Long-lunch legend looks ahead

By IRENE CHAPPLE

On display in Mike Hutcheson's small central Auckland apartment is a smashed laptop computer, framed and hung on a wall.

The screen sits defiantly independent of the keyboard. Wires sprawl like dried-up arteries.

This is an original Hutcheson artwork and a visitor needs to look just a little closer for the explanation.

Snuggled between the computer parts, in capitals, Hutcheson had scribbled "It was late and I was tired."

The word "Crash" shouts at the base of the work.

Hutcheson threw the computer out a window when it crashed and he lost a 30-page presentation.

"It was very satisfying," he says, with a giggle that appears suddenly and is boyishly highpitched.

"But then I had to explain to everybody what I had done."

He looks coy, embarrassed - until he hoots again. It is like watching a schoolkid caught smoking behind the bikesheds, only in the body of a 56-year-old man.

Hutcheson, who gleefully described himself as "quite large" before our meeting, once wrote a column on his failure to achieve any significant reduction in girth. He concluded the only answer was to focus on increasing his height.

That did not work, but Hutcheson remains an ardent advocate of the long lunch, and argues that more business should be done over them.

"Think about it," he says, leaning back in his chair with the air of a man stating the obvious. "All the great deals in history have been done over lunch or over supper ... the Christian church was founded on a supper. That is how ideas come out, organically and spontaneously."

Ideas are what drive Hutcheson. He was formerly Saatchi & Saatchi's managing director and is now local head of its think-tank, The Hive.

He will leave the agency next month to write a book and to nurture an "innovation and start-up incubator".

The book will be aimed at helping people with ideas.

The incubator, called The Lighthouse Ideas Company, has been set up with American business partner Brandon Daniel.

Hutcheson is excited about the incubator project. You can tell because talking about it brings on his stutter.

Hutcheson stuttered badly when he was a child, but ignored the impediment and it all but faded away. But it is noticeable when he has been drinking or when he talks enthusiastically about something.

Lighthouse Ideas already has four clients, none of whom Hutcheson will name.

He has invested in at least one company - but the tape recorder has to go off before he will talk about it.

The company has a good idea - one of those obvious things that comes from an everyday occurrence, much like George de Mestral's invention of Velcro after the Swiss mountaineer and inventor returned from a walk covered in burrs.

"I get much more satisfaction when I take things from conception right through than in just making [a product] look good at the end," Hutcheson says.

"I believe quite passionately there is a real need in this country for start-ups and entrepreneurs and inventors to be connected with marketers early on.

"Most people are looking for solutions to problems but I say that's the wrong way round.

"Lots of people look for a gap in the market but they need to ask, 'Is the market in the gap?' "

Hutcheson pulls out a pad of paper from the pile of books, photos and folders sprawled over the outside table, and draws lines on the page. He delves into the Myers-Briggs personality theory, stabbing at the border between the intuitive and extrovert boxes with his pencil.

"I am here," he says, naming Saatchi & Saatchi creative colleagues such as Howard Greive, John Plimmer and John Fisher as others who share the same psychological neighbourhood.

Most clients, says Hutcheson, sit on the sensible introvert fence.

And that, with the proliferation of accountants and the conspiracies of human resource people, has been draining the innovative potential of New Zealanders, he says.

"One of things I have learned over the last few years is that some people are intuitive and others are process-driven."

He says process-driven people - and accountants - can be destructive.

"People have these short-term contracts and they need to be able to show something straight away.

"So they produce advertising that yells at the consumer because some accountants says you have to get bottom-line results.

"But brands take years to build," he says.

"We emasculate brands to order to get short-term gain - and you wonder why we have such crap on telly."

Hutcheson says he intends to support innovation through his experiences in capturing the hearts of consumers.

During his career he co-founded Colenso BBDO, Hutcheson Knowles Marinkovich (HKM) and Marco Direct advertising, among others.

It is his name that is associated with the Auckland A promotional symbol and sign that attracted so much flak.

Hutcheson looks skyward.

"Not all ideas fly," he says.

Talk of retirement makes him grimace.

He is not retiring - and declares that he never will.

Another word makes him grimace: granddad.

It is a word he fears his adult children (two from a first marriage and two adopted through his second) will soon force him to face.

Hutcheson says he does intend to spend more time on the 5ha he bought on Waiheke Island, where figs are now sprouting and he plans to plant Merlot vines.

But mostly, he just wants time to write, to paint and to dream up good ideas.