John Allen speaks without notes, cuecards, prompts or pauses, and when he speaks, people listen. He has headed NZ Post Group for six years, and he helped start Kiwibank and Datamail and forged relationships with German giant Deutsche Post. While he spoke, NADINE ISLER listened.

“Creativity is at the heart of what this city is, and what this ?city can be,” intones John Allen. We are talking about Wellington and its endeavour to be the nation’s ‘Creative Capital’. What is that? What does it look like? “Creativity isn’t simply about having symposiums of learned persons talking about how to create a future for the city. It is about building a city in which people who are creative want to live.”
If we can attract those people here, Allen says, we will drive the city forward in a way that years of academic or business thinking or journalistic endeavour will not.

But Allen quickly shoots down the notion that we are “better” than Auckland, calling it an “easy parochial mistake to make”. “There are some advantages Wellington has that enables us to be a laboratory for this approach, more easily perhaps than other parts of the country. We are a relatively small, geographically confined community, so it’s one which is easily accessible to lots of people. We have very strong tertiary education institutions and good policy and research capability as a consequence of being part of government.”

Allen is positive about what is already happening in Wellington. “We are doing a lot of things very well. I’m not one of those that looks at the city and says, ‘Oh my God, this place is a disaster, let’s knock it down and start again.’ The ones that think like that, they’re wrong and need to get out and about more.

“I’ve mentioned education and policy and all those things, but one of the other great enablers is the diversity of the communities that we are building here. Wellington, I think, has avoided the trap of building dated communities where certain types of people are in this place and certain other types are in this place. In our town planning we’ve been much better at bringing lots of different types of people together. And that’s important, because it’s out of that sort of diversity and difference that you create those conversations from which creativity is born.”

S?o what do we do about those people who??inevitably aren’t as positive about things as Allen is? “I think we have to get far more robust in debating with those who want to hold us back. Because there are undoubtedly people who think growth is bad, people who would rather we moved ourselves progressively backwards to the 1950s and had a simpler lifestyle – I understand those views, but I think those views are wrong.
“But, I do think it’s really important that people engage in the debate about those views – ?because I think that is what’s constraining the city rather than a lack of vision, or a lack of understanding of what’s needed to take us forward. We want to be a noisy, dynamic, disagreeing, colourful community, because that’s the stuff that gets the creativity at the outset, not from some advertising slogan. I’m big on debate, big on disagreement, big on different ideas.
“All that I’m saying is that, rather than sitting back and allowing a very small number in our community to frame the future, I think it’s really important that everybody get involved in that discussion, because after all, it’s going to define who we are, and how we live. It frustrates me when you have local body elections and virtually nobody votes. It shouldn’t be that way. People should have opinions about how their city develops. It’s important.”

And who should be having the opinions, exactly? “Sometimes I think in the talking about public policy, politics and local body authority things, we forget about the very people who are in the middle of it all, doing stuff. I suppose from my point of view what’ll often happen is we’ll have a business or political forum to talk about creativity. We bring all these people together and they all talk, but we don’t bring the artists, the people actually doing this creative stuff.

“I’m a great believer that at the heart of a creative strategy has to be the recognition and celebration and support for people who are themselves creative.”
At the recent 7?x?7 series of speeches, Allen spoke about the Pacific influence on New Zealand. He has no time for people who are negative about that either. “You will get people who say, as we’ve seen in some headlines recently, that the cultural and ethnic diversity within our country is a drag on performance. I take completely the opposite view. I think New Zealand has been hugely enriched by our Maori foundations and the contribution made by Pacific peoples to this place has been enriching as well as has the arrival of people from China, Laos, South-East Asia, South Africa?.?.?. I think as a consequence of the different world views and perspectives that those people bring, we are a much richer community.”

He is also known to have strong views on learning Maori. “I don’t think you can be a Kiwi unless you can speak some Maori. I think people who pretend to be Kiwis and then close their minds and eyes to Maori culture are exactly that – pretending. Those sorts of Kiwis I don’t think can make a lasting contribution to this country. It is about respect, it is about understanding the foundations of our culture and our society, it’s about recognising that Maoridom, having been marginalised for so long, actually now stands in a position to make a significant contribution.
“I’ve made mistakes speaking Maori in all kinds of organisations. I forgot my mihi speaking at Turangawaewae at the 150th anniversary of the Kingitanga movement, in front of King Tuheitia and all of the assembled Maori. But people are very forgiving if you sincerely make the effort.”
It goes broader than just learning Maori though. “I have a very strong view that enabling Maori and getting Maoridom to achieve to its potential will make more difference to the future of this country than just about any other thing we could do. We can give tax breaks to returning New Zealanders, and businesses coming to New Zealand, but unless we are actually allowing our people that are here to achieve their potential, then I think all of that is going to be, at best, bandaid solutions. And at worst, probably useless.”
The ubiquitous ‘PC’ label is nonsense, Allen says. “Generally you’ll find that the people who take that approach to issues of Maoridom and its future are actually hiding behind that assertion of PC-ness for other difficulties that they have with the notion. I think that’s very narrow, very myopic, and frankly very wrong.”

Allen isn’t a big worrier. He calls himself a natural optimist and speaks often of the opportunities open to the country. But is there anything he worries about, regarding our future?
“I think that, as a country, we tend to focus on the negative not the positive, to depression rather than optimism, and we tend not to really understand what the potential available to us is. If I worry, it tends to be about attitudinal constraints in this country. And there is a whole range of those. I don’t know that New Zealanders actually think that growth is a good thing, and I think that attitude is an issue. And I also think we are desperately risk-averse. We see that in all kinds of ways in business, I suppose the most obvious way is you see New Zealanders shooting down people who take risks and fail, and we get this ridiculous assassination of people who’ve failed, which is hardly the sort of attitude you need to enhance growth. So I focus on the attitude side, rather than the sorts of things you read about most in the business press – balance of payments, or the credit crisis. I think, let’s understand what is holding us back, and deal with the mindset, because that will enable us to make better progress.”

As co-chair of the Australia New Zealand Leadership Forum, Allen strongly believes in developing relationships with Australia. So why does he think we aren’t doing it effectively?
“You go into board rooms around New Zealand and you talk about doing something in Australia, and what you get is a litany from senior grey-haired board-type people and they’ll tell you about AAPT, Ansett, and The Warehouse, they’ll give you chapter and verse on all the reasons it can’t be done. They won’t talk to you about Mainfreight, Datacom or Les Mills, or any of the businesses that are actually doing hugely well in Australia. That sort of risk-averse attitude is gutless really. I mean, you wouldn’t have thought – the pioneering spirit of New Zealanders! We’re not meant to be like that.”

It’s not all bad. “There are plenty of examples of heroic independent entrepreneurs within New Zealand – people who have done it with No 8 wire and all those sorts of things, all I think is the genes just haven’t carried through to this generation. Somehow we’ve managed to deaden or stultify people – or terrify them? – I’m not sure, or maybe just make them complacent through our own success so they don’t feel the need to take those risks. And I think that the way in which we’ve treated people that have taken risks and failed, comes at a considerable cost for our business community.”

Allen will have been in his current role for six years in June. Which he thinks is an “awfully long time in a role like this. These sorts of roles are ideas and energy roles, and you don’t want to stay so long that they are wheeling you out saying ‘let’s get rid of him’. Six years has been a good length of time, and an exciting journey.” But he gives nothing away about where he might be heading next.

I ask what he enjoys most about his job. He identifies the people factor and being able to recognise people in the workplace who can be pushed to take wider responsibilities. “I find it really interesting, for example, to identify a person who is doing a relatively routine job in one of our mail centres, who, when you get talking, in their wider life is acting as a leader in their church community, in their sports club or whatever, they just haven’t brought that talent into the workplace, or we haven’t seen and unlocked it.”

Another of his loves is strategy. “One of the things we’ve been able to do here which is a real privilege is we’ve been able to model some of the stuff I’m talking about. We have been able to take businesses into Australia despite all the doubts. We have been able to take some risks, like starting a new bank, though everyone told us it couldn’t possibly be done, it was a dog, it wasn’t ever going to work.”
I wonder if this doubt was frustrating to come up against, and perhaps cause for satisfaction when given the chance to prove wrong? “What I find frustrating is the New Zealander’s natural default setting is that it can’t be done and it’s too risky. Yes, there’s is a certain amount of enjoyment in proving people wrong, but I try not to get too excited about that because, to be honest, the next risk we take might not be successful.”

But back to what he loves about the job. “Another of the great benefits of being in a company such as this is that I can get out around the country a lot. And when I’m in those communities, it’s not people who are in glass towers who earn squillions of dollars, it’s not big business people. Our people are ordinary kiwis and they’re doing the stuff that ordinary kiwis are focused on. So you have conversations at a much more grassroots level than I suspect some of the people who engage at the intellectual level of this discussion ever do.

“And the third thing I love about this job is that this role gives me access to lots of people. Now, I’ve mentioned the people at the grassroots level, but it’s also a great privilege to be able to talk with the leaders across our community and New Zealand. Many different types of leaders, people who are in all kinds of different roles, who all have ambitions, all have passions, hopes, aspirations for this country – I might not agree with everything they say, but it is a great privilege to engage with those people. So in the end it comes back to the people things and the thinking things and the ideas things. And they’re the things that motivate me.”