Leaders to chart NZ path

By FRAN O'SULLIVAN

New Zealanders' spirits soared as Team New Zealand took the America's Cup for the first time in 1995.

We felt great pride in Sir Peter Blake, his team and in ourselves.

Our hearts lifted again when Sir Peter and the team successfully defended the cup, focusing world attention on our ability to turn great ideas into world-beating yachts.

As Dean Barker seeks to repeat that stellar performance on Auckland's Hauraki Gulf this week, 450 New Zealand leaders will face their own leadership test. At a three day Leadership Forum beginning tomorrow, leaders from business, politics, education, community interests and unions will confront major challenges facing New Zealand,

There are high expectations for the Leadership Forum (not just those of the promoters).

A Herald/Digipoll out today isolates the necessity to "lift leadership aspirations for all New Zealanders to succeed" as the single most important issue the leaders must tackle at this conference.

Just as Sir Peter held himself up as a role model -- and Barker now does with his own crew -- the public is looking to leaders to demonstrate what they themselves are doing to lift New Zealand's overall performance.

Those surveyed want Forum participants to tackle how to produce a growth strategy for New Zealand rather than simply pressure the Government to produce plans.

Coming in a year in which New Zealand celebrates another great leadership feat, the 50th anniversary of the Sir Edmund Hillary's ascent of Mt Everest, the message could not be more apposite.

The forum has three broad themes: Economic growth, knowledge and community.

But leadership is common to each and is the overarching theme for Knowledge Wave 2003.

The Forum may lack the path-breaking cachet of the 2001 Catching the Knowledge Wave conference. That talkfest brought together international political leaders, Nobel Prize winners, educational, political and business leaders to set the scene for the creation of a "partnership" to work in New Zealand's long-term interests.

Eighteen months later there is little real confidence that a growth strategy has subsequently been put in place to ensure New Zealand rejoins the top ranks of the world's richest nations.

New Zealanders are now less anxious to leave the country: September 11 and Iraq have changed the external landscape. They are also more open to exploring a closer relationship with our nearest neighbour Australia.

But fundamental change is still needed to lift New Zealand's overall national performance. That requires leadership action.

An impressive array of international speakers has been assembled by the Knowledge Wave Trust and the University of Auckland. Prime Minister Helen Clark will define the leadership challenge from her perspective. University of Auckland vice-chancellor John Hood, Sir Hugh Kawharu of Ngati Whatua o Orakei and Team New Zealand CEO Ross Blackman will also share their insights.

But much of the interest will centre on the perspectives that the international cast will bring, particularly Stanford University's Paul Romer's New Growth Theory which shows that economic growth is not spurred by simply employing more labour and capital to make more products -- but from new ideas: technological progress.

Romer famously draws on the simple paper coffee cup to illustrate how his theory divides the world into "ideas" and "things".

Says Romer: "The paper that makes up the cup in the coffee shop is a thing. The insight that you could design small, medium and large cups so they all use the same size lid -- that's an idea. The critical difference is that only one person can use a given amount of paper. Ideas can be used by many people at the same time."

The one-size-fits all lid for the small/medium/large cup is an idea that makes a company money over and over again. That's economic growth.

Distinguished international journalist Bill Emmott, author of "20:21 Vision: Twentieth Century Lessons for the Twenty-first Century", will complement Romer's analysis. As editor of The Economist for the past decade, Emmott is credited with putting the weekly viewspaper "up there with top British brands such as the Beatles, the BBC, the Royal family and Scotch".

At a time when growing United States hegemony raises international unease, particularly on Iraq, Emmott takes a position of "paranoid optimism". He suggests that American predominance and the spread of democratic capital can persist in the face of growing opposition.

"Whatever the anti-American noise around the reality is that America's pre-eminence is basically assured. America's dominance in world affairs is contingent on its willinessnes to lead."

A Herald survey of opinion among 120 top chief executives and company chairman late last year reported a widely shared view that the government-business dialogue was not delivering results.

The answer may be to widen the dialogue so that "creative thinkers" play a bigger role. Richard Florida, Director of the Centre for Economic Development in Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, is typecast as a "poster-boy academic".

"Hot at the moment" say forum promoters. So hot in fact that Auckland City Mayor John Banks is getting Florida up to his council chambers tomorrow for a special session on how to turn New Zealand's biggest city into a creative haven like San Fransisco.

Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Every Life" rocketed up US best seller lists.

Public policy books might seem a turnoff, but his contention that cities will thrive if they develop fun places to attract creative people with good coffee, arts, music and nightlife, instead of underwriting big-box retailers, subsidising down-town malls, recruiting call centres and squandering taxpayer dollars on extravagant stadium complexes will challenge current New Zealand thinking.

Robert Putnam has another answer to the growth conundrum. The Professor of Public Policy from Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government has focused on what he calls America's declining social capital.

Putnam argues that economic growth has been negatively impacted by the decline of community participation in areas ranging from membership of baseball teams, hosting dinner parties, parent teacher groups, volunteer organisations and churches in favour of what he calls "bowling alone".

His research shows that in a range of crucial areas such as education, urban poverty unemployment, public heatlh and the control of drug and crime abuse the most successful outcomes occur in civically engaged communities.

Ironically, while Putnam blames the fixation with television, the PC and internet as contributing to the bowling alone syndrome, successful communities are now being built online with e-volunteers banding together to solve social issues.

Then there is Juan Enriquez-Cabot. an internationally renowned thinker on how genomic and other forces are changing the future.

Enriquez-Cabot is the director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School. A frequent speaker at major international conferences, he is revered both by other futurists and biotech pioneers.

He argues that genetics will be the dominant language of this century and that those countries and individuals that remain illiterate about what is happening will miss out on what is rapidly becoming the greatest single driver of the global economy.

Dr Vincent Cerf, the "father of the internet", who is currently working on an interplanetary internet system and Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation in the United States add technological brilliance. Colwell is the first woman and the first biological scientist to head the federal agency.

Economic growth does not take place in isolation. New Zealand's place in the world will be examined by former World Trade Organisation director-general Mike Moore.

The ubiquitous Kevin Roberts, Worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, will provide motivational input.

New Zealand's long-term success is also dependent on the emergence of newer players who are passionate about their prospective roles.

Some 100 "emerging leaders", selected by the Knowledge Wave Trust and through a nation-wide newspaper search, are gathering today for a pre-forum meeting.

Former Silver Ferns captain Bernice Mene, a French, English and German teacher, joins Warriors rugby leage coach Daniel Anderson this evening to talk leadership with the "emerging leaders" at a special dinner.

Herald Special Report - February 18, 2003:
Knowledge Wave 2003 - the leadership forum

Herald feature: