Love is in the air, everywhere I look around
I’ve just spent the past two weeks sailing a 40-year-old Farr yacht around Nelson’s beautiful Tasman Bay, pootling in and out of Abel Tasman National Park.
Having been a card-carrying petrolhead for most of my life, it’s been an unlikely transition for me, learning how to harness a 15 knot north-easterly to push a four-tonne hull through the briny.
Apart from picking up new skills it’s also been a time to get my reading up to date and check out a bucketload of podcasts I downloaded over the last few months of 2019.
One of these podcasts was the RNZ interview with Courtney Johnston, the new (and youngest ever) CEO of Te Papa. Interviewer Kathryn Ryan put the heat on Johnston, pointing out the revolving door of chief executives in recent years and the impact on staff’s morale and trust.
When asked how she planned to respond to this, Johnston paused briefly, thought and then responded simply ‘‘with love’’.
It was a simple statement, but a heartfelt one. It was also one that would have been totally unthinkable with previous Te Papa leaders or chief executives more broadly.
Johnston’s vulnerably honest response seems to encapsulate the different business climate we are operating in now, coming as it does after two years of a Labour-led coalition Government and 11 years of a bull market.
There’s a palpable change in play. A mental odour that has notes of social licence and human health alongside commercial success.
It’s a million miles away from the market-solves-all bravado of previous Governments and the fading generation of dispassionate directors and wine-cellar-enabled chief executives.
Former trade unionist, now turned director doyen Rob
Campbell put his finger on it when he received a CNZM gong in the New Year Honours a few weeks ago. In accepting the honour he had a bit of a tilt at business people refusing to give up privilege, and letting that privilege get in the way of quality decisions.
Campbell noted that tends to produce power structures where a few people have a lot of power and a lot of people have very little power.
In these situations, a lot of power gives privilege and money to a few and those things aren’t necessarily distributed in the most efficient way to grow the business or the wellbeing of the social system it exists within.
And it’s this concept of wellbeing that’s going to colour the way the Government funds projects and allocates resources.
Last May’s Budget codified this by focusing the allocation around five long-term priorities – taking mental health seriously, improving child wellbeing, supporting Ma¯ ori and Pasifika aspirations, building a productive nation and transforming the economy while at the same time preserving the environment.
But it was crystallised even more clearly by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at the World Economic Forum. In simple terms she said that if any minister in her Government wants to spend money, they need to prove that they will improve intergenerational wellbeing.
Going forward into the 2020s I reckon this approach is only going to get stronger. This could manifest itself in a number of ways, from the allocation of research funding by Callaghan Innovation, to the granting of International Growth Fund grants by New Zealand Trade and Industry through to the assessment criteria being used by the Provincial Growth Fund.
Last year Deloitte penned a piece exploring what a wellbeing focus could mean for New Zealand business. It suggested that it was likely to bring a rebalancing of the four types of capital – natural, social, human and financial – with the importance of the first three ramping up at the cost of the fourth.
The Deloitte piece suggested this capital rebalancing could be great news for social enterprise businesses while natural capital measures to protect the environment could put pressure on parts of the agriculture sector. Either way, something’s changed.
Right now, all over the country, executive leadership teams will be coming back to work, spinning up for a strong fourth quarter before the end of the tax year and pushing into their strategic planning for FY21.
Given the contextual move to wellbeing-focused outcomes for business, it’s clear to me that the traditional strategic planning processes won’t cut it. To be effective strategic planning needs to be more than just putting old business plans into new wellbeing folders.
In agriculture, this needs to be about long-term sustainable use of resources, in financial services it needs to be about great customer outcomes and in consumer businesses it needs to embrace transparency around sourcing and equitable labour practices throughout the value chain.
After two weeks of sailing the old Farr around Tasman Bay, I found the secret to a successful trip was balancing desired destinations with fellow boaters’ needs and having a healthy respect for the physical environment. I reckon the same is likely to apply to strategic planning heading into the 2020s.
Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director and adviser, and a very amateur yachtie. His Twitter handle is @modsta