Living in Dunedin we have many disadvantages, or so we are led to believe.
I recently spoke excitedly to an Auckland business leader about the opportunities for New Zealand agribusiness in Asia and he looked at me with a slightly paternalistic smirk and said, ''So you're planning on building a global business from Dunedin?''
''Absolutely'' I answered, and then pointed out to him that the extra two hours spent on a trip to Asia paled into insignificance compared with the hours he spent weekly log-jammed in Auckland traffic ... point to Anna, but by no means the game!
In all seriousness though, the growth of Auckland, often at the cost of regional centres, is a very big issue we seem unwilling or powerless to do anything about. The majority of New Zealanders coming home and new immigrants are choosing to settle in Auckland because that is where the opportunities are seen to be. As a result, more jobs are created in building new infrastructure, education and business to service that growth, perpetuating the belief that centralisation and one large international city is key to our country's future prosperity.
My frustrations at the short-sightedness of this have been rumbling around for many years but my attempt to address this topic was inspired by an unexpected source ... alcohol!
No, it was not in a drunken state I came across de-centralisation. Rather, it was when researching successful alcohol marketer Pernod Ricard, which is renowned for its successful market strategy of ''premiumisation'' (this is hot - I'll write more about it in another column), that I noted one of their other five strategic drivers was ''decentralisation''.
A strategy of decentralisation for a company like Pernod Ricard makes sense: it needs people on the ground in international markets where the consumers live. But interestingly, its view was that a flexible and responsive decentralised structure ''has proven its ability to boost performance and individual motivation''.
In an organisational sense, de-centralisation means a conscious effort to disperse decision-making power to the lower levels of an organisation. From my experience working in various organisations, from universities and Government-owned institutes to private enterprise, the deeper decision-making goes the better those decisions are and people become more empowered and motivated wherever they sit in an organisation.
The same should be true of how we run our country and our cities, but - and here is the caveat - we need to have a critical mass in terms of city size to attract and retain talent in the first place.
When I speak to people in small companies as well as in the education sector in Dunedin, we are all faced with a big challenge: when we attract talent from outside the city, very often that talent arrives with a talented partner/spouse. If we cannot satisfy that spouse's career demands, our talent will not stay for long and we lose any growth we may have developed.
I believe Dunedin needs to grow to have a population size of at least 200,000 to 300,000 people to create more employment opportunities and to be seen as an attractive place for people to grow their careers.
At the moment, we encourage the growth of businesses and our educational institutes in a very organic and unaggressive way. We are putting in place some ''nice'' initiatives but it is just not enough to swim against the Auckland centralisation tide. We need to make more noise about what centralisation is costing the country in terms of innovation and decision-making spread.
Our approach has to be a combination of hounding the Government and aggressively promoting our patch to national and international investors. In hounding the Government we need to show decentralisation promotes innovation, empowerment and motivation and in doing just that we become attractive to investors.
This is not a case of me being anti-Auckland and parochial. It is common sense: New Zealand's population is going to grow, our country is an attractive proposition for immigrants and more New Zealanders are coming home. Let's not cram that growth into one area and create more traffic headaches; rather let's spread that growth throughout the regions and create vibrancy and innovation throughout the country.
How can we do this aggressively? I am open to co-ordinating and passing ideas on to our city's leaders. Please send me an email acampbell@abacusbio.co.nz and I will keep you posted. Game, set, match Dunedin (one day).
- Dr Campbell is a partner at AbacusBio Ltd, a Dunedin-based agribusiness consulting and new ventures company.
