The world will never again be as we knew it before the global financial crisis. We teetered on the edge of precipice, staring into the chasm of the total failure of the world’s financial systems. Globally we have been forced to mature, and we learned some hard lessons – in banking, in ethics and about greed.
It has taught us that even in this country, far from the world’s wealth centres, we must be constantly examining our economy, our ethics, our drive and our innovation to ensure we prosper and that we can compete in this new world.
These pages aren’t just about just group of top-performing companies that are the envy of other businesses they are also record of an incredibly smart and powerful group of individuals who hold the future of New Zealand in their hands.
As we gather all these people in one room for night of celebration and networking, we are also acknowledging the forces that help us survive in this new world of business.
Over our series of six themes, we’ve looked at this new environment and here’s what we found:
Leadership: We’ve learned that even though we’re busier than ever, the best bosses are first of all leaders of people, then storytellers, role-models for the behaviour they want to see, transparent, honest and ethical.
Banking: We’ve discovered that banking is going back to the people, with resurgence in neighbourhood banks and an emphasis on building relationships and forming networks.
Technology: We’ve learned that all of life is conversation. If we want to talk to our customers and our contacts, we have to learn new, bold ways of talking through technology, using social media like Facebook, Twitter, blogs and Linked In.
Brands: As the consumers of this new world become more sophisticated and cynical, brands need to work harder and in different ways. Our search for New Zealand’s Most Reputable Organisations discovered that ethical behaviour and honesty are key attributes to give brand standing among its peers.
The environment: New Zealand has cultivated an image of this country as clean and green, so why are we not at the forefront of the cleantech revolution?
Innovation: “We punch above our weight but the rest of the world isn’t waiting for us to turn up. We’ve got to get out there.” – Kensington Swan chairman, Clayton Kimpton.
In this, the final chapter in this year’s Top 200 campaign, we asked leading New Zealanders to peek into the country’s future.
Leadership
Rt Hon John Key, Prime Minister
One of the best parts of my job as Prime Minister is travelling throughout the country, and meeting all sorts of people doing extraordinary things. They make me optimistic for our country’s future.
During last year’s global economic recession, entrepreneurs, businesses, and people in our communities showed excellent leadership. I would like to thank all of you who went the extra mile to help others get through.
It proves just what New Zealanders can achieve if we set our minds to it. We are gritty little country of people who dig deep when the going gets tough and work together.
As Prime Minister, I worked hard to lead New Zealand through the recession. New Zealanders needed strong economic leadership, and that is what the National-led Government delivered.
Our economy is recovering now, but the need for strong leadership is no less than it was year ago. That’s why my team is working hard to build on the recovery of the economy.
There’s no better time than now to unleash your potential as leader and an entrepreneur. So I encourage you to get out there, strive for excellence, and find the leader within.
Banking
Dr Alan Bollard, Reserve Bank Governor
Banking in New Zealand has been traditional in focus and this will always be cornerstone of the New Zealand economy.
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) taught Northern Hemisphere banks lessons about problems with risk, governance and capital quality; it taught us more about the fragility of funding, hence our new liquidity policy. It has worked well having Australian-owned banks through the GFC, but Australian domination does bring its own challenges.
Basel III (new rules that require banks to hold top-quality capital totalling seven percent of their risk-bearing assets) still has some way to go to sort out issues, and then we will decide what is relevant for New Zealand.
The CUBS (Credit Unions and Building Societies) have come through the crisis in reasonable shape due to conservative lending and loyal customers. But the deposit-taking finance company sector is tiny and mess, with major reconstruction and re-building of balance sheets ahead. Some of these companies previously provided high-risk equity-type funding for speculative property development. To meet this need in the future, we are starting to see securitisation and other funding forms.
I believe we won’t achieve full economic recovery until the private sector takes over as an engine of growth and we start to see moderate growth in credit.
Ultimately the financial system is also reflection of our national savings and consumption imbalance. More saving could mean less foreign funding, less vulnerability, and higher New Zealand equity.
Technology
Rod Drury, CEO, Xero
I think New Zealanders are very aware of technology – what’s coming, and what’s new on Google and Facebook makes the papers the same day. But in terms of accessibility, we’re seeing more and more stuff that’s not available to us; for example we missed the Kindle – it just passed us by – and there are lot of applications we’re seeing now that we just can’t access. iTunes in the Cloud is about to arrive in the US, but we won’t be able to use it here and the new Skype multi-party video conferencing, Skype 5, doesn’t really work in New Zealand.
I’m very concerned about this growing digital divide. It’s becoming obvious that the way that we’re doing business isn’t changing to the same extent as companies overseas that are operating in the same business are changing, and it will have an impact.
The way to fix this is international broadband. We need to put New Zealanders on the same platform as the US.
There are some great things coming in the future: We’re starting to see technological changes that I’m excited about, like the Android information ‘widget’ that will let you see all the bits of information you need in your personal and professional life in one place. What we’ve seeing with Android and Windows 7 is more information-centric than ever before, with personal information dashboard that has the weather, time, what the latest tweets are, RSS, and even my office CRM.
The next big thing will be near field communications which will become payment system; just touch your phone to an EFTPOS terminal – that’s the next big thing. Changes to the banking system are quite long way ahead and will improve with high penetration of mobile phones.
Brands
Sir Stephen Tindall, The Warehouse founder
What makes successful brand in my opinion? brand is not brand without huge amount of behind-the-scenes activity. When we started The Warehouse the logo said The Warehouse, Where Everyone Gets Bargain. This meant nothing until we started delivering on that promise.
It takes time to build successful brand. Securing good reputation is lot of hard work. It comes from good idea transformed into strategy and business plan and then excellent execution to ensure you deliver the promise. To me the word “brand” equals reputation. People buy either product or service, not brand.
However they do recognise either good or poor product or service through memory recall by recognising the brand name. We’ve seen how the brand Sanlu was destroyed over night when number of Chinese babies died and the health of hundreds of thousands was severely jeopardised. As result the reputation of that company was destroyed along with its brand.
To me another interesting
