The other day I watched Ford v Ferrari, a Matt Damon film from last year that detailed Ford’s project to create a vehicle that could win the famed 24 hours of Le Mans race. I’m no petrol head, but…

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I’ve been known to trot out a saying from time to time. The old “give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he’ll eat forever,” is sadly not heard much…

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Back in the 1970s, a Japanese academic who was involved in early robotics research coined the term “uncanny valley.” Masahiro Mori, then a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, developed the term in his studies around robots. The…

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I used to have a colleague whose personal moral perspective was well summed up by one of his favourite sayings: “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” Pete did a good job of ensuring the decisions…

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Everyone has their thing, right? For some people it’s motor racing, others get in behind their favourite rugby team. For me, it’s running stupidly long distances that people respond to by saying: “that’s a long way to drive, let…

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Cross-posted from NZBusiness magazine. So, there’s nothing worse than someone who thinks they have all the answers. Add to that the fact that, as you’re reading this you’ve probably seen about twenty-five thousand articles all suggesting exactly what your…

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I’ve always been a fan of the movie Forrest Gump. In part that’s because I’m a long-distance runner and, hey, any movie that normalizes my somewhat bizarre pastime is a good thing. But it’s also because I identify with…

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A lifetime ago New Zealand was a different place. There was no such thing as big-box retailing and we all still shopped at local retailers owned by people we knew. Sure, the selection was less rich, but it made…

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The other night we gathered around my laptop and watched a movie about the operation that the Israeli army and secret service undertook in 1976 to free the hostages that were being held at the Entebbe airport in Uganda.…

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My parents were refugees to New Zealand 60-odd years ago. New Zealand was a very different place back then – back when pubs closed at 6pm, everyone still called England “home” and the standard fare was mutton and boiled…

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