The World's Getting Smaller – Yeah Right!
18th May, 2009 | 9:18 pm | By Graham Crombie - Audit and Assurance Services, Partner and Chief Executive

I’m writing this sitting on an Air New Zealand 777 somewhere over Russia.  I have now been travelling for 30 hours on my way to London and still have another five hours to go.  I’m not feeling like we are living in a small world!

The good thing is the trip has given me time to think about issues from a fresh perspective. It has been a busy few weeks for me focusing on Polson Higgs.  We have been going through our annual balance as well as finalising our planning for the next few years.  On top of that we have had our staff development session in Methven and our partners’ annual meeting last weekend.  All these events have given some focus to where we are going.  

The meeting I am going to is the governance group overseeing the operation we are working with in India.  There will be representatives there from the UK, USA, South Africa, Australia and India along with myself representing New Zealand. It will be a great couple of days focusing on this part of our business as well as catching up on how the various firms around the world are operating in these challenging times.

One of the barometers I have been using on business out there is the hostess test.  You get a fair bit of time to talk to the crews on these long haul flights and they are visiting a wide range of cities and countries in their jobs.  No surprise that they are seeing a lot of the world in a much worse state than New Zealand.  Their industry is also one that is being affected greatly by the recession.  It has been interesting for me to hear what Air New Zealand have been doing to respond – getting capacity right,  focusing on what their customers want, focusing on their long term strategies, collaborating even more (Star Alliance) etc – all the stuff we have been talking about for the last few weeks.

I am continuing to feel that, while the next year will be hard, we are well placed to grow strongly.

Thinking more about the small world it occurs to me that we have two of our managers in India for the next few weeks training our staff there and Phil Broughton, one of my Dunedin based partners,  will be in Melbourne representing the Maori Business Network at an indigenous people's conference.  Maybe after some sleep I will remember the world's not that big after all. 

As always love to hear from you at graham.crombie@ph.co.nz

PS. For those of you asking about the marathon runner training has resumed and is going well.

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Last updated: 19th May, 2009 | 4:50 pm