Sleep is over-rated

A Waikato University Intensive Opened Many Doors

It was around 1993. Meatloaf was flying like a bat out of hell for a second time, and I decided to do an MBA with a difference. The focus was on new venture creation and enterprise innovation.

I arrived at a complex in Hamilton and was met by Geoff Boxel, who was the manager and facilitator of this degree course at Waikato University. I was shown to my room and returned for refreshments and to meet the fellow students I would be working with for the next seven days and nights. Geoff was a fellow motorcycle enthusiast, novelist, and overall great guy.

To be fair, I didn’t really think about what the word ‘intensive’ meant. I would soon find out. We were inducted and provided with books, tools, and a schedule for the coming week. We introduced ourselves over a few drinks and food, socialised, and at about 9 pm we were finished for the first day, or so we thought. I was ready for a little TV and an early night.

Little chance of that! The honeymoon lasted a few hours and before we were released for the night we were given not only a reading assignment to be completed before 9 am, but also a presentation to prepare to deliver the following morning on what we had read. So off I went to my room, armed with my books, and highlighters and worked till around midnight. The first day.

The following morning, sharing notes with my fellow students of all ages from school leavers, to really old people in their 50s, we shared notes, drank lots of coffee and juice and prepared to get stuck in for the day.

I won’t go into detail, but it was an amazing course. We had lectures, loads of reading, and presentations from some of the Waikato’s leading entrepreneurs, like the CEO of Gallagher group, a world leader in electric fences for farms, who told us how they also became a world leader in manufacturing plastic clothes pegs, after trying to figure out what to do with the waste insulation plastic.

We weren’t just learning academically but were formed into teams, and our grades were in part to be based on creating a new product business segment, doing market research, a venture screen and full financials, forecasts, and budgets to be pitched in the style of the ‘Shark Tank’, to senior lecturers and business leaders.

It was a very tiring, but inspiring week, and I journeyed back to Auckland late on Sunday night, and back to work the following morning. I didn’t know it yet, but that single paper was going to help me harvest Fields of Gold.

Just to digress. I am not going to write about the harvest that was a consequence of that week’s toil, just yet. This was really an introduction. Fields of Gold came out in 1993 and I was excited, then a little disappointed to hear that Sting is going to perform in New Zealand again, at one of the Mission Concerts in March 2023, exactly 30 years after this song came out and 30 years after the first Mission Concert. I went to a few of those events.

The highlight for me was a celebration of Motown, with some amazing artists including Mary Wilson, a foundation member of the Supremes, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, and the awesome Jimmy Barnes.

The reason I’m disappointed is that I won’t be able to go down to the vineyards, to enjoy the Sting concert. I am currently working as an Area Manager for the New Zealand 2023 Census of dwellings and people, and that weekend I will be facilitating an event, helping people from Kiribati, Tonga and the Tokelau islands complete their forms. I do feel it is a worthy reason to not be able to go, and there will always be more concerts.