Well…. Day one held an interesting variety of speakers. The highlight was Andy Lark who gave an interesting (if, IMHO, slightly biased towards the IT viewpoint of things) presentation. To paraphrase he identified a number of paradoxes for NZ exporters; We live on an island…..but have export conferences because we
For awhile now I’ve been uncomofrtable about the whole carbon trading dialogue – it feels to me like greenwash, whereby middle class consumers can feel themselves absolved of guilt by making some token gestures towards environmentalism. I’m uncomfortable for the same reasons that I’m uncomfortable about Greenpeace membership drives and
Interesting to read Rod Oram’s editorial in the SST yesterday. Specifically his comments that our laggardly performance in terms fo GDP growth may possible\y be due to “failure of ambition, management skills and strategy” in our businesses. I’d go further and say that one of the core reasons for our
I see there have been a few postings in the last couple of days about the whole infrastructure provisioning issue as it related to the structural separation of Telecom. Both Rod Drury and Jim Donovan have posted some interesting comments. The fact of the matter is that we will never
The greater part of next week will see me, in my role as a board member of Enterprise North Canterbury, attending the Economic Development NZ Conference. The theme of the conference is “Growing an Export Economy” and it is a challenging time for this conference given the recent announcements by
I see that, following on from his research about governance in New Zealand, Jens Mueller and his team have set up a website as a tool for both prospective independent directors, and entities needing the same, to meet. Now in all my writing I have pressed for more governance in
The latest issue of Idealog magazine had this excellent piece by Vincent Heeringa. It’s amazing how wowed we were by the Knowledge Wave conference and how little came of it. My contention is that we didn’t have sufficient integration between business, education, local and central government and business thinkers to
Good to read today that Vector has taken (or will if the shareholders agree) a 19.9% stake in NZ windfarms. I’ve hoped beyond hope for awhile now that Geoff Henderson at Windflow would be successful in building an alternative wind turbine supplier to the European brands. Partly for parochial reasons
I read tonight that Bruce Sheppard has been appointed to the board of Christchurch bus information firm Connexionz. I wonder how he’ll react to some pesky shareholder holding him to account the way he’s historically held other directors to account????
I just hate all this hyperbole about CEO’s and blogs. I mean if a CEO sees value in having a blog and actually uses it regularly than fine – but if it’s just a trend bandwagon…. Over at No8 Ventures , Jenny Morel has her own blog last posting…. February
Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include many industries from manufacturing and property to technology. More on Ben
Krishnan Subramanian is an entrepreneur, cloud computing analyst and consultant, open source researcher and evangelist, one of the industry’s most prolific bloggers. More on Krishnan
