SHE’S a very well-known face in a very private industry, but Julia Hartley Moore’s 15 years as a private investigator is only her most recent incarnation. At the age of 16 she was mother to three kids under the age of one. In her 20s and married to a millionaire Waikato horse-stud owner, she, along with many of his friends and family, lost everything after money they put into his finance company was poured into his farm instead of invested.

In her 30s she worked as a “groom” – keeping jumpy young thoroughbred horses calm on the 13-hour flight from Auckland to Hong Kong, before ending up working for Mohamed Al-Fayed at Harrods of London, where she blew the whistle on a multi-million poundstaff theft ring while working on the perfume

Back in New Zealand in 1996, aged 42 and wondering how on earth she was going to make a buck, she decided to set up her own firm after a little extra motivation from none other than Oprah. While watching a show about turning passion into a successful home business, she decided “well, I think I will”.

At age 18, she had been turned away from the New Zealand Police for being “too feminine”, but had always had good instincts. And after the experience in London, Harrods’ head of security told her she’d make a fine private investigator. So “Arbeth and Co” was started with just a telephone and an ad in the Yellow Pages. She runs the business discreetly from her Auckland-fringe home with the help of “a very good accountant”, deliberately shunning the big flash offices, big signage and the fleet of leased cars which was, and still is, so appealing to others.

And therein lies the contrast between keeping a low profile and having a well-known face, but it’s this combination that’s kept her in business. She’s seen many private investigation firms come and go. “You’ve only got to look at the yellow pages now, and see what the advertising is like for us compared to when I started when every other cop had a full-page ad [saying] ’28 years ex police’, ’25 years ex police’ – big massive ads, and now how different it is and how small it’s got and yet I still tick along very nicely.”

Her high media profile, including several books and appearances on Sunday, 20/20, Fair Go, Good Morning and Radio New Zealand, means sacrificing anonymity in an industry where most prefer to remain anonymous. But that allowed her to give up surveillance work – which tends to swing between wildly exciting and excruciatingly boring – to focus on the side of the business she enjoys the most.

The good surprises her every now and then, but it’s the bad and the ugly that keep her in business. “You’ve got fraudsters, like betrayers,” she says. “They will always be there. A lot of people that do this kind of thing, it is just the way they are – they’re opportunists, they’re always looking for an easy way.”

Tracking down and dealing with schemers and scammers takes, she says, a certain kind of person. “To do this job you have to be the eternal optimist.”

Illustration by Rebecca Walthall

IT’S true the worlds of trade and politics foster an innate, burning desire to create acronyms.  The ‘group of eight’ major world economies, made up of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Russia are the ‘G8’.

In 2001, commentators would say ‘BRIC’ was better than using ‘emerging economies’ because after all the reform, after seeing the skylines of showcase cities like Sao Paulo, Moscow, Mumbai and Shanghai – bastions of light, energy and freshly-minted money  – it seemed a bit condescending to still refer to them as ‘emerging’.

The next 11 coming up, the supposed inheritors of the BRIC mantle, are the ‘N11’: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam.

The acronym BRIC was designed to give an exciting glimpse of where fortunes would be won, lost and built over coming decades. It was originally coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill as a way of grouping high-growth countries together. Early this year the heads of state invited South Africa to join them, turning BRIC into BRICS.

Where New Zealand fits into this crowd of acronyms is around our current trade positioning, and around our need to move from an internal-consumption model of growth towards an export-led one.

One country makes a notable presence across both the G8 and the BRICS: Russia. It is also the country looking set to soon be our second BRIC free trade partner.

For the BRICS countries, who have largely  lifted themselves up in the last decades through export, there is now a need to move to a model where economic growth is fuelled by internal consumption – growing a middle class with purchasing power and disposable income.

The crossover would seem to be the very definition of trade, like an economist’s dream market: we need to sell and they need to buy, but instead we have an impasse on a grand scale.

The World Trade Organisation’s Doha Development Round, kicked off in 2001 to negotiate increased worldwide trade liberalisation, has been limping on, in circles, for a decade.

Senior lecturer in political science and international relations at Victoria University Marc Lanteigne says many of the BRICS countries have been trying, unsuccessfully, to act as intermediaries between the European Union, the US and the lesser developed countries to reach a consensus in the talks.

“You have China, to a lesser degree India, to a degree Brazil, trying to act as mediators back and forth, all of these countries are trying to put themselves as the go-betweens and in the end we haven’t seen much in the way of solid progress,” he says.

Because of the start of electoral cycles, particularly in the US, experts have called for December 2011 to be a deadline for the final make or break of the Doha gridlock. Not many hold out hope of any success.

In the absence of success in WTO trade liberalisation, what many countries will fall back on is the agreements they’ve already negotiated.

“New Zealand is aware of this,” Lanteigne says. “New Zealand is certainly aware of the value of creating as many bilateral and multi-lateral [agreements] as possible.”

New Zealand’s regional, bilateral and multi-lateral trade agreements in force include with Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore. Agreements currently being negotiated include with Korea and the Gulf Co-operation Council (Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar).

In terms of agreements with the high-growth, high-potential BRICS’ countries, the last four years has seen fast movement.

The New Zealand-China free trade agreement (FTA) was signed in 2008. Many credit the huge resultant increase in trade with getting us through the recession.

In May 2011, Indian Minister of Commerce and Industry Anand Sharma said he hoped the New Zealand-India FTA would be in place by the first quarter of 2012.

Negotiations for the Russia-New Zealand FTA were announced in 2010 and are due to be completed late this year.

Lanteigne puts our popularity as a free trade partner down to our experience and the fact that our number of sectors open to preferential trade is small enough that the negotiation process is much shorter compared to European states.

We also have a history of jumping at opportunities to declare things first. In 1997, New Zealand was the first Western country to conclude a bilateral agreement with China on its accession to the WTO and, in 2004, the first developed country to recognise China as a market economy.

“Those other countries wanting a stronger economic role in that region will very likely see New Zealand as a very good way of getting started; it’s almost like training wheels,” Lanteigne says.

Illustration by Rebecca Walthall

THE BRICS have a common story: inflation is a short-term risk across the board, and all of them have a certain amount of political risk, but the long-term fundamentals are there: increasing population, burgeoning consumer consumption, low debt relative to GDP, increasing household saving and increasing spend on infrastructure.

China and India are seen as the stronger two for manufacturing. Russia and Brazil have advantages in the supply of natural resources.

HSBC New Zealand Head of Wealth Glen Tonks says he sees the BRICS countries’ massive investment in infrastructure as particularly exciting for business, typified by construction to host world sporting events.

The BRICS together will spend in the region of US$8 trillion over the next 10 years on infrastructure, which is around about 80 per cent of the world’s infrastructure spend over that period, he says.

“That is a story we are seeing with developing nations hosting the world’s major sporting events – the Beijing Olympics, the Indian Commonwealths and the Russian winter games – it’s really interesting to see how the relative success of those events – what message that sends to the world.”

China is leading the BRICS with respect to moving rapidly from an export-invest model, to an internal-consumption model, with last year 70 per cent of China’s GDP growth coming from consumer consumption.

“Really these four nations that have 40 per cent of the world’s population are the future growth engines,” Tonks says.

“[It] is a shift from West to East, and we see that accelerating out of the financial crisis. Particularly because of the hangover of debt in the developed world, so really it is game on the BRIC nations, really led by China.”

New Zealand’s long-term BRICS strategy has been accelerating in recent years. More than anything, our free trade agreement negotiations with China, India and Russia represent a fundamental shift towards a more long-term, strategic view of our place in the world and our friends in high-growth places.

Deputy chief executive of New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) John Ballingall says the developments show a movement away from focusing on tariff reduction alone towards building long term political and economic relationships, as well as freeing up the way for enhanced services and investment trade, or put simply:

“We curry them some favour and as a consequence we hopefully get to be alongside them when they really start to grow rapidly.”

Because of the focus on high-quality agreements, New Zealand now finds itself well-placed to act as a go-between country with others who want to trade with our free trade partners.

“We’ve got these great links to China and Russia and soon India and South-East Asia and lots of other countries,” he says.

“[International companies can] invest in us and use us as a base from which to export or invest into these countries so it’s about getting this first-mover advantage really.”

In terms of the agreement we have most recently started to negotiate, Russia occupies a strategically important geographic position as a bridge between Europe and Asia, he says.

“[Russia has] got the extremely fast-growing Asia Pacific region on one side and a much more muted growth profile of mainland Europe on the other side and therefore potentially Russia could play a really important role of acting as a link between the two.

“If we’re then tapped into that supply chain as well, then that allows us to try and benefit from the growth that might happen in that supply chain as well.”

FOR grouping and vernacular purposes the BRICS are lumped together under one acronym – but they are also closely watching the success of each other’s state-guided economics, which has profound impacts for foreign businesses working under complex political, bureaucratic, financial and regulatory environments.

Perceptions of the Chinese model of state-guided economics, also called the ‘Beijing consensus’, have gone from abstract concept to “they may have something here” among other BRIC countries, Lanteigne says.

“Russia has definitely adapted that [Chinese] model, the state is now hyper present in so many parts of the country’s economy, especially in the energy sector.

“You’ve got the same thing in Brazil, you’ve got the same thing in South Africa, India; they’ve been oscillating back and forth a bit towards greater free market, but there’s still a huge amount of state dominance in several sectors and still a lot of bureaucracy involved in setting up any kind of business in the country.”

Lessons learnt from doing business within China’s state-guided economic sphere could help us do business in Russia, Lanteigne says, but the Sanlu scandal with Fonterra in 2008 will continue to be a cautionary tale.

A common communist government history in both China and Russia, countries where private property laws have traditionally been weak, will also have some relevance, as we’ve seen with New Zealand company Pacific Hovercraft NZ’s continuing fight over intellectual property with Chinese company Lianyungang Supreme Hovercraft.

“I think New Zealand’s experiences with China will help [in Russia] quite a bit, but there’s still a lot of caution that’s needed. When you’re in a country where the state has such a strong advisory role in so many sectors, including raw materials and agriculture and so forth, keeping that in mind is very important.”

With increased trade liberalisation brokered by the World Trade Organisation looking increasingly like a pipe dream, a ‘hub and spoke’ model of free trade agreements with BRICS countries in particular looks set to be what takes New Zealand through.

And if there happens to be some progress in the Doha talks, New Zealand will be in a much stronger position, and much better informed, to play an active role in the negotiations.

“Because a lot of it is also about information,” Lanteigne says. “In order to successfully complete a deal you really have to understand the concerns of the state, what the other states wants out of various deals, their economic situation.

“Setting up bilateral [agreements] is in some cases not a perfect method, but it does create a lot of windows into what your potential trade partners are thinking.”

Mixing a mysterious drink, Wonka explains his formula: “Invention, my dear friends, is 93 per cent perspiration, 6 per cent electricity, 4 per cent evaporation, and 2 per cent butterscotch ripple.”

Quite rightly, Mrs Teevee points out Wonka’s formula actually adds up to 105 per cent. He ignores her and drinks. She asks if it’s any good.

He smacks his lips, thinks about it.

“Yes.”

In business, the secret ingredient isn’t usually butterscotch ripple, but what I like about that quote is it might as well be.  It could be anything, something unidentifiable.

You’ll have an idea of what it is. Perhaps it’s down to perspiration – you’ve toiled over winning a crucial piece of business for your company. Perhaps it’s down to inspiration – you’ve quietly invented something groundbreaking.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. And from there it is only a hop, skip and a jump to what we keep hearing so much about from industry experts, insiders, government and talking heads – innovation.

And to me, innovation is the ability to think in terms of 105 per cent.  But the idea is just the beginning. The practical execution is what will make or break you. It is a combination of both perspiration and inspiration.

A basic definition of innovation is to make or do something new. But a definition of business innovation should embrace the idea of improvement: making or doing something better than it was before.

So business innovation involves different combinations of both the new and the improved. Business innovation is improving or developing new products, services, technologies, processes, designs or marketing to solve problems (the familiar ones and the upcoming ones), to reach new customers or to reach existing ones better.

Thanks to the fantastic feedback we get from IN-Business magazine, we have designed this new section of the magazine to reflect how readers have told us they want to receive information about innovation. The stories are short, sharp profiles about real people and companies involved in a variety of different industry and areas of innovation.

Through our use of images we are showing there are always new angles and fresh approaches. Sometimes innovation is great leaps forward. Most of the time though, it is incremental shifts, small improvements that go a long way to changing the look and feel of the overall picture.

So welcome to this, the first instalment of IN-Business magazine’s “Better” section.

We look forward to hearing what you think.

In 2008, the chiefs of three quintessentially American companies, Ford, Chrysler and GM, flew into Washington in the finest business jets money could buy – but with dry pockets and extended hands. They had come to ask for taxpayer-funded bail outs.

Congressmen and lawmakers were scathing on behalf of the outraged man-on-the-street. One Democrat, Gary Ackerman, described the situation as “almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo”.

For private aviation, 2008 was comparable to two ships passing in the night – while the private jet became a dirty word in America, deliveries of aircraft to mainland China and Hong Kong started to explode. In China private aviation still meant everything it did to those first Americans to fly private planes: success, ease and efficiency.

The number of private aircraft registered in mainland China still pales in comparison to the US (approximately 100,000 in the US and only 200 according to official Chinese estimates), but the Chinese industry has come a long way in a very short space of time.

Chinese “air heads”, millionaires and billionaires alike rejoiced in late 2010 at news that the country’s low altitude airspace would be provisionally opened up from its strict military control. The decision, made by China’s State Council and Central Military Commission, is seen as a milestone.

Low-altitude airspace is predominantly the home of what is termed “general aviation”, which includes private business or leisure, tourism, flight training, agriculture or aerial mapping – in fact, all flight that is not military, scheduled commercial airlines, or regular cargo flights.

Industry experts are optimistic that last year’s decision, made by China’s State Council and Central Military Commission, will allow the general aviation industry to start growing into its potential.

MIKE Walsh is the CEO of Hong Kong-based Asia Jet, Asia’s leading private jet charter company. In his 16 years in the aviation industry, he has earned a strong reputation for starting up aviation businesses in developing markets, including in Russia and Dubai.

Walsh predicts that once the Chinese government sees the benefits of their initial airspace opening-up trials, they will roll it out province by province in coming years – and that China could overtake the US in terms of private aircraft ownership by 2022.

Private jets are not just a must-have toy anymore, Walsh says. “You have got corporations in China and Hong Kong who are actually buying [jets] and can justify it to the board of directors, why they need a jet – for efficiency.”

Walsh estimates 30 to 50 private aircraft were delivered across China in 2010; 30 that are known about and 20 that, because of difficulties with registration, aren’t. He estimates that 20 per cent more will be delivered in 2011. “That is still nothing compared to other markets, but it’s significant from where we were.”

Gulfstream’s newest model, the Gulfstream G650, is currently being certified in America. Of the first 650s on order – and there are already 300 confirmed – 60 will go into Hong Kong or China.

Despite high demand, Chinese aviation still faces severe and high-profile deficiencies: insufficient airports and landing facilities, not enough trained pilots, tight government restrictions that take away the ease and spontaneity of flying, and off-putting costs of aircraft maintenance.

But Walsh cites examples like Shanghai’s Four Seasons and Grand Hyatt Peninsula Hotel, which both have rooftop helipads in anticipation of the days when these deficiencies are overcome.

In 2010 alone, China opened four Fixed Based Operations to support general aviation aircraft – two at Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport, one at Shanghai’s Pudong Airport, and one in Shenzhen. There are already two in Beijing. Across the board, China has committed to a plan to build 97 new airports by 2020 to meet demand for all types of aviation.

The first China Business and Private Jet Expo was held at Hongqiao airport in August 2010, the Asian Aerospace International Expo and Congress will be held in early March this year in Hong Kong, and both the Hainan Rendez-Vous and Shanghai International Business Aviation Show (SIBAS), will be held in April 2011. The region is teeming with general aviation activity.

Kiwi industry insiders told IN-Business that the Chinese general aviation opportunity is still a glimmer on the horizon rather than a full-blown prospect.

A Kiwi business mission to China in June 2010 focused mainly on opportunities in airport infrastructure and commercial pilot training. Several of the companies who participated are now progressing the opportunities they developed.

But in general aviation, New Zealand companies are treading cautiously – busy with other more current and more pressing prospects, keeping up with what competitors and supply chain partners are doing in China, and trying to better understand the intricacies of doing business there.

New Zealand Trade and Enterprise recently hosted a delegation from the Civil Aviation Administration of China, which involved Hans Frauenlob, NZTE’s director for specialised manufacturing. He says members of the delegation were particularly interested in New Zealand’s general aviation history. “It was clear to me that they respected our abilities and were keen to learn from New Zealand’s experience.”

Frauenlob sees two broad opportunities for the New Zealand general aviation industry to do business with China, the first relating to the surge in Chinese private plane ownership and the second, “less glamorous, but probably more lucrative”, being the use of private aircraft for commercial operations – in agriculture to apply fertiliser, in forestry for logging operations, in viticulture for frost management, aerial mapping and infrastructure inspection, in search and rescue, and for tourism.

He adds that, while ambitious New Zealand general aviation companies aren’t targeting China today, it is their solutions that will be in demand as Chinese general aviation grows.

LOCAL player Altitude Aerospace is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Air New Zealand that was separated from the parent in 2008.

The company does customised fit outs for large jets, both for VIP customers and airliners, and employs a dynamic team of aviation engineers in which the average age is just 30, compared to the global industry average of over 55.

Altitude is led by general manager Mike Pervan, who has been with the Air New Zealand Group for 22 years.

The company’s biggest export market is currently Asia-Pacific, but as their customer base is small and exclusive, they don’t chase a region specifically. Rather, they choose a type of customer: airlines who understand the value of differentiating their interiors and “high end” VIP jet customers with newer aircraft.

They focus on Boeing and Airbus business jets, the kind that are a serious commitment – in the vein of US$50–$65 million to buy and $5–$10 million per year to operate.

Pervan sees the private jet market as being driven by three factors. The first is obviously wealth: “You really have got to have a lot of spare cash to be able to handle those sorts of outgoings.”

The second is the dispersal of a high net worth individual or company’s assets and responsibilities around the world, and the third, as illustrated by the tale of Ford, GM and Chrysler, is perception and publicity – if you are a “man or woman of the people” then it’s not a good look.

Pervan notes China has yet to move into being a customer of theirs, but that they have had Chinese companies as suppliers.

“For us we see the big opportunity as the Chinese airlines start getting comfortable with putting more innovative materials into their aircraft – not just buying the standard catalogue product – and of course we see the great opportunities with large private jets for the super-wealthy of China.

“I would have thought that a lot of New Zealand general aviation expertise, in agriculture and that sort of thing, would have been highly applicable in China too,” he says.

COLIN Brown is a South Island businessman whose company TracMap is a proponent of the aforementioned “less glamorous, but potentially more lucrative” general aviation opportunities in China.

At the end of 2004, Brown bought a small Dunedin business that sold hand-held radios and GPS systems via retail.

Brown worked for 10 years in PGG Wrightson, after his consultancy business was bought by them in 1994, and becoming frustrated with “trying to manage an innovative, fast-moving business inside a slow-moving corporate beast”.

The business evolved into TracMap New Zealand; they started with truck-based systems to get improved efficiencies and traceability, to prove fertiliser was being spread in the right places, and have now moved into aviation systems as well.

After putting their first unit in a fertiliser spreading truck in October 2006, now somewhere around 65 per cent of all the fertiliser trucks in New Zealand run TracMap systems – a fact Brown uses as an instant peg of the company’s legitimacy in the market.

“We have been able to leverage off New Zealand’s credibility in agriculture, we have been able to go into the US market and say, ‘look you haven’t heard of us, but we spread 50–60 per cent of the fertiliser that goes on the ground in New Zealand and as you know, New Zealand relies on agriculture and good agricultural technologies’.

“So we sort of started from that foundation and [it has] given us credibility then to move on and say ‘now look what we have done to adapt our product to suit your market’.”

The aviation areas of the business came next. TracMap have developed and are developing GPS guidance systems for applications like aerial fertiliser spreading, crop dusting, poisoning, fire fighting and search and rescue.

In the year ending March 2010, exports made up 18.5 per cent of revenue. Brown anticipates that figure will jump to between 40 and 45 per cent in 2011 and 2012 on the back of the foundations they have laid in Australia and the US.

Those two countries are their dominant markets, but some of their US distributers are negotiating and doing deals in South East Asia and China specifically, and including TracMap systems as part of the package.

“We haven’t had a significant number, it’s going to grow, but you know, two years ago we weren’t heard of outside of New Zealand for agriculture aviation and so we are pretty happy with the progress so far,” Brown says.

The scale and speed of progress so far is what leads most fingers to point toward mainland China and Hong Kong as the new frontiers for general aviation – both the glamorous jet side and the down-to-earth sides of the industry

Shanghai has been my home and the Shanghai Daily my life for the last three months as I have completed an internship at the English-language newspaper of China’s largest city.

The country’s censorship is a concept that’s often written about in the west – the Google debacle was particularly high profile – but it’s not common for westerners to work within it.

The Shanghai Daily is like all mainstream Chinese publications – supervised in some way by a government agency or body, or party member, but the paper is predominantly run by ordinary, everyday people working a job and getting paid a salary. There is a passion for journalism there as there is in virtually any publication anywhere in the world.

It took me three months to even begin to get a picture of where that line is, even though I worked at the newspaper full-time. Simply asking where the line is, is the kind of direct question only a westerner would ask and expect to get an answer to.

I actually did ask it once, but a reply was not forthcoming. And plus, actually figuring it out myself was the interesting part.

Some things from the distance of New Zealand would seem obviously off limits: homosexuality and sham marriages, government corruption, arrests of senior government officials, or the plight of China’s poor and exploited migrant workers, but we published stories on all those things and on other subjects that I thought for sure would be touchy.

But one piece I wrote included quotes that criticised the Chinese music industry and the way it is operated and supervised by the government. It had parts totally cut out or the quotes actually changed in the sub-editing process.

So there is a line, but it is arbitrary and it takes years to discern. It ranges from the very big leagues to the very small. As we sat in the newsroom one night watching the CNN coverage of jailed Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the screen suddenly went black right in the middle of the report – censored. My blog was shut down intermittently – same deal.

I think it’s fair to say that China’s media industry is in a state of flux.

Whereas government was the sole interest group in Chinese media for so long, now there is another: business. Most Chinese publications are at the moment grappling with issues around being government supervised, but having to be commercial and stand on their own two feet. The market for readers, listeners and watchers is fiercely competitive.

In his welcome at the Shanghai Daily Christmas party, the editor-in-chief made special mention of the fact that 2010 was the first year the Shanghai Daily had managed its business affairs entirely on its own. Australia’s Seven Network had officially pulled out of a joint venture the year before.

WORKING as a journalist in China was exciting, challenging, rewarding and affronting – all at the same time. I had licence to pick the brains of some of the most talented and, truthfully, inspiring people I have ever met.

While in Beijing, a friend gave me a book about Chinese journalism called China Ink.

In it, one of the young Chinese reporters interviewed said something that really stuck with me: “I think that of all the principles for journalism, the most important is to complicate simple things and simplify complicated things.”

Three months working in China is nowhere near long enough to be able to form a coherent picture of the country and its culture, but it’s a good start. I’m not sure I even began to scratch the surface, but one thing that became clear very early on is that China is a country where the grey area far outstrips both the black and the white put together. The simple and the complicated are the same thing.

The intersection between government and business with state-owned enterprises is intricately, but also haphazardly, woven. Many young people join the party because they feel it will get them a good job – in a private company not a state-owned one.

While travelling in another area of China, I met a young Chinese-speaking Australian who had worked at the Australian pavilion of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.

Shanghai was captivated by expo-related news for six months from May 1 to October 31. It was Shanghai’s equivalent of the Bejing Olympics.

Thousands of families were forcibly relocated from their historic Shikumen houses on prime inner-city real estate to make way for the behemoth 5.28 square kilometre expo site. In a letter to the United Nations, one Chinese activist put the number at 18,000 families.

Chinese Shikumen, literally translated as ”stone gate”, are terraced houses arranged in straight alleys that are increasingly disappearing in the wake of new Shanghai construction. By their occupants they are looked upon with starry eyes for the communities and tight bonds they house. They are designed with common areas to create interaction.

ONE night in Shanghai I absently watched a documentary on the English channel about the people who had been relocated. Narrated by a revoltingly patronising American presenter, it went on to chronicle several families and their lives before and after.

One high-school aged boy declared proudly that he was now going to university and that would never have been possible in his old, cramped Shikumen house because it was noisy and there was no space to study. His new government-provided house had the usual townhouse lack of character, but it was spacious and he pointed proudly to the books piled studiously on his desk.

MY Australian acquaintance recounted a very different story. The relocatees were granted special early access to a limited number of expo pavilions in the week before expo opened, by way of a concession for losing their communities.

When it became clear that there were too many people, and after long lines had formed outside the pavilions, the people rioted.

When I saw the Australian pavilion during expo, it had gaudy queue control barricades that seemed at odds with their slick pavilion.

My Australian friend told how it was that human crush of thousands of people who felt “angry and entitled” that ripped the original concreted bollards out of the ground.

China is a country of contradictions. Despite hearing a story like this, I felt infinitely safer walking the streets of Shanghai at night than either the streets of Auckland or Wellington. The streets in China teem with life after dark – rendering New Zealand’s streets cold, clinical, sterile in comparison – the people locked away in private property.

In contrast, my Chinese colleagues were overwhelmingly warm and friendly. Read and say what you like about the Chinese being cold and shy; it is absolutely not so.

One night I had dinner with a friend and her husband and young son. They had been through the wringer for two weeks – the little boy had been very sick, they had made around 10 trips to the hospital over a two-week period, and every doctor had had a different diagnosis and prescription. They went to the hospital very early in the morning to get a number and wouldn’t be seen until the afternoon.

I couldn’t help but contrast this with my own experience. I was hospitalised in Shanghai a month earlier for food poisoning and a respiratory infection and received better care in one of the foreigners’ wards than I have in New Zealand.

I didn’t see another patient the entire time I was there, I waited for maybe 10 minutes, and was put in a hotel-esque room with fantastic nurses who spoke impeccable English.

The Chinese of my generation are notable for being only children in accordance with the one-child policy. It is something I don’t think business has quite realised the implications of. The young business people coming through the ranks now are single minded and will walk over you to get what they want. You may have heard of the term ”little emperors”. Nobody I met really fitted that description, but you can see it in certain aspects: bossy – yes, but often not intentionally; at times selfish – yes; lonely – yes. They have always lived in an adult-dominated world.

MOSTLY they have been educated to within an inch of their lives – a friend of mine was teaching English to three-year-olds on Sundays – it’s that kind of competition for absolutely everything that New Zealanders cannot understand.

In addition to the fierce competition and education in the cities, economic and business news is much more widely read and received.

While the announcement of the CPI in New Zealand would make the business section and be accompanied by some commentary for a couple of days, it would be quickly forgotten or not understood by most.

The record 4.4 per cent year-on-year rise in China’s CPI in October 2010 was reported in every section of the paper in some way or another in multiple stories – including the sport section. The coverage continued for weeks.

The experience of working at a Chinese publication and making a life for myself in Shanghai for a few short, fleeting months was like a revival. Shanghai is a city of blinding lights and it has left me with a lasting impression that China is where it is all happening.

There are some people I would like to thank: Cathay Pacific for helping me get there, the Asia New Zealand Foundation for giving me the opportunity in the first place, the Shanghai Daily staff for hosting and teaching me so much, and KEA China – in particular the wonderful Sharon Fraser.

Cheers, guys.

The iconic conceptual artist is also famous for coining the notion of fleeting fame for the masses when he said in 1968, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

Annoyed with being constantly asked about that particular statement, Warhol dead-panned interviewers who continued to ask him about it, insisting variously that it was actually: ‘In the future 15 people will be famous’ and ‘in 15 minutes everybody will be famous’.

Warhol was famous for straddling the divide between creativity and business. Those learned in art will insist variously that the aesthetic was pretty much secondary, that he was more businessman than artist. That concept of fleeting notoriety, of vogue, of blink-and-you-will-miss- it applies as much to business as it does to art. In business, just like in fashion and art, trends come and go.

There are the latest fads, gadgets and buzzwords. The latest three- letter acronyms and motivational tools. The latest Theory-That-Will- Change-Your-Business. The latest from the talking heads about how to become a millionaire. We hear so often that design and creativity are the future of New Zealand business and export. Or some similarly worded statement. But what are the implications for the not-so-traditionally-creative: the accountants, banks, telcos, lawyers and public servants? Are they to be left out in the cold, left out of the cool-kids club? Are the be-suited and the be-spectacled of business to be excluded from the fun? How can they engage in the creative process in a genuine and inclusive way – not just ending up with something that is mutton dressed as lamb? How can we bridge the creative divide?

Their ‘Orcon + Iggy, Together Incredible’ campaign won Kiwi telco Orcon and independent advertising agency Special Group the advertising industry’s version of the Oscar: the Grand Prix award in the Cannes Lion International Advertising Festival in France.

Special Group also won eight of the 31 gold awards at the New Zealand AXIS awards, where Orcon also picked up the Creative Business of the Year award. Orcon Chief Executive Scott Bartlett says the idea for the ad was around a tangible demonstration of the eclectic nature of broadband, portrayed in a customer-centric, rather than technology-centric way.

“And you know, that’s the beauty about collaborative processes – to come up with creative ideas is that it’s not sort of design by committee, but ultimately you end up hiring a drugged-out rock star to pull together eight people via the internet to record music, a new music video, and then you put it on TV,” he says. The premise was simple: get Iggy Pop to record a collaborative new version of his song ‘The Passenger’ with New Zealand fans via webcams and broadband internet and in association with Orcon. Then they made the ensuing organised chaos into an ad. An open call for kiwis to get, as Campbell Live termed it, ‘jiggy with Iggy’ resulted in over 200 genuine audition videos being uploaded from Kiwis keen to record with Iggy.

Beyond just the individuals who were keen to make music with a rock legend, the videos received nearly 300,000 page views from interested bystanders, arguably the most successful Kiwi advertising campaign for a good few years.

It certainly achieved what it set out to do – raise Orcon’s awareness outside of their core base of highly- engaged customers, and it certainly did it in a creative way.

It’s a creative business model gaining traction overseas: ‘crowd- sourcing’ or ‘co-creation’. The process of using your customers’ creativity to inform company strategy. It is free creativity, effectively, but it is not all take and no give. Bartlett’s not shy about saying what you’re thinking: “it’s pretty unique for a company in our industry, because telcos are usually god-awful companies,” he says. In mass-market New Zealand, the Together Incredible campaign is significant for its relative novelty. It is a rare example of a company that has basically ceded control for the creative process to its customers.

A key aspect to the success of this kind of strategy is not just delegating, but practically outsourcing a brand, arguably a company’s biggest asset. You surrender your rights and your ability to control the process – your customers engage with the concept and drive the outcome of the experiment.

“I just sat back and went for the ride along with everyone else,” Bartlett says. “We gave Iggy no brief other than here are the videos, choose the people that you want to record the new version of the Passenger with and do your thing. I mean it wasn’t much more complex than that.”

Bartlett says increasingly the case studies of this kind of strategy are emerging, of companies realising they need to be genuinely interesting to get any kind of cut through the noise, especially because customers are never where you expect them to be nowadays. Using PR and advertising-space values, the worth of the media coverage the company received outstripped the cost of the entire campaign by a significant margin.

The coverage included a five minute piece on Campbell Live – the biggest single hit – and a bit of an anomaly: a current affairs show essentially covering the making of an ad. The front page of Wellington’s Dominion Post and the New Zealand Herald’s business section also came to the party. The success of the campaign would have been impossible without the rather-large head start Orcon spent years creating for themselves. The seeds were sewn, as it were, four or five years before.

“This didn’t happen in a vacuum either, this came from years of work leading up to this, of us understanding our customers and, as I say, building that really passionate base. We’ve had this whole facebook presence and twitter presence, been really engaging with customers on forums and blogs for years quite literally,” Bartlett says. “So we had this really strong follower/fan – whatever you want to call it – kind of base that was obviously a huge help in seeding the idea and getting the original excitement and interest going.”

Orcon’s Facebook fans quadrupled in a matter of weeks. International examples have shown the success of this kind of strategy is impossible without a strong social media foundation.

“It’s talking to people, there’s no other way to learn,” Barlett says of how they developed the knowledge of their customers that ensured the success of the Together Incredible campaign. “You can’t hire an analyst and plonk them at a desk and say ‘analyse our market would you please, and tell us who our customers are.’”

In addition to this, interest in the brand and the company was built by engaging customers in the eclectic and the irreverent – things that were of genuine interest to them. “You really only learn by engaging with your base. We’ve done some things that I think in many regards are more interesting than even the Iggy campaign.”

In 2009 they sponsored what they called the’ Great Blend’, evenings held once a quarter and open to all customers as well as the general public . They invited experts in topics as miscellaneous as women’s rights in eastern Europe, through to moon rocks, and then bought in both local and international experts and talent. Orcon Head of Brand and Communications Duncan Blair describes how it worked: “these amazing people, a little bit of music and a few drinks and everyone just sitting round.”

In a separate effort the company flew in eight digital artists from around the world, hired a house in Piha, locked them in it for a week, and charged them with the task of producing inspired digital art, which they then displayed on their website. “If we share, they might want to share back. So a lot of ideas that we get from our customer base do end up as products, do end up as hobbies that we invest in or infrastructure that we buy or build. It’s a great way to get creativity for free,” Bartlett says.

One of the most common instances that business people come in contact with creatives is around branding.

Jimi Hunt owns 12-month-old design and branding company The Creative Difference and has a fairly eclectic CV. It includes everything from building New Zealand’s biggest slip ‘n slide through to bringing in military technology from India to use in commercial operations in New Zealand, all while owning and operating a number of different Auckland bars.

Last summer his company worked on the biggest contract of his life: designing all the material – websites, brochures, identity cards etc – for the Rugby World Cup corporate hospitality. His job, he says, is “making things prettier. Because stuff is ugly, 90 per cent of stuff is.”

Hunt is currently in business with his father Paul, a traditional “suit” who, among other postings, was the Chief Executive of Tower Insurance for 15 years.

“The biggest thing that creatives hate in the entire business,” Hunt says, “is the business. I am here to draw pretty pictures, come up with crazy ideas. I am not here to do my taxes or anything like that.”

“So 29 years later we start working together. It works perfectly because he is that business balance to my creative chaos and I have learned a lot about business and he has learned a lot about creatives.”

Hunt says design is an increasingly widespread profession. He did not formally train in design and says it’s absolutely an advantage. “It seems to me design became very cool, like it is a cool job to have. It’s like ‘I don’t want to work in an office, I wanna be a designer and so everyone goes off to design school.”

Recently he needed to hire a designer so put up an ad. Coincidentally, he also needed a new duty manager for his Auckland inner-city bar. Both ads went up on Seek at the same time. Both jobs were for the same salary. In a week and a half he had 12 applicants for the duty manager’s job and in three days had 428 applicants for the designer’s job.

The ad Hunt wrote was funny and clever and creative. A creative ad for a creative job. He had four responses saying they liked the ad so much they would work for free. He had three responses from people who weren’t even designers saying they liked the ad so much they would take a job anywhere else in the company, making coffee or doing anything.

As for the rest of them, “the state of those 400 odd, the quality of the designers that are being produced at media design school is pretty fucking average,” he says. “They all produce the same style, the same stuff. One of the ones I opened up and this girl was like, ‘oh, I designed Ralph Hotere’s book about his life painting’. Then I opened up about 10 more of people who had designed Ralph Hotere’s book and it was a project at media design school. A class project so everyone had to design one. And the thing that made me the absolute angriest, not one them declared that it was a project and not an actual brief and produced book. That’s ethics 101.”

Out of 428 applications in three days, Hunt says he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of applicants who put in a creative application for a creative job.

“That seems like the saddest thing in the world to me for this industry,” he says.

Jones envisions turning the space into a pedestrian haven, a little corner of Europe in New Zealand, with free bicycles, street markets, cafes, and fountains. It’s would-be European chic, antipodean style. Jones is not standing for mayor; instead he’s assembling a team to contest the Wellington mayoralty and council.

Opinion is divided as to the practicality of pedestrianising Wellington’s CBD. But it’s a vitally important issue for retail and other central city businesses. In Auckland, a two-year project to upgrade Queen Street was completed in 2008, under the banner of “reclaiming the city for the people”. Urban design manager at Auckland City Council, Ludo Campbell- Reid, says personally that is what he interprets as the ultimate aim of the Jones proposal.

Campbell-Reid says Queen Street was typical of New Zealand’s city high streets: dominated by the requirements of vehicles. The upgrade meant widening footpaths, more pedestrian crossings at more intuitive places, decreased waiting times at lights, decreased car turning circles, more planting, street furniture and art, better lighting, and raised median strips.

Campbell-Reid says pedestrian traffic has increased by 27 per cent on weekends and 32 per cent during the week.

Exact figures are difficult to calculate, but indications are that retail revenues are increasing. In a recession, Campbell-Reid says, this is something of a feat. High-end retailers Louis Vuitton and Gucci have moved into retail space previously occupied by a $2 shop. Campbell-Reid says limited pedestrianisation is a future option for Queen Street.

“I would love to pedestrianise parts of Queen Street. I don’t think the whole street needs to be pedestrianised,” he says.

But the idea should not be thought of as one-size-fits-all. “Anything that starts to reclaim the city for people is an exciting thing,” he says. “There are many, many ways of doing it and there are many, many success stories around the world where it has worked.”

He says Wellington’s council has taken significant steps on behalf of Wellingtonians. “It is definitely seen as a more human city than Auckland. It is more compact, there are a lot more people living more closely to the city, to their place of work. Wellington has certainly led the way with the public realm and the money that it has put into the streets.”

But Auckland has no intention of being left behind: “We now feel we are taking on a bit of leadership in that area,” he says. Campbell-Reid says there are situations in urban design where boldness is called for, and also times where an incremental step by step approach is best.

“To come in and just pedestrianise something – that is quite a dramatic approach to take.”

Christchurch City Council Principal Advisor for Urban Design Hugh Nicholson worked at Wellington City Council for 10 years. He explains the street-level relationship between people and vehicles is a continuum with motorways at one end and full pedestrian malls at the other, “but actually most streets need to be somewhere in between that”.

“It is seldom that you need to go to the extreme of total pedestrianisation. They are only the very special streets, so often the answer is somewhere in between,” he says. One such special street is Strøget in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, which was pedestrianised in 1962.

“If you go to Copenhagen and to the main street there, which is pedestrianised, while the retailers opposed very strongly when it was pedestrianised, now if you tried to put cars back through there would have a riot,” Nicholson says. “So if it works, it is really good for business. If it doesn’t work, of course, it is disastrous.” Nicholson says personally he applauds Jones for the intent of his proposal.

“The idea of putting people at the centre of the city, it’s the core of urban design thinking around the world.”

He says a lot of the work already done in Wellington has used similar thinking, but Jones’ proposal is taking it a step further.

“Actually his step is a lot further, but they are not diametrically opposed. He is putting people back into the centre of the city in a more radical way. I think, absolutely fantastic idea: the concepts, the intention behind it. I think the mechanism he proposes is perhaps gloriously simplistic.”

A major risk of the proposal lies in losing the strength of the Wellington public transport system, which Nicholson says is among the most effective in New Zealand.

“Wellington’s public transport network is the envy of the rest of the country. Really it is very strong,” he says. “The risk with Bob’s proposal is that you cut the public transport network off at the knees; you are shooting yourself in the foot. On the other hand he has got a real point: there comes a stage when the number of buses along the Golden Mile becomes a negative factor. And while I am a tremendous supporter of public transport, at the end of the day I do think the cities are for people – and even buses, when they start to take over the people space, that becomes a negative thing.”

With a problem identified, it is just a matter of employing some creativity to fix it, he says. “I think it is really just a matter of finding a little bit more subtlety to create the spaces for people rather than just chucking everyone else out.”

Wellington City councillor and urban development spokesman Andy Foster says Jones’ proposal poses more opportunity for disruption than it is worth.

“There are elements of Bob Jones’ idea that are already being thought about, like more activity and more people space, but others which would be highly disruptive and likely to damage the city rather than benefit it,” he says.

Foster is under the impression Jones’ proposal is responding to a perceived need that isn’t there. “At present we think the balance of pedestrians, public transport and private vehicles in Lambton Quay is about right and that an incremental approach to change is the most prudent approach in this instance. That is: change is made in response to a need for it.”

Foster cites Australian examples such as Church Street in Parramatta, Sydney and Hunter Street in Newcastle where vehicles have eventually been reintroduced to under-performing pedestrian malls. A proposal to allow buses back into Wellington pedestrian zone Manners Mall is currently before the Environment Court, the end game in a two-year public battle to save the space.

He says the Vibrant Wellington team should be under no illusions that even “relatively modest” changes like Manners Mall are subject to huge and lengthy public debate and “that would inevitably be dwarfed by the debate over pedestrianising the Golden Mile”.

Mayoral candidate Jack Yan says a mayoralty should be based on more than just one proposal. He questions the ethics of an unelected businessman bankrolling a city plan in the capital.

“It’s not about one road and that is what Bob is about. He’s about one road,” he says.

Yan is worried about the success of such a large pedestrianised space during Wellington’s colder, windier, and wetter months. “I don’t know if it is going to look that romantic and nice and warm and lovely and quaint year round,” he says.

Jones is a clever man, Yan says: “He knows how to pull the strings of some people. He knows people will say ‘hey, I look back on the last sunny day I had in Wellington, wasn’t it great’.

“People aren’t going to look back on that day that it was wet and four degrees and effing freezing walking around town.”

Chief executive of software company SilverStripe, Brian Calhoun, has experienced the ‘request for proposal’ process through bidding for work building websites for local government.

“You fill out this document and you kind of throw it over the wall so to speak, and several other people that you are competing with throw it over the wall as well,” he says. “Then the government makes a decision and they say ‘okay, you are the winner’ – no negotiation. “A lot of times we can’t even find out why we weren’t selected; it is like talking to a brick wall – no response.”

Chief Advisor for Procurement Reform Chris Browne says they accept there is a perception from business that responding to government tenders can be an exercise in frustration.

He says the best thing he can say to reassure businesses is that the reform programme is actions as well as words.

“The first thing I would say is change is happening, this project is happening, it is changing the way in which we do procurement in New Zealand. That is really what we are very focused on: trying to make it a very different experience – a positive experience.”

The first three all-of-government contracts for passenger vehicles, stationery and IT (laptops, desk- tops and multifunctional printer/ scanner/copiers) will be in place by 30 June this year. It is expected that every all-of- government contract will be serviced by a multi-supplier panel as opposed to a single company.

“At the moment there are about 200 agencies covered through the reform programme, so that is 200 separate contracts,” Browne says. That is a lot of repeat bidding costs, so what we are trying to do is take some of those repeat costs out. And equally, for government that is a lot of repeat procurement cost, plus legal cost and everything else. So it is trying to take that cost out of doing business.”

The grand objective of making supplying government more acces- sible to business is to be fulfilled in several ways. Standardised contract terms and conditions to be piloted in June are designed to reduce the costs of seeking professional advice, and will provide consistency. A ‘suppliers guide’ document will set out the expectations and process of working with government.

And by engaging earlier with businesses, government procurers are intending to push innovative solutions. The primary goal in the first year is, unashamedly, cost savings. The money saved will be, as Min- ister for Economic Development Gerry Brownlee puts it, “a truck- load of hips, cataracts, and knees”.

There are those in business that see government savings as money taken directly out of their pockets. Chief executive of Ricoh Mike Pollok says businesses making noise over lower margins are not in tune with commercial reality.

“I think that is a very naive view to have and if you think that, you shouldn’t be in business.”

Brownlee responds to business fears of margin squeezing by saying companies need to look past the emphasis on price to see there are genuine opportunities when it comes to volume.

“I suppose you could take that rather pessimistic and fatalistic view that the government is setting up an opportunity to hammer people on price, but the other side of it is to say ‘well, the government does spend a terrific amount of money’.

“We spend a great deal of that, it would seem, offshore with the suppliers who are not from New Zealand and so therefore if you can be a domestic supplier there is huge opportunity there as well.”

He says it has not gone unnoticed that New Zealand businesses may have been overlooked by government procurers in the past.

“Anecdotally you hear of [government procurers] that could have got something a kilometre down the road, but instead they took an international flight to see what was available somewhere else. And there is a little bit of, I guess from the procurer’s point of view, we suspect there may have been a bit of a question asked: ‘well, do I want to go to Christchurch and get this or do I want to go to, well, any foreign capital, the United States or whatever’, you know what I mean?”

The New Zealand procurement reform programme is based on successful overseas initiatives in Australia, Canada, Scotland, Eng- land and Wales, where savings have been in the range of 10 to 15 per cent a year. There is much positive support for procurement reform, but it comes hand-in-hand with scepti- cism about priorities, practicalities and long-term outlook.

Chief executive of state-owned telecommunications and media company Kordia, Geoff Hunt, says procurement reform, if implemented and followed through correctly, can only be positive for New Zealand business.

“From the point of view of a supplier to the government, this is good news. In terms of one of the other ones, achieving costs savings, that is always a motivation to do the big deals well.”

He stresses that procurement needs to be about more than just price.

“It needs to be quite a proactive thing by the government procure- ment organisations; they have got to have in their minds that this is not just buying at lowest cost. Just the word procurement, to me is a little bit of a problem. Procurement to me is about buying commodity services – lowest cost and highest quality and about compliance and so on. But when it comes to building industrial capability I think there needs to be more emphasis on part- nering as well as procurement.”

SilverStripe’s Brian Calhoun has seen how all-of-government contracts have panned out overseas and is unconvinced they can offer any value to New Zealand. Calhoun cites the situation produced by low-bid, all-of-government contracts in California, where the wining company for the state furniture contract was Prison Industries Inc.

The name says it all – the com- pany has an abundant supply of low-cost labour at its finger tips: state prisoners.

“Any time I hear things like ‘all- of-government contracts’ or ‘low-bid winners’ I think that is a bad idea for New Zealand,” Calhoun says. “Everybody wants to cut costs. Nobody can fault that logic. The problem is where do you cut the costs and how do you cut the costs?

“That is precisely what stifles innovation: when you get monopolistic practices and that’s what this is really.”

It’s no secret government tenders can be a confusing world of smoke, mirrors, and red tape. Win or lose, you often come out the end of the process a little more frustrated than when you went in, and a little lighter in the pocket as well.

One industry professional puts the success rate for average companies responding to govern- ment tenders at about one in five. The average time given to respond to a tender in the United Kingdom is 30 days. In the United States it is 42 days and in New Zealand just 12.

Research carried out by the Ministry of Economic Development found the main issues the private sector had in doing business with government revolved around a lack of transparency, short timeframes, a myriad of varying terms and conditions, risk aversion of agencies and mixed skill levels of government procurers. Manager of the Government Procurement Development Group Phil Weir says the difficulties stem from the fact that the procurement profession across both the private and public sectors in New Zealand is under-developed.

“I know I have seen things in the past – people’s perceptions of the profession in New Zealand being about five years or so behind Australia, and even longer behind Europe and the UK,” he says. “Perhaps because of the small na- ture of our country, or the types of industries and things we have had in the past, it has just been slower to grow as a profession in New Zealand.”

The next steps in the reform in- volve the implementation of further all-of-government contracts based on the success of the first three. A review of the current tender interface, the Government Electronic Tendering Service (GETS), was carried out last year.

Companies and stakeholders were asked what kind of function- ality they would like to see in a second generation GETS. The government has already tendered for a separate e-procure- ment tool to help agencies connect into the all-of-government contracts, and there is potential for the same tool to be used to give suppliers access to government.

In terms of change management, Ministry of Economic Development documents have identified “pockets of resistance”.

Brownlee says he does not expect resistance from government agencies and departments because, “that would be requiring you to be very cynical about the willingness of the New Zealand bureaucracy to participate in a government programme.”

The objectives of procurement reform throw up some interesting ques- tions around mutual exclusivity.

Can the reformers have it all: innovative solutions at a low price, government savings, and increased business capability and access? Will the words and intentions translate into the appropriate actions? Will the actions filter down correctly from the reform team to affected government agencies and departments? Will those agencies and departments fully comply? Calhoun echoes the sentiments of several executives spoken to by IN-Business.

“I think it is just all talk. It’s not realistic. When you want to find out the effects of what is really happening in any situation in life you look at the actions, you don’t look at the words. “You look at the actions of low- bid, all-of-government contracts on one hand, and on the other hand you’ve got these words that say, ‘we want to support local business’. It doesn’t match.”

If the office homogenises us, it never diminishes our desire to stand on a podium and wave a trophy, to tearfully thank God, and to be crowned the lower North Island’s top grey-suited, grey-haired; middle- aged, middle-management practitioner of the year. Far be it to take recognition away from those that deserve it, but have we reached a critical mass for awards?

It doesn’t help when you look at the accolades afforded to quintessential evil corporation Enron, which include the title ‘America’s Most Innovative Company’ for six years running. Closer to home, ING was named ‘New Zealand Fund Manager of the Year’ in October 2008 after $400 million of investor funds were frozen in March of the same year.

National Sponsorship Manager at Westpac Mark Graham compares business awards to the heart foundation tick as a mark of credibility.

“If someone has won an award, and has been put through a process and judged against their com- petitors and peer evaluated and all those kinds of things – hey they must have actually done quite a few things right here. So we can feel comfort about them being acknowledged as a winner – that says something.”

There have, of late, been questions asked by central government agencies about the value and place of our business awards. A report commissioned by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise for the Business Capability Partnership in 2004 found around 200 separate business awards programmes in New Zealand. “The proliferation of the award ‘industry’ is seen by many of the key stakeholders within the areas as both a positive issue, and a potentially damaging challenge,” the report says.

Positive, because awards encourage New Zealanders to identify with the concept of celebration, and because they showcase role models outside of the sporting area. But potentially damaging because the number of awards has grown in an ad-hoc way, because there has been little integration across sectors and industries, and because there is little national planning.

Graham says the situation with inconsistent national judging criteria has at times produced unworthy winners of some awards.

“There was quite a focus on trying to bring some consistency across how awards are judged, for ex- actly the point we were just talking about: inconsistencies. Suddenly people are given kudos when in fact, jeepers! If you really sort of looked a little bit deeper into the business there is no way they should have actually got that award,” he says.

New Zealand Business Excellence Foundation CEO Mike Watson sits on the Business Capability Partnership and the Capability New Zealand Council and says personally, he feels awards in New Zealand are not stacking up.

“Let’s face it: a lot of the awards in New Zealand are just rubbish,” he says. “They don’t ask many questions, they don’t give any decent actionable feedback to the applicants.”

Watson, as part of the Business Capability Partnership, was heavily involved in the development of a condensed version of the internationally recognised Baldrige judging criteria for use in judging New Zealand business awards. The Baldrige criteria break down judging criteria under the headings of leadership, business planning, customers and stakeholders, information and analysis, workforce, project management, and business results.

Watson says many New Zealand awards are not so thorough.

“What we were trying to do was institute or implement a robust criteria which we had developed; implement robust evaluation and judging processes so that the right people were winning – not the guy that you play golf with sort of thing,” he says.

While winning leaves you feeling warm and undeniably fuzzy, is the sheer number of awards given out nowadays really constructive? Or is even thinking such thoughts a manifestation of our tall poppy tendencies? Business is a fickle game, as evidenced so well by the little arrows up and down on the TV news every night. Every year there are new awards with new agendas and new categories popping up, new ways to pat each other on the back.

All this begs the question: are the business awards given out nowadays worth less than the frosted plastic trophies they are screen printed on?

The big business winner

In her haste to retort, former awards winner Diane Foreman cuts off the question about which awards she will be entering this year: “definitely no more awards”.

“Last year was a hard year for awards because we entered the Entrepreneur of the Year, we entered the NZTE awards and we did a couple of awards in Asia, plus we do the Ice Cream Awards. So there were five different awards processes going on and that was a big year for us and we have decided that we won’t do that again. It’s very time consuming and you take the focus off the business and you put the focus onto the competition. Our business needs our focus.”

Foreman is the Managing Director of Emerald Foods, the company that carries, among others, the New Zealand Natural, Movenpick and Killincy Gold brands. They have had a good year. Foreman was named 2009 New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year and Emerald won the Best Business Operating Internationally – $10m to $50m category in the International Business Awards. Foreman is awards-wary though, saying the realities of business dictate she takes each year as it comes and judges her own business success by her bottom line.

“You can only ever judge yourself on your latest budget, and I am expecting that I have as many down years as I have up.”

In an awards environment where it is not uncommon for achievement to be further cross classified by gender, ethnicity or geography, Foreman is clear on one particular point: she loathes gender-based awards.

“I hate it…I think we are all on a level playing field, and while we promote business women awards, you are never going to be on the same ground as men. I don’t like the gender split, I think if you are good enough to compete you are good enough to compete against.”

Foreman has the rare experience of seeing both sides of the fence, having been both a judge and an entrant in Entrepreneur of the Year. She rates the role behind the table as far more enjoyable.

“Being a judge was amazing and the exposure to bright, young creative minds was incredible,” she says. “Being a participant was really harrowing, because you didn’t get that kind of exposure to everybody else, you got to meet them a couple of times but you didn’t get to go really deep inside their business, which as a judge you did.

“It was very lonely. You are there and the spotlight is on you and you can either win it or lose it.” Any award, she says, is ultimately what you make of it. The first one she can remember being part of was “a hundred years ago” when a staff member won Hairdresser of the Year at the salon she was a partner in.

“We plastered it over our whole window, we just made it so huge, we took ads in the local paper, we did everything.”

Foreman speaks of her disappointment upon recently coming across a winner of the same award complaining of inadequate post-award support and recognition.

“It is an opportunity for you to use it in your marketing; it’s what you do with it that counts.”

She agrees an award is like a mark of authentication, and says she found it good for attracting franchisees, bankers and other professionals to the business because of the sense of confidence a thumbs up from independent judges instils.

“We haven’t got any new clients but we haven’t been actively seeking any, but it has been a mark of respect.”

While the benefits to her business are more qualitative than measurable, she is under no illusions as to where the benefits of awards lie for the companies that sponsor them.

“Well, obviously they are doing it for their own branding, they would be doing it because it helps their brand and it is a passive way of marketing themselves – the whole ‘tie yourselves with a winner’ thing. So obviously that is why people are doing it: it’s the whole marketing ploy.”

The small business winner

Casey Martin’s dilemma is: How do you market a funeral business – but seriously – what do you do? Do you go put business cards in old people’s homes? Do you give out pens? It’s an interesting dilemma faced by the funeral industry and even tougher for the smaller players: to be recognised as a business when it’s something most people don’t like to think of as a money-making venture.

Taranaki Regional Business Ex- cellence Awards Judge Paul Fifield understands well the challenges faced by one such small business, Eagar’s Funeral Service. He and his panel judged them as the winner of Best Small Business category of the Taranaki awards in 2008 and 2009. For owner Casey Martin, the awards have helped to create ‘top of mind’ recognition for the family business, which employs three staff.

“Most people only use a funeral director two, maybe three times in their lifetimes and we can’t exactly have a sale if we are quiet. So it is that top of mind stuff and because we push the fact that we have been recognised as business leaders in our community, it has raised our profile,” she says.

Martin was pressed to enter for the first time in 2007. She didn’t win that first year but saw the experience as an opportunity for some professional advice and feedback in running the business she bought from her parents’ estate after her father was killed and her mother died of cancer.

“In the first year I was looking for a free business review and that information to help me grow. Because you find that in small business you can get caught up in the way you do things and sometimes people don’t tell you a different way, you don’t even think of it, and it is just being open to other people’s suggestions.”

Martin took her staff to both the awards ceremonies as a way to recognise the team effort. On a personal level, the most poignant recognition of her business’ success came from a previous judge.

“I had a congratulations letter from a lady who was my judge the very first time around and in between her judging us, her daughter died and we looked after the funeral. For me that was the best recognition, she came into our business, she saw what we did, the passion we had, and the ultimate compliment was to use our service.”

Martin says business awards need to recognise the Davids as much as the Goliaths.

“We need to be recognising other areas, the likes of Taranaki and Manawatu; we are not Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch. There are some very important companies and very important businesses all over the country and you do get a little bit frustrated sometimes when you only hear about the big boys.”

The sponsor

As far as sponsorship goes, Westpac is heavily into awards. They sponsor the 15 Regional Business Excellence Awards, as well as the Halberg Awards for sport, and national industry awards in tourism, franchising, retail, agriculture and the restaurant industry. They also sponsor numerous categories in other awards ceremonies.

With so many ways to spend marketing dollars nowadays, Westpac National Sponsorship Manager Mark Graham says they have persisted with awards because of the association with, and celebration of, excellence – as well as more commercial motives.

“If they [winners] are not a customer we might try very hard for them to become a customer and look, that is how it works. We want to be associated with the best and this an opportunity for us to work closely with some very successful companies, and that is another fantastic benefit for us.”

Graham is familiar with comments about too many awards, but points out that in recessionary times he would have thought more people would be eager to celebrate and learn from others’ success.

“Let’s put them on a pedestal, let’s talk to them and find out what they have been doing that we could perhaps learn off,” he says.

The judge

Taranaki Business excellence awards Judge Paul Fifield says being a business award judge is like being a nosey parent.

“I don’t know about you, but my parents don’t know what I earn or anything like that, but we are just saying to these people ‘just show us everything you’ve got’. We do it without blinking almost. It is probably quite unnerving.”

Fifield says he believes the unique fingerprint of New Zealand business, in terms of our traditional strengths in the primary industry and prevalence of small business, is under-represented by our business awards.

“I think at the moment we can’t do enough [awards]. I look at the primary industry – it just doesn’t get any pats on the back, yet without it the country would be dead in the water. I look at the SMEs in particular – they represent probably 80 per cent of business in New Zealand, they just don’t get thanked for what they do.”

He says one of the biggest challenges in judging is with the mix of company sizes and industries within categories. “It is never apples with apples, rather apples with pineapples – especially when it comes to the Supreme Award winner. To me that is a fundamental flaw in the awards at the moment. I don’t know how you compare a one- man band, mum and dad business with a medium business. I hate to say it but it is going to be near impossible for a small firm to win the Supreme [Award] – it sort of, I don’t know, bastardises the whole process.”

Fifield doesn’t subscribe to the less is more school of thought, saying they took a firm stance in all the speeches delivered at all the various Business Excellence Awards around the country last year: tough economic times warrant an increased celebration of success.

“I don’t think we can do enough patting on the back…we have got to look for opportunities to really get in behind these people.”

The organiser

John Dow is involved with organising both the WELLYS and the Gold Awards. He does it because he believes the business community is seriously undervalued for what it does: providing employment and livelihoods, and generating the income that funds the workings of society.

He says celebration should come before feedback.

“I believe that business awards should be primarily a night of cel- ebration and acknowledgement of the achievements and innovation within a region’s business community; a public way of thanking these hard working risk takers rather than an onerous and laborious process of ‘checkin up’ on people’s businesses. In my opinion if business people want good advice or support they can engage a professional consult- ant or advisory firm and do it in a confidential and considered manner in their own chosen way.”

The Critic

Ceo of the new Zealand Business Excellence Foundation Mike Watson sits on the Business Capability Partnership and the New Zealand Capability Council. Personally, he feels we are heavy- handed with business awards in New Zealand.

“I think there are far too many awards in New Zealand. I think a lot of them are of dubious benefit in terms of their process for evaluation.”

He says the fragmented nature of the awards industry is some- thing you see in many areas of New Zealand business, and has resulted in an enormous variance in the calibre of awards. “I won’t mention names – prominent awards programmes ask sort of half a dozen inane questions and then judge, and then make an award when there is absolutely no rigour to it. The awards, a lot of them are just celebrations of business. The ones who win, in no way are they necessarily the best business there. They win the thing for a variety of reasons.”

He says awards should be in place to not only celebrate excellence, but also to build the capability of applicants and businesses.

“If they are not there to do that then – what the devil – what is the point of them?”

Some kids learn but in adulthood forget what their pretty and patient young kindergarten teacher so lovingly taught them. If we think of the main players in the New Zealand tertiary education sector like a playground, all the usual kinds of kids are there.

There are the big kids – they have lots of clout, they shout the loudest. They steal everyone else’s toys. There are the kids that like maths, the kids that like music, the kids that like science, the kids that like to play house. Then there are the kids to whom anything is a magic wand. These kids like to explore, use their hands, take risks, learn new things. These kids are the polytechnics. Some kids like to read. Some kids like to do.

The polytechnics like to do, and the six largest New Zealand polytechnics are definitely doing something big. They broke away from the other 14 New Zealand polytechnics earlier this year and banded together to form the Metro Group. They are deep in uncharted territory. Collaboration County. Leadership Land.

The Metro Group’s ambitious plans are to change the mechanics of this country’s tertiary education sector and to play a more integral role in modernising the economy through a focus on innovation, technology, and higher level learning. They also plan on reducing the number of qualifications offered across their institutions by 25 per cent by 2012, thus decreasing back office costs and allowing for content streamlining.

Linda Sissons of WelTec, Mark Flowers of Wintec, Rick Ede of Unitec, Peter Brothers of the Manukau Institute of Technology, Neil Barns of the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, and Phil Ker of Otago Polytechnic are the six CEOs on a mission. The Metro Group’s first initiative, the pilot, the testing of the collaborative waters, is the Bachelor of Engineering Technology – a common degree shared among all Metro Group member polytechnics.

It is a bit of a diversion from the out-wit, out-smart, out-educate mindset seen in the wider sector, which the six CEOs agree largely results in money being spent
unproductively.

“There was a lot of money spent on the competition and not a lot of purpose,” Flowers says.

Long hours have gone into crafting this new course. 2010 is the inaugural year with 2000 students enrolled across the six Metro Group members. The structure of the degree plays to the strengths of individual institutions in the civil, mechanical, and electrical majors and sub majors rather than every polytechnic replicating every major within their own institution.

A common first year is offered at all institutions and students will then move according to the area in which they choose to specialise. For the polytechnics it means greater efficiencies. For business it means a higher standard of graduates with a more specialised knowledge. For the wider tertiary sector it means an exciting new business model for education.

The creation of the Bachelor of Engineering Technology was spurred by the results of career research and mapping carried out by the Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand. Rick Ede says it was a natural progression of the polytechnic model of working closely with industry.

“There was just the perfect opportunity there to say, ‘hey look we can come together and package up a national qualification that goes directly into this career structure framework of the industry. It wasn’t easy developing the choices, but it is an awful lot easier when you know exactly what the industry really needs,” he says.

It’s textbook management practice in action. They are walking the walk and so far – it is early days yet – it seems to be paying off.

 “For business – I think they should have a high expectation of what institutes of technology do, we are supposed to be modernising this economy,” Flowers says.

“You know as well as I do the pace that technology is showing. So the real benefit should be if the six of us can get our act together and really get focused and make a difference. And if we don’t then we bloody well ought to be.

It’s like the old sayings go – no polytechnic is an island. You can lead a man to university but you cannot make him think.

Flowers says the Metro Group’s model considers both the employer and the student as customers of the service of education.

“Business is the customer, you will find all tertiary institutes say ‘oh the student is the customer’ but I believe the employers are just as important,” he says.

 “Whereas if I was sitting in a university I’m not sure that I would be saying it quite as insistently as that, and that is a connection I would like to make and I think my colleagues would all agree.”

By placing business as the end customer of the process they are ensuring employers get graduates that can hit the ground running, promptly add value to the business, innovate, and create breakthroughs. Chief Executive of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limited (GNS) Dr Alex Malahoff agrees.

“They have the right desire, the attitude, the right training for specific areas,” he says.

“New Zealand is such a tiny country, in order to make use of all available avenues to get as intense a degree as possible, you might as well make use of your colleagues and make use of the other institutions. All the institutions realise that of course you compete for students and all of that but in the end if you get the right facilities and the right really special talent you can help make the degree a better one.”

The Metro Group initiative is a diversion from the decade of ups, downs, and identity crisis the polytechnics and the wider tertiary education sector has seen. Courses in twilight golf, incidents of bail out funding and appointments of crown managers at several institutions have, according to Ede, tainted the whole sector with the same brush.

The Education (Polytechnics) Amendment Bill, currently before Parliament, riled up the sector earlier last year by tabling a reduction in the size of polytechnic councils and giving the Minister for Tertiary Education the right to appoint the chair and deputy chair of those councils.  Unitec, under Ede’s 18-month leadership recently dropped their 10-year-bid to become a university. He says New Zealand needs to recognise that polytechnics and universities are different but equally valuable.

Flowers agrees, “Personally I just see it as two parallel systems with a slightly different emphasis, it shouldn’t be seen as superior – they are just different.”

 The tertiary education sector has been in a constant state of flux. The Metro Group leaders say in particular, the growing importance of the international student market and the increases in entry-level qualifications have kept them busy over the years. Where previously a certificate or diploma would have been sufficient for an entry level position a degree is now the norm – due largely to the increased role of technology at work.

 “Look at nursing – nurses used to do a diploma, now they do a degree,” Ede says. “Radiographers – they used to do a diploma and now if you want to specialise in ultrasound or MRI you need a postgraduate qualification. Over time it’s been a gradual shift.”

The international student market is a lucrative one, and one largely dominated by universities and private providers like language schools – the polytechnics now want in on more of the action. WelTec’s Linda Sissons says one goal of the six institutions banding together is to present a united front to the international market.

“Other countries and other agencies would much rather work with a consortium of providers than with one after another,” she says.

Some have already made more progress than others; Mark Flowers spoke to IN-Business at Auckland Airport before he flew out to Beijing on a 10-day trip to cement current relationships and look into new projects.

Sissons reiterates collaboration is the key to their success in Asia.

 “We won’t succeed unless we go out together, go out as metros united or New Zealand united, not one by one,” she says.