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 […]
Read More… from Getting Wellington out of debt—by growing the right businesses
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 […]
Read More… from What we need from leaders in the new decade: creativity leads the list
Certain media are reporting the city’s [debt] in the $200 million–$300 million mark but our outside-council research reveals this is a very conservative estimate. It’s likely to be more. Regardless of whether it’s $200 million or half an (American) billion (scary just saying it), any deficit that’s nine digits long can’t be good for […]
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 […]
Read More… from Chatting to TV, radio and internet journalists for the mayoral campaign
I had a very insightful meeting today with one of the country’s leading information strategists, which put things into perspective for me regarding the mayoral race. His thoughts (though not exactly his words): Wellington has almost always voted for the right person at the right time. We needed someone like Mark Blumsky to give […]
Read More… from A new decade demands a new way—and a new mayor
This weekend was spent in recovery mode after getting some weird stomach bug before Anzac Day. Without getting too gross, let’s say it took a lot out of me. That’s right: I was energetically drained. But it’s not to say that the campaign has stopped or slowed. Things seem to be proceeding at a […]
It’s been an exhilarating few days. First up was speaking to the residents of the Rita Angus Retirement Village last Friday—a very fruitful discussion to cement further some of my ideas for the mayoral campaign. Saturday, meanwhile, was Residents 2010 and Public ACTA—two conferences which were both very important to Wellington’s future and representation. More […]
The good news today is that Wellington Airport is officially in two minds about what type of sign it will put up on the Miramar cutting, which means that the ‘Wellywood’ sign protest has had a victory of sorts. I’m thrilled at the news because it shows people power—especially people like Anthony Lander who […]
I seem to be on a lot of social networks (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Vkontakte), so I thought I’d look in to Sonico. I can see why it’s not as big as the others. For a start, there seems to be insufficient globalization of its features. Try entering a Chinese film in to the favourite […]
Due to others’ appointments, the Vista Group meeting today was a mere duo: myself and Jim Donovan, Esq., who will give up blogging in 10 days. It meant it was the second-least well attended meeting in our history. Jim has never let us forget the least well attended one. I have always said that […]