Agenda 2011

By The Editors, January 22, 2007 @ 1 am

Idealog January/February 2007, page 56. Photograph by Toaki Okano/Croydon Studios

The Rugby World Cup can supercharge our creative economy and put New Zealand on global display. Here’s how

We don’t take up much space really, do we? New Zealand’s footprint on the world is small, about one-twenty-eighth that of Australia, one-thirty-fifth of China. They don’t print many column inches in The Times or Le Monde about life down here. Most Americans could be forgiven for thinking we’re part of Canada. (Temuera Morrison was once described as Star Wars’ most successful Mexican actor.)

So when an opportunity arrives to star on the world stage— to create both the national infrastructure to improve the quality of our lives and the Kiwi brand we need to spread the Enzed message to an eager planet—it’s critical that our best side is on show.

The 2011 Rugby World Cup is that opportunity. A report prepared for the New Zealand Rugby Union predicts our GDP will get a $500 million boost from the cup. Well, maybe it will, and maybe not. But raw dollar figures can’t tell the full story of how we can use the event to build the society we want here and the buzz we want abroad. South Africa used the World Cup to start reconciling a nation. Surely we can build some infrastructure and throw a decent party.

The model? Barcelona. The Mediterranean city of 1.6 million has used events to both revitalise and advertise itself. For the 1992 Olympics, Barcelona expanded its airport, transformed its waterfront, built a system of ring roads and used its new profile to become one of the most popular tourism destinations in Europe. At the time it was a new strategy.

In 2002 a delegation from Seattle visited Spain to learn how Barcelona had managed such an ambitious programme. Two factors stood out:

Consensus and commitment. Barcelonans got behind the development programme and expected it to benefit the whole region. They all worked together—including local and regional politicians, unions and business leaders—to ensure that the games would be a success and all Barcelonans would benefit. “We were pursuing not the games, but the change of the city,” Barcelona’s then-mayor, Joan Clos, told the visiting Americans.

Cultural identity. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia and has a strong regional awareness; most of its citizens speak Catalan and most support independence from Spain. They want their city and province to prosper and to have a global profile.

The Rugby World Cup wasn’t awarded to one city. It was awarded to New Zealand. Photographic montage by Bruce Nicholson

So how is New Zealand doing? If Barcelona is an honours student, then our report card says “can do better”. But the good news is that we have time to prepare for 2011 and the strategies that worked in Barcelona can also be made to work here.

On these pages, we’ve asked some of New Zealand’s sharpest thinkers to lay out their vision of New Zealand in 2011. They’re ambitious and optimistic—which is exactly the kind of planning we need. If the plans are worthwhile then people will back them.

We have a vision for our cultural identity, too. New Zealand is home to four million people on our own in the South Pacific: our nationhood isn’t a political creation or a statement of ethnicity; it’s defined by geography, distance and society. So just what is it that makes a New Zealander? Jake Pearce has researched what’s special about Kiwis and has a new message for us to tell the world.

Barcelona is over 2,000 years old and its leaders think about the long-term. Architect Antoni Gaudi began designing the Sagrada Familia church in 1883 and worked on the project for over 40 years. They’re still working on it today and hope to have it finished by 2026, the 100-year anniversary of Gaudi’s death. It’s not a planning style that Trevor Mallard would eagerly adopt.

New Zealand is not Barcelona and we can get the job done by 2011. It’s up to us how we capitalise on the Cup. But if you haven’t already worked out your strategy for 2011, then it’s time to start planning.

It’s time to train the builders of tomorrow’s web. Photograph by Stephen Langdon

The view from the after-match

Nathan Torkington on the net

Good morning, New Zealand! As your hangovers clear, the Fire Service puts out the last of the celebratory firework-related blazes and groundsmen pick up the final plastic Tui bottle from Haemorrhoid Cushion Park, it’s clear the only thing that really worked in the Rugby World Cup was the Internet.

Dame Theresa deserves her OBE for her role in the 2008 decoupling of Telecom’s broadband business. We could webcast the games only because of the tremendous increase in speed from competition. Over half a million New Zealand houses watched the games online via TVNZ’s YouTube Live channel, and the infrastructure held up. Unlike the CBD’s—we wish those of you in downtown Auckland a speedy return to stable power and moving traffic.

The government found the political pressure for the Telecom separation only through the legion of broadband-hungry creatives unleashed by Steve Maharey’s curriculum reform around creativity with computers: programming, design, entrepreneurship. History may remember him for his role in the abortive ‘Chardonnay Coup’, but future Internet millionaires will remember him as the fairy godfather of the New Zealand Internet industry.

Broadband gave us more than the Cup, obviously. The mini-bubble in 2008 was a highlight, with Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch spawning Internet startups as fast as Google, Yahoo!, AOL, FairFox and Microsoft could buy them. Now, even though the economic climate is more sober, software has still overtaken forestry as an export industry.

Teens who grew up on MySpace, Skype and incessant text messaging are now the rising stars in finance, farming, films and software. They brought the web into everyday life by expecting everything to be as easy as Trade Me. Skype and Web 2.0 business applications let workers avoid the seemingly-gridlocked CBDs. Now more business happens online than off.

So as the country rebuilds after the riots, let us give thanks for the Internet that still works. It’s as though the Government that signed us up to host the Rugby World Cup realised the roads were always going to be a disaster and thought: the first thing to do is to train the builders of tomorrow’s web.

A resource worth keeping: mountain-biking in the Bay of Plenty. Photograph by Graeme Murray

It’s not easy being green

Rod Oram on sustainability

Sustainability isn’t just a green buzzword. Today, there are three areas where we’re struggling.

Economically: we’re fast losing our competitiveness in the commodities that dominate our exports; our current account deficit equals ten percent of GDP; and our households are accumulating net debt at the fastest rate in the OECD.

Environmentally: our urban lifestyles and rural farming practices are putting unprecedented pressure on our natural resources. Our clean, green image is a sham that our foreign competitors are starting to ruthlessly expose.

Socially: we’re still struggling to understand what it means to be New Zealanders, each in our own way, as Maori, Pakeha, Pacific Islanders, Asians, Indians … to name some of the roots of our nationhood.

We can’t achieve sustainability by 2011. The job’s too big. But we could make some headway—chart our potential, set some strategies and start to reap some rewards.

This isn’t a task for government or any other unwieldy, detached organisation. It’s a challenge for us all: as individuals, as communities, as companies, as industries.

Here are some thoughts to help along the way:

We must find the uniquely right New Zealand approach to sustainability, answers that are true to who we are as peoples, what this country is physically and where we are in this distant part of the world.
We must be ourselves, not a pale imitation of other countries.
We must be global citizens, aware of and responsible about the world’s needs.
By choosing the right drivers, we can rapidly achieve big changes.

Where to start? Here’s a first step: at home and work, cut both petrol and electricity consumption by five percent a year—every year.

Che Fu photograph by Simon Young

Telling tales

Jason Smith on talent

Travelling along a rural highway one fine day in 2011, between two matches of the RWC, your videophone pops up with a message that this particular spot is the site of an important historic event. On the screen a video overlays the landscape you’re passing with images of that historic event. Heck, for kicks you can even have fellow-travellers film you getting down and dirty placed in that scene, and then email it to your friends missing out back at home.

Edgy, gritty and blurring the lines between imagination and reality, these experiences will bring authentic New Zealand adventures alive for travellers more than any guidebook (or movie location book).

Kiwi designers of the creative economy will neatly make the link between cutting-edge gaming smarts, videophone technology and the wide-open spaces of the New Zealand landscape. Holographic images and digital overlays of the existing landscape will tell our stories in compelling and clever ways. Superimposed digital images of action and history will be in the hands of each traveller, beamed to mobile phones. This will interpret our place in fresh, young, imagination-rich ways, drawing multiple links between landscape and the creative economy.

Graphic designers across the country will be encouraged to showcase their creative talents, adding content for locations close to home. The effect of this will be to simultaneously show our visitors—and their friends everywhere else in the world—that all over New Zealand there is blisteringly hot creative talent which is smart and connected, and that anywhere here is a smart place to live, work, play, create and invest. A portal about careers in our creative economy will make it easy for the talented to come on down. And New Zealand music will capture will capture a global audience with its unique mix of Pacific roots and club rhythms.

Where to start? Let’s encourage collaboration on a Wikipedia-style version of the Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand, adding tourism planners, gaming experts, software hotshots and telcos. The phrase ‘I’ve been everywhere, man’ will have a whole new meaning in the fourth dimension.

Stock yards at Kumeu. Photograph by Alistair Guthrie

Natural business

Jude Hooson on trade

The defining issue for New Zealand’s economic future is our ability to apply our best minds and creative talents to our environment. Eighty million years of isolation means that we have a unique ecology and, combined with issues of sustainability and climate change, our challenges are unlike those of other countries.

For many years we’ve successfully traded off our clean, green, ‘100% pure’ image. What has been a great marketing asset will potentially become our Achilles’ heel with the global angst regarding the consequences of climate change. In highly competitive, protective global markets, the media spotlight on issues of food miles and dirty travelling is a welcome excuse to buy local and potentially strikes at the very pillars of New Zealand trade—agribusiness and tourism.

We have a deeply biological economy with 70 percent of our exports traceable back to industries of land-based innovation. The bottom-line driver of our wellbeing and competitive advantage is our ability to make nature work for us and land-based innovation is our version of Finland’s Nokia story.

Five trade considerations:

Global imperatives around climate change will not only mandate that we trade closer to home, but also open up new export opportunities like water and biofuel crops.
Trade will have a new ‘orient-ation’ as we leverage our existing relationship with Japan and explore the emerging opportunities in China and India.
Brands with global interest will carry the new New Zealand value of sophisticated simplicity.
To become a destination (not a transit lounge) and claim global-city status, Auckland will embrace its unique vibrancy as the South Pacific Capital of the World
As workforces become more globalised we’ll develop smarter strategies with our ‘missing men’, ‘KiwiAsians’ and ‘expats/inpats’ as bridge-builders to critical markets.

Mass market at the Big Day Out

Come together

Rod Oram on the economy

Change happens fast when you work at it. Our companies and our country could be bigger, better and bolder by 2011—if we want them to be.

The world economy is offering us abundant opportunities to earn a better living, to be wealthier in economic and social terms. The only thing holding us back is our relative lack of ambition. It seems so hard. Almost all of us settle for easy, tiny pickings at home.

Yes, it’s tough being out in the world. But a fast-growing cohort of highly entrepreneurial companies—like Obo, Zespri, Weta Digital and Weta Workshops—is showing us how to do it. They’re pioneering new business models and skills for devising brilliant products and services, collaborating with whoever they need, and connecting with customers.

If more of us get excited and ambitious about these opportunities, New Zealand will be quite different by 2011. Overseas earnings from exports and investment could be, say, 50 percent larger; our economy could be 30 percent bigger; our incomes 25 percent fatter; and we could be vastly more confident and capable.

Sounds impossible? Take heart from Gary Hamel, the most insightful business academic on strategy. He says the best companies don’t defend their past. They make their future. They achieve rapid, revolutionary change by taking lightning-quick, small steps towards their big strategic goals. (Hamel’s 2003 Harvard Business Review essay, ‘The Quest for Resilience’, is downloadable for just US$6.)

All it takes is the first step: get your colleagues together for a half-day. Stand in the future. Imagine it is 2011. What does the world look like for you and your industry? What does your company look like? Be bold, be brave.
Then backcast. Figure out how you got there, what steps you took, what skills and resources you acquired from that moment in 2006 when you committed yourselves to making your contribution to building the new New Zealand.

And don’t creep. Leap!

The economy on the move in Christchurch. Photograph by David Baird/The Studio 75

Free the state

Mark Weldon on investment

We’re already seeing a huge growth in ambition and confidence in young entrepreneurs, especially in technology and marketing companies like Phitek and 42 Below. By 2011 I expect to see these entrepreneurs running global companies with their headquarters located in New Zealand but making use of China as a manufacturing centre. These companies will have scale and will spawn other smaller companies as subsidiaries.

We’ll see two types of companies on the NZX—ones that are domestically-focused with traditional price-to-earnings multiples (PEs) and a growing number (like Pumpkin Patch or Rakon) that have PEs in line with the best in the US. They’ll be valued not so much for what they produce but for their brands, technology and designs. I expect the SciTech Index to quintuple by 2011.

My dream for 2011? That the State-Owned Enterprises, which account for 16 percent of our GDP, will be freed to pursue export earnings. Take the power companies like Meridian or Mighty River—they have huge management talent, technology and engineering intelligence. Why not let them seek capital through listing on the exchange, and use it to expand internationally into places like Indonesia and Chile? Sustainable energy production and management are in huge demand globally. New Zealand has strong capability in both.

Originally published in Idealog #7, page 56