El período de desarrollo de las ciencias básicas (1955-1966)

“The more I go into this, the more I realise I have heaps to learn.”

Nick’s perfectionistic striving drives him to identify problems and conceptualise solutions to achieve “ideals”. Nick’s ideals translate to the “vision” or “high level view” for himself and the businesses he develops. Nick prefers to pursue complex problems and analyses for weakness both within him and in the outer environment that present barriers to achieving solutions. Nick then strives to resolve the weaknesses and achieve the solution.

Underpinning Nick’s ideals are his personal values: “I call it my ‘value logic’. It becomes the pathway, or roadmap.” Nick’s ideals help him to define his business propositions. Once a business proposition is defined Nick strives to perfect it: “The perspective I try and operate from is to do my best to do justice to the proposition or thing that I’m working on. Justice is a high standard, or state of being.” Nick’s perfectionistic striving causes him to continue to analyse for weaknesses throughout the business and self-development process. Again, these weaknesses are conceptualised as problems to be solved. Solving these problems alleviates dissatisfaction and is fulfilling for Nick as it gives him something to strive for:

118 “When you are doing these things you just have to run as fast as you can, it’s like a

marathon. You have to keep the pressure on. You can’t relax into it because the market’s continually changing, sentiment is continually changing, the world’s continually changing; so it’s like this continuing, rolling maelstrom you’re walking into. So that’s good.”

For Nick, the process of analysis, problem identification and solution development is ongoing: “With each deal I learn something more; so each one is a step along the way to better competency.” Nick has high expectations of his own performance. To minimise the opportunity for mistakes Nick is careful with details: “I do get mad with myself if I make a mistake. I try to minimise things, like, paying really close attention to my schedule so that I make sure I am in the right place at the right time. Also, I very rarely use email groups. Each time I do an email I think about who it should go to and minimise the risk of the information going to the wrong person etc.” Where Nick assesses a personal weakness, this is used as an opportunity for self-development: “I’m not superman and there is always going to be personal learning. For example, I am trying to be a bit more patient and not react so quickly. I’m not sure whether this works for me or not yet.” Nick’s focus on error, or weakness, is such that he tends to be aware of where things might, or do, go wrong but to be less aware of his personal strengths: “Recently I have come away from meetings sort of surprised at my reputation and how much people respect me. This caught me by surprise as I don’t think this way when I’m operating.”

Nick enjoys striving, whether to solve a personal weakness or one in a business proposition. The desire to problem solve invests Nick with a sense of urgency: “I’m actually better under pressure because I’ll just jump in and start sorting it out because there’s a degree of urgency in it. I won’t sit back, or hide, I do the opposite. I will step up and I’ll be on the phone, and I’ll be hustling and trying to get things sorted so, yeah, that’s good.” Nick’s sense of urgency energises his desire to work hard: “At the moment I can just about work pretty- much twenty-four hours a day. So, I start off on the East Coast US, then go onto the West Coast, then Hong Kong opens up, then China opens up, then Europe opens up; so there have been times when I’m still working at 11.30pm or midnight.” While Nick embraces high expectations, problem solving and working hard, he also recognises that there are costs to his striving: “The quid pro quo is, of course, is that it’s also really hard, and that gets annoying and it gets tiring; but I also rationalise it on the basis that if it wasn’t hard and annoying then it probably wouldn’t be as interesting as it is.”

119 Solutions energise Nick and conversely “linked logic38” frustrates him: “I had a conversation last week about some of the professional advice we’ve been getting, and I came out

thinking, well, this is not what I’m paying for. I want solutions; not ‘no, no, no’, but ‘possibly this, this, this or this’. It has to be purposive and not negative.” For Nick, each solution is a step toward the creation of something of value; therefore, to Nick, energy committed to maintaining the status quo or to the distractions of “materialism”, is wasted: “I’m seeing that now as a distinct pattern. There are probably only three professional lawyers and financial institutions in New Zealand that I’d deal with because the rest are quite happy pumping it39—saying no, or offering another ten thousand dollar opinion. And sure they can make money and send their children to private schools, and build bigger houses and go to Paris for Christmas and all that sort of shit. But ultimately they will realise, in twenty years, when they’re ending their career that they’ve pretty much wasted their time in society.” For Nick, to focus on problems without formulating and enacting solutions is wasteful. Nick prefers pragmatic application of skills and resources to achieve solutions.

2. Pragmatism – to act in a practical or efficient way; to get things done, alongside openness to new ideas that can be applied and tested.

“I have to have meaningful conversations. Not just conversations.”

Nick’s pragmatism leads him to be open to new “ideas and things that resonate with me.” The ideas that resonate with Nick are those that he believes he can “execute”. Nick’s pragmatism leads him to be goal focused and due to the nature of his work “the companies are the goals.” Nick achieves his goals through “innovative thinking” in his scoping,

research and planning and by engaging with “detail”, forming “meaningful” collaborations and being efficient with resources: “Growing up in a rural environment you naturally work as a community, and you work with constraint because you can’t just rush down to the store to buy what you don’t have.” Nick works “from the market back” to develop a strategy40 most likely to achieve dissemination of the technology being developed: “I negotiated one deal—and everyone always goes in thinking you always want exclusivity—but that’s actually an old way of thinking. This project is big and with an offensive/defensive element

38

In this context, linked logic is a form of circular reasoning with a vested interest in maintaining the problem.

39 _{“Pumping it” is used to describe actions that maintain a problem in order to acquire more money}

or resources to (pretend to) solve it.

40

Nick does not use the same business strategy each time; rather the commercialisation process defines a different market-responsive strategy for each business.

120 to it just because of scale; so let’s get a big gorilla on our side as early as we can which we’ve successfully done.” Nick prefers collaboration for many reasons. Collaboration enables access to markets, leverages organisational power, acquire new or broader skills and gain access to information: “We were working with the best people in the world; so our information, our insight and the data that we had access to was pre-eminent data and just sped everything up.”

Collaboration also provides Nick with knowledge exchange opportunities and experience of different business models: “[They] invited me to join their establishment board and it was interesting because it is set up as a cooperative where it squarely sees itself as a social entrepreneurial business. It’s actually quite uncommon for co-op structures to be used for technology businesses they tend to be industry/sector businesses like dairy. So that intrigued me a little bit, around just, you know, seeing how that could work. It was a bit of an experiment for me, so I quite enjoyed that.” Through collaboration Nick is also better able to deal with the level of detail he likes to work with in his business development. For Nick, getting the detail right is important: “If you don’t do the detail you might get the deal done but you’re not necessarily putting yourself in a position where you’ve got a team that could do the next deal; because it was probably more luck that you got it across. You’re trying to manage the gap between the vision, if you like, pushing out [gestures with hands] and the detail coming in behind.” Engaging with the detail in a deal ensures that Nick has “the bases covered” and that business risk is minimised: “If that detail is there you get locked in so you can hold your place. The bigger the distance [to market] the more exposed you are to market silliness, or someone not being truthful or making bad decisions. I think it’s something I learned as a lawyer actually; that detail is important. But, I think, the way that I would frame it is that to me the detail has to be focused on a solution.”

Being solution-focused is important to Nick, as his resources are limited, he must show investors that capital is used wisely and he is focused on making things “happen”. However Nick has found that, as a resource himself, he has faced both exploitation and the potential for personal burn-out. Therefore, he must also carefully self-manage: “People just wanted me all the time [used strong emphasis] and I was just totally emotionally exhausted. Nick now focuses his attention on relationships that involve “meaningful conversations”. For Nick, meaningful conversations are developmental and involve a valuable exchange of ideas: “When it’s about the idea and the creativity, it’s much more of a medium of exchange than we actually think it is. The people who want me, they don’t realise that for

121 me to go and spend an hour with them and share stuff with them takes a big chunk of my energy. And it’s like feeding a hungry lion [laughs] the more you feed it the more it wants. And, then it will just eat you up.” Pragmatically, Nick remains focused on what he seeks to achieve—development—and one of his goals is to become increasingly efficient at

achieving this: “I mean the companies could still fail because the market’s not there, or they can’t get the right amount of capital at the right time. But I’m satisfied in a sense of having gone from zero to getting them to be serious opportunities; which is, basically, what I do.”

3. Development – To start to exist, or experience. To convert to a new purpose. To cause to grow, mature or become more elaborate.

“The personal goal side of it becomes complex in that I don’t delineate between work and life. And life is work, and work is life;

and it’s not really work, because it’s life.”

Nick engages in activities that lead to self-development. I define self-development as a process of change, where one begins to experience one’s life differently; or where one is caused to grow, or mature. For Nick, self-development and business development are symbiotic: “There’s a total fusion between life and work, they’re not a separate thing.” Nick’s desire for development leads him to create start-up businesses and invest in technology development. Nick targets transformational change and calls his ultimate transformation at a personal level, “enlightenment”: “Enlightenment is my key word. To me enlightenment is about having this wonderful view or understanding about how it all fits together.” For Nick, enlightenment coupled with technological innovation can effect broader transformational change by informing decision-making and providing new options: “A leader able to effect enlightenment can spread change in much greater proportion than their individual scale. I hope that I can make that context available to more people; whether it is a choice at the fuel pump to buy renewable fuel, or whether [company name] can halve current CO2 emissions per tonne of steel produced etc.” The degree of challenge in a proposition is important to Nick as this requires learning. As Nick’s skills in legal

consultancy increased the level of challenge decreased, thus Nick decided to “take the next step” and take on the “entrepreneurial leadership” of a portfolio of “start-ups”. The development of his first clean technology business took Nick on a steep learning curve: “I didn’t have the skills, nor did the team, to really execute this sort of scale. You’re talking about a minimum project size of a couple of hundred million dollars.”

122 Nick responded to the need for new skills and resources through the development of a new partnership model: “Rather than take a pure play IP41 approach, we decided to err towards a more collaborative partnership approach. So rather than hold out an IP position we basically participated in this programme with a view that if the technology turned out to be worth it we would have earned the right to deploy the technology package, which is what’s happened.” With two clean technology businesses underway and some tough lessons delivered by the Global Financial Crisis Nick’s attention then turned to new areas of business development. Recognising his desire to invest in propositions that are “structural and global”, but also recognising a potential weakness in always targeting very difficult propositions, Nick expanded his portfolio of start-ups to include software developments: “Within this framework of structural stuff I’ve got food, water and big data; those are three other areas I want to do work on.” This inclusion of less complex propositions led to involvement in a software technology platform focusing on food quality information (which expands to the quality of water), and a data project (at conceptual stage at the time of this study) that will “capture the intelligence of a city to the extent that it has its own

personality.” These projects focus on the democratisation of information and on informed decision-making. Nick conceptualises his role in business development as a “surveyor”.

“I’m a bit like a surveyor, you know? So when the Europeans first came here the first people they dropped off were surveyors and they had to climb the mountains and find the valleys and the streams with good water and put up with times when they didn’t have enough food … so you just have to accept that part of the deal is that you’re going to get wet and you’re going to have to, you know, climb over a mountain in gale force winds and not know where you are, and be by yourself in this big space.” Nick’s goal is to “count myself out” at the right time, by handing over to the next leader. Nick can then commit his energy and resources to undertaking the next development and continuing his journey of learning: “I’m really conscious that I don’t want to fall into a trap like a lot of technology

entrepreneurs where they make a lot of money on one deal and then they think that they know everything. I’m still really happy and open to doing new stuff, but it will be in the framework that actually excites me; structural and global.” Nick’s ultimate business transformation is to achieve a “founder” role where he is involved in the markets but not in the day to day operations of any business: “I think that there will be an evolution to some sort of market-facing founder role going forward and there will be a whole execution team that does the work. And I’m sort of quite looking forward to that because it means I’ve

123 actually done that best that I can do; that I’ve actually successfully taken it from a blank sheet of paper to something that is pretty cool, pretty satisfying.”

4. Meaningful Reward – rewards Nick believes are important and valuable. They can be