Earlier this month, I attended a session on the potential of a Wellington super-city, and was interested to note that the mood, that was so dead set against one in 2010, had begun to shift. In fact, in the previous month, the outgoing chairman of Price Waterhouse Coopers (I can’t bring myself to write that […]
Tag: mayoralty
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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A farewell to Sir Paul Callaghan, and the next step for our innovators
When I attended Sir Paul Callaghan’s talk at the Wellington Town Hall last September, I felt vindicated. Here was a man who was much better qualified than me to talk about economic development, effectively endorsing the policies I ran on in 2010. But not being political, he was a great deal more persuasive. Since then, […]
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Storm in a teacup on tape
The ‘tea tape’ that’s been on the news for the last week or so seems like, if you’ll pardon the analogy, a storm in a teacup. PM John Key and Epsom candidate John Banks invited the media to record them chatting, then dismissed them. One cameraman, Bradley Ambrose, left a recorder on the table. […]
The Murdoch apology does not let us off the hook
Above is Rupert Murdoch’s apology for the actions of the News of the World, to run in the UK in the wake of the resignations of Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton. They’re great words, and they’re straight out of the PR 101 playbook. Some might say they’re a trifle too late, as was […]
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The land beyond Facebook
Stowe Boyd wrote (and I re-Tumbled) the big drop in US and Canadian Facebook traffic this week: Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in […]
What’s wrong with our values now?
Alistair Kwun always finds great articles on personal identity. The latest is from Wesley Yang in New York, discussing the Asian-American experience, and why, despite having such good grades at school, are there so few Asian-American leaders in the US? (Incidentally, this is a strange term: what do Americans call non-oriental Asians?) I applaud […]
In the wake of the ’quake, a time to be bold
The Christchurch earthquake is certainly not over, not while the city rebuilds. And the bill, at a meeting I had with some other luminaries last Thursday, is estimated to be in excess of the NZ$20,000 million that the New Zealand Government predicts. So, other than juggling the funds, what does the Government intend to […]
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Giving our young people a fair go
Earlier this month, I gave a workshop talk to the Leadership and Development Conference for the New Zealand Chinese Association in Auckland. I’ve just uploaded the speech notes, and as I did so, I wanted to append a few more thoughts. The topic was identity—not just branding, but personal identity. My self-critique […]
TPPA could turn the clock back
During the campaign trail, people tended to ask me if I was left or right. While I cheekily said, ‘Forward,’ many a time (and had at least one imitator), there’s something to be said for abandoning what are, effectively, nineteenth-century constructs. And unless you are DI Alex Drake in Ashes to Ashes, you need […]