The future is craftsmanship

The future is craftsmanship

In a world that is full of mass production everyone can buy a range of products in the rush to keep up with the Joneses. Mass production techniques produce identical items to exacting standards to ensure all have the same quality.

Some products are modularised to allow for some individuality and to customise commodities. In other words design your own products with company produced parts. For example Dell Computers allows people to design their own computer online and have it delivered in 3 weeks or a menu at a restaurant allows the making of a meal from a list of items.

Increasingly we are seeing the emergence of new and young designers. Fashion, clothing, jewellery, gardens, cars, technology, bicycles and house hold items. But are people really getting something personal to match their personality, ideas, expression and creativity. Unfortunately young designers are setting out to do the same thing as their predecessors. Design good stuff and have it mass produced and sold all round the world as a commodity.

There is of course an increasing trend to Buy Local as this is better for the environment and helps achieve sustainability. The increasing price of fuel is pushing up the price of goods as well as manufacturing and delivery prices. Further pressure will come on products as people start calculating carbon miles.

With the increasing need of the consumer to be more individual, to be carbon neutral, to express personality and to contribute to a sustainable future people will look for new and interesting local products made by excellent local craftspeople. The concept of handmade will become increasingly fashionable.

With high class equipment available at reasonable prices, locally produced handmade bespoke products do not have to be inferior but rather superior. They may be cheaper or more expensive than mass produced products depending upon the quality of the materials being used and the quality of the finish required.

High quality, creative, handmade products locally produced will generate great sales. In addition the sales marketing power of the internet can take great local products to the world at less cost than traditional retail methods.

Expect to see creative, high quality, hand made, bespoke products locally produced gracing the lives of people throughout the world while having a low environmental impact.

Teams

There are many reasons that teams function successfully and there are many academic studies to identify the characteristics that make a good team or team player.

You could identify people with the right characteristics and ethics etc and put them together and may be if would work for a while.

What teams really require are leadership from behind not out front. A great leader is one that encourages  and allows others to succeed.

In fact a leader has to be a gardener! Identify what will make the team grow and flourish and provide as much of that as is needed before the team starts manufacturing its own nutrients and conditions to grow.

For another view of teams read this

http://www.thinkbrilliant.com/2010/06/6ways-employees/

Alan

The Art of Listening

Recently I read a piece by Tom Peters about the essential skill of listening.

As a manager in the public sector for many years you have to develop the skills of listening. Listening to the politicians and listening to the constituents. Coupled with that is a professional understanding of the situation which  involves listening to the researchers, consultants, your peers and the staff (all in no particular order).

While listening is important it  is also the synthesis of that information into a workable solution or at least a point of view.Once that has been determined a sound decision based on the information is required. In some situations much of this can be done very quickly and so called instant decisions can be made and in other situations a longer period is required to get to a suitable solution where a decision can be made.

Tom Peters (2009) suggests that Listening belongs on the short list of "strategic competencies,"  people need to Study listening! (Study = Become a serious student thereof!), Treat listening as a "practice"! The Big Idea here is that (1) this is a strategic strengths (or weaknesses), (2) this is a disciplines that can be mastered  and (3) these are disciplines that must be mastered to be effective. 

The Green Thing

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."

She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed andsterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.  But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.  But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's nappies because we didn't have the throw-away  kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right. We didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Queensland. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower
that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right.  We didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just  because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the tram or a bus, and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their mums into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza place.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

The new century is 10 years old.

As we move into the 10 year of the new century it is timely to look back to where we have come from and into the future and where we would like to be.  Horticulturally speaking that may be interesting.

Looking back Christchurch has bought the Ellerslie Garden Show and the first one has been held in Hagley Park. The CHS won a Gold medal. Also we have seen an upsurge in home gardening mainly in the vegetable production area as people cope with the recession. Biodiversity was a catch cry to win the hearts and minds of people to help retain our natural heritage and recently the term sustainability has been on everyone’s lips. Climate change and global warming have provided some interesting dialogue with some predicting disaster and others suggesting a warmer climate will be great for gardeners.

Garden centres have closed and big box retailing has increased their presence selling trees shrubs and plants. The Christchurch Botanic gardens announced a $10m build for a new visitor centre and nursery complex. The Festival of Flowers is 20 years old. Public trees in Christchurch have been subject to a removal system as they are getting “to old” and there has been a rise in the number of people requesting trees to be removed.

For the future we need to think about what we would like Christchurch to look like, what kinds of plants we want to grow in our gardens and how we enjoy our gardens.

We do know that there are a lot of people going t retire in the next 10 years – baby boomers. They are well educated, reasonably well off, very healthy and may have a green ethic. So what may happen in 10 years time? Ellerslie Garden Show may still be around but not in the form that we see it now and with a name change. Home gardens will flourish and we will continue to see an increase in the amount of vegetables, fruits and salads growing in our gardens. Unfortunately the variety of ornamental plants will narrow in choice as the big box retailing continue to sell easy to propagate, easy and fast to grow plants for a quick turnaround and fast profit to the detriment of all NZ gardens.

With the removal and replanting of urban trees we may see these trees better looked after only if the Council and is advisors rethink a tree  planting and management policy and procedure or we will see a further demise in our trees.

The Botanic gardens will have its new visitor centre and we hope it may be a stimulus for the further development of gardening, horticulture and community pride in Christchurch.

Sustainability, Climate Change and Global Warming

Fresh water is vital to humans as well as to all plants, animals, insects, birds and freshwater creatures. It is one of the major international, national and local issues of the world. Fresh water for drinking  is vital for human survival as it is also vital for the growth of our food crops, meat and poultry. The higher quality the water the better the end product. Retention of our fresh water sources and resources must take top priority for the future of our civilisation.

Energy in all its forms are essential for us to continue to live in the manner in which we want to become accustomed with access to all the mod cons, entertainment and communication devices we can afford. Unfortunately global warming is a result of the  consumption of oil, coal, wood and other combustible products which have led to global warming and climate change which is now a main stream school of thought however the public discussion is still limited to those who want action and those who do not want action.

Population growth has continued to change the way in which we live. More people, more land for housing etc, more food, more  consumer products all adds up to more production, imports/exports and waste. Consumerism is still with us and getting stronger as technology develops faster than we can wear out our  purchases.

Collectively we all wish to see ourselves, our children and others in the world living a “better” life. Yet the would globally is facing huge challenges about how to deal with all these global happenings. Additionally people are trying to tackle these one at a time which only gets traction from time to time when politicians are listening.

This week a number of the worlds most powerful business leaders suggested that some of these are the biggest issues in the world to be resolved and they are important to business and to the world.

A recent spotlight on Denmark shows that as a country they have set about tackling a few of these issues like transport and energy with the bicycle now being one of the most preferred forms of transport and wind power a major source of energy.

The answer is not just one thing it is a variety of things that are all interrelated into the way in which we have developed our lifestyle. As some say there is no “silver bullet”. If fact it is more likely to be many small and larger changes that will enable us to develop ways to conserve this world for ourselves and our future generations.

When thinking about dams being created to store water, large tracts of good quality land being carved up for housing or  new form of waste disposal taking a larger tract of land, to more roads being created I think about a few words my Uncle used to say “You know Alan, they are not making any more land”. How true.

Here in New Zealand we still take an old fashioned approach to storing water by suggesting we create dams across rivers and valley entrance ways to create artificial lakes. Rivers, riverbeds and their valleys are a supreme source of biodiversity. Damming them is like killing nature.

We build more roads because we want to get more people some where faster even when there is a clear body of evidence that alternate transport  options are much better.

We build more subdivisions because it appears to be the only way we know to design living spaces rather than taking a community led approach we take a developer led approach and we get the housing a developer thinks we should have rather than something better.

We buy more stuff because we are told it is good for you yet in many cases we know it is not. Imported stuff costs something to make and something to get it to NZ all the time using energy resources.

 Lets just take the water issue. So what is the answer? There is no one big answer but there are a lot of little answers. Conservationists have for years argued that damming rivers is wrong because of the very high biodiversity social and cultural values. Using ground water at increasing rates  of extraction is likely to see a reduction in underground water stores in the very near future and if we are lucky it will not be contaminated.

We do need to think about this differently. Maybe the newly proposed Water Resources Strategy will help. The only problem with that is will it be accepted, will it provide the frame work for good decisions, can it change direction or stop things when the evidence is clear there is a problem or will we use it  as a tool to continue doing the same thing. Plans are OK but people make decisions based on those plans. If the decisions are wrong because we ignore a good plan we have a problem.

As my uncle said “they are not making any more land” lets take that a step further and say “they are not making any more land, rivers, forests, birds, animals and nature”. We have to work together to get it right now.

Case for investment grows as evidence for plants' role in well-being is highlighted

by Matthew Appleby

Horticulture Week
09 October 2009

Horticulture must cash in on the increasing scientific evidence that suggests plants help improve mental health, a conference pooling the latest research heard last week.

Professor Geoff Dixon, chairman of the Plants to the Rescue conference, organised by the Society of Chemical Industry in London last week, said: "Horticulture has moved in the 21st century towards what it provides to humans in terms of food, health and well-being.

"Working with plants makes you feel better. That has begun to be recognised by media and psychologists. It is now important that horticulturists raise their hands and say if you wish to apply this you need us because we are the people who know how to grow plants and do the business.

"Economists ask what we get back for our investment in nature. Evidence heard at this conference provides ammunition that justifies that expenditure."

HTA scientific adviser Dr Ross Cameron of the University of Reading, who was speaking at the conference, said: "The environment and green space drive social health."

He cited research from Swedish scientist Kristina Sundquist, who found a 72 per cent increased risk of psychosis and 16 per cent increased risk of depression in a study of four million Swedish people who lived without access to green space.

Cameron said 20 per cent of children never visit the countryside, adding that green space does not need to be parks - it could even be indoor plants. He added: "Plants make employees more productive."

Plants for People representative Jonathon Read said with people spending 80 per cent of their time inside, houseplants "are more important than outdoor plants", adding: "We can change health, welfare and business with plants."

He said research from NASA scientist Bill Wolverton showed plants eat poison and emit oxygen, reduce headaches by 45 per cent (Roger Fjeld/Tove Ulrich) and regulate heat and noise (Peter Costa).

Read said houseplants become a benchmark in new-builds, adding that Andrew Smith's 2008 research at the University of Liverpool showed plants halved CO2 levels and led to a 50 per cent sickness reduction in offices.

Read dismissed plastic plants as "plant-shaped ornaments".

Natural health adviser to Natural England Dr William Bird said the NHS forest (see p4) and formal recognition of plants' health benefits demonstrated opportunities to unlock NHS budgets.

He said the NHS' £110bn budget would be focused on key issues such as childhood obesity and that green space had "a huge role to play in that".

He added: "The natural environment will be centre stage in the Government's new 'get active' plan. These are all indications of how important green space will be in future thinking."

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