...but not so good at creating value and profit.

Kiwi culture is unusual because all of the important dimensions strongly favour initiation at the expense of implementation and value is created in the implementation stage!

We are fiercely self reliant. When it comes to creating wealth that’s not the asset it might appear to be. It plays out in the capital structures that we adopt, and our reluctance to delegate, to collaborate and even to succession plan. We adopt capital structures that force us to be risk-averse and we compete amongst ourselves because we lack the trust needed for collaboration.

We prefer transactional relationships and to sell things while many trading partners seek solutions and long-term trust-based relationships. We resort too quickly to contracts and to price instead of value and trust. Some trading partners of course share our way of doing business. The secret is in knowing which is which and adapting accordingly.

We routinely substitute our thinking for that of our customers assuming that they will value the same things as us, share our priorities and preferences. As a result we fail to understand our true value proposition that is closer to words like “integrity” than it is to “low cost”.

The Tall Poppy Syndrome has many impacts including promoting under performance, a reluctance to be seen to excel (stand out from the crowd) and a particularly negative attitude towards failure - that is particularly tricky when our innovation model relies upon trial and error. That is a barrier to the transition from the relatively safe stage of creativity to the riskier stage of implementation. We have an endemic and striking inability to provide and receive constructive criticism. We therefore have a significant barrier to organisational learning that is so essential to productivity at the implementation stage.

This all contributes to our profound feedback reluctance that makes us loath to give or receive constructive feedback. Many of the people we aim to do business with see us as 'beating around the bush' or even being elusive. Alone this is one of the greatest barriers to creating wealth. We prefer generalists to specialists, breadth to depth, information to knowledge, simplicity to complexity and widely adopt do-it-yourself and make-and-use (versus make-and-sell) approaches including do-it-yourself management and design that all too often becomes
make-do.

In the UK the term 'jack of all trades' was invariably accompanied by the qualifier but master of none and implied someone who wasn’t much good at anything. In New Zealand it is a term of unqualified approval.

Low assertiveness has many manifestations, the most significant being our weak negotiation skills and lack of confidence to launch products before we believe they are perfect, irrespective of what the customers think, trapping us in a pathology of serial initiation - in other words going back repeatedly to the lab or workshop to add more bells and whistles or refinements when we should get into the market and learn from our customers exactly what they think (which is almost certain to be different to us). This approach combined with our narrow capital structures delays market entry even though speed to market is increasingly a competitive necessity.

Low work centrality and preference for pleasure and individual pursuits (outside of work) does not mean we don’t work hard because we do. It does mean that we draw our sense of being from outside of work pursuits and we reach a threshold of 'enough' at a much lower level than most other nations. At that point our motivation switches from creating additional wealth to leisure and personal pursuits. It's called satisficing. Consequently we do not pursue personal satisfaction and respect (refer to Abraham Maslow’s work on motivation) through work and wealth accumulation in the way many North and South American, European or Asian people do.

We unwittingly let a lot of value slip through our fingers, often to be appropriated by other companies in other nations. There are a number of strategies that can be applied to exploit what we are good at and compensate for the things that we are weak in. None is more important than extracting new value from the intellectual assets that we already possess and create anew every day.