Addressing business audience at the World Class New Zealand Inspire Auckland event, Falkenstein said we can transform the country through adopting different ways of thinking.
Currently chief executive of Red Eagle Corporation, Falkenstein founded the Just Water company in 1989 and has been instrumental in setting up the $10 million AUT Venture Fund encouraging students to start business ventures.
He was the driving force behind the establishment of the Onehunga High Business School, the country’s first dedicated business school at secondary level, and helped introduce business studies to the national curriculum.
“Old thinking is about analysis, truth, logic and the past,” he said at Inspire. “Often we are locked in to an old pattern and can only see what has been… and only analyse what has [already] happened.
“New thinking is about the future, perceptions, intuition, and new ideas, possibilities and vision.”
Falkenstein is firm believer in the positive power of experiential learning and the economic benefits that it can bring to both individuals and the nation.
He told the Inspire business audience that, in Germany 60 percent of students at age 15 go to trade school, rather than take an educational pathway to university. The trade school option provides them with real-life skills, company sponsorship and small token wage.
“Here in New Zealand we want to train everyone to become what they call ‘intelligent” but they’re not necessarily intelligent for the real world,” he said.
“When I was three year old, pen could be the Sky Tower, sword, train… anything that I wanted it to be. We are born new thinkers. But what happens? We start school which is all about facts, analysing problems and problem solving. It’s all old thinking. We go to school and unlearn all our new thinking for the next 15 years.
“We’re born new thinkers and we need to get back to new thinking.”
• For who’s who pics from the World Class New Zealand Inspire Auckland event, see NZ Management magazine’s July edition.
