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| I came in to Auckland this morning from a freezing snowy few days in Geneva, London and New York. It's great to be back home. This morning's touch-down delivered a jolt of anticipation. I'm a director of Team
New Zealand. Three weeks out of four my head lifts off from Auckland and goes global. My heart, though, never leaves these shores. It's riveted into the local. New Zealand cast a spell on me back in 1989. That's when Doug Myers - the head of New Zealand's biggest brewer - persuaded Ro and I to bring our family to the edge of the earth. It wasn't a tough sell. I'd spent close to 20 years with Procter & Gamble and Pepsi Co - when I called my dad in the North of England and told him I was going into beer, he said 'Thank God - you're leaving all that girl's blouse detergents and soft drinks and getting a man's job at last!'. And then there was the sport. I grew up in England, and always dreamed of being a New Zealand All Black in rugby. My boyhood imagination was ruled by the men in black - the likes of Waka Nathan, the Black Panther and Colin Meads, Pine Tree. Earle Kirton. Brian Lochore. How could I resist the promise of being close to the greatest sporting teams the world has ever known? A 74% win record over 105 years … I was asked to join the All Black board as rugby went professional. Later this year in Australia we'll take on the world at the World Cup … just as we'll do here in Auckland next week. |
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Investment New Zealand have put together 50 terrific things you should know about investment-ready New Zealand - all compelling. I'm not going to drag you through them. They're real. There's one more thing you need to know about. Reason 51. It's our secret weapon. It's what I take out into the business world. It's why I told the Saatchi & Saatchi board in 1997 I wouldn't leave Auckland for London or New York - that I'd travel between offices and homes. And it's a big part of why Saatchi & Saatchi has been growing ever since. Our revenues have grown for five years straight, recession or no recession. We were rated number one global agency of the year by both Ad Age and Adweek, we were the number one agency in Cannes, the industry's 'Oscars' for a second consecutive year, and we topped the global new business league. How? Reason 51. The business case for New Zealand investment is one word. EDGE. The 51st - and first reason to commit to New Zealand is that people here are radical. The return on investment is unbeatable edge - a convergence of attitude, location, agility, risk-taking and velocity. Edge creativity makes New Zealand the most entrepreneurial cluster of islands on the planet. It's why an investment in New Zealand is an investment in the world. The origins of edge theory are biological - no news to anyone from Silicon Valley. In biology, change - the new stuff - always starts on the fringe of a species' range, on the edge where the population is most sparse and orthodoxy the weakest. The modern networked economy is no different. Biology explains the internet, exponential growth and increasing returns to scale. |
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Malcolm Gladwell rationalises edge as the tipping point, where a small number of dramatic changes at the margin build quickly into a critical mass of attitude and action. Futurists Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker equate innovation with deviants - individuals who don't, won't or can't play by the rules. It's the deviant's advantage, an innovation virus on the fringe that migrates new ideas and markets to the centre by assaulting orthodoxy at a cellular, primal level. Every mass market - from energy to entertainment - is born of deviance. Wacker gave us a minority report: to catch the wave of the future, you have to start surfing a lot closer to the fringe. Out here on the far edge of existence and fast-forward of time, a mix of sanctuary, incubator, quarantine and asylum has spawned a dazzling dichotomy of head-in-the-clouds vision and feet-on-the-ground action. Driving all before it is attitude. The New Zealand edge is forged by location. Not only are we falling off the edge of the world, we're teetering on the edge of the Pacific and Australian Plates. Geologists call it the Tectonic Tango. |
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This seismic dance plays to a sense of danger - that we might drop off the globe in a heap of irrelevance, or that our social dysfunctionalities might implode upon us. Distance from markets has always meant we've had to think smarter, faster and be more adaptive. Our industry has had to be über-competitive just to make it into global markets. That's the twister in the kiwi DNA. I'm going to unravel the strands. With great distance from the centre comes great freedom from conformity. This freedom gave Ring-Lord Peter Jackson the mind space - and fashion statement - he needed to cast Tolkien's dreamscape across New Zealand's astonishing landscape. AOL Time Warner love him! Freedom to improvise, to invent, to imagine…. it's created one of the world's great experimental cultures - a down-under laboratory that calls to the future from the edge of the dateline. Examples of New
Zealand inventiveness march down through history… |
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New Zealanders have hogged a whopping helping of global creativity.
There's an uncanny ability here for design, engineering and breakthrough
technologies. 3G on the New Zealand edge stands for grit, gut and genius -
qualities prized all over the world by hi-tech and bio-tech companies.
Our ability to take short cuts and improvise is a factor. Industrialist Ron Trotter puts the legendary ingenuity of Kiwi farmers with no.8 fencing wire down to one factor. Not being able to wait three months for a tractor part off the boat from England. New Zealand is a rare, global idea. We are the best global citizens because we're out there soaking up inspiration from the best of everywhere. Eleven percent of Americans have passports. On number issued, a 101% of New Zealanders have them. One million of the five million New Zealanders are offshore. Per capita, it's one of the biggest diasporas in existence. Before fast jets and fat cables formed expressways of inspiration, we simply dreamed the future - and then got on with realising it. That's what Joseph Edward Nathan did a century ago. From a humble dairy creamery in Bunnythorpe - near Palmerston North - he dreamed a global empire. Today it's called GlaxoSmithKline. There's a speed line in the kiwi DNA. Maverick John Britten home-brewed a motorcycle into a 300 km/h blur. Driver engineer, and instructor Bruce McLaren smoked the Grand Prix circuit. Running man Arthur Lydiard invented jogging. Godfrey Bowen - the fastest shearer in the world - changed economics because of the way he sheared sheep. Only through taking risks, through daring to believe in a dream, do we open the possibility for magnificent success. As Suffragist Kate Shepherd said, "we must be ourselves at all risks." The Marquis de Sade put it this way "sometimes a little agony is a necessary part of ecstasy." Implode all these factors into each other and you get the New Zealand Edge. Global business is starting to realise what the yachting world knows. If you want a world-changing idea. If you want to put a ding in the universe, invest in a Kiwi attitude. |
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Attitude has launched us high over the sheep's back… Take the giant-killing wine industry - where style, taste and craft meet the natural elements of land and sky. American wine guru Michael Franz wagers our wine industry will be producing the best wines outside Europe inside 20 years. No surprise overseas investors own a lion's share of the industry. Style to empty your wallet… fashionistas Karen Walker, Rebecca Taylor and their like are wowing New York, Milan, London and Paris. Escorial has produced the world's finest bale of wool, with a fibre diameter of 12.7 microns. Escorial wool is used by Gucci, Comme des Garcons, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Brioni. New Zealand film creativity, technology, story-telling and location are whale riding. From Nicki Caro's evocative Toronto/Sundance triumph and Christine Jeff's Rain through to Lee Tamahori's ball-busting 007 and Jackson & Taylor's box-office ring-smasher. Richard Taylor's Weta f/x crew are the tip of the tech ice burg. Auckland bioengineer Dr Peter Hunter's team is closing in on a "virtual body" - 3D computer modelling of the body's inner workings. In Canterbury, Andy Cockburn's team of computer scientists - in talks with Microsoft and Netscape - are a metaphor for ambition. They're redesigning the back button function on the browser. Go mobile broadband and there's Auckland's ROAMAD. They developed the world's first Cellular Wi-Fi network. Tack into medicine… Gene revolutionary Matt During has broken world ground in treating depression obesity, epilepsy, stroke and now, inspirationally, Parkinson's disease. It goes on…. architecture, literature, tourism, food, rock music… name it! New Zealand's role in the world is to be its edge. |
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The New Zealand Edge is a historic pattern. You feel it with your gut. My advice to investors is get out of your own way and let your intuition rip. Step back from spreadsheet rationality. Incline towards pure gut inspiration. If you don't have a sixth sense, get a seventh. George Soros apparently feels opportunity in his back. Find the sharpest New Zealand edges, add new dimensions and carve out global niches. Look beyond sectors like biotech, ICT and pure creative. Sweep the economy for creative spots. The edge is latent in every sector - from agriculture, dairying, and forestry through to engineering, entertainment, technology and design. In this Age of the Idea we live in, the New Zealand Edge has huge premium. That's because ideas-in-business will shape the human future. I passionately believe the role of business is to make the world a better place. By giving people self-esteem, choices and jobs. Wealth and balance flow through these. There's simply no better place than New Zealand to take this aspiration global. No group of people on the planet are better equipped to take on the world and beat it. From the cutting, leading New Zealand edge, you come in at pace. Changing perceptions, building markets, creating wealth, and transforming lives. As a collaboration of
ingenious individuals, New Zealand inspires and delivers competitive
advantage. Come. Join us. |
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