I want to start by being clear about what I'm not.
I'm not a great business success. I don't have a formula for leadership. I've got more questions than answers, and I make mistakes all the time. Most of my working life is spent in that exhausting, frustrating gap between knowing where I want to go and not yet knowing how to get there.
I'm just an engineer. I run a company that's trying to design and build physical technology, here, in New Zealand.
And perhaps, my experience has taught me something worthwhile sharing.
Not long ago, I needed a bracket.
Not a revolutionary bracket. It wasn't going to transform the energy sector. It wasn't going to save the New Zealand economy, or stop FastTrack.
It was just a bracket.
So I designed it. I 3D-printed it. I found the mistakes I'd made, fixed the design, printed it again. I worked out exactly which bolts and fasteners I needed and got them. Within a few days I had something I knew would work.
Next, I needed the real part machined.
That took more than two weeks. It cost me an arm and a leg. And when it finally turned up, it didn't quite match the drawing.
But what really unsettled me, wasn't the price, the delay or even the result.
It was that this was supposed to be the easy part.
Designing something new, is meant to be hard. Solving a problem nobody's solved before, is meant to be hard. But making a simple bracket from a finished drawing?…Should not feel like a major industrial undertaking.
And when I started talking to colleagues about this, I found many had a story.
They couldn't find anyone with the right machine. Or someone had the machine, but not the time. The work took weeks. The price made experimenting impossible.
And we can imagine the consequences: they designed around whatever they could get, sent the work offshore. Or, sadly, quietly dropped the development.
We have a saying: hardware is hard. And yes, hardware will never move at the speed of software. But development still depends on fast, affordable iteration.
When every iteration takes weeks and costs a fortune, you make fewer attempts. And ideas start dying.
When the easy things become hard, the hard things become almost impossible.
So while I was waiting for my bracket, I had a good look around.
I saw that we now depend on other countries to clothe us, to equip us and to make most of the physical world we live in.
A massive credit to these nations that have deliberately built those capabilities. Our dependence isn't their fault. It's the result of our complacency.
We had this capability. We treated it as a switch. Something you could turn off, send offshore and flick back on whenever you need it.
But capability isn’t a switch. Once it's gone - getting it back takes years.
So, the question isn’t: “who is going to make my bracket?” It is: how does a country that could make things, forget?
I think the answer is, that we came to believe that you could keep the capability without going through the hard part.
And I've noticed we make the same mistake with people.
We're all running around trying to find our passion. Discover our calling. Find work that keeps us in some permanent state of flow. And then, when the work gets repetitive, or confusing, or painfully difficult, we're told: maybe this isn't your thing. Maybe you should pivot. Maybe difficulty means you've picked the wrong path.
Now, sometimes changing direction is the smart thing to do. But difficulty on its own can't tell you you're on the wrong path. Because every serious capability is difficult before it becomes easy.
Remember algebra? Nobody understands it the first time they see it. You spend ages trying to find x, and nobody ever explains why it wandered off in the first place. And then one day, some structure appears. What made no sense becomes something you can actually use.
Algebra hasn't changed. You have.
That's the part of achievement we seem less and less willing to talk about. That before there's confidence, there's confusion. Before there's mastery, there's repetition. Before work becomes satisfying, it can be tedious and discouraging.
If we teach people that discomfort is proof they don't belong, we rob them of the experience of becoming good at something hard.
I once heard someone say that if a woman can switch on a kettle, she's already a "woman in tech."
I understand the intention. It's generous. It's trying to tell women that technology isn't some foreign country we've been locked out of. And I agree with the intention.
But I profoundly disagree with the logic of the statement.
Using a piece of technology is not the same as understanding it, designing it, repairing it or making it. Knowing how to put on a bandage doesn't make you a doctor. Making that distinction isn't an insult. It's exactly what gives accomplishment its value.
Women don't need technical achievement symbolically redefined on our behalf. We are capable of travelling the full distance.
Yes, we may need to be encouraged into difficult fields, but then we need the dignity of being held to real standards once we're there.
That's what genuine inclusion looks like.
And here's the thing: by the kettle definition, New Zealand is a technology country.
We use technology. We buy it. We market it, manage it. What we've stopped doing is the hard part: making it. We've done to the nation exactly what the kettle does to the woman. We've redefined the achievement downward so we can tell ourselves we already have it.
A country can't keep the ability to make complex things if its culture gets uncomfortable with the way complex skills are actually acquired.
So, what do we do about it?
I'll be honest with you, I don't know what government should do. I don't have a policy to propose. And I've become suspicious of anyone who answers a problem like this with a programme, because I don't think this is a problem a programme can reach.
Manufacturing needs skilled people. And skilled people take years to make.
Years of instruction, practice, failure, correction, repetition. Behind every one of them is a teacher. A workshop. An employer. And, most importantly, a society that thought all of that was worth doing.
That last part is what we've lost. Not the money. Not the machinery. The belief that it was worth doing.
Somewhere along the way we decided the goal of work was to get as far away from the workshop as possible. We ranked jobs by how clean they were. How abstract. How far removed from the thing actually being made. We told our kids the smart move was to manage, to market, to stand somewhere in the chain where you never have to get right into the thick of it. We told them that if the work was hard, it probably wasn't for them.
And I don't believe government can legislate excellence back into existence either. Politicians belong to the same society as the rest of us. They're shaped by the same ideas about what counts as a good job and a good life.
Whatever government does, it will follow the culture. It won't lead it.
So the change I am asking for is not a policy, or a programme. It is a rethink - by all of us - of what we believe work is for.
That work isn’t something to be endured until the weekend, or escaped by promotion. It is the place where capability is forged. That difficulty is not a signal to leave. That a standard is a form of respect.
If we get that right, the policies will follow, because the people writing them will want what we want. If we get it wrong, no amount of funding will matter.
I'm saying all of this because I think we're capable of far more than we currently ask of ourselves.
Young New Zealanders should inherit more than the ability to buy, market and manage things that were designed and made somewhere else.
Inherit workshops that are alive with noise.
Laboratories where ideas get turned into real things.
Machinery and institutions worthy of their ambition.
Have teachers who understand the work, businesses where they can practise it and a country with real uses for what they can do.
And most of all, know that particular satisfaction that comes from staying with a hard problem long enough to become the kind of person who can solve it.
That's how individuals become capable.
That's how industries get built.
And that's how New Zealand gets back the ability not just to consume the future, but to make it.
I started today with a bracket. I want to finish with one.
I didn't tell you about it because it was important. I told you about it because it shouldn’t have been. It was small. Ordinary. Unremarkable. And that's exactly why it worried me. A country that struggles with the small things has already lost its grip on the big ones.
So here's what I want.
One day, not too far from now, a young engineer somewhere in New Zealand is going to need a bracket.
Just a bracket.
I want her to draw it in the morning, walk it across the road and have it in her hands the next day. Made properly. At a fair price. By someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
I want her not to think twice about it.
I want it to be the easy part.