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Home / Business

A cheerleader for New Zealand

By by Carroll du Chateau
29 Dec, 2004 09:21 AM9 mins to read

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Bridget Liddell, banner-waver for New Zealand business and the Knowledge Wave, has a new passion.

Gesticulating enthusiastically, the former high-ranking economist explains her various strategies for selling her native country to the world. And being one of those who knows everyone who is anyone back home, she has taken networking to
new heights in New York.

* * *

It is not surprising I have a feeling I already know Bridget Wickham.

As she is one of the country's most accomplished networkers, I've heard her name dozens of times, had her pointed out at the Knowledge Wave dinner back in 2001 and seen pictures of her looking like a younger version of Julie Andrews - I've even interviewed her high-performing husband, now chief financial officer of International Paper, Chris Liddell.

But when the newly reinvented Bridget Wickham meets us in this huge New York cafeteria, and lets me have both barrels of that drive that helped fuel the Knowledge Wave and Kea (Kiwi Expats Association) in New York, everything changes.

For a start, she used the move to New York last year to take her spouse's name. Liddell, her second husband, had left Carter Holt Harvey for the job at parent company International Paper.

By then they'd been married eight years, their younger sons Sergei and Andrei were 10 and 12, the three older children were in London and Auckland. "It was a good opportunity," she says.

Second, she is a whole lot more formidable than Julie Andrews.

She is one of four responsible for setting up the New York chapter of Kea.

She knows everyone who's anyone in New Zealand, and helped pull together several strands of expatriate networks functioning at different levels in the city.

As she says, a significant part of the link in Manhattan is the financial sector, which is very powerful and important to New Zealand, and the creative industries which showcase the things that set New Zealand apart.

"We're edgy and inventive, she says. "It's no accident what happened with Peter Jackson," she says. "He's an enormously creative individual, but he's also incredibly creative in the business sense - so he's been able to reinvent the business model of how you make a film.

"By doing three at once you can imagine what it's done to the economics of the industry. Certainly he's an enormously creative individual but also characteristic of the way that we [New Zealanders] think about things."

Liddell's own skill is similar in that she is also able to take creative ideas and make them work financially - wrapping what she calls "the economic imperatives around them".

She is enthusiastic and never forgets a name - even if she hasn't met you.

She also has three sons and two daughters, ranging in age from 25 to 12, and is driven by the kind of struggles you encounter when your high-powered husband gets promoted to head office and you worry about your older kids, twins Matthew, a project engineer and Amanda who works for the Bank of America in London and Jessica, 21, who is a graphic designer in Auckland, who may be unable to get the right visas to join you there.

She also has a seriously banged-up knee, from a long-ago skiing accident, and is struggling with the idea of a reconstruction.

As the trees in Central Park first tinged yellow at the end of last October, 150 of these high flyers came together at Peter Gordon's Public restaurant on the edge of Manhattan's Little Italy for the launch of Kea New York. Canapes were by Gordon, conversation was animated and networks were set up and strengthened as architects, web designers, fashion people, writers, people involved in the film industry sipped 42 Below vodka martinis and New Zealand chardonnay.

There were people from the former BINZUS group with its strong business focus and creatives from Kevin Roberts' and Brian Sweeny's New Zealand Edge organisation which targets poets, PR and advertising people.

Introduced by Liddell, the launch speech was by Stephen Tindall, another contact from her Knowledge Wave days back in New Zealand. Tindall, one of the three founders of Kea, outlined its mission and vision as New Zealand's global professional network - plus his personal vision for New Zealand. The result, says Liddell, was explosive. "He's a great leader and philanthropist, people were really excited."

The New York launch takes the total membership of Kea above 3500 in eight chapters covering 72 countries. The largest is London, with 1300 members.

Every year, the organisation hands out the World-Class New Zealander Award to the expat who made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand's economic development. In 2004, it went to Richard Mander who, after helping high-tech New Zealand companies reach the North American market, moved from Silicon Valley in California to work with New Zealand global positioning specialist Navman.

In Manhattan the same names keep coming up: The New Zealand Edge, NYNZ, World Class New Zealand, the Kiwi Club, KEA, the Department of Trade and Enterprise, as people like Liddell work to mobilise the network of New Zealanders living abroad - around a million worldwide.

Liddell says New Zealand is much bigger than the physical bounds of the country. "There are so many tentacles. We don't ever stop being New Zealanders. When people go overseas they become even more passionate."

For all Liddell's friendliness and down-home candour, she is much more than a networker and cheerleader for her various causes. A talented and experienced economist, she sits there in the empty cafeteria, waving her arms, ticking off her career highlights. By the time she arrived in Connecticut in 2003 she had done seven years, rising to a director of the company, with investment bankers and stockbrokers, CS First Boston, another eight as director of corporate and public affairs, then general manager of CHH Plastics, at Carter Holt Harvey.

In 1998, she used her Harkness Fellowship to Harvard to study the Balanced Scorecard: how business balances commercial objectives with its people and community objectives. This is, "a very important emerging trend in business".

Next came the move to the University of Auckland, working with then vice-chancellor John Hood, who is now at Oxford University in England.

At this point Liddell, then Wickham, became part of the business landscape as she helped Hood and the university council organise the Knowledge Wave conferences.

"The idea came when the university council - I was on it at the time - discussed ways of putting a more international perspective on the challenges New Zealand faced." The challenge was to get the best speakers in the world to come to debate in New Zealand and generate talk and challenge across the country. "We got absolutely unbelievable people ... a great richness of ideas and themes."

Despite those who saw the conferences, with their Sky TV link-ups, white tablecloths and hype as a massive and elitist PR exercise, the spin-offs from the Knowledge Wave (KW) have been considerable. Business clusters came out of the KW as did the Government's Innovation and Growth strategy, Auckland University's Leadership Forum and Ice House, its entrepreneurship centre which helps new ventures develop business plans and prepare to launch onto the market.

More significant was the Strategies for Building a Talented Nation paper which recommended, among other things, the creation of "a global community of New Zealanders".

The first Knowledge Wave conference was in August 2001, the second in February 2003. "And I left," says Liddell, "[for IP's head office in Connecticut US] immediately after."

And no, the fact that she and John Hood have left the country, is not a tragedy for the Knowledge Wave - or New Zealand.

"His elevated position at Oxford gives him a fantastic opportunity to help New Zealand," she says. "When he was inducted into the new role he wore a Maori cloak ... the best of New Zealand can be opened to the world and is even more important to the country in a sense."

Every Monday, during term time, when the boys are at Eaglebrook, a private boys school in Massachusetts, Liddell takes the 45-minute train ride from their "lovely, very treed" family home in Connecticut, which so reminds her of Titirangi, to the office in Tribeca.

Since she and Chris rent a loft apartment just a couple of streets away in Soho, she often stays in Manhattan during the week and Chris, who works at IP's headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, joins her. "We manage to stay together most of the time."

Most weeks she divides her time between Kea, her directorship of the Cullen Superannuation Fund and her day job at Fahrenheit 212, a 30-strong start-up company devoted to business innovation.

Liddell's chief operating officer role at Fahrenheit, which looks at ways of improving a product's chance in the marketplace, is to "put the business model around it" - making sure that the creative idea is properly positioned from a commercial perspective.

Clients include Proctor and Gamble, Starbucks, Yoplait. "We've had very strong revenues, very strong new growth."

Strategies work in various ways: transferring products and ideas from one industry to another or transferring an idea geographically to re-energise a brand. This, she says, "is where New Zealand comes in, with its amazing ability to capture the latest trends and approaches and translate them to new products and ideas".

"The made-in-heaven opportunity here is linking these qualities with the vast consumer markets of the US that are so hungry for new ideas."

Then there's her role with the New Zealand super fund which she sees as probably more useful now that she is in New York, at the heart of the global financial world.

The Cullen Fund will be large, even by New York standards. "It's a huge responsibility to the citizens of New Zealand whose retirement will be part-funded by it."

Now that the launch is over, the Kea side of Liddell's career revolves round networking in New York, feeding that back to New Zealand and trying to ensure that the opportunities both ways come together. The database the organisation is now putting together "is amazing" and will allow members to search for people with like-minded interests and create both business and personal contacts.

"We're putting in place the infrastructure to make these linkages, following Ireland, etc, and working out how to really make the diaspora work," she says. And no, there are no inducements: "We just think people should want to do this ... It's an opportunity for people to contribute back and for New Zealand to provide networks and support."

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