Wind hardly a surprise risk for the proposed Basin Reserve flyover
which welcomes white-knuckled airline passengers to this city features an inverted umbrella, and the moniker for our town used to be ‘‘windy’’, I would have thought that the possibility of the odd strong gust on the flyover was taken as read by most Wellingtonians.
If a bit of a breeze is a valid reason for not building a bit of much-needed infrastructure one wonders that Wellington exists at all given its reputation for ‘‘bracing’’ climatic conditions is as old as the place itself.
That opponents of progress have grasped at this wind-beaten straw to try to stymie the flyover is indicative of a wider malaise that is holding the capital back.
It is always easier to find reasons not to do things than reasons to do things. For those risk or progress or development averse it will always be easier to stand on the sidelines and give reasons not to play the game than barrack for your team and exhort them to greater heights.
But such an attitude seldom leads to success or victory. More often it produces smugness, complacency and atrophy.
One man who’d never tolerate such an approach is Ian Taylor, founder and chief executive of Taylormade Productions and Animation Research, which operates globally from its base in Dunedin. I was lucky to spend a day with Ian last week at a Chamber of Commerce conference in Nelson.
He’d been invited to tell his personal and professional story and it turned out to be one of the best motivational presentations I’ve seen, despite the fact that Ian had arrived the night before from London, stayed up all night preparing his PowerPoint, and flew out to San Francisco as soon as it was over.
The basics are this: Having babysat thousands of kids (me included) as a Playschool and Spot On host in Dunedin for many years, Ian was packing his bags to move here after TVNZ decided to close its Dunedin studios.
The morning of his flight he suddenly decided he liked Dunedin and wanted to stay there. He committed to the place and resolved that, whatever he did with his life, he was going to make Dunedin his home.
After getting the lease for the old TVNZ premises, he teamed up with a couple of students from Otago University who were mucking around with graphics on these new-fangled things called computers. There was no detailed business strategy but Ian thought they could probably do some neat stuff, have some fun and make a go of it.
Animation Research is now a globally recognised player in a highly competitive field, providing computer graphics for golf, yachting, cricket and Formula One events. It has pioneered literally dozens of innovations in its field and is still based in the place Ian Taylor calls home.
Ian told a dozen stories of near failures, knife-edge business deals and sheer dumb luck in his professional and personal journey, but what we never heard was a reason for not doing something.
The phrase he most often used when describing his reaction to being asked if his team could develop a system for judging lbws in cricket, for making yacht racing exciting, developing air traffic control training simulators or using computer graphics to help predict the effects of natural disasters was: ‘‘Don’t see why not.’’
We’re lucky to have several Ian Taylor types in Wellington, most notably Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor, but we need more and we need a city that matches their can-do attitude.
Plenty of committed Wellingtonians are putting their hands up in the mayoral race and, while I’m not in the business of telling anyone else how to vote, I’ll be looking for a candidate who doesn’t get the wind up too easily and who embraces the philosophy of ‘‘Don’t see why not’’.