ISAMBARD

This article first appeared as an article for the Institute of Directors.  “Books became my go-to solution.” A transformational read on liberalism and why boards should welcome ideas but stay focused on purpose. Jim Donovan CFInstD describes himself as a ‘retiring’ professional director who now holds just one board role – independent chair of the New Zealand Utilities Advisory Group Inc, a forum representing the network infrastructure sector that advises the Minister for Infrastructure on improvements to the legislative framework governing the sector. As a CEO, he led major transformations at the helm of power company Electra, IT services firm Fronde, and telecommunications manufacturer Deltec. He has also held a wide range of company, industry, and government board roles – including chair of Crown-owned telecommunications company REANNZ. And he is a former IoD board member and mentor. This week, he shares a transformational read and explains why boards should welcome ideas and in...

I've long been a fan of journalist and broadcaster Tim Harford (aka.  The Undercover Economist ). Harford's skill is making economics and related topics understandable/readable/listenable for you and me.  His latest book is Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy , published by Abacus and based on the excellent  BBC series of the same name. As the title implies, Harford tells the reader something of the often-quirky history of 50 important inventions which have had a profound impact on the world today.  These are not "The Top 50" - more like a curated selection among many important developments. Some are obvious, such as the plough and its impact on food production.  Others perhaps less so; for example, copyright and the limited liability company.  And Harford makes no bones about leaving out some of the more obvious, such as the computer, while extolling the significance of Grace Hopper's computer language compiler, and the wonders unleashed by comput...

Yesterday, after 6 years, was my final day as chair of REANNZ (Research & Education Advanced Network New Zealand Limited).  REANNZ has been a fantastic business to be part of.  It is a highly specialised national and international telecommunications company with a very particular technological advantage.  In layman's terms, REANNZ moves heaps and heaps of data very, very fast.  We're talking truly huge data flows - astronomically large files (literally).  Normal telcos are optimised to move lots of small packets of data. REANNZ (like its partner R&E networks around the world) moves data in a different way. A normal network might need to re-transmit 1 out of every 100 or 1000 data packets.  REANNZ has a packet loss rate of 1 in hundreds of millions. That has huge performance implications for large discrete data flows over long distances. What REANNZ moves in an hour can take days or even months on a conventional network.  That means researchers...

To mark The Year of Engineering , here's  Sydney Padua's envisioning of my personal engineering hero, the one and only Isambard Kingdom Brunel: If you haven't already read it, check out Sydney Padua's comic novel  The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage , featuring the founders of computing and other Victorian engineering heroes in all kinds of bonkers derring-do. ( T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.  are available from Zazzle). The UK Government has designated 2018 as  The Year of Engineering , and launched a campaign to promote  engineering in all its forms  as a career.  I still think of myself as a systems engineer; the skills I learnt have been invaluable and widely applicable throughout  my career  as an executive and director.

Access Granted, the online podcast channel, focuses on NZ tech sector and related themes. They interviewed me recently. We discussed change, tech, research & education, construction, and directorship. We covered a lot of ground. If you've got a spare hour, here's the link: http://www.accessgranted.nz/episodes/2018/1/9/jim-donovan-professional-director-changing-the-world-in-big-ways

Governments, business theorists and business media are obsessed with innovation. Vast sums of money are expended on government-sponsored research. Something’s bound to pay off with a ground-breaking new technology that will increase jobs, wealth and foreign-exchange earnings, won’t it? However, innovation is only the start of the process. We’ve got plenty of innovation, and we aren’t short of new businesses either. The problem is creating better, larger businesses that can foot it internationally (with full overseas operations, not just exporting). The Economist  explored the same issue , reporting on those who question the fear of US companies being overwhelmed by technological innovation coming out of India and China. So does the relative decline of America as a technology powerhouse really amount to a threat to its prosperity? Nonsense, insists Amar Bhidé of Columbia Business School. In “The Venturesome Economy” ... he explains why he thinks this gloomy thesis misunderstands...

You’ll be aware of the strange phenomenon of the national skills shortage coexisting with high youth unemployment. It’s a problem across the developed world, driven partly by demographics and partly by economic activity. Industries across the spectrum are finding it difficult to attract skilled staff, and frequently the call is for ‘the government‘ to restrict entry into popular courses like law and accounting, and to increase the number of engineering or ICT graduates, plumbing apprenticeships or whatever. While governments have increased funding for technical subjects, it would take a very brave government to start directing who should do what courses, at what level. Who’s going to force your son or daughter to do a course that they don’t want to enter? Last time I checked, we don’t live in a dictatorship. In any case, government workforce planning never works, except either in very macro or micro situations. (By the way, the number of practicing lawyers and accountants in New Zeal...

On 10 September 2013, I was part of Fairfax Media's Great Debate . David Slack , Phil Veal and I put the affirmative case and argued (somewhat tongue in cheek) that New Zealand should face 3 uncomfortable truths - we're overcautious, inexperienced and mean.  Selwyn Pellet t, Davey Hughes and Greg Cross put the negative case.  Here's my pitch (without the bad jokes about the opposition): Ladies and gentlemen; ten years ago, the NZ government commissioned a series of industry task-force reports for ICT, design, food & beverage, etc,. They all said essentially the same thing: the biggest challenges facing New Zealand businesses aren’t exchange rates, investment capital, innovation, tariff barriers, infrastructure, or government regulation; no, the top issues are the skills and capabilities of our owners, managers and workers. Ten years on, nothing’s changed; last week’s Global Competitiveness Report said the same thing: many New Zealand businesses lack skills and ...

I said goodbye today to the board and executive team of the Tertiary Education Commission, where I've been a non-executive board member since 10 June 2002, which must set some kind of latter-day record for government board tenure. I first became involved with New Zealand’s tertiary education system in the late 1990s as CEO of telecommunications manufacturer Deltec: Recruiting engineering graduates and post-grads from the University of Canterbury, and sponsoring research projects & internships; Working with Whitireia Polytechnic and WINZ on an innovative programme to give long-term unemployment beneficiaries the skills to work in our factory, where they could quickly earn substantially more than the minimum wage, let alone the dole; On the board of the Manufacturers Federation (now part of Business NZ) where I became a de facto spokesman on education reform. In 1999, employers were very unhappy with the NZ tertiary education system. When the newly-elected government as...

The late Sir Paul Callaghan was very passionate about the importance of science and technology to our future economic success. He made the oft-repeated point that kids will take up science and engineering if they and their parents are excited by the career opportunities.  Creating that excitement is the responsibility of industry, not just “the government”, but I add a proviso: children must be taught maths well in their earlier years. The ability to understand algebra at age 13 is a key indicator of future earnings, whatever career is chosen.  It demonstrates not only mathematical ability, but also abstract reasoning  and logic.   Algebra is good for future artists and lawyers, not just the technically-minded.  But the big worry about algebra is that if children haven’t grasped its basic concepts  by Year 9 of their schooling (the old 3rd form), they’ll turn away from the physical sciences and technologies, choking our future supply of scientists...

I've said before that most service jobs are created directly or indirectly by those who make stuff.  Until the 18th Century, manufacturing was essentially a cottage industry.  Between 1750 and 1850, the 1st Industrial Revolution saw the rise of machine-based manufacturing (especially textiles), enabled by innovations in energy (coal-powered steam engines), materials (especially large-scale iron-making and casting) and logistics (notably canals).  The 2nd Industrial Revolution - also known as the Technological Revolution - gave us low-cost steel,  new materials and chemicals, effective railroads, electricity, mass production and the assembly line. Last month, in a special report on manufacturing and innovation , The Economist pronounced the world to be in a 3rd Industrial Revolution. Additive manufacturing (3D printers), flexible smart production equipment capable of runs of one unit, super-modular design concepts, design visualisation tools, new composite and na...

Many readers will have seen Sir Paul Callaghan advocating the merits of manufacturing and technology to lift New Zealand's economic performance (as opposed to more dairy farming or tourism, the current favourites, even though we lack the natural resources to lift those land-based industries much further). Sir Paul challenged us to create 100 more companies of comparable size to our existing leading manufacturing and technology businesses. His proposal is based on a simple fact: manufacturing generates 2-3 times more GDP per job than dairying or tourism. Now someone has prepared a graphic tool to extrapolate the economic and job impacts of those additional businesses . I suspect the underlying assumptions and formulae are too crude to make this tool a serious economic predictor, but it does illustrate how manufacturing and technology outperform dairying and tourism in lifting GDP per capita (which flows through to higher wages and better public services and infrastructure). ...

There's an oft-repeated line that we already have 80% of the workforce we'll have in 10 years time. That's both wrong and misleading. According to the New Zealand Treasury in 2010, our 2020 workforce will comprise: 20% from school-leavers between now and then 20% from immigrants (who may or may not have vocational skills) 60% already in the workforce today. At least half of those existing workers will undergo a major career promotion or change of career. Add in the school leavers and some migrants and I'd say it's a reasonable assumption that over the next ten years, at least 60% of our workforce will need some very substantial vocational skills education. Not only that, putting a rising star from a local firm onto a one week course - in technical, marketing, leadership or negotiating skills at the right time in their career - should be highly valuable to the individual and the business (whether or not the government subsidises it). How about the level of ski...