR isn’t about finding the right candidate
A friend in the UK recently told me: I read how companies say they cannot find anyone to fill their roles, and I have a bunch of very talented, highly qualified friends who are out of work who can’t find anything. Having looked into this locally, it’s far from being a strictly UK problem. I […]
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Forget the “shoulds”

My Lucire interview with Bay Area designer Devan Gregori has gone online—it’ll likely appear in print afterwards with different visuals. Devan has a wonderful story about how she came to be a fashion designer, and it’s very different to those who fell into the trade through a childhood interest or watching their grandmother sew. I […]
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 […]
Big Tech: you’ve already lost against mainland China
Big Tech often says that if they’re broken up, they won’t be able to compete with mainland China. Folks, you’ve already lost. Why? Because you’re playing their game. You believe that through dominance and surveillance you can beat a country with four times more people. The level playing field under which you […]
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If you’re in the ‘New Zealand can’t’ camp, then you’re not a business leader
Which club is the better one to belong to? The ones who have bent the curve down and trying to eliminate COVID-19, or the ones whose curves are heading up? Apparently Air New Zealand’s boss thinks the latter might be better for us. From Stuff today, certain ‘business leaders’ talk about the New Zealand […]
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Have we stopped innovating in online publishing?
For a while, we’ve been thinking about how best to facelift the Lucire website templates, to bring them into the 2020s. The current look is many years old (I’ve a feeling it was 2016 when we last looked at it), which in internet terms puts this once-cutting edge site into old-school territory. But what’s […]
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Live from Level 3
Finally, a podcast (or is it a blogcast, since it’s on my blog?) where I’m not “reacting” to something that Olivia St Redfern has put on her Leisure Lounge series. Here are some musings about where we’re at, now we are at Level 3. Some of my friends, especially my Natcoll students from 1999–2000, […]
Andrew Yang’s campaign: #YangGang was just the beginning
Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons On Andrew Yang’s run for the Democratic nomination in the US: If Mastodon ever stops supporting that Javascript, I wrote: ‘Pretty stoked at what Andrew Yang has managed to achieve. Certain forces tried to minimize his coverage, to give him as little legitimacy as possible (sounds familiar). Yet he also normalized the […]
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Capitalism falls down when it’s rigged
Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, touches on a few points that resonate with my readings over the years. He believes capitalism, as a system, is not a bad one, but it is bad when it is ‘rigged’; and that Aristotle was indeed right (as history has since proved) that a sizeable middle […]