Where the big bosses expect the competitive corporate world to head

Christopher Luxon. Photo / Nick Reed

Christopher Luxon, Air New Zealand

We need to grow if we are to have the money, people and technology to invest in better communities, more skilled people, alternative energies to replace carbon, greater biodiversity and product innovation. As a business, we do not have the luxury of choice, we cannot choose between growth and sustainability - we have to have both. Thus we need to build new business models that will enable responsible and sustainable growth.

David McLean, Westpac New Zealand

One of the things we need to do is change the mindset from thinking that we know everything and can do everything internally. We need to accept the fact that a better outcome might result from partnering. Technology increasingly is going to transfer more and more power to the consumer. There will be better artificial intelligence, better use of data, people will have a clearer understanding of what they are getting and they will know whether it is the best deal in the market or not.

Mike Bennetts, Z Energy

Mike Bennetts.

Increasingly, employees will choose to work for companies because they have a decent purpose to them, rather than they want to make some money, pay off their student loan or advance their careers. As opposed to making the next widget or app, they are out to change the world. Essentially your employees are just another version of your consumer. I think the consumer is the new regulator. Consumers can respond to good and bad things ... which will force companies to change - much quicker than a parliamentary process or even a regulatory process.

Craig Olsen, IAG

We do practical things around how we make your world a safer place. If you are really extending "we help make your world a safer place", it's not just about having an insurance product for them. I think we have to be very careful in business that we don't get so many metrics that it makes things more confusing.

Chris Quin, Foodstuffs North Island

One of the beautiful things about being a co-op and not a listed company is you can achieve both profitable growth and success in meeting wider stakeholder expectations. The difference for me, in a corporate, is the managers are looking up the chain at their career, and in our model they are only looking down into their store asking how do I get more customers?

Michael Daniell, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare

Healthcare expenditure has grown over the past 20 to 30 years. This is partly due to improving technology, but also largely due to the ageing demographic. So this creates big opportunity, but also creates a threat of having a very strong desire to control the growth in healthcare costs. Our focus has been on developing technology that improves the effective-ness and efficiency of care, reducing labour costs and the cost to systems.