Category Archives: NZ Business

John Brackenridge is Chairman of the The New Zealand Merino Company, a key supplier to Icebreaker. He sees their goal as being the smartest most robust and valuable part of the primary sector. Smart means listening to others, robust means … Continue reading →

Casey Sheahan is the CEO of Patagonia, the apparel company with a conscience. He was introduced by Jeremy Moon from Icebreaker who is a big fan of the company. (When living in the US a friend and I used to … Continue reading →

Dev Patnaik is from Jump Associates, which apparently sites between McKinsey and IDEO. He is the author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy Dev (pronounced Dave) started with the announcement of the Sony PS2, … Continue reading →

In the intro Jeremy Moon recounted how clothing companies moved from wholesaling to wholesaling and retailing, worrying unnecessarily as it turns out, about retailer concern about disintermediation. , Their latest challenge for the industry is selling directly online, again worrying … Continue reading →

Matt McKendry Learned from Apple that the employee experience is as important as the customer experience, something that applies absolutely to consulting companies like Deloitte. Learned from Stanford D School (design school) to move away from Powerpoint. Ironically Matt is … Continue reading →

Keith Yamashita from XYPartners. Seeing defects. CEO as designer. Yamashita San (I’ll refer to him as Keith from now on) worked for Steve Jobs at Next Computers as his writer when he was 26. His job was apparently to extract … Continue reading →

Matt Brown is President and Co-Founder big BOING. His introduction, by Judith Thompson, played up that he attracted their attention when he said that play you are immersed in as a child  drives the creativity you have as an adult. … Continue reading →

David Lawee is VP corporate development for Google. He started by trying to articulate why Yahoo! is failing, believing it comes back to their inability to crisply identify a mission statement. (This is quite something from Google, who are failing … Continue reading →

Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO, and one of the thinkers who energised the beginning of the design thinking movement in New Zealand. He now says we need to move beyond that phase, noting that life expectancy of companies … Continue reading →

I’m here at the Better By Design CEO Summit, which is an excellent event that occurs every 1.5-2 years. It’s targeted at CEOs and senior leaders from the Better By Design client companies, and from companies considering entering the program … Continue reading →