David Teece warns NZ unprepared for rapid global changes

David Teece says there needs to be more political unity in NZ. Photo / Paul Estcourt

“We’re on the cusp of dramatic change … and New Zealand is not fully prepared for it.” That’s the view of David Teece, one of the world’s leading business scholars who retains links to New Zealand through extensive farming and winemaking in the South Island.

Speaking to Bruce Cotterill on the Leaders Getting Coffee podcast, Teece said New Zealand has a lot of positive attributes and he’s proud to call it home, but the country is unprepared for the pace of technological and geopolitical change happening right now.

“New Zealand economically has been mismanaged, I think, for maybe the last decade or so,” said Teece, who teaches at the prestigious Berkeley Haas School of Business in California.

“There were great reforms in the 1980s, that gave a new lease of life, and I see the Government now is endeavouring to bring about economic reforms and make progress. I like the direction of change, but it just all seems very slow. Things have to move much faster in the world that we’re in.

“Maybe there’s not enough political unity for that to happen, and if that’s the case, then New Zealanders will suffer because of it.”

Teece also referred to recent Chinese military activity in the Tasman Sea as something the country needed to be more alert to.

“Your neighbourhood is changing dramatically and in ways that are not favourable to New Zealand.”

While New Zealanders are tenacious, which makes for good entrepreneurs, what we haven’t done, with a couple of exceptions, is create scalable entrepreneurship and globally scalable companies, he added.

Teece left New Zealand having completed his Master’s degree at the University of Canterbury. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed a second Master’s degree and ultimately a PhD in Economics.

He taught at Pennsylvania and then Oxford and Stanford, before a professorship at the age of just 32 took him to the University of California at Berkeley.

Listen to the full chat in the podcast embed above, covering Teece’s unique career, discussion about the importance of good leadership, and some commentary on New Zealand’s place in the world, the current state of Donald Trump’s USA, and his thoughts on a troubled world.

Leaders Getting Coffee is a podcast produced by Bruce Cotterill with the NZ Herald. You can follow it on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.