Mr. Brian Sweeney
Founder & Chairman NZ Edge

World Report: New Zealand Edge was co-founded in 1999 by yourself and Kevin Roberts who privately finance the initiative. Can you explain the thinking behind the concept?

Brian Sweeney: One of the things we have tried to do with New Zealand Edge, which no one had really done before, is to update the myths, the imagery and the language. From 1984 to the end of 1999 New Zealand went through a massive and long-overdue restructuring of its economy. It was compelling and absolutely necessary.

Despite these massive changes, we forgot to spend time on restructuring our psyche as a country and we've relied on well-worn myths, catchphrases and symbols to make us contemporary. This is why over the last decade we have vigorously pursued the New Zealand Edge concept, and the notion of edge. There is a discipline in marketing and communication that we often have to resort to, and that is you have to find a single word to do all your work. That's all you are allowed - a single word. We set ourselves the task of finding New Zealand's word and asked ourselves, "If you had to describe New Zealand in a single word, what would it be?"

We arrived very quickly at the word edge. Kevin Kelly, who was at the time the Founding Editor of Wired Magazine, gave it to us. He said that New Zealand was a very easy place to explain. Biology, the science of all life, is the best way of explaining how the internet has evolved so rapidly, like a biological system. In a very contemporary sense, he said, that as in biology, all new stuff happens on the edge, on the margins and fringes of a species and not in the centre. Every world, every species, every discipline needs an edge. The edge has a vital role to play in the performance of the whole because it is a source of new ideas and innovation, evolution and unexpected breakthroughs.

And that's New Zealand's role in the world as we see it: to make new things. This concept appealed to us hugely because it gave New Zealand a global context; it shattered the rhetoric about us being small, isolated, remote and therefore irrelevant. It says that we have a very specific and significant role in the world, and that we have real purpose. Without the right language and constructs, we end up thinking that having a nice time is the purpose of living in New Zealand, where, in most other parts of the world, there is a greater sense of urgency about what life's about.

New Zealand has produced a disproportionate number of people who have changed the world in some way, often profound. We've even got the word new in our name for heaven's sake!

So, "Edge" it was. We also came to like it because it wasn't a comfortable, cosy, nice sort of word. I think that we kid ourselves that we are this lovely little country far away at the bottom of the earth but whilst we might be lovely to visitors, we're very tough on ourselves for reasons we haven't really explained to ourselves very well. This is the dissonance between our external marketing and domestic behaviour. The two things are not related.

World Report: You talk about "restructuring the psyche" of New Zealanders. Why do you feel this concept of edge is the best way for New Zealand to develop a sense of itself and what do you think this metaphor will help New Zealanders to escape from?

Brian Sweeney: In a way, I think insularity and introversion. Although, New Zealanders have travelled tremendously and many have enjoyed great success internationally I still feel we have a stuffy, mid 20th Century view of ourselves. I don't think we've spent a lot of time questioning our identity, and coming up with the right language and that is essential, because if you get the language right and most other things take care of themselves.

World Report: How do you think the metaphor of the edge can that benefit New Zealand in the global market place?

Brian Sweeney: First and foremost visibility is important. It's a very competitive world, there are a vast number of countries and regions and cities competing for the attention of many different markets and we're not just talking about tourism, we're talking about investment dollars. New Zealand needs to make a commitment to increasing its profile aggressively. For the past years we have relied too heavily on what I call the Twin Peter Economy: in the late 1990's it was Peter Blake and the America's Cup and in the first five years of this century it's been Peter Jackson and The Lord of the Rings. There doesn't seem to be another Peter in the pipeline at the moment so we've got to up our game and be more programmed and focused and concerted about the brand marketing of New Zealand.

World Report: That brings us on to the whole issue of sustainability and New Zealand's clean and green reputation. The Prime Minister recently set the country the challenge of becoming the first carbon neutral country on the face of the planet. What's your view on New Zealand's clean and green credentials and the Prime Minister's recent announcement?

Brian Sweeney: Obviously, it's really important because the perception and the promise of New Zealand is clean and green. The 100% Pure campaign also implies a lot of things environmentally. There is a certain amount of good will towards us in the world because of this but the truth is there is some catch-up to be done. The climate change issue has been a wake-up call for all of us.

If you go into any major corporation in New Zealand and talk to their CEO's, I think there would be a high awareness of environmental and sustainability issues and they would all have programmes that are underway. The real challenge is on a more individual level and, in that sense, the first part of getting somewhere is to declare a goal. The Prime Minister has done well to raise the level of urgency.

World Report: I've got a quote of yours: "The New Zealand landscape compels you to absorb beauty and mystery". There is a special relationship between people here and the landscape. Do you think it's true that people here care more about environmental issues than many countries around the world?

Brian Sweeney: Well, personally, I go nuts if I'm not near the sea, and I love that horizon line, which to me is an edge. Somebody who works here once lived in California and told me that, while people there live on the coast, nobody really looks out at it or gives it much significance. In New Zealand the horizon means possibility.

It's basic human nature to respond to beauty, and there is a lot of intrinsic beauty and wonder in New Zealand. I love driving through the country; I drove to Auckland a month ago because I hadn't done it for a long time. Did I think about my carbon footprint on that day? No I didn't, there were hardly any cars on the road. The smells and the sounds were incredible.

I live between New York and Wellington and the first thing I noticed when I came back here were the birds. The bird life here is amazing. I live part of the time at the Kapiti Coast, and Kapiti Island is a bird sanctuary so there is a phenomenal bird life; the birds do drag races down the beach; they run the place. I know the stories people tell when they have been away from New Zealand for a long time, what they miss is the smell of the sea, the sound of the birds, that very close proximate relationship with nature.

World Report: What is it you love about your people, what is it you miss about New Zealanders when you are abroad? What are the particular aspects of the national character?

Brian Sweeney: I think we are fantastic in teams. We usually under promise and over deliver, making sure that things are on time and on budget. Teamwork is important in every organization or society and we are very good at it.

We're well educated, we've spent our lives with our heads permanently up about 45 degrees looking at the world, and wondering. New Zealand gives you a great vantage point from which to run a global business. It gives you perspective as you spend your time looking at and thinking about the rest of the world. Australians don't think like that and neither do Americans because when you're in the centre you never look outward.

The other thing that is huge for us is the New Zealand diaspora. A decade ago when we began looking at the whole issue of who we are, it was inevitable that we had to look at this group of people who had left. We didn't like the word expatriate because it sounds so colonial and it invokes a sense of exile. Instead, we talk about New Zealand being a country of five rather than four million people, because it blends those people living overseas into the mix. This thinking is perfectly attuned with the more positive aspects of globalisation.

The Australians are more advanced than us than looking at their diasporas. The Lowy Institute and the Australian Treasury have both done reports that have found about the same number of Australians living overseas as New Zealanders. That's a country about five times bigger than us with the same number of people living overseas. There are 400,000 Japanese people who live permanently overseas, there are only two million Americans who live overseas in the world and we've got approximately a million people - My God!

We believed that there was a big group of people with a huge amount to gain by being emotionally repatriated. That said, a lot of people left feeling very angry and slamming the door behind them. At a certain time in New Zealand, there wasn't space for you if you were creative or if you were gay. The country has changed a lot now and we wanted to reconnect with these people.

I think there is enormous affection for New Zealand among those people who live overseas, and simply recognizing them as part of the daily public life of the country has quite a profound effect on them. I've seen people cry, saying, "My God, you recognize we exist!" The way we have approached it is by recognizing and reporting the activities of these people on our website. Once again, it comes back to what New Zealand Edge is all about: storytelling. It's a metaphorical vehicle and once we get it into the community, then people can decide what they want to do.

World Report: And what is your take on the work that Kea is doing in terms of fostering this global sense of community between New Zealanders living overseas?

Brian Sweeney: What Kea is doing is absolutely fantastic and absolutely necessary. They are more applied than we are in terms of physical networking, events and marketing, identifying talent, having meetings, making connections. It's an entire Government department run by a couple of people and in that sense we're very similar. This is we see our role as private entrepreneurs; to create the environment, create the context, set the language, tell the story and then step back and let people get on with it. You can also channel them and direct them and set up opportunities - and I think Kea is doing a fantastic job with that.

World Report: We had an interview with David Skilling of the New Zealand Institute, and he was talking about how he feels that New Zealand needs to make 'unreasonableness' a national characteristic. There are many notable examples of New Zealanders who've gone out and taken on the world. Are you trying to inspire more of this sort of behaviour by telling these stories on NZ Edge?

Brian Sweeney: I think so. I'm a firm believer in role modelling and mentoring. The mentor doesn't have to be alive for you to learn from them, they can be dead and gone and you can still learn from these people. A story that has been personalized and told through the life of somebody else is inspirational. We had a sense of the obvious people, Ernest Rutherford, Edmund Hilary, Katherine Mansfield, Bruce McLaren and Kiri Te Kanawa but most people would run out of steam at about that point. We figured that there were so many more people that have somehow changed the world. Take the Maurice Wilkins story, for instance. He lived in New Zealand for four years, but he still passionately believed he was a New Zealander, and that was incredibly important to him. It was an immense emotional affirmation to him when he got recognition as a New Zealander because that's what he really wanted to be.

Going further back, we have rescued the extraordinary story of Alexander Aitken from the annals of history. He was a brilliant mathematician from Dunedin who fought in the First World War and spent his career at Edinburgh University. He was known as the human computer, because of his amazing skills in mental arithmetic. We've got a schools kit on this guy, and we set out to bring some scholarly rigor to our research and produced school kits with a 3,500 or 4,000 word story on Aitken. It was adopted by mathematics teachers to teach fifth-form boys. Can you imagine a worse thing, teaching fifth-form boys mathematics! But the Aitken story immediately makes it more relevant to them.

So I guess 'unreasonableness' is just another word for edge. The edge is not an easy place to occupy - it can mean working 20-hour days, taking massive risks and pushing your body and mind to make breakthroughs. We're pretty clueless about a lot of the fundamental things about our country and I've spent a lot of time looking at this. I trained as a historian and social scientist, I've worked in the communications business for twenty years and in between I had seven years as an entertainment producer, so I've specialized in a study of New Zealand; I haven't arrived at these thoughts by some random process, it's been quite deliberate.

World Report: Do you think that New Zealand offers the space to think? Is that part of the attraction for some of the creative people that have moved here?

Brian Sweeney: Absolutely. I've got a t-shirt that says NYNZ and that equation works for me. There is a one in sixteen thousand chance of a New Yorker and a New Zealander ending up next to each other on the table of contents of the Atlas and yet every Atlas that has ever been published has got New Zealand and New York right next to each other.

New York is really complicated and multi-layered, a really exciting and wonderful place. But everything takes twice as long and costs twice as much, and there is a level of psychological and logistical complexity around everything.

New Zealand is largely stripped of that, there is the time and space to do things. There is quietness here and if you want it there is absolute silence. As a place to run a global business it's great. The logistics are really simple, it's quick to get places and while there is a lot to do, you can very easily opt out of it.

We have no sense in New Zealand of the population densities of Europe or Asia, and the pressure that puts on you personally. There's a great German term 'lebensraum', living room, we've got it here.

World Report: The whole flag issue. On your website you wrote an essay called, "Eight Reasons to Change the New Zealand Flag." In your opinion, why is this so important?

Brian Sweeney: To me the current flag is anachronistic. It's representative of something we have emotionally well and truly left behind. Constitutionally we may have some work to do but in terms of our identity and Mother England and all that stuff, it's well and truly gone.

I also think it's a bad design - all that blue - and the proportions are all wrong. I appreciate the obstacles that have been faced in trying to get a new flag and quite possibly we'll never have one. What I think is that you grow popular choices around it, and I think what Lloyd Morrison did to instigate a new flag debate was terrific. He deliberately focused on one thing, in terms of saying, I'm going to choose one thing that is really powerful and symbolic and resonant and try and do something with that.
I personally think the silver fern is a terrific symbol; apparently it is the most recognized symbol of New Zealand internationally, much more so than the Kiwi.

There are some issues over interpretation, whether it's a white feather, which is the symbol of cowardice and surrender and so on, but we adopted it and used a silver fern as our logo from day one. So when Lloyd came along with his cleaner, sleeker design we asked if we could use it as our symbol. And in many ways while that campaign has folded, we have hopefully kept it alive in another way. As to what the perfect symbol is, maybe it's something different; Hundertwasser did a beautiful koru design. There's probably a suite of symbols that come to symbolize New Zealand - Air New Zealand's koru is really powerful, obviously the silver fern. The Kiwi? - the jury is out for me.

There's an artist called Gordon Walters who did some pioneering work with blending Maori designs with korus into artworks, so possibly something that's red and black and white; red is very important in terms of the mix. Is it green or blue, you know, there's a lot of debates about that, but we've made our choice, and that's the silver fern. As my wife says, on her wedding day the bride has to have chosen her dress. You only wear one dress on your wedding day so let's get on and make a choice!