Editorial

By Matt Cooney, June 27, 2008 @ 12:36 pm

A recent visitor to the Idealog offices looked at a draft of our cover with disbelief. “Kevin bloody Roberts!” he cried. “You’ve bought into the myth!”

Well, maybe … but as someone who doesn’t believe in the fabled Kiwi Knocking Machine, I can’t help but notice how quick we are to give Roberts a good knocking. Sure, his books have a bit too much love and not enough substance, and he sometimes seizes on trends that we’ve heard before. But you don’t spend over a decade at the helm of Saatchi & Saatchi worldwide without delivering the goods. Roberts is curious, keen, opinionated and, frankly, irrepressible.

Do we knock him because he’s ours? Roberts still lives here, considers himself a Kiwi, frequently lends a hand to up-and-coming New Zealanders and he’s generous in his praise of this country and its people. He keeps on doing his thing and doesn’t let a bit of criticism get in his way. Maybe he’s less the arriviste and more the way we like to think of ourselves: the plucky little Kiwi battler, done good. Find out on page 58.

Plenty of battling Kiwi business people can take heart from his example, but we have good news for them too—they should be left alone. That’s the conclusion of Ed Vos, a Waikato University academic who has studied over 600 small and medium-sized Kiwi companies. The owners of these SMEs are less interested in being rich than in being happy, says Vos, and that’s all right with him. They don’t go into debt to fund huge growth plans, and so they’re less risky ventures than more ambitious firms or public companies that are driven to make an ever-larger profit. “The fact that New Zealand is a country of SMEs warms my heart,” Vos tells Mike Booker on page 64.

It might also be more profitable, if James Hurman is right. He reckons that the mad pursuit of bigger earnings is, by definition, unsustainable—for the planet and for the companies. We’re headed for a change in focus, he argues on page 67—and that might bode well for New Zealand.

We’ll wait and see, but we’ll still take a leaf out of Roberts’ book. His greatest strength might be his ability to network—and, with a few exceptions, might be New Zealanders’ greatest business liability. So while I’ll pass on tucking into bacon-and-egg ice cream with Stephen Jones, I still admire Roberts’ ability to get himself and his message out there. Happily, Vos says it’s also connectedness that is the best trait of small companies. Perhaps we just need to join the dots.