Value and Irony [2007]
For almost 40 years we New Zealanders have been telling ourselves that the environment is really, really important, especially for future generations.
But apart from picking up after ourselves and saving the odd lake, we really haven’t done that much about it. “Green” products have always been a niche item and we’ve saved our energy efficiency efforts for when the lakes went dry.
In my most recent Windshift survey on the matter [2005] a full 50% of 18 to 64 year olds didn’t believe that New Zealand lived up to its clean green image.
Now suddenly the issue of climate change has reached critical mass and we’re all onto it. All those latent environment-friendly activities we always meant to do have emerged, fully formed – though not always directly aimed at global warming.
The local supermarket has envirobags, which really won’t do much for the ice shelves but they do make you feel much less polluting.
Writers of emails now ask me to consider whether I really need to print theirs out, which of course, releases trees to help save us from ourselves.
And people who never ever mentioned the e-word are now dusting off their environmental credentials and talking knowledgeably about emissions trading and the NZCX. Man stuff. Ooh.
The crowning irony to date must be the TV ads run by the dirtiest of all New Zealand’s energy providers, [according to the Clean Energy Guide] promising that together we can make a difference.
Yeah sure – we’ll close down our coal and gas-burning power stations and you close yours. . .
Part of me wants to move on to new, less popular issues, now that climate change is becoming so mainstream. But I have to be realistic:
I’ve made the investment in understanding how people will translate green thinking into green behaviour ; the least I can do is see it through till 2012. Keep on top of the burgeoning mass of information. Without printing it out of course.
Who said information was power? Really it’s just annoying. Sifting through information is time-consuming and highly inefficient. There’s usually only one good idea per book or article and it’s usually half way through.
Too much desk research leads you directly to information overload and burnout which lowers your mental energy to a trickle. Apparently, around 40% of the workforce is at some stage of burnout. And I blame information.
It's like water. Take in too much and you drown. But when you distill it all down to a set of insights – that’s another matter.
Nobody ever drowned in a bottle of Evian.
And everyone loves an insight.
The question is: what’s the most energy efficient way for us to proceed? Climate change is one thing, but we also have to consider productivity. That’s exercising a lot of concern in economic circles, so they’re making it quite mystical and tricky.
But in its raw form it’s simply a measure of how long we work and how much we make doing it.
At a national level, according to the OECD, between 2000 and last year, the number of hours we worked grew by 14%. That’s more people employed and more people working longer.
At the same time our GDP grew by 20%. So our productivity increased. But not as much as it did in Australia. In the same period they also had 20% GDP growth but their hours of work only grew by around 9%. So New Zealand loses. AGAIN!!!!
I think if we had beaten Australia, productivity wouldn’t be so much of an issue here. We’d have shelved it along with our uber-indebtedness and our little balance of payments problem. But according to a down-under version of the Al Gore presentation I saw recently, climate change is going to really do the Aussies in. They’ll be lucky if they grow at all in the years to come. . .
Of course they are our major trading partner and an important part of our labour market, so that might not work for us either. Unless the Arctic ice cap melts and wrecks the gulf stream. That’ll see us move on up the OECD on productivity and every other measure.
We won’t be down there with Australia MATE. . we’ll be up with all those annoying little economies that always do much, much better than us. Like Finland, Ireland and Norway. Frozen solid! Cornering the market for designer snow shoes – the ‘it’ accessory of winter 2040. Course that'll be big.
In the end, productivity is all about the value and the multipliers. In manufacturing it’s about the value of widgets produced per dollar of wages.
That’s clear enough, but at the other end of the scale in consultancy, the trades and most of the creative industries, it’s about having such a massive [I mean reasonable] charge out rate that you can afford to sell each hour only once. And doing such valuable work that the client doesn’t wince when they get the bill.
I have to say, that’s much easier to achieve in corporate New Zealand than it is in small business New Zealand. The scale of fees in downtown Auckland is a whole lot higher than what you’d expect to pay in downtown Hawkes Bay, even for a flat white.
Corporate clients just expect things to cost more and there’s no point under-charging them – it just makes it look like they’re accepting a lower standard. And good on you for thinking like that. If you're working for an international firm you don't do the New Zealand economy any favours by getting a cheap deal.
Actually my favourite story about value is a Raglan story – a true story. A friend of a friend, whose house with a sea view in Raglan was stuck on the market at 500K, consulted a local real estate agent who told her that homes in both the 300K and 700K range were selling steadily.
So she increased the price to around 700K and [yes this story has a happy ending] sold within days to a homesick Kiwi in New York.
So if our manufacturing’s gone to China and all we’re left with in New Zealand's private sector is consultants, plumbers and real estate agents, I think we’re definitely going to need more head offices to keep our productivity up.
That – or more homesick Kiwis in New York.
Cheers
Jill
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Jill Caldwell is Director of Windshift Communications Ltd. Click Here to contact Jill directly This is a free monthly newsletter provided to direct subscribers only. No further use is made of subscriber information. [Copyright Windshift Communications Ltd 2007]
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