Looking forward to roasting some wallaby tomorrow. Enjoy your weekends and c’mon Work Team Emirates.

My colleagues at Clemenger BBDO have been busy creating another masterpiece. This time for Panasonic Viera. Enjoy it with the sound up.

The Internet is the coolest medium in America. Edison Media Research has published results of an American study showing that the Web has passed radio in the ‘cool’ stakes and is closing in on Television as the most essential.

Newspapers were named as ‘least essential’ medium by 35%, followed by the Internet at 24% (was most mentioned in 2002 at 33%), and both radio and television had the fewest mentions at 18%.

Internet and television have swapped places in the 5 years for ‘Most cool and exciting’ medium. The Internet was mentioned by 38% in 2007 (vs. 25% in 2002). 35% now say television is “most cool and exciting” (vs. 48% in 2002).

Two great quotes from Larry Rosin, President, Edison Media Research:

“It is not a stretch to say that the Internet has become just as important as television as a primary source of information and entertainment in the lives of Americans.”

“It is entirely possible that the Internet will lead in all positive categories five years from now.”

View the reports.

After a couple of days trying out the desk and chair, the release has finally been dispatched, announcing Paul Reynolds annointment as Telecom CEO. Simon Moutter will be acting CEO until Reynolds formally kicks off on September 27. Reynolds has the opportunity to earn between $3-$4M with a base salary of $1.75M. Let’s hope he oversees a significant investment, in partnership with a similar contribution from Minister Cunliffe, to start building out an open regional and national broadband network next year with decent international connectivity. We’ve been waiting long enough.

A couple of interesting insights: he will be based in Auckland, which continues the slide of head office staff to the City of Sails (do they still call it that?). He hates politics. Oh, dear, I hope he mentioned that to the recruiters. Finally, he’s a big work/balance guy. Given the workloads across Telecom to deliver the separation & LLU documents within the Comcom & Govt deadlines, I’m sure he’ll give those studious teams a week off as soon as he starts.

It’s not often I get this stuff right …

The three All Black ‘Loosies’ are my favourite Sunday People this week. Richie McCaw, Rodney So’oialo and Jerry Collins were pivotal in last night’s win against a confident South African team who threw everything at the AB’s. I won’t bang on about rugby on this site, but waahooo, what an almighty test to kick off our Tri-Nations contest in Durban.

This week I had the pleasure of meeting Alan Macdougall, one of the Wellingtonistas, in person and found out that Alan regularly photographs his Mojo pick-me-up. I found his 54 coffee pix filed under Latte Art on flickr. I frequent Mojo Coffee Cartel on Taranaki St every morning for my large latte. I’m inspired to take my camera tomorrow.

The new millimetre wave scanners to be trialled in Auckland later this year are sure to get local civil libertarian’s fired up. These scanners use low energy radio waves as opposed to high energy x-ray to ‘virtual strip-search’ travellers. Apparently the image the machine produces is located separately and the viewer does not physically see the person being scanned. If a passenger is approved, security is signaled to let the traveller though.

Congratulations to the good folk of the Wellington Innovation Network for their persistence in building and launching Wellington’s business plan contest, the Cable Car Challenge last Monday. The $50,000 winners package is Australasia’s largest business competition prize and with over 60 sign-ups in week one, it’s sure to be a success.

With Gordon Brown being fast-tracked into office this coming week, I enjoyed Andrew Sullivan’s piece on Blair and the power of poodling in the TimesOnline this weekend.

Finally, if you get a chance, take a lunchtime visit to the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary to watch the Kaka. Three of these majestic native bush parrots visited our house last Sunday morning, screeching and acting up, before swooping gracefully away.

I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from the US lately. Then I got a random email from the United States this week. It clearly wasn’t for me. I started wondering … was it for the Hack The Stack Certified Ethical Hacker and CISSP Michael C. Gregg? Is that the same person as the Mobile Computing Security Michael Gregg? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for Ohio-based advertising group, Michael Gregg Agency and damn I wish they worked in another sector! It definitely wasn’t directed to psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg. It was probably just more spam.

It’s odd how many of us are out there - dutifully employed in the world and sharing our experience on the web. It’s even worse in China. No - not for Michael Gregg’s but definitely for Wang’s, Li Gang’s and Liu Bo’s. The Times UK reports that “if all the Wang’s in China seceded — all 93 million — they would become the world’s 12th-most-populous nation.” Apparently, it’s so confusing that “the Ministry of Public Security wants to change the law to allow parents to create double-barrelled surnames for their children. Currently the law states that children are allowed to take the surname of only their mother or father.” Perhaps being Michael Gregg is not so bad after all.

Upon reflecting on a series of quality engagements this week, I have been considering at least three ‘projects’ [I note that these are not necessarily work-related] with powerful, articulate visions that are unlikely to achieve their full potential. I started thinking about what attributes were missing that might lead to below-par outcomes.

That led to me re-reading a paper on stakeholder typologies by Victoria University academics, Bob Cavana and Arun Elias [pdf]. There’s a pertinent diagram in here that I remember discovering in the nineties, I think produced in a defining paper by Mitchell, Agle & Wood (Oct 1997) analysing stakeholders in terms of Power, Legitimacy and Urgency.

Without sharing specifics, a common thread running through these projects in that the stakeholders thankfully all possess these attributes. However what seems to be missing is a real burning passion to achieve the vision. Better to ‘just get the project completed this time around’. My fear is that this complacence is an affliction seaming through New Zealand business circles, mainly with activities that are not benchmarking at world-class level.

When this happens, the result is dissatisfaction, falling back to the ‘weakest link’, and wasted effort by the group. What is needed is frank, mature, open discussion by all parties about re-establishing the vision, setting minimum levels of expectation and working together to achieve this.

Dr Broad has let me in on a little secret. You might have guessed. YouTube is the 12th button. Served as H.264 through an Apple app.

David Richie’s post on what he did in Christchurch is worth a read for the full story on the Metro Monster. I didn’t think this stuff happened in real life …

Experienced THE WORST WAITER IN THE WORLD at Metro Cafe. One of our number ordered a tan square and tea with *trim* milk, waiter brought over *full* milk then refused to bring trim milk instead since it didn’t matter what said punter had in her tea since she was having such a fatty slice.

Got a big idea, or a business concept you’re working through? Enter it into the Cable Car Challenge and you could win NZ$50,000 including $30,000 of seed capital. That’s a sweet prize. It’s only for people living in the Wellington region. I attended the Mayoral launch tonight; a good turnout from Wellington’s business, academic and local government community. Good to see Rod Drury there, and Tim Norton (also a sponsor).

Check this out - finalists have to present to the judging panel in the cable car up, and answer the judges questions in the car heading down. Only 9-10 minutes to present their business plan. That’s what I call an elevator pitch.

Can I please ask the blogging community to promote this competition - it’s good for New Zealand and deserving of our support.

Thanks,
MG.