The last Tweetup: farewelling Twitter as it was and having a yarn about what comes next.
It's funny what you see when you look up.
I was in Napier for a couple of nights recently, meeting with business owners and giving a breakfast talk.
Between appointments I did a fair bit of walking, and as out-of-towners tend to do, a fair bit of gawking at the art deco architecture that's helped put the city on the tourism map.
Now this might be an insight into my personality, but the thing that stood out for me about the rather lovely hotels, lawyers' chambers, banks, offices and shops wasn't the architectural aesthetic. It was the numbers on the buildings. 1932. 1933. The odd 1934.
Not chiselled into any of the facades I saw, but etched forever into New Zealand's collective memory, was the number that started it all: 1931. The Napier Quake. 256 dead across the region and practically every CBD building destroyed by the earthquake or the fires that followed.
It was the greatest disaster the country had seen, and would have been even more challenging for a provincial town, a long way from anywhere.
But by the end of that year, the rubble had been cleared and the first major commercial building had been completed. By March 1932 – 13 months after the quake – 19 newly built shops were open. The rebuild continued until World War 2, creating the world-renowned architectural showcase thousands of tourists come to see every year. The sound shell, the old museum, the colonnade... all built quickly and well on the rubble and dust of disaster.
The dates on Napier's post-earthquake buildings were front of mind when I got up to talk to 160 or so business owners, accountants and advisors the next morning. Cyclone Gabrielle had hit hard. If a business wasn't directly affected, then its suppliers or customers were. Transport and labour issues were biting deep. All this on top of rising fuel prices, lending interest rates and general cost of living.
You'd think the mood in the room would be pretty grim. Maybe it was the kai, or maybe it was the view of the sunrise from the conference centre, but it was anything but. There was energy in the room. Curiosity. Optimism in the face of things being, to quote one hospo operator, a bit f*cked.
But Napier is a place literally built on bouncing back. To create a new, beautiful, CBD in the time it takes to get halfway through a resource consent today takes energy and optimism, despite what nature and the Reserve Bank throw at you.
I'd watched something in my hotel room the night before that seemed to tell the same story.
It was an old video of the Apollo 13 post-flight press conference (that's the one that had an explosion on the way to the moon). Soon after the "Houston we have a problem" moment, mission control calculated the crew would run out of oxygen two thirds of the way home (making me wonder, of course, if the three-man crew considered the rather obvious, if slightly violent, solution).
Running out of oxygen would have been a pretty depressing prospect. But that's not how Commander Jim Lovell (played in the movie by Tom Hanks) framed it. Instead, he added four words "Unless we do something."
We're going to run out of oxygen, unless we do something.
The earthquake will be the end of this town, unless we do something.
We won't sell enough stock to pay the staff, unless we do something.
There aren't enough customers to keep the business afloat, unless we do something.
Lovell and his crew didn't know yet what the "something" was. The important thing was to commit to doing it. Figuring out what it was came next.
The business owners I met after the talk – including restaurateurs, a winemaker, an accountant, an advertising freelancer, a lawyer, a Māori leader, people running a boutique hotel, an art gallery, and a fashion store – didn't need to be told that. Gabrielle was their earthquake and just like the business owners in Napier in 1931 they were ready to do something. They didn't all know exactly what it was, and I certainly didn't have all the answers. But they were looking for them, which is why they'd gotten up early, arranged for someone to take the kids to school and turned up at the conference centre.
I hope I gave them a few "somethings" to think about and maybe use to help their businesses bounce back. I suspect though that just being there; being in the room with 160 other people in similar boats, was just as valuable. It's hard, owning a small business. When you're in a big company there are plenty of people to bounce ideas off, celebrate successes with, and support each other through setbacks. When you're the boss, the janitor, the bookkeeper and the head of marketing you don't always get those opportunities.
So coming to hear some yarns from an Auckland advertising rooster can be as much a chance to make personal connections as it is to look at PowerPoint slides.
I'm not sure they flew in Aucklanders in 1931 to give pep talks. But I am sure that Napier's business owners – who saw almost everything they owned turned to rubble and soot one January morning – didn't need advice or consultants. They decided that they were going to do something. Then they worked out what that was, and did it.
So there’s this bar near my office. Let’s call it Elon’s. It’s been around a while and at one point was the place to be seen. If you wanted to meet anyone in tech, politics or media, then Elon’s was the only show in town.
As Elon’s got more popular, it started to attract a wider variety of patrons and before long it began to feel pretty mainstream.
What we saw as a big, fun, slightly weird crowd, clever advertisers and a bunch of government departments saw as an audience. If they wanted to get their messages out, sticking a notice on the wall at Elon’s (plus one at Zuck’s, the bigger place across the road) did the job. Everyone saw it, and for starters at least, it cost nothing or close enough to it.
The advertisers and government departments loved this, and set up whole departments just to write messages to stick on the bar-room walls, paid for, in part, by pulling back on old-fashioned stuff like radio, TV and billboards.
Then, recently, things started getting weird at Elon’s. People would turn up and discover there was a cover charge just to get into the better parts of the bar. Then they said unless you were a member you could only look at a set number of notices on the noticeboard each day.
Finally, one day we turned up to the bar and discovered it had closed down and been turned into a charging station for electric cars.
The advertisers and government departments were pretty cranky at these developments. After all, people had come to expect that they could find important information – sometimes some real life or death stuff – on the noticeboard at Elon’s.
But there was nothing they could do about it. Elon’s was owned by some guy overseas who’d never even been to New Zealand. It was his bar and he got to make the rules. And when he got sick of running a bar, he closed it.
Now, you could say that relying on some privately owned, relatively unregulated platform to get important information to customers, citizens and ratepayers is a bit of a high-risk strategy.
And you’d be right. Since the literally free-for-all early days of social media ended, audiences have become more and more expensive to connect to.
Advertisers, including government departments and essential services, have seen what was once a powerful way to spread vital information and hear from communities deliberately transformed to a pay-per-play media channel.
Most recently, in just the latest of a series of deeply unpopular moves, Twitter has announced that users will only see a limited number of posts each day. If they pay a monthly fee, they can see more.
Twitter is completely entitled to do that. It’s a privately owned company, not a public utility. It could just as easily cut its losses and shut down entirely.
So, what are all those advertisers, government departments and essential services to do?
The answer isn’t as much staring them in the face as tapping them on the shoulder.
The channels and platforms that social media relegated to second place are about to get called back into the spotlight. Paid advertising channels – radio, TV, news sites and outdoor – are proven, effective and can be held to account. Yes, we’ll pay, but we can expect to get what we pay for.
“Owned media” – organisations’ own websites, apps and email lists – have a place too. Sure, they’re unsexy, but they offer a direct connection to audiences without the worry of wondering if an offshore billionaire woke up feeling grumpy.
We had some good times at Elon’s. Great times.
And bars being bars, people are already working on new ones to take its place. New bars are great news for punters – who doesn’t want somewhere cool to hang out with friends and meet new ones?
But if you’re an advertiser or a government department, don’t expect them to take the place of the boring but effective channels your audiences trusted long before Elon pulled his first beer.
OPINION: A popular state-owned radio station, finding itself short of actual experts the other day, asked if I'd join an on-air discussion about the evils of business jargon.
An Australian office supplies company had run a survey and come up with a list of people's most-hated examples. The radio show's producer wondered if I, as a renowned exponent of commercial English, might like to add some expert comment.
Sure, I said. Thanks for reaching out. I'm sure we can blue sky some take-home learnings if we all get on board the same waka and take a helicopter view.
At least, that's what went through my mind when I accepted the invitation. Jargon is bad, right? It can be impenetrable, and sometimes deliberately so. It makes the in-crowd feel in, and reminds the out-crowd that they're out.
George Orwell was no fan of jargon, especially when it came to politics. The abuse and deterioration of language is a thread that runs through every page of 1984, even if that's remembered less than its predictions of a state obsessed with surveillance and control. Orwell's take on newspeak and doublespeak were as interesting to me, though, as Big Brother, thought crimes and the catchy Eurythmics soundtrack to the forgettable movie version.
Here's Orwell in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language: "Modern writing at its worst consists of gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else."
And that's where I thought I'd go too. Proper English Good, Jargon English Bad.
Only that's not what happened. The more I thought about it (and to be fair you don't get to think very much between getting an email at lunchtime on a workday and being on air at 5pm) the more I realised that I rather like what jargon has added to our language.
English without catchphrases, jargon and figures of speech can be bland. When we play with the language; when we add colour, drama, surprise and sometimes a little mystery, it gives us a reason to read or listen beyond just extracting the facts.
Sure, we could say that management has "stopped" a project, but "pulled the plug" is much more evocative. I can see an angry hand, veins bulging, yanking a black Bakelite plug from a heavy-duty metal wall socket. I can hear the cheerful carousel music winding sadly down to nothing. I can see the bright white carnival lights dimming through yellow to darkness.
"Flavour of the month" is as good a way as I know to describe things that are fashionable only briefly. One day you're strawberry and everyone wants strawberry. The next, people are into pineapple, and you're left in the fridge next to the expired yoghurt and those chicken sausages no one wanted to begin with.
I could go on, and I probably would if you were to tell me that my repetitive actions are having no measurable effect. But if you were to say that I'm "flogging a dead horse," then you've added drama to meaning and I'll know exactly what you're on about. I might even hear the kid watching Homer Simpson beating up a hamburger chain's costumed burglar mascot and yelling, "Stop, stop! He's already dead!"
I love great writing. Lazy, unimaginative prose both grinds my gears and burns my hump. (Whatever that means; I've never really known but I still like it.)
Great writing needs both the baby and the bathwater. Throwing away jargon – even when you've got a survey of 500 people and a radio host to back you up – is as dumb as a sack of hammers.
Comments welcome. Whatever your take, I know we'll be on the same page.
OPINION: "Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success."
British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton's recruitment ad for his 1914 Antarctic expedition is almost certainly fictional (and penned by an American – note the spelling of honour). But it has become part of recruitment folklore because in my then-toddler's words, it's "true enough to believe”.
It makes a solid point, though. If you're motivated enough by what a company, or perilous Antarctic expedition, is all about, then little niggles like low pay, long hours and a high chance of death don't count for quite as much.
It's just as well, or we wouldn't have nurses to look after us when we're crook, police to catch the crooks or teachers to keep our kids off the streets so they don't become crooks.
A purpose-driven employment brand is pretty magical stuff.
When I was 17, I was lucky enough (after competing with a few hundred other less lucky applicants to get a place) to walk from school straight into the RNZAF. On the face of it, the work ahead of me and my coursemates wasn't all that exciting: make our beds, polish our boots and march up and down for a few months before attending university (in uniform!) for three years, after which we would start pilot training. Thanks to Prime Minister Muldoon's idea of freezing both prices and wages the pay was awful too - $9700 a year before tax.
Honestly though, we would have done it for nothing. Other than (very cheap) beer in the cadet mess bar, we had few living expenses. Clothing, food, medical, dental and transport to work (boots!) were all laid on.
Maybe we were a little blinkered (unkind people might say brainwashed) but for a 17-year-old kid at the tail end of the Cold War, being a small part of an exciting machine with a both literally and figuratively higher purpose was just short of heaven.
As a trainee pilot – even one at the boot-polishing stage of my training – it's arguable that it was my profession, rather than the RNZAF's purpose, that got me out of bed at 0530 hours.
I don't think that's true. For every pilot, the RNZAF had workshops full of engineers, warehouses full of suppliers, kitchens full of cooks, and trucks, vans and refuelling tankers full of drivers.
I guarantee that when asked at the Hornby Tavern on a Friday night what he or she did for a living, the person who drove the Toyota Hiace van to deliver the sandwiches to the crew that drove the tankers that refuelled the training aircraft that I clumsily bounced across Wigram's forgiving grass runways didn't say they were a van driver.
They said that they were in the airforce.
And that's purpose.
When you've got that, pay, hours of work, the shabbiness of the carpet in your office or the age of the vans or aeroplanes you drive or fly doesn't matter.
When you haven't, getting people to come on your Antarctic expedition becomes harder and more expensive.
An accountant I knew, nice guy, but as will become clear by the end of this sentence a not particularly principled one, once worked for a big tobacco company.
He'd clearly spent a lot of time convincing himself it was a good idea, because he'd take every opportunity to tell me what a great place it was to work. His salary: astronomical. Annual leave: ridiculous amounts. Perks: travel, "conferences," car, expenses... you name it. All of that must have cost the tobacco company a bomb, while more purpose-driven outfits were paying nowhere near as much for equally talented (and way more principled) folks to count their beans and dodge their taxes.
With unemployment at record lows, but revenue under threat for many companies, spending your way out of the talent shortage isn't much of an option. A strong employment brand is no longer a nice to have.
I'll finish with another ad, only this one's real. It's from the 1950s and it's for the American publisher McGraw Hill. It features a testy-looking rooster (picture WKRP's Les Nessman) perched on a chair and reads:
“I don’t know you.
I don’t know your company.
I don’t know your company’s product.
I don’t know what your company stands for.
I don’t know your company’s customers.
I don’t know your company’s record.
I don’t know your company’s reputation.
Now, what was it you wanted to sell me?”
Change the last line to "why should I work for you?" and you begin to understand why that in a tight labour market it's employment brand, not market brand, that's keeping CEOs awake nights.
OPINION: As I write this, feet on my desk, waiting for my office mates to arrive and start in on the proper work, I notice that there's a black smudge of oil on my leg.
It's not unusual. Most days, despite my good-for-a-bloke personal hygiene habits, there'll be a bit of engine oil somewhere on me or my clothes.
The reason is my (literally) dirty habit. At the weekends, and on weekdays if I can sneak off, I fly and fiddle with old, oily, petrol-burning aeroplanes. The newest was built in 1978; the oldest in 1953. There's even one I've just started to fly that was built in the 1930s.
The aeroplanes I fly aren't particularly big, fast, noisy or powerful. Some of the ones we hang out with are, though. At the weekend I flew in an airshow alongside Spitfires, a Focke-Wulf, a team of snarling Harvards and more Yaks than a Nepalese butcher's shop.
In three days of flying we used enough avgas (a 100-octane lightly-leaded version of what goes in your car) and engine oil to fuel the average Aucklander's commute for the next thousand years. And that's not counting the diesel that was literally poured into aircraft exhaust systems to make those oh-so-photogenic smoke trails.
In 2023, with the climate warming and humans, our machines and our livestock undeniably in the frame, I should feel at least a little guilty about it all.
But I don't.
There's no doubt that the tide against internal combustion engines is gathering pace. An EV was on my shopping list last time I bought a car, only the $20,000 price difference tipping me towards my magically efficient 1-litre ICE Volkswagen. I'm certain my next car will be electric. Small electric aircraft are just appearing on the scene, and if I need to fly domestically in 2035 the aircraft may well be electrically powered.
I'll still fly noisy oily petrol-burning aeroplanes at weekends though, and here's why:
Joy.
Every one of the thousands of families who visited the airshow over Easter weekend enjoyed it. The kids squealed. People clapped and cheered. There were literal oohs and aaahs from the crowd at what looked like the scary parts. More than one old bugger cried.
For some, the aeroplanes didn't even need to be airborne to be worth admiring. A rare and precious De Havilland Mosquito, plucked from a Māpua barn a few years back, attracted hundreds every time it ran its two V12 Rolls Royce Merlin engines. One exhibitor was even running engines without aeroplanes attached; beautiful locally-made reproductions of the very earliest WW1 fighter engines, castor oil lubrication and all.
It was joyous.
The pilots, a few dozen guys and girls aged from about 30 to north of 70, enjoyed ourselves too. Being upside down in a 75-year-old aeroplane dragged along by a clattering, smelly engine that looks like something from Thomas the Tank Engine is a unique pleasure.
When the 1953 engine I'm helping rebuild, currently in hundreds of gleaming pieces on my 83-year-old engineer's bench, coughs and then purrs to life, I'll be overjoyed and he will too (although he probably won't let on).
In 2023, if you're going to use fossil fuels at all, if you're going to increase your personal contribution to anthropogenic climate change, joy is one of the few defensible reasons to do it.
Driving a three-litre petrol truck to pick up some groceries, drop off the kids or occupy half the space a bus would on your motorway commute makes no sense.
We've seen this exact shift before. Horses were once the smelly, dangerous, polluting scourge of big cities like New York, London and Paris. The internal combustion engine swept them away as a safer, seemingly cleaner alternative. Horses as a means of transport plodded on for a while, but before long the only reason anyone would keep one of the big, needy, dirty, expensive things was for joy.
And to me, and the motorbike tinkerers and steam train enthusiasts and V8 polishers in sheds, hangars and garages everywhere, that's as good a reason as there is.
OPINION: If there’s a change of government next year, Three Waters is toast.
Which is to say, if the Water Services Entities Bill manages to become the Water Services Entities Act by then, it will be repealed, and if it hasn’t yet been passed, it won’t be.
Which is a bit odd, in a way, since almost every local and central government politician in the country agrees that most of what this package aims to do is badly needed.
I was down the line the other day, not too far from the poster-town of waterborne disease, Havelock North.
As I had an early flight the next morning (blame the pilot and author of this column) I stopped into a local supermarket for some breakfast supplies.
Supermarkets are supermarkets, but the thing that struck me about this one was the amount of water on the shelves. Boxes, bottles, and jugs of the stuff. For the locals, drinking water that they’re not scared will kill them has become just another line on the ever-growing weekly supermarket receipt. I suspect that whoever sells home water filters in the area is doing a pretty good trade, too.
Everyone wants clean water. Always has, always will. So why is Three Waters so hard to swallow?
For me, it’s not the kaupapa, it’s how it’s been sold. And that starts with the name.
Three Waters is newspeak. People don’t get it. Combined, those two ordinary words sound foreign and odd. To government and public service insiders it might feel like contemporary, clever, slightly academic language. To the rest of us it feels like something designed to keep us out. Three waters? Ok, drinking water, sewage I guess… irrigation? Or swimming? Wait that’s four. At the weekend, driving through Judith Collins’ electorate, I saw a National Party hoarding promising to repeal five waters.
Names matter when you’re selling things.
The Americans know this, bless them. Sometimes they go a bit far. I’m not saying we want the next dog licencing law to be called the Cuddly Puppies Roaming Free and Happy Through Flower-filled Meadows Act.
But we could do better.
In advertising we know to sell the sizzle, not the sausage.
So what is the Water Services Entities Bill aka Three Waters really selling?
Not entities, for a start. Say it out loud right now and the other people in your office or café will think you’re a weirdo or, worse still, a policy adviser.
Three waters, I think we can agree, is out.
How about this: The Clean and Affordable Water for All New Zealanders Bill.
Is that what we’re trying to sell? Sounds like it to me.
It’s hard to argue with a bill like that. Which bit don’t you like? The clean bit? Or the affordable bit?
The problems Three Waters is designed to solve won’t go away.
The bill itself might be toast; maybe the idea just needs to be served up differently.
I am a middle-aged white man and you should listen to me.
I am a middle-aged white man with money, so you should listen to me when I tell the government what to do with your taxes. I make a lot of money and don’t pay much tax, so I know about these things. I know the key to economic recovery is getting taxpayers working again, especially the ones in my company. I am watching the webcams in my offices in New Zealand from my apartment in Sydney and I don’t see anyone working. You should listen to me when I say we need to end the lockdown so they can get back to making me money.
I am a middle-aged white man who’s big on Linkedin. You should listen to me because when I say things to my friends on Linkedin they all agree with me. Some of them click Like on my posts and some spell out exactly how much they agree with me in a comment. They liked what I had to say about plastic moulding and pivoting and provisional tax and they like what I have to say about Covid 19 just as much. You should listen to me too. You will probably like what I say and agree with it.
I am a middle-aged white man who works at a university. You should listen to me just as much as you listen to those other university people who work in the medicine and biology parts. Some of them are not even middle-aged men. My academic freedom of speech means my opinion cannot be silenced even if my expertise has nothing to do with viruses, epidemics or public health. I have as much right to be listened to as them and I deserve to be remembered when my name comes up in a funding application too. So you should listen to me.
I am a middle-aged white man who started a company once. You should listen to me because not everyone can start a company unless they are an entrepreneur. I am an entrepreneur like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. We are middle aged white entrepreneurs and you should listen to us. We invent things all the time so when we say we’ve invented a way out of this pandemic you should listen to us. But mainly me. Listen to me.
I am a middle-aged white man and I am fit and healthy so you should listen to me. My house is warm and dry and my food choices are not driven by affordability because I have plenty of money. My house is close to supermarkets, specialty food stores and many restaurants so you should listen to what I have to say about what other people eat. If I ever feel sick I head straight to my doctor and we talk about that time we played golf in Fiji then I pay with my Airpoints credit card. There is almost no chance Covid-19 will kill me if I catch it so you should listen to me about health policy.
I am a middle-aged white man and my opinions are relevant. Listening to them is essential. Writing them down for you is an essential service. You should listen to me. You should listen to me. You should listen to me.
OPINION: One of the best things about social media – whether you prefer Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or some platform I haven’t heard of yet – is that it’s personalised.
In a world where you can interact with virtual influencers and pets, there’s now a chance you might be wearing something designed with the help of artificial intelligence. TGF recently ‘collaborated’ with AI design platform Midjourney on the design of its TGF t-shirts and tote bags.
TGF senior art director Michelle Vohan and senior designer Alana Howitt worked with the Midjourney AI on the project. “It was a great lesson in briefing,” Michelle says. The AI uses the word prompts we supply to create a set of images which we then feed back on to see iterations and improvements. Some of the first ones were pretty weird!”
TGF creative director Vaughn Davis says it won’t be the last time the agency works with artificial intelligence. “Midjourney has only been public since July last year and even in that time its capabilities have grown enormously. It’s a really exciting time.”
TGF’s designs feature nine different goats, each generated by a string of different prompt words, fed to the Mindjourney AI via chat platform Discord.
Karangahape Road turned orange last Thursday night as local independent ad and design agency The Goat Farm celebrated its tenth and a bit birthday.
The bash was originally scheduled for February, but the bastard virus derailed that plan.
100 or so clients, staff and partners past and present joined TGF in its neighbouring studio / event space The Ever Room for a celebration of more than a decade’s work on clients including Vector, Graham Norton’s Wines and Spirits (Invivo), HRV and Kiwi Wealth.
Not surprisingly, the crowd was well watered thanks to the generosity of Invivo and Hallertau.
TGF founder and creative director Vaughn Davis says the event was as much a housewarming as a birthday party. “We moved to our new Karangahape Road space after outgrowing the old one last year. Covid put the kybosh on an opening party, so it made sense to combine the two. Has anyone seen my glass?”
If truth is the first casualty of war, then the Covid-19 pandemic shows every sign of being one. Three months since the first reported case, reliable information is becoming as rare as toilet paper, face masks and a busy Chinese restaurant.
The other parallel is more sobering. As far as we know, the virus’s mortality rate is about 3 percent. That’s about the same percentage of the world’s population that died in World War 2. There are differences, of course. It’s almost impossible that everyone on the planet will catch the disease and that no cure will be found. And while the WW2 losses were mostly among the young and fighting fit, the average age of death due to Covid-19 so far is 80.
So far, so grim.
But let’s look forward – maybe 9 months, maybe a couple of years – to when Covid-19 is under control and just another reason to wash your hands and believe in vaccines.
What could be the lasting effects of a pandemic on the way we do business and live our lives?
Looking back over the last century or so, the other thing global wars had in common (and we’ll count the Cold War and its sexy cousin the Space Race here) is that they all drove innovation. Technology and society advance far more rapidly in times of global crisis than they do in peacetime. When it’s do or die, we choose do.
If we’re lucky, the Covid-19 pandemic could have much the same effect. Tragically, many people will die. But, as we always have, we’ll innovate and adapt, and many of the changes we make will stick.
Travel
Ironically, the global air travel market was made possible by a global crisis. World War 2 accelerated innovation in aircraft size, speed and range and left us with the planes, pilots and long runways that cheap world travel needed. Covid-19 could well wind back the clock.
Targeted travel restrictions were among the first actions governments took to control the spread of infection. Businesses and sporting bodies have followed, imposing severe restrictions on international travel. The environmentally-driven #nofly movement was already gaining momentum pre-virus.
In a world with less business travel, organisations will lean more and more on video conferencing, email and just plain old phone calls to connect. Travel will bounce back post-virus, but by then we will have become familiar with new ways of working… so it’s unlikely business travel will return to anything like the same level.
How we connect
If there’s one thing a virus likes, it’s a room full of people from all over the world, shaking hands. Conferences large and small are being canned, including Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress and just this week Austin Texas’s tech/film/music megaconference South By South West. On the business front, a year of cancelled events will likely force companies to find new ways to communicate, learn and sell, and many of these will stick once the pandemic passes.
Gatherings for entertainment – concerts, movies, festivals and so on – are more likely to recover. Like Marie Kondo’s half empty sock drawer, they spark joy – and we’re always going to want that.
How we work
Technology companies – telcos in particular – have been predicting we’d be working from home for years. Until now, though, it just hasn’t happened. The number of Kiwis working from home reached about 10% a decade ago and hasn’t grown much since then, possibly due to the social appeal of spending time in a workplace outweighing the benefits of a 30-second commute and Skyping in your undies.
Today, the technology to support remote working is accessible to almost any business. Fibre connectivity and fast mobile internet mean workers can remain constantly connected from anywhere. Free or cheap cloud-based services like Google Drive or Dropbox remove the need to physically connect to an office server. And communications platforms like Skype, Zoom, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger make it as easy to send a cat video across the planet as it is to send one across the office.
That 10% working from home number? Expect it to go up and stay up.
How we commute
Not everyone can work from home. So how will the way we get to work and school change in the face of a pandemic? One unfortunate and likely effect will be people avoiding public transport. So we can expect a rise in private vehicle use, with lower fuel prices making this even more probable.
On the upside, for those who can make it work, commuting by cycling or walking is likely to increase. Hopefully this habit will stick.
How we shop
Online shopping – especially groceries and ready-to-eat meals – is already booming. My Food Bag is already New Zealand’s third biggest food retailer. Uber Eats drivers outnumber customers in many restaurants. In China, home food delivery businesses are reportedly flat out. If the pandemic leads to people avoiding trips outside the home, it’s likely this will accelerate.
As the home food delivery market grows, so will the logistics back end needed to support it. Greater scale, coupled with lower fuel costs, will help make delivery more affordable and accessible. Once home delivery becomes a habit, it’s likely to continue post-pandemic too.
Three months in, it's not clear whether Covid-19 will become this generation’s World War 2 or just another skirmish in the endless battle against disease. Either way, we will adapt, change and innovate, just as we always have in the face of global threats. While the challenges are ahead of us aren’t clear, I reckon we can find the confidence to face them by looking to history.
Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past.”