New Zealand's cleantech change agents
Their Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to transform the New Zealand economy. Who are they and what do they want?
Monday, June 21 2010 || Features || BY Mark Revington
Vision isn’t a word Rob Fyfe likes to use. Air New Zealand’s chief executive prefers the word ‘belief’. That is what it took to get Air New Zealand named airline of the year by Air Transport World magazine in January, he says.
“We didn’t get there by saying ‘here is the strategy, if we tick all these boxes, we will become the best airline in the world’. We said ‘we would continually look for the opportunities to enhance our status with a strong belief that we can become the best airline in the world by being uniquely Kiwi’.”
Consider the seven famous businessmen on our cover, all consummate brand builders and united by a common belief: that New Zealand is looking a gift horse in the mouth by viewing the world’s inexorable move towards a low-carbon economy as a cost, rather than an economic opportunity.
Last year, when Sir Stephen Tindall spoke at the 10th anniversary dinner of the New Zealand Council for Sustainable Business Development, an organisation he helped establish, he touched on the issue of food miles and the focus of UK retailers on the cost of carbon.
Soon after Tindall got a call from Phillip Mills, chairman of Les Mills International. “He said, ‘why not have a chat about starting something up, get a few more people focused on cleantech’,” says Tindall. “I think that was the genesis of it.”
It was decided that a dinner would be organised as the first step. A loose plan was agreed on and the enlistment of like-minded capitalists began. Geoff Ross, founder of vodka company 42 Below, had written an opinion piece, published in the New Zealand Herald, in which he said it wasn’t good enough for New Zealand to be a fast follower when it came to pricing carbon. Mills gave him a call and the next thing you know, Ross is on board the lobby group.
Rob Fenwick, co-founder of Living Earth, which turns waste into compost, is a family friend of Mills. Fenwick showed skill in combining business and politics — helping to found the Bluegreens, the National Party’s advisory group on environmental affairs.
Sir George Fistonich, who built Villa Maria into New Zealand’s largest independently owned winery, is quite simply a visionary. He founded Villa Maria at the age of 18, against the advice of his father at a time when port and sherry sales ruled supreme and the wine industry was almost non-existent. Years later he went against the grain again when Villa Maria became the first major wine company in the world to move its entire production to screw tops. Tindall, of course, founded The Warehouse and built it into a billion dollar company before stepping down as managing director in 2001 to focus on the Tindall Foundation and his investment company K1W1. Mills built a remarkable international fitness empire based on packaging innovative gym programmes and selling them around the globe. Jeremy Moon has built Icebreaker into a globally recognised brand. Among the group are several former Entrepreneurs of the Year, several World Class New Zealanders and a couple of knights
There are others involved behind the scenes, but you could consider these men core members of a movement that wants New Zealand to investigate the business case for a change to a low-carbon economy.
I agree with the sentiments of the article - a recent Harvard Business Review identified that the green economy is the motherlode of innovation.
This is a laudable initiative, but where is the action? Is the only strategy to raise awareness and ask the government to have a task force?
Probably the biggest obstacle to progress towards more cleantech is the way many associate of "green" with tree-hugging/anti-business/anti-growth. Incremental change won't do it - we have to reconceptualise our businesses and lifestyles - and if we get it right, we can be both prosperous and sustainable.
Posted by Peter Bruce at 09:29 on June 24, 2010
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