Commercial Law: Assignment 1

This assignment was a study of the Lai V Chamberlain case where the New Zealand Supreme Court found that Lawyers were a prefessional group and should be subject to professional liability or a duty of care.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_35hfhngtvw

I've Graduated!

I've graduated!

Here's my certificate

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_378ds98zpcp

And here are my final grades

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_380dmr6nhhp

Organisation Behaviour: Assignment 1

As part of my goal to publicise all my MBA assignments I have started adding older documents that I completed before I started this blog in 2008. This is the first assignment from the Organisational Bahaviour paper I completed in 2006. It covers my personal views the importance knowing somthing about Organisational Behaviour in sucess. It was also a taster of the ambiguity that can occur in University assignments. The entire class did badly at this assignment and we got a big lecture on the importance of answering the question and referencing. As it happened I was one of the students of did better than a B+ :-)

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_376cwbm26j3

Advanced Corporate Management: New Zealand Railways Research Assignment

The purpose of this paper was to examine the New Zealand railway governance structures and to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the new approach to rail system management. The paper begins by reviewing the literature on regulation, ownership, structure and governance of railway systems. The research showed that while changes to these aspects of railways governance have lead to short term efficiency gains, few of the approaches that have been used have lead to long term, sustainable rail industries without active management. The study moved on to discuss the market data, ownership and regulation in the New Zealand context and found that the rail system has had a tough time competing in a deregulated transport industry. Based on the financial data, market valuation and poor state of the railways assets; the government’s argument that it had to buy rail or let it die seems justifiable. The study moved on to analyse the new structures, strategies and legislation and found that there are significant concerns regarding the centralisation of planning and control. Specifically, issues include agency problems, information asymmetries, monitoring costs and the difficult task of measuring against the large number of social objectives that the rail system must now deliver on. The paper concluded that a vertically integrated, government owned rail system is probably the best outcome that twenty years of New Zealand style privatisation could have lead to. However, the pitfalls of centralised planning, legislative lag and co-ordination between public and private in a logistics chain need thoughtful management.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_330cqvc83c5

Systems Thinking: Analysis of Gen-i and ACC Change Management System using Soft Systems Methodology

This is assignment #2 for the systems thinking paper. It continues the analysis of the Gen-i change management system for the Accident Compensation Corporation account. The totosl used in this assignment are from soft systems methodology, specifically rish pictures and congnitive maps.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_311f499jffc

This presentation shows the diagrams from the document.

Negotiations: Exam, Dabhol Power Company case

This is my submission for the negotiation paper exam. The exam uses the Dabhol Power Company case study and covers issues of uncertainty, culture, poltical interferance and the use of third parties in negotiation.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_306w2p5c32v

Leading Change: Optimal Usability Case Study Presentation

This is the presentation given by my study group to Sam Ng or Optimal Usability. This accompanies the report that is also found on this blog.

Leading Change: Optimal Usability Case Study

The purpose of this report was to explore the question of what the services company Optimal Usability can do with their software product Optimal Sort. The report explored some strategic options, and arrived at the idea of building a product company structure that would generate ongoing cash flows from the product. The functions of a product company were discussed and it was found that many of these functions can be outsourced. The report moved on to explore the potential delivery mechanisms for software, and highlighted the potential for the software as a service business model. The benefit of this model is the potential to scale. However, sales and marketing costs will initially exceed subscription revenue. The market potential of the product is also discussed with key markets being the usability industry, web design organisations, marketing organisations and web design schools.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_220g5rjnwc4

Creative Leadership: Experiment in Autocracy

This is a presentation I did as part of my wildcard project. The idea was to use this as a backdrop to a experiment in creating autocracy as described in the film Die Welle (2008).

Creative Leadership: Leadership Challenge Presentation

Creative Leadership: Experiment in Autocracy

At the Wellington film festival I saw an intriguing drama called Die

Welle (2008). This film tells the story of a group of high school
students in 1990’s Germany who go to a history lesson on
Autocracy. The teacher is a punk rock kind of guy who is a bit
miffed that he didn’t get to teach the Anarchy history class.
When he starts to discuss autocracy with the students they tell him
that they already know what autocracy is, we know it’s bad and
it couldn’t possibly happen again i.e. we are bored of hearing
about it. The next day the students arrive to find the classroom
rearranged into orderly rows of desks, desks are assigned to each
student and new rules have been implemented in the classroom. No
talking without permission, sit at attention because this allows you
to breath deeply and feel better, stand up when answering a question
and ask it in as few a words as possible…and so begins a
journey that will answer the question “do you really think it
can’t happen again?”

For my wildcard experiment I thought I would try to recreate some of
the aspects of this experiment in class through the use of common
symbols, group exercise and ritualistic chanting of slogans. I want
to do this because I want to demonstrate how easy it is to get sucked
into these kinds of movements and also to discuss with the class how
many movements use these techniques. Outward Bound is one such
organisation. Firstly, they use the technique of forming specific
groups and then make the groups self disciplining. This is done by
telling the group that each member must check on the other members to
make sure that the group as a whole make it to each exercise and that
no one is left behind. The implication of this is that if any
individual fails the group fails which is a clever way of making a
group self disciplining. Groups are given specific names and are
encouraged to form group identities that are backed up with shared
stories. One exercise involves making a theatre production that
demonstrates the group’s values in the form of a mythological
story. As you can see these are common features of many movements.
As a participant in the Outward Bound experience I lapped this up and
even agreed to keep secret exactly what goes on in the camp. I’m
not saying that Outward Bound are trying to create an army of
fascists out in the bush and then sending them back to infiltrate the
business world, but what I am saying is that if a movement has a
cause that is less noble that what Outward Bound are doing then the
techniques of building loyalty to a movement are much the same.

Why am I doing this as my wild card? Because I want to raise the
awareness in the class of exactly how easy this is to do, what the
look out for and to always be sceptical. I am a typical generation X
seventies baby, over educated, under utilised, paranoid and sceptical
of everything. For me to take a step back and analyse what leaders
are doing, how they are doing it and what their message means is a
natural state. What I hope to achieve through doing this exercise in
class is get people thinking about the movement to which they belong
and asking questions about what they do, how they do it and what the
implications of their message are. I would hate for anyone to
suddenly drop out of their church social club or anything as a result
of this heightened awareness but I think it’s important for
people to be able to recognise the signs.

A lot of people have been willingly sucked into all sorts of
movements over the history of humanity, some good and some not so
good. To me the issue seems to be that humans are instinctively
programmed to do this and that’s something that some leaders
seem to be able to recognise and manipulate. Way back at the
beginning of this journey in discussion paper one I put forward the
proposition that leadership has instinctive elements to it. I think
that this kind of group mentality is part of that idea and it’s
worthy of further study. Nature itself seems to encourage humans and
lots of other animals to join groups, to follow the leader of the
group, to make the group strong by rejecting outsiders and to defend
the group. Part of this is about natural selection, propagation of
the species and basic survival. My belief is that this is a powerful
force that we as humans are powerless to resist without a deep
understanding of ourselves and our values. I would like to think
that only the unsophisticated can be manipulated by these instinctive
tendencies but the fact of the matter is that some very intelligent
people have willingly joined some pretty horrifying movements in the
past.

I will consider this experiment a success if I have taught just one
person to take a look at what’s going on around them and
thought about the question “is this what I really believe?”

Creative Leadership: Leadership Challenge

Overview

For my
challenge I decided to concentrate on the idea of leader as teacher.
The reason for this is because it’s the face of leadership that
appeals to me the most and I enjoy working within. I would like to
think of myself as a visionary, creative leader but what I find is
that I’m not so good at having ideas. What I am good at is
imagining the possibilities of an idea, what it could leverage off
and where it could go. I figured that the easiest way to reach out
to people who have had the idea is to be a teacher who helps them to
make the idea all that it could be. The approach to this took many
paths, the main on being to put myself out there as an advisor for
start up companies with ideas. I approached the organisers of the
Cable Car Challenge, a Wellington business plan competition, and
advertised my services on their web site. After what seems like an
eternity I finally had a reply! We had a meeting and we chatted to
this about his idea and I gave what I thought was some pretty useful
advice and some ideas to take the project forward. I got an email
from him later saying that he had taken the advice and the project
was on the heat. I found leadership and I think he did to. Job
done!

Searching for a path to leadership

I hate
leadership and I try to avoid it at all costs. I don’t mind
sticking my head out in public and having a rant and rave on my
soapbox but the thought of actually creating a movement and having
followers feels like a responsibility that I can’t abide.

So what
the hell am I doing putting myself out to a world of strangers as an
expert on business matters? Am I insane? During some points of the
challenge I was beginning to think so. So, without any further ado I
will tell the story of how it all happened.

At lecture
one I was sitting there writing the passage about finding leadership
into my journal and thinking about what it is that gets me pissed off
enough to want to do something about it. I thought of my heroes who
are all punk rock poets and decide I wanted to become one of them.
The plan went something like this: form a band, put together a
political message and get going with a hard core punk song. It
sounds daft now but it’s not actually that hard. I already
know some musicians in Wellington who are pretty good and I’m
not bad at writing lyrics. The trick was to figure out how to get
the song out there and then I realised I could volunteer at the
Victoria University radio station and sneak my song into their
playlist while I DJ on the graveyard shift. It’s also quite
easy and not very expensive to get your music into iTunes and the
potential sales bonanza that is the internet. Add your tune to a
crazy home video and it can be a YouTube hit in days. The
possibilities are endless! Unfortunately this enthusiasm was short
lived because at the end of the day I’m quite a homebody and I
just didn’t have the gumption to get out of my comfort zone and
do this thing.

The next
idea was to piggy back off someone else’s political movement
and being a computer geek the One Laptop Per Child program seemed
like it was the ideal way to use my skills and do something in the
volunteer space. I found that there were already some projects on
the boil in New Zealand so I contacted the people involved and found
that the projects were not really on the boil at all and that most
people seem to be too busy to really contribute a lot of time to a
volunteer program of this kind. It’s not the type of volunteer
program were anyone can just rock up and hand out bread or anything,
this is hardcore computer programming. It also struck me that the
people involved in this process were mainly concerned about promoting
their own companies which I didn’t think was the point of the
exercise at all.

Finally, I
thought of something that ended up being the answer, although I
didn’t know it at the time and strictly speaking it wasn’t
my idea at all. I was bitching about the challenge in class and
asking Sophie if there were any things I could do at VicLink that
might help out some businesses that they had on the go. She
indicated the VicLink has a bit too much Intellectual Property for
volunteers to be moseying about in but she suggested that I put
myself out there with the Cable Car Challenge people as a free
business advisor. She had thought of doing this herself but as a
judge on the challenge it was a conflict of interest so she didn’t
think this was appropriate. I got the contact name of the Cable Car
Challenge organisers and contacted them the very next day to see how
I could go about being a business advisor.

Taking the path to leadership

Initially
the organisers were very receptive although a little concerned. At
first they suggested that I might get inundated with replies as there
are over two hundred entrants in the competition. I know how these
things work on the web and I wouldn’t expect that any more than
10 percent of the people who read the newsletter would even bother to
contact me. Carol, the organiser of the Challenge offered to put my
details into an email that would be sent out to the challenge
entrants to get the ball rolling. I took the initiative and built a
web site in Google Pages that was advertising my services and then
sent to link to Carol to add to the email notice. Job done! Or so I
thought…

While I
was awaiting the plethora of emails from people seeking my help, I
got on a roll with sharing knowledge! Leader as Teacher! I started
a blogger site for all my MBA musings, published all my assignments
on Google Docs, added Google Analytics so I could keep track of the
site activity and thought this is it! I’m sharing my knowledge
with the world! Come feast on the wealth of my experience. It was
satisfying and gratifying to know that I was putting back into the
world at large. Meanwhile, I was waiting for the emails to roll in…

And time
passed. No emails. What the f^&k? I thought? The MBA is so
useless that I can’t even give away the skills I have learned?
Does not one respect me? Is it all about me? I gave Carol a ring.
No we haven’t sent out the newsletter. What? We thought that
there were professional liability issues with associating ourselves
with a free consultant. Hmmmm, what about if I post something in the
blog on the Cable Car Challenge website? Oh yes no problem! So off
I went again. I added an entry to their blog and awaited Carol to
moderate it so that it would actually be visible to the world at
large. And waited…and waited….checked the
site…nothing. The due date of the challenge is rolling up
fast. Cue state of depression, desperation and self doubt then give
up.

Now what
do I do? Can I rely on no one in this world to deliver what they
promise? All sorts of thoughts filled my head. Do I abandon this
and crack on with something else? In desperation I thought I would
create a social/politics interest group in Face Book. Surely with an
election coming up that would work! Even if I only get 5 members
then it’s better that failing this task!

Then one
day I checked out the statistics on my website and found that I had
received some new hits. I checked the referring page and found that
they were from the Cable Car Challenge website. Finally some action!
Only four hits in the first day but it’s better than nothing.
Then an email turned up from a young chap looking for some help.
This chap had actually failed to make it to the final of the
challenge but he was not prepared to give up and wanted to pursue his
idea anyway. That’s the kind of spirit I can respect so I got
in touch and we agreed to meet up on campus so I could get some
information on his background, idea and see what we could come up
with. We met up and chatted for an hour about his idea. I
understood his idea straight away and thought it’s not bad at
all. I mentioned some other possibilities that he hadn’t
thought of and his face lit up when he realised how much potential
this thing has. Finally, I advised him on some things he could do to
move this project forward. I made two points…

Leadership:
get people on board who get your teachable point of view, if they
understand it you have found the right person and they will follow
you

Emotion:
Emotional commitment is key, be emotionally committed to your idea,
get your followers to be emotionally committed to it, get your
customers emotionally committed

I agreed
to draft up a bit of the stuff we had talked about in the
mind/cognitive map of some kind and send it on to him. He emailed me
a couple of days ago to let me know he had gone out and found some
followers who had come on bard and were going to work on the project
with him. Good on him!

Reflections on the journey

It felt
pretty good to know that I had learned something useful in my MBA
after all. It also felt good that I had been able to share it and
someone had not only listened but had acted on it.

I was in a
state of despondency with the MBA process. I was unhappy with my
career which was why I did the MBA in the first place. As the
process drew to a close I began to look about for new things to do
and thought that being a business advisor was something I would be
good at. After the initial failure I became very frustrated and
started to fall back onto my old habits and to look for jobs that
were really no different that what I had done before. I became quite
depressed about the idea that I had spent all this time and effort on
learning all this stuff, only to be back in the same dead end I was
in before.

After
completing this journey and getting through to the other side I can
now rationalise that depression and angst as just part of the
process. It’s not very pleasant being in the middle of it and
I imagine that as life goes on there will always be periods like
this. Reflecting on the cycle of change and stepping up to
leadership this is part of the process, the test as it were. You
take the step out of your comfort zone, you slide down that slope
where you don’t know what’s going to happen and the
uncertainty almost kills you. Then you see something catch alight
and the idea begins to burn. If you keep at it you start back up the
slope, different, changed but alive and knowing it was worth the
effort of going there. No matter what the size of your movement, if
you change one life you have changed the life of everyone that person
knows, all the people they know and on into infinity.

Were too now?

I still
don’t like the test bit of the process, it can be pretty
shitty. That being said this is just part of making or leading
change. I think the world doesn’t really like change, it
resists it. Whether it is people not doing what they promise, the
little voices in your head giving you shit about it, the temptation
of the easy path, the relentless battle between internalising and
externalising blame, in short the world just doesn’t like
things that are different. If you want to make a difference then you
have to understand that the process is painful, the rewards are
uncertain and but the opportunities to change are infinite. Some
opportunities will not work out. Some will work out beyond your
wildest imaginings. Nothing is written and only a fool would believe
that they had planed everything from the beginning when things do
work out. Change and leadership are processes that you manage the
best you can. Win or lose you need to accept that change is tough
and that you need to keep changing, keep fighting the world in order
to make a difference. It’s not a conspiracy against you as a
person, although I often feel it is! The world is like a comfortable
child in front of a television and you have to push it outside once
in a while. It will resist but eventually it will thank you for it.

Leading Change Handbook

This is the final copy of the Leading Change hadbook as handed in to the lecturer. I managed to bash out over 8000 words of analysis and self reflection regarding leadership and change management. Hopefully this is A+ material!

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_199fkv284c8

Leading Change: Handbook Entry, Week 10

Journal Entry – Week 10,
06/10/08

Here we
are at the penultimate week, praise the gods. This group assignment
has been tough because of the personalities involved however I have
been staunch in the face of folly and brought things back on track
through some tough negotiating. I’m amazed how some people can
actually keep talking until they physically run out of oxygen. I
wouldn’t want to be in an argument with them.

So what
struck me this week? This quote is a good one…

“How
dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to
shine to use”

I’ve
made a few attempts to actually use some of the things I have learned
in that last 2 years in this MBA journey and I finally managed to
achieve something. Oddly enough it was for the leadership paper, not
this paper but the timing with the lectures on leadership seemed to
fit quite nicely. I’ve been working on a leadership challenge
project for creative leadership MMBA 545 under Dr MacDonald. The
idea was to put myself outside of my comfort zone and find leadership
so I advertised my free services as an MBA guru of everything on the
Cable Car Challenge website and waited for the emails to roll in.
And waited, and waited and finally got pissed off and tried to think
of something else to do. Then I got an email from a young chap who
didn’t make the shortlist but wanted to keep working on his
idea anyway. That kind of enthusiasm I can respect so we met up and
chatted about his idea which is actually quite good. Anywho, I gave
him a whole lot of suggestions and some ways of taking it forward by
gathering people around him who understand the vision and sent him
off down the path of leadership. I got another email from him the
other day and the advice is working too! Good on him I thought.

The reason
I prattle on about this in the final handbook entry is because most
of the previous entries have been about how much I learned that week
and how I intend to use it in the future. Last week I actually put
something into practice. Job done.

Unfortunately
I’m not actually that good at taking my own advice. During the
Teachable Point of View exercise I realised that no one was really
all that interested and those who were listening didn’t get it.
I haven’t figured out how to sell the idea that I’m not
the innovator who had the big idea. I’m the guy who is the
right hand man of the innovator who keeps things on track and makes
the big things happen. The problem seems to be that no one in New
Zealand seems to be able to understand that these are often different
people. I think it might go back to the recurring theme through the
paper regarding control and equity. New Zealanders don’t seem
to be able to let go of their idea or admit they need help to make it
a big deal. They like to think that if you have an idea you have to
do everything yourself otherwise you might have to share the rewards
with someone else. I find this a bit silly when the whole modern
world is geared towards specialisation but there you go. The lesson
I have learned from this is that I don’t think that the
opportunities for me to really make something of myself are here in
New Zealand, they are in the United States or other countries where
they understand that making ideas in something big is a team sport
and you need to share the reward around. It reinforces a belief I
have come to that New Zealand is a great place to retire after you
have made you money overseas. Being rich here is really good fun.

My last
thought for this journal is related to the Rosenzweig article about
the halo effect. I like the way he sums up strategic leadership as:

• Gather
  information

  
  

• Evaluate
  it thoughtfully

  
  

• Choose
  actions with high probability of success

  
  

• Don’t
  let uncertainty get you down

  
  

I’m
really good at this sort of stuff. The trick is that I have to move
to an environment where people respect this kind of thinking. Again,
the lesson learned is that I need to get out of New Zealand.

To sum up,
the strategic options before me are many but they fall into a few
basic categories.

Firstly, I
could continue with a meaningless career in the Information
technology industry, take my $200,000 per annum and try to buy
meaning in the rest of my life. Nothing wrong with that, good supply
of cash, the industry isn’t going away and I could afford a lot
of fun hobbies. Time frame is short, reward adequate.

Secondly,
I could try a more high risk approach in the same sort of industry by
working for a product company that is prepared to deal me in some
shares. Rewards high, medium time frame, opportunity to prove myself
in some way. Sounds good.

Thirdly, I
could bail out of the Information technology industry and move into a
career where the rewards are true power. Law appeals because I could
specialise in Intellectual Property issues which would expose me to
lots of ideas driven people because they would have something to
protect and I would be able to offer that protection. It would also
leverage the skills I already have but in a more business like way.
Finally, it’s a real profession with a quasi-monopoly
structure, reasonably high barriers to entry and a real professional
body that you have to be a member of in order to play the game.
Quite different from Information technology where any dingbat with an
IQ of over 70 can get a piece of the action.

And on
that note Sam left the room to make a cup of tea while the options
spiralled through the air…

Systems Thinking Assignment #1: Gen-i Change Management System

This report uses the Viable Systems Model to analyse the Change Management System at Gen-i. The scope of this project was to cover the system as it pertains to the Accident Compensataion Corporation account. This systems analysis project has provided some useful insight into how the change management function at Gen-i is working. The system description presented a worldview that was very mechanistic and orderly and this is typical of Information Technology organisation culture. The viable systems model revealed that the system is functioning in a world where one group is carrying the majority of the weight of system management. The leadership that should be present is not engaged in the meta system functions. The solutions that were drawn specifically targeted the active management and leadership for the system, the issue of metrics and accountability and the management of the communications between the actors and other stakeholders in the system. Taking a broader view of the situation, this is a recipe for dissatisfaction among the technical resources as there is no way of recording their successes and celebrating them. Finally, the lack of transparency and management in the system is leading to a situation where the external customer has no visibility of where the system is breaking down and this is leading to false conclusions as to whom is to blame. As a systemic problem this quite complicated and is worthy of further analysis using a soft systems methodology approach (Jackson, M. 2004).

The main word document can be accessed here:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_182nmr7d5rx

Diagrams from the document can be accessed at thise links:

Creative Leadership: The Leader as servant

The

Servant Leader Within: My Appreciation for Past Service and My
Resultant Legacy

There are
two people whom I can say went out of their way to be mentors to me
and left a lasting impression on me in terms of the way I conduct
myself in the professional sense.

The first
of them was a contractor I worked with in the United Kingdom. He was
a total mercenary. One of his favourite quotes was “The only
difference between me and the permanent guy is that I’m always
1 chapter ahead of them in the documentation”. Some people
remarked that this guy must have had some kind of photographic memory
because he could quote “best practice” literature in
meeting s and blow other peoples arguments out of the water. He also
grew in legend around the place as the guy who can write computer
code from memory and became the go to guy for software developers all
over the organisation. There is a warning in this however, in that
he also rubbed people up the wrong way and eventually left the
organisation because his contract was not renewed. He was also a bit
dysfunctional in his personal life, few friends and few meaningful
relationships outside of family. In the words of my manager “there
is no room for someone like him in this organisation again”.
With the benefit of hindsight I now understand that some types of
leader only work in some kinds of situations and I would have to say
that this guy was one of those! Why was he a servant leader to me?
Well I was a willing student I suppose. Initially I moved from one
department to another just so I could be in the proximity of this guy
while I learned the specialisation that he was doing. The idea was
that I would train up in this new technology so that I could bust a
move out of the organisation and go contracting again as soon as I
could. He just liked teaching people who were willing students I
guess. I think he also liked the fact that I was looking at the
contract market so he took pity on me a bit in order to show me the
ropes. The lessons learned from this guy were twofold; there is
never any risk of being out of work in the contract market if you
keep your skills up to date and an eye on the market. The second
lesson was that certification counts as an important way to
differentiate your CV from others. These are two things that I
soaked up straight away and started spending a lot of personal time
doing the exams and gaining the certifications. To be honest they
don’t make that much difference in terms of actual competence
in a particular role but they give you something interesting to talk
about in interviews. To a certain extent sitting the MBA program was
really about the same strategy, differentiation from the other CV’s
in the pile. It’s only recently that I have really begun to
understand how the process has changed me through self reflection and
broadening of the frames that I use when analysing a situation.

The second
guru who shaped my career was a chap who was another dysfunctional
and misunderstood genius, but he had one key difference: he was a
master relationship builder and player of politics. I have never met
anyone else who can play the social games of a large corporation and
who has a background in computer science. I suspect that his middle
class, educated English background might have something to do with
it. He could mix it up with computer geeks, was a sports fanatic and
could work the room at a cocktail party with total ease. I learned a
lot from him in terms of negotiation skills and meeting room
political strategies, in particular how to make some else in the room
feel uncomfortable. I think he might have had an interest in
psychology because he certainly knew how to take control of a
conversation. Some people have the voice of authority and the words
of reason that just bring a chaotic meeting back on track with one
short sentence. This leader taught me the generic strategies of
problem solving, taking the lead when a crisis hits and avoiding
being sent on wild goose chases or running around like a blue arsed
fly when others are falling apart. His structured troubleshooting
approach and its emphasis on problem definition is a benchmark
against which I now judge any problem manager or colleague. When
negotiating with a colleague of manager I use his approach of
presenting a single choice as an option that the person I’m
negotiating with feels was their idea. I also avoid being positional
about anything as that’s totally the wrong foot to start any
negotiation on. I’ll never be as good as this guy was but I’m
definitely keen to get better at this soft skills stuff. He was the
kind of chap that could meet someone for the first time and they
would give him their business card and say “if you are ever
looking for as job, call me” and mean it.

I don’t
like being a leader and as I said in the assignment last week I would
rather not. That being said I enjoy teaching people, much like the
first colleague whom I described. That’s about the only
service I provide anyone. I guess if I stretch it into the personal
as well as professional life, I am a partner, son in law, grandson
and cousin so I have other roles where I provide service without
expectation of reward but to be honest it’s not much of a
commitment as I barely see the rest of the family. It’s a bit
at odds with myself really because I have a lot of bizarre interests
in technical things so I’m always surfing around the internet
looking for tutorials on programming microcontroller system for
example, but I rarely put much back into the open source community by
teaching others. I have taught others who have shown an interest
when in the working environment but that’s more out of a sense
of obligation related to the role than as a person who really gives
of their own time to help others. I guess I’m very good at
putting excuses in front of myself as to why I don’t help out
others more or it could just be that a very self centred and
introspective person. That’s probably just another excuse!
The guts of it seems to be that I haven’t found something that
set’s afire the passion to be a leader to others, either as a
servant or a teacher or anything else. The amount of effort required
to go out of ones way and be a leader seems huge and daunting and I
never feel like I have any time to do it. I guess if I keep looking
then the passion will ignite and I will burn every waking moment
fuelling it with all the energy I have but until now I haven’t
come across anything that I really want to share with anyone else.
It’s not that my interests are peculiar to me; there are plenty
of other people out there who program microcontrollers in their spare
time (true but hard to believe). It’s just I’ve never
really felt the need to get to heavily involved in the community,
partly because I feel I sometimes need the illusion of a commitment
to get me to actually turn up to an event or participate in some way.

In terms
of how I intend to focus my commitment to service over the immediate
and long term future, I guess I won’t be. I’ve been in a
career that I’ve been unhappy with for a long time now, despite
the high points which were when I worked with the two people I
mentioned above. That was in 2004. The next step is all about me.
After the MBA is completed I intend to go back to University and
finish an undergraduate degree in Law. Maybe I will be able to find
time to teach others or volunteer while I do this but I really doubt
it. Even that is still up in the air a bit because I still have an
interest in electronics and technology but the lure of power is
rapidly overcoming that. It’s a shame I didn’t have the
maturity to stomach 4 years of undergraduate living when I was 18 as
it would have saved a rather large amount of time now. I guess
that’s one of the benefits of being younger is that it really
is all about you and your future. Now I have to make changes to
myself and to the others who depend on me to make this happen. A lot
more negotiation has to be done to get things in a state where I can
change. I guess the point of this is that I don’t feel that
there is going to be a lot of room for servant leadership for at
least the next 4 years. Even when I graduate and start work for a
law firm there will be a period of learning and I probably won’t
have a lot of spare capacity then either. I know I like giving back
to the community and my colleagues, I just don’t know how
that’s going to be possible so I’m making no plans to
deliver it at this stage.

Leading Change: Handbook Entry, Week 9

I like the
Ozymandius poem. It’s a very clever way of saying that the
fruits of power are only enjoyed for your own lifetime. After you
are gone no one really cares about what you did or who you were and
all your works are as dust. The sneering face of the bully, the
message of their hubris, the absence of any visible sign of their
existence. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”
indeed!

“The
right tools at the right time” is a pretty obvious message to
anyone who has ever had to complete any kind of task. It gets a bit
more conceptual when you apply it to leadership and change
management. I find the idea of “power tools” appealing
for some reason. Fear, force, coercion and threat are easy to use
and usually effective at getting short term compliance or regaining
control of a group that has become undisciplined. These tools are
most effective when they are used by the group members on each other,
creating a unified team that is self governing. “Management
tools” I don’t have a lot of time for. While I
understand the use of metrics, models, training and procedural
activities, they bore me. “Leadership tools” are far
more interesting, vision, charisma, and inspiration. I find it hard
to resist leaders who display these things. “Culture tools”
are like a blend of power and management tools. The culture of an
organisation is really the sum total of the way they get things done.
The group dynamic and the level of bureaucracy are fairly good
indicators of how interesting the company is. The other metrics of
interest are the amount of group activities there are. I’ve
never been much of a work place socialiser, preferring to keep work
and play quite separate. The lesson from all this is the right tools,
right time message. I definitely prefer the crisis mode and I like
it when a leader steps up and gets things moving. Sitting around
being a business as usual operations kind of chap is about as
interesting as watching two ants crawl across a car park.

I find the
idea of emotional intelligence interesting and I understand that
there is plenty of evidence that leaders who have it are more
effective at motivating high performance teams. The problem with the
concept is that it requires a great deal of imagination to
understand, which automatically disqualifies most managers in my
opinion. Future focus is not a trait of too many managers that I
have ever worked with, they mostly seem interested in using
management tools and getting their metrics correct. I can’t be
bothered with all that metrics stuff which is why I have studiously
avoided management by working as the contract guru. If I could bust
a move straight from the coal face of the IT industry to the
strategic level of the boardroom I would, but the thought of chipping
away at it for the next 10 years doesn’t appeal. The lesson
here is that if you truly belong in the strategic space, then your
options are a bit limited. You can bust a move into government as a
policy analyst and make recommendations to ministers if you like
really big picture stuff. You could start your own company in which
case the strategy is all your from the get go. Or you move in
academia and hire yourself out as a strategy guru on the side. The
answer for me is to change industry, most likely law, or go into
academia.

The
lessons I take from the parable of Sadhu are twofold. Stress is a
great way to find emergent leaders. This is practiced by the
military and could well be applied to business. Personally I like
this idea but other people I have spoken to think it’s just a
way to encourage people out of a company. The second lesson is the
traits of good leaders: action orientated (tick), conflict resolvers
(cross), tolerant of ambiguity(cross), deal well with stress(cross),
like change(cross), strong sense of purpose(tick). Not the best
score card I have had to date. Going forward I think I will stick to
roles where I can be the guru and lead a bunch of high performance
people who are orientated towards producing quality results.
Reputation is something that matters more to me than control so it
will be in professional services and it will be in the quasi monopoly
industries like law, medicine or engineering.

Creative Leadership: Spirit Doctor Audit

Spirit
Doctor Audit

This will
be a challenge for a spiritual vacuum such as me. I like the Marxist
view point on spirituality; it’s a disguise for the true source
of control and power.

Accept the role of spirit doctor

I have
never accepted this role; in fact I have studiously avoided it. One
of the benefits of being a contractor, hired gun, guru or mercenary
is that I don’t have to give a toss about the company I work
for the petty squabbles that percolate through their organisational
structure on a daily basis. I open revel in the fact that I don’t
need to care, something which permanent staff in the near vicinity to
my outbursts can find a little uncomfortable. I have had only two
incidents where I have ever seen any hint that my behaviour may
actually be motivating someone else and that is with junior staff I
have mentored in the past. I teach them the skills that I have,
often repeating the phrase “when you are as good as I am then
you can fuck off to the contracting market and earn 500 GBP per day
like me”. For some reason they lap it up and really believe it
(it is true after all). This followership usually manifests itself
in a “I really worship you” moment when they have had too
much to drink at the Christmas party. I just tell them to pull
themselves together, resign tomorrow and get out there. There is not
hint of romanticism or the lone ranger image on my part, it’s
pure selfishness that drives me. I’m amazed that they don’t
see it that way so I will have to adjust my teaching style to
emphasise it.

Interpret events for others

I’m
not a big fan of this one either. I interpret things for me and my
purposes, not for other people. Often when people ask me what I
thought of something then they get an answer that they couldn’t
understand because it’s totally out of context and I can’t
be bothered explaining it. They take it at face value, look
confused, give up and go and talk to someone else which suites me
fine. Yes I do interpret events for others and I can remember a
couple of occasions where I have set them down the wrong path because
my view of events was based on what it meant to me, not what actually
happened. I have a habit of reading too much into events, seeing
personal attacks where there are none. Maybe I’m just so
intelligent that people are not capable of understanding the
cognitive leap that I cam too when analysing a seemingly innocuous
set of facts. I should probably just avoid people because they
suck.

Engage in rites and rituals

No, I’m
not interested in this one either. For example, the daily catch up
team meeting we used to have at my last place of work was just an
irritation in the middle of a time when I could have been doing other
things. For example, I could have been reading the news on the BBC
website, my only daily personal ritual. I have an amazing ability to
be given a task and then just get on with doing it. When it’s
done I guarantee it will be completed properly and that it won’t
be escalated to anyone for the duration of the activity. Do not
hassle me at any point during the activity. I have a table on the
whiteboard that displays to anyone who cares what the status of my
task list is, you don’t need to interrupt me. I suppose if I
took a broad view of this then process and procedure are a form of
ritual. If that’s the definition of the word then I am
fountain of procedure, writing documentation that ensures that I can
hand over a task to someone and they will not need their hand held
because it is of such high quality.

Use symbols

Don’t
care. I have 5 pairs of identical black trousers and 5 identical
black short sleeve shirts. The only variation on that theme is that
I do have a large range of black designer shoes that change every day
however that’s really because I don’t want to get smelly
feet. I have no symbols. I make no use of symbols. If anything,
having an obstreperous chap dressed in black wandering around the
office with a mean look is probably the most significant symbol of my
existence in the workplace. Even that will have to change now that I
have an MBA and I’m all grown up. All that being said I do
find symbols fascinating, but that’s because I’m
interested in them. I’m certainly not interested in sharing
that interest with anyone else.

Rely on the media

As you
have read my personal leadership challenge progress report you will
have probably guessed that despite my attempts to use the media the
challenge has failed. The reason that it’s not working is
because it’s me standing on a soap box ranting about the things
that interest me. Obviously no one else in interested in the same
things. Even if they are interested in the same issues, then they
are definitely not responding to my message, positively or
negatively. The problem is really dawning on me now that I am doing
this audit. My style is all about me. I’m not really
interested in what anyone else thinks, I just want to verbalise what
I think in someone else face. I do this because I know that I’m
right and they are just thick. This presents a bit of a problem if I
want to start a popular movement, because people don’t really
like being called thick or being yelled at by crazy people standing
on soap boxes on speaker’s corner. The trouble with yelling
into the void of the internet is that it’s just that, a void.
I would get more of a reaction from people if I went and did this in
the middle of Cuba Mall with a megaphone. People would probably
throw eggs at me but at least they would be reacting instead of just
stumbling through their insignificant lives while the Politian’s
serve themselves. See, there I go again!

Act with a sense of drama

Hurray! I
can do this one. I’m usually loud and I like it when I’m
holding court and monopolising the conversation. It’s still
all about me! There is a theme forming here. I’m also good at
walking out of jobs when I’m right and my values are being
questioned. Maybe it’s just the way I perceive things that
make me think my values are being questioned. To everyone else on
earth it just looks like I’ve stomped off in a huff after being
challenged by someone. Life’s too short to put up with other
peoples sense of drama. I have valuable skills and I can go and use
them somewhere else. It’s a big world out there.

Nurture the cohesion of a common
bond

No, I
don’t do this at all. I like being the voice of reason in the
world gone mad. If the world was perfect I would no longer need to
exist. I do things for me because I’m right. It’s
nothing to do with other people. They should do their own thing
because it’s right for them. End of.

Leading Change: Handbook Entry, Week 8

Journal Entry – Week 8,
16/09/08

Another
presentation done and dusted and another bunch of points to be added
to the final grade. It’s quite a milestone to know that two
thirds of the deliverables for a paper are now delivered and it’s
only a few more weeks until the whole process is done and dusted.

The
presentations were an interesting bunch. I liked the one about God,
otherwise known as the captain of the Indian cricket team. It seems
that people are really good at figuring out what leaders to follow
when the chips are down and everything it coming apart. Other
leaders that were discussed included Hitler and Churchill. Both of
these men were charismatic leaders who arose during times of
depression and who were adept at using language as a means to
galvanise a nation into action. Human emotion is a most primitive
and yet most powerful force when manipulated by a leader who
understands it. If you can emotionally engage a group of people you
can make them do great evil or good depending on the purpose of your
movement. I remember a friend of mine who grew up in Northern
Ireland saying that the best feeling he ever had was being part of a
riot. Nothing is as intoxicating as being part of a violent mob that
is destroying something or someone. I think a lot of modern
politicians emulate the strategies and tactics of these leaders
seventy years later. Robert Mugabe springs to mind.

Other
leaders were of an entirely different nature. The Prime Minister if
India is an educated man, a professor of economics at Oxfords and
grew up in poverty, hating the caste system. Like Ghandi, he has
built a following based on hard work and providing a good example.
He really believes in the power of economics to change people’s
lives for good and it’s working for India.

Barnardos
is a nice movement that grew out of the Victorian era in industrial
England. He was one of the few people who didn’t automatically
believe that being poor was your own fault. Patch Adams was another
leader who was discussed. He set out to provide free healthcare to
poor people in the United States, a group that is largely ignored by
a health system that only provides help to those who can afford it.

Jengis
Khan was the last leader who not only followed through on this
promises but brought a written language to the Mongol people. With
out that it is possible that all of the good stuff he did would be
written out of history by the Chinese, Persians and Europeans who
hated his guts. Sure one could say he ruled by force, but his
people followed him because they knew that he would support them in
the event that they were attacked by someone else. He was a leader
who followed through on that promise of protection, usually to the
detriment of the civilisations who chose to piss him off.

What have
I learned from all this? Well it’s an interesting journey
being the academic world and now that the end is drawing close I’m
wondering about the futility of it all. Will all this hard work lead
somewhere or am I going to just go back to the same old stuff as
before? I don’t rightly know yet but I’m still thinking
about plans to make something happen.

Creative Leadership: Leadership Challenge Update

The leadership challenge is going nowhere slowly for me. I thought I
would take a brief backtrack through my journal to see what I’ve
been thinking about and actually doing so you can get an idea of the
emotional rollercoaster I’ve been going through as ideas have
come and gone.

The first
idea was to form a punk band and release a lofi single into the ether
of the internet and see if any sort of following could arise.
Starting a band, even for a small project like this is a leadership
challenge in itself and met with the requirement to be something that
I’m excited about. When you were discussing the challenge on
the first lecture night I thought about my own heroes and what they
did to become leaders to people of my generation. Jello Biafra, Sid
Vicious, Jonny Ramone and Henry Rollins were all heroes of mine and
they vented their anger and frustration through music and poetry. It
seemed like the perfect vehicle for exercising a bit of my own anger
at the state of New Zealand Society and Politics, protesting about
boy racers, drinking culture, rugby culture and the political apathy
of the masses whose highest aspiration in life is to lead a
meaningless existence as middle class debt slaves. Like punk rock
itself this idea lived a short life, the walk home after the lecture
to be precise, before being shattered upon the reality check known as
marriage.

The second
idea was a little more sensible. I had a look at the video of
Nicholas Negroponte (I guess that’s a posh way of saying
Blackbridge) and the One Laptop Per Child program. The program is
always looking for people to volunteer their time and skills to
developing software for the OLPC platform and I thought this would be
a project that would be right up my alley. Full of enthusiasm I set
out to find who had been doing volunteer work in New Zealand and if
there were any groups I could move in on. I found a couple of people
who seemed to have been contributing to the projects and sent off
some email to contact them and see what I could lend a hand at doing.
After a week of hearing nothing I figured that my challenge had
better not involve any actual followers because people are useless at
getting back to me and don’t follow through on their agreed
action items – more on that later. Anywho this idea went
nowhere, especially after I worked out precisely how much work is
involved in setting up an OLPC development environment and getting to
work creating a Maori dictionary for it. Oddly enough it was about
this time that Google announced they were producing a Maori language
version of the site. I’ve some the conclusion that it’s
pretty pointless to produce a OLPC Maori language module when there
are no poor and underprivileged people in New Zealand. OLPC only
goes to poor countries whose government are not too proud to admit
they have some problems and want to buy into the deal.

The third
idea showed some real promise and was suggested to me by a classmate.
The Wellington Cable Car Challenge is a competition to produce a
business plan and sell your idea to some investors while riding the
cable car. The idea I had was to offer up my services as a brainy
MBA student to Cable Car Challengers for free. I got straight down
to business. I contacted the organisers and talked through my idea.
They were enthusiastic and said to email through my stuff and they
would post out a link to my website with the nest newsletter. I set
up a website with an advertisement, put some analytics on so it so I
could track the hit count and waited for the emails and phone calls
to roll in. They didn’t. During mid term break I chased these
people up and it turned out that their site had been broken for two
weeks because of some problem with the hosting company. We had a
chat and I offered them my services as a computer geek to assist them
as well as making sure they put the advert for my free services onto
the website. I even went to the trouble of checking with a lawyer to
make sure that I wouldn’t get messed around with professional
liability issues in case I helped someone and they didn’t will
the challenge. Time marches on and still no mention on the website,
blog or new letters so I’ve decided that relying on others to
do anything is a futile activity.

The next
new idea occurred to me just last week. I’m getting desperate
now so I thought I would start a political discussion group on
Facebook “New Zealand Society & Politics”. The idea
is to start conversation subjects that rant and rave about stuff,
just like the uneducated peasants who write letters to the editor in
the paper – or the opinionated journalists who write editorial
content. So far I am the only member of this group and no one has
looked at any of the topics, however I am hopeful that with the
election date drawing nigh that the followers will come. The key is
to get good content onto it and see if pulls followers in. My
classmates have all promised to join the group anyway so it might
gather some momentum.

If all
else fails I will go full circle and make a punk single as a solo
artist and release it on iTunes. I dusted off my guitar for the
first time in about six months just last week and did a little bit of
recording on my PC. I’m actually quite good at music. It
might be my best idea yet!

Leading Change: Potatau I, Presentation

Leading Change: Potatau I, Maori King

Potatau
I, Maori King

Unique History

On May 2
1859, Te Wherowhero was elevated to the status of king and took the
name Potatau Te Wherowhero. Already in his 80’s, he reigned
for 1 year and 54 days before he died on June 25^th 1860
(Cox, L., 1993). He was the first Maori king, leader of a movement
that sought to maintain the sovereignty of Maori and legitimise the
customary systems of ownership and governance of assets. The
Kingitanga movement represented a massive change in Maori society,
that being the elevation of one person to be the voice of all the
tribes and to unite them as a figurehead of Maori nationalism. While
this was a new concept in Maori society, it was a change that worked
in concert with the existing customary economic and legal systems
that had been established for a millennia. Rather than an upheaval
of the old system, the Kingitanga movement created a new layer of
governance that was based on the old but allowed the development of a
unified Maori society that could provide a significant political
response to colonial policy.

Background, decisions and
consequences

The period
1850-1870 saw a number of significant upheavals in Maori-Pakeha
relations. When Governor Grey returned to New Zealand for the second
time in 1861, he began instituting the runanga policies created in
the Native District Regulations Act 1858. These policies were
designed to assimilate Maori into British society and simplify the
interaction of Maori & Pakeha in the political process. The
outcomes of this change would be to have Maori & Pakeha living
under the same laws and to reduce the number of distinct Maori groups
that the government had to deal with. Problems arose almost
immediately because the runanga “districts” were not
based upon whakapapa, resulting in the alienation of families from
the resources that they had traditionally controlled. Leadership
patterns also changed under this system. Rather than traditional
leaders based on family or tribal relationships, leaders were now
appointed by the government based on their geographic location. This
gave the government the power to control who the leaders were and
their leadership style. Traditional leadership roles and
responsibilities towards the previously existing groups were no
longer involved on the political process. This process has not
stopped to this day, with the Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu Act
1996 being a typical example of the adoption of Western bureaucratic
politics over traditional Maori values (Carter, L., 2003).

Another
powerful piece of legislation was the “Half Caste” act
that wa used to define who was and who was not Maori. The principle
of Whakapapa is that whenever two families are joined together then
all their extended families are part of the group. The half caste
legislation broke up this system by making legal distinctions about
who was considered Maori. Based on these distinctions, Maori people
who were participating in Whakapapa or runanga based groups were no
longer included in those groups and had been converted to Pakeha
ethnicity by law (Carter, L., 2003).

The
Kingitanga movement sought to counter these influences by creating a
movement that would, to some extent, unite Maori in a common cause.
The idea of creating a monarchy in New Zealand had been originally
discussed as early at 1825. In 1854 a Waikato Chief Piri Kawau was
travelling with Governor Grey when he witnessed the plight of the
indigenous peoples of South Africa while staying in Cape Town. Upon
his return to New Zealand he immediately wrote to Maori leaders
urging the establishment of king so as to avert the possibility of
the South African scenario developing in New Zealand (Cox, L., 1993).

Firstly,
the Kingitanga movement created an effective focus for burgeoning
Maori nationalism, which clearly identified who Maori were and
formalised their own governance principles. Secondly, realising that
Maori had been alienated from the constitutional process because of
the electoral regulations, the Kingitanga movement formed a structure
which represented their own constitutional sovereignty. The
intention was that the system would operate along side the Pakeha
government with equal status and protected by the Queen Victoria as
discussed in the Treaty of Waitangi. Thirdly, the Kingitanga
movement would provide a united front against the appropriation of
land by Pakeha. Lastly, the Kingitanga movement would provide the
framework for a common law and justice system for Maori, the
intention of which was to end warlike reciprocity and to provide a
peaceful means of dispute resolution (Cox, L., 1993).

A key
aspect of the Kingitanga movement was the Maori use of Whakapapa as
the primary way to deciding who would be appointed king. The man who
was chosen, Te Wherowhero, met all the Maori criteria for leadership.
Firstly, he was an accomplished warrior, both as a general and in
hand to hand combat. Secondly, he was a religious man, providing the
important spiritual connection to the role of king. Most
importantly, he was connected to strong Whakapapa that included most
tribes in New Zealand, legitimising him in Maori eyes because of his
family connections to most geographic localities in New Zealand (Cox,
L., 1993). This allowed Maori to retain the use of whakapapa as the
primary ownership system, maintaining the existing ownership
structures. In terms of agency theory, the king is the agent of all
the families that he belongs to and the families control the assets
and resources in their dominions (Carter, L., 2003). Another
important consideration was that Te Wherowhero had an existing
relationship with Governor Grey and maintained a residence in
Auckland where he would meet with the governor and maintain a dialog
with the Pakeha government (Jones, P. T. H., 1959)

There are
a number of obvious contradictions between these approaches.
Although the interests were mush the same, particularly with regards
to the maintenance of law and order, the two system approach was in
direct contradiction to the one system approach the colonial
government wanted to achieve. The runanga system was based on
arbitrarily drawn boundaries that separated families from each other
and the resources they controlled, whereas the Kingitanga system
recognised whakapapa as the source of the rights of ownership.

Business Lessons

There are
a number of business lessons that need to be heeded for anyone
wishing to do business with Maori authorities or other Maori
structures.

Firstly,
the principles of whakapapa as related to ownership and control of
assets needs to be understood to ensure that you are dealing with the
right people in regards to these matters. It is not enough to go to
the government prescribed authority when working with
Maoriorganisations, you also need to consider the guardians of the
resource you wish to discuss and that means going to see the people
of the marae who manage it (Carter, L., 2003).

Secondly,
modern Maori leaders have dual roles of equal importance to both the
state created apparatus and the traditional organisation structures.
Mark Solomon, chairman of the Ngai Tahu trust, explained this best
when he described his dual role as being the Chief Executive Officer
of Ngai Tahu Corporation and also a leader of the Kaikoura people.
The effect of this is that there are two groups you need to deal with
when approaching a Maori organisation (Carter, L., 2003).

References

Carter,
L., J., (2003) Whakapapa and the State, Phd Thesis, Auckland
University.

Cox, L.,
1993. The Search for Maori Political Unity, Oxford University
Press,

Oxford.

Jones,
P.T.H, 1959, King Potatau, Polynesian Society, Wellington

Further Reading

Curnow,
J., Hopa, N., McRae, J., 2002. Rere atu, taku manu! Auckland
University

Press, Auckland.

Winiata,
M., 1967. The Changing role of the Leader in Maori Society,

Blackwood And Janet Paul, Auckland.

Whakapapa And The State: CLOSING REMARKS

CHAPTER5: CLOSING REMARKS

This thesis was concerned with the survival of whakapapa as an organisational process for Mäori society. It also examined the challenges and changes to its continuation as such from non-whakapapa driven systems of organisation. One system stems from the processes ordered by whakapapa which is tradition-based and aims to move Mäori forward without compromising the cultural integrity of the groups. The other processes are ordered and shaped by State-driven policies and legislation and aim to move Mäori forward as modern legal-bureaucratic entities. Mäori, as part of a wider nation-state, must comply with the laws of the State in order to maintain relationships with non-Mäori groups and Government alike. Therefore all Mäori groups currently have both whakapapa systems and legal-bureaucratic systems within their organisational processes, whether they are, for example, in the form of Trust Boards or Marae committees. Mäori have also gained experience in the State-driven organisational methods and this has expanded their ways of acting and contributing economically, politically, and socially. Somewhere though there needs to be a balance sought between the two processes that does not deny the distinct identity of Mäori, but allows continued growth and development in all parts of society. In the case study in chapter four I discussed in detail the two conflicting governance processes as they exist in the contemporary structure of Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu. This study highlighted the implications for the wider Mäori community of relying too heavily on non-Mäori processes, and of attempting to justify change after the fact. By corporatising culture and calling it “tikanga-based,” Mäori will increasingly move towards governance processes that are dependant more on State law and policies than on whakapapa.

Too see the rest of the chapter, click on the Google Docs link below:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_119hjj9c8cw

Whakapapa And The State: TE RÜNANGA O NGÄI TAHU

CHAPTER4: TE RÜNANGA O NGÄI TAHU

Ngäi Tahu began to modernise their governance as early as the 1860s. By the 1990s the triumph of democratic, bureaucratic, corporate and legalistic principles was almost complete. The TRONT structure is a contemporary innovation devised by Ngäi Tahu and accepted by the government, but it has its roots firmly imbedded in past government legislation and policies that were designed to implement government strategies relating to Mäori development. TRONT was designed to provide a voice for Ngäi Tahu during their dealings with the government over their Waitangi treaty claim settlement process. Once settlement was agreed upon it would act as an asset-holding corporation for the final settlement package, and ensure the smooth implementation of the settlement. The Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu Act, 1996 gave the legal authority to TRONT as the representative for Ngäi Tahu whänui. The act also stressed that the structure was designed to look after both individual and group beneficial rights. The TRONT legislation provided management guidelines and defined who the iwi beneficiaries were. It defined the tribal territories, which are shared among the eighteen papatipu rünanga. It defined how representatives were to be elected. It defined how disputes were to be settled. It contained regulations for determining who could be a member or a beneficiary as well as rules specifying how to compile a beneficial roll. The legislation also required that the number of papatipu rünanga be maintained at eighteen and spelt out regulations governing any additions to that number. Included within the legislation was a Charter of Incorporation, the Kawenata, which sets out a further set of governing rules.

Too see the rest of the chapter, click on the Google Docs link below:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_118fs3sqxgf

Whakapapa And The State: THE STATE

CHAPTER3: THE STATE

In this chapter I propose to study the nature and impact of the Runanga Iwi Bill and Mäori reaction to it. While it is true that the bill remained as legislation for only six months, I will demonstrate how it has remained part of Government policies and thinking towards how to manage Mäori. The bill’s directives for defining “iwi”, defining and managing membership, and forming rünanga structures have had lasting implications for contemporary Mäori organisational structures.

Too see the rest of the chapter, click on the Google Docs link below:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_117gx27zhxb

Whakapapa And The State: THE LIVING TRADITION OF WHAKAPAPA

CHAPTER TWO: THE LIVING TRADITION OF WHAKAPAPA

How people perceive the value in something or some activity is best observed in how they maintain relationships. The interactions that occur in relationships are often best observed through stories. In this chapter I will focus on the stories that help to evoke an image of what whakapapa is and how it works. The stories that are told by the members of Ngäi Tahu and other Mäori groups demonstrate how people position themselves within the relationships that link them and the natural and spiritual worlds – how they operate within the three worlds of whakapapa. The actions they carry out demonstrate their understanding of the principles of whakapapa and how they work. Russell Bishop recently stated that stories were ways of representing truth. There is always more than one way to tell a story and this will result in many diverse truths being heard rather than one dominant version.¹ In stories that show whakapapa in action, and stories about what people have said whakapapa is, there are secreted the diverse understandings and complexities of whakapapa in ways that cannot be demonstrated by a single definition. The stories illustrate the workings of the relationships that are depicted in them. The truth of what is happening in the stories depends on the knowledge systems that are in place in the storyteller’s community. Everybody interprets things differently depending on their values and level of knowledge. The stories – explanations – of how certain activities are viewed or interpreted reflect an understanding of the truth. Consequently, we often arrive at more than one truth. This could give us a jumble of explanations except for the fact that a commonality in values and levels of knowledge, such as those adhered to and attained by Mäori hapü groups, allows for a commonality in interpretation of significant events. Therefore, people become like-minded in their understanding of something. The stories from each individual or each hapü group contain common denominators that are easily understood by others within the same corporate group. There is a universal understanding of the common denominators and this understanding helps to support knowledge systems and expectations of how the world works. The one common denominator that underlies Mäori knowledge and values systems is whakapapa. The explanation of whakapapa is expressed through the stories surrounding the origins, values and history of the participant hapü groups. Whakapapa is the key to unlocking this knowledge, and it is the key to the mass of facts we see before us in the stories. The stories that are depicted in this part of the chapter are about how people experience the whakapapa relationships such as whanaungatanga, rangatiratanga and tiakitanga, and ahi kä, and how they understand the spiritual concepts of hau, tapu, noa and mauri. The relationships experienced in the stories are those linking people to the land and to other resources, including people.

Too see the rest of the chapter, click on the Google Docs link below:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_116f7ck64fx

Whakapapa And The State: CHAPTER ONE

This thesis is an investigation into how tradition-based societies, such as Mäori, are coping with challenges and changes to their organisational structures, and how they are adapting to the changes in ways that allow them to remain an integral part of New Zealand society. An important argument within this thesis is that Mäori are becoming less reliant on whakapapa, their tradition-based organisation process, and more reliant on modern, legal-bureaucratic processes when reshaping their iwi governance structures. This has meant that whakapapa, the base of Mäori tradition-based organisation, has become marginalised as the way of structuring and maintaining relationships that are important to the growth and development of Mäori groups.

Too see the rest of the chapter, click on the Google Docs link below:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9bf7w7_115hsss4w2f

Whakapapa And The State, Dr Lynette Carter: ABSTRACT

This is the abstract of the PhD Thesis I referenced in my assignment on King Potatau. The entire document can be viewed on Google Docs. A link to each chapter is contained in further blog entries. (Sam Waymouth, 2008)

Abstract

This thesis examines modern iwi governance systems and their effect on whakapapa as an organisational framework in Mäori societies. The main question addressed was; can whakapapa survive as an organisational process, or will it be stifled, as Mäori societies struggle to establish a strong identity in contemporary New Zealand.

As an organisational framework for Mäori societies, whakapapa works through a series of principles that function through relationships between people, and between people and other elements that make up the world. Contemporary Mäori groups continue to claim that they are whakapapa-based societies. This thesis examines that claim by investigating to what extent of “being Mäori” today is about adherence to those principles and to whakapapa-based processes and relationships, and how much is it about being shaped by non-Mäori constructs that have been formed by state-intervention and legislated changes to Mäori social organisation. If being Maori today has as much or more to do with the latter, what place does whakapapa have in contemporary Mäori society, and to what level and to what extent can the principles of whakapapa be upheld as the basis for contemporary Mäori societies.

A series of stories and case studies were used to answer the questions posed in the thesis. The case studies demonstrated the ways in which whakapapa worked in everyday situations, and how the people who take part in whakapapa-based relationships understood them to work. They also demonstrated how state intervention through legislation has challenged the way Mäori groups structure themselves when new circumstances have required compromise and change. The institutionalised evolution of Mäori societies is examined in more detail using one example of a modern tribal structure, Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu. The Ngäi Tahu example typifies the implications for Mäori if they choose to move from a whakapapa-based organisational model of governance to a centralised legal-bureaucratic model of governance.

The adoption of the new centralised governance structures, such as Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu, will mean that Mäori hapü and iwi societies are in danger of disappearing to be replaced by a generic group, shaped by legislation and integrated into the wider nation-state of New Zealand. Whakapapa can only remain at the core of Mäori societies if Mäori allow it to, but when Mäori adopt centralised “generic” system of governance, hapü and iwi societies become censored versions of their former selves.

Prologue: positioning myself into the dialogue

The primary theme throughout the thesis is whakapapa, and its ability to survive in a culturally significant way as part of modern iwi governance structures. In the Mäori world, everything has a whakapapa that explains the relationships that exist between all entities and the environment in which they reside. It is appropriate therefore that I begin with a whakapapa to explain the relationship between the contributors and the thesis, and their space within the thesis environment.

My place in this thesis is both as participant and observer, and as the originator of some thoughts and ideas that help to explain the relationships between the themes of the thesis and the arguments that make up the overall work. One theme concerns whakapapa and its role as the key to understanding the processes that shape Mäori social structures and relationships. The second theme concerns the forces that have reshaped Mäori social processes and contributed to the modernisation of Mäori governance structures. I will begin by using two ways of presenting my own whakapapa as a model to help explain the two interwoven themes in the thesis.

Ko Aoraki te maunga

Ka tähuri ia, ka tiro ake ra ki te tai tonga

Ki te maunga paenga o Takitimu

Ka tiro atu rätou ki te maunga o Motupohue

Ka tähuri ia, ka tiro atu ki te maunga o Rau Uira, kei te noho ia i te wähi o Tautuku, o Waikawa hoki.

Ka rere noa iho ngä awa o Mataura, kei te hono ai ki te Awa-a-Kiwa, kei Motupohue.

Ko ënei taonga ko ngä whai take o Murihiku, Ko töku turangawaewae.

No reira,

Ko Motupohue te maunga,

Ko Te Rau Aroha te marae

Ko Te Rapuwai, Waitaha, Ngäti Mamoe, Ngäi Tahu ngä iwi

Ko te whanau Wybrow töku whanau

Ko ënei taonga, ko ahau

No reira

Ngä mihi aroha ahau ki ngä tïpuna näna i tautoko tënei mahi, Kei te noho mai koutou i te rangimarie,

Tënä koutou

Ngä mihi aroha ahau hoki ki ngä whanaunga ora näna i tautoko anö tënei mahi.

Tënä koutou, tënä koutou, tënä ra tätou kätoa

The mountain, Aoraki, is the supreme ancestor under whose mantle the land and all the people living upon it are protected.

The mountain range, Takitimu, and the mountains, Rau Uira and Motupohue, are the boundary markers of my hau kainga – the place of my origins.

The river, Mataura is the river that runs through part of my hau kainga and links the realm of Täne, the origin of the natural world and people, with the realm of Tangaroa, the origin of the sea, rivers, lakes and the water ways and everything that lives within them. The Mataura is also the river that has special significance in the history of my own family.

The land is Murihiku, the southern most region of New Zealand’s South Island, and the people are the past, present and future generations of Te Rapuwai, Käti Mamoe, Käi Tahu and Waitaha peoples who occupy the space within the landscape.

This whakapapa is part of my whakapapa and it provides a key to understanding how I, as a Ngäi Tahu woman, am related to all the elements of my Ngäi Tahu environment – the snow, the various winds, mists, and the geographical features, are within my whakapapa and are all within me as Ngäi Tahu. It provides a key to explain how I am part of, and a product of, my Ngäi Tahu environment. The lands, the stratosphere, the elements, the resources, are all part of me, as per according to my whakapapa. Whakapapa shapes my experiences and relationships with place, space and other people.

There is another way, however, of writing down my whakapapa. Connections to contemporary Ngäi Tahu are often spoken about in the following way.

I am Ngäi Tahu, Ngäti Mamoe, Waitaha and Te Rapuwai. These are the Mäori groups that occupy most of the South Island of New Zealand and are collectively referred to as Ngäi Tahu whänui. The term, Ngäi Tahu Whänui, was awarded to us through the passing of two pieces of legislation that gave us a legal identity and organisational rules and structure: The Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu Act, 1996 and The Ngäi Tahu Claims Settlement Act, 1998. The name, Ngäi Tahu whänui, is stated in the 1998 Act preamble as meaning ‘the collective of individuals who descend from the primary hapü of Waitaha, Ngäti Mamoe, and Ngäi Tahu, namely Käti Kurï, Käti Irekehu, Käti Huirapa, Ngäi Tuahuriri, and Kai Te Ruahikihiki’.¹ When I recite these names I am considered to be giving my whakapapa or my genealogical relationship to the various groups. This identifies me as part of well-defined, highly structured groups who share kinship, have distinct cultural traits - Ngäi Tahutanga - and hold mana whenua in areas of Te Waipounamu, which are defined by legislation. I connect by some degree to about 29,000 other people who are classified the same way. There may be more than this of course, but it is only those who have registered with the governing body called Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu who are officially recognised. It is only the registered beneficiaries who can access the benefits that Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu administers on our behalf. That is, the benefits of being Ngäi Tahu which come to us through whakapapa. I have often been told that this thing, whakapapa, is like a family tree and tells people how I fit in with the rest of Ngäi Tahu whänui. The base of Ngäi Tahu whakapapa is the Blue Book, which is administered by the whakapapa unit of Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu. This book is made up of lists of names of Ngäi Tahu ancestors alive in 1848. In fact, I have also been told that if a person cannot whakapapa to one of the ancestors in the Blue Book than the person is not Ngäi Tahu. So the book is pretty powerful as obviously it distinguishes me from everyone who is not Ngäi Tahu and enables me to substantiate my claim to various benefits as outlined in the 1998 Settlement Act. It was the subject of this Act, the Waitangi Treaty settlement with the New Zealand Government, that recently made being Ngäi Tahu something more desirable. Now lots of people want to be able to prove they have an ancestor in the Blue Book as this entitles them to join an elite group: it gives them a whakapapa thereby substantiating their Ngäi Tahuness. The person may have always known that he or she is Ngäi Tahu but somehow this connection to a list of names taken down in 1848 makes it official. Therefore two Acts of Parliament and a census list in a blue book explain by example what whakapapa Ngäi Tahu is.

Ngäi Tahutanga, is our distinct cultural difference; our language dialect, our material culture, our waiata, stories, shared history and all manner of things that make us culturally Ngäi Tahu. This is managed and controlled through programmes organised and directed by the Ngäi Tahu Development Corporation, which is in charge of overseeing Ngäi Tahu cultural development. Ngäi Tahu mana whenua (power and authority over land) is now measured through all the assets that identify us as the owners of certain parts of Te Waipounamu. All the assets and economic ventures are administered by the Ngäi Tahu Holding Corporation, which is the financial division of Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu.

Both the above whakapapa create different images of me as an Ngäi Tahu woman. One is the traditional image of whakapapa in its entirety that explains the way all entities are integrated into the world. It is an image of inclusiveness. The other is a re-imaged identity that explains my position within an ethnic group. The way the whakapapa is constructed makes the group appear to be excluded from the environment in which they exist. It is an image that suggests exclusiveness.

The second whakapapa excludes most of the relationships between Ngäi Tahu and other entities. It describes members of a group who have a shared history, stories, genealogies, ancestral home, language and culture. It describes a generic ethnicity devoid of any specific connections with the knowledge, belief and values systems of the first whakapapa. The images are in tension with each other, because in the second whakapapa, there is no hint of the experiences and practices that make up the connections, alliances and relationships between all the elements that co-exist in the environment. As described in the second whakapapa, the image of Ngäi Tahu identity has been shaped by forces other than whakapapa and, as a result, part of the total Ngäi Tahu identity is missing. It is an incomplete image of who Ngäi Tahu whänui are as a people.

The use of the two whakapapa to portray contrasting images of myself as an Ngäi Tahu woman serves as a model to portray what is happening in wider contemporary Mäori society. There are two significantly contrasting images of Mäori that are in tension with each other. One concerns the image of tradition-based groups whose organisational processes use whakapapa as the fundamental measure of their identity. The other concerns the image of Mäori groups who are being reshaped by forces external to whakapapa processes, which have, in turn, contributed to the shape of modern Mäori governance structures. The external forces have provided special challenges to the way Mäori groups are modernising to fit with changing national and global environments. Yet Mäori insist that whakapapa remains as the key to understanding their unique identity and organisational processes. There is some question, however, in what form and to what degree the tradition-based processes will be allowed to occur in the future. The overall aim of this thesis is to examine the development of Mäori strategies for restructuring their governance structures and, if during this process, they are able to successfully maintain their distinctive identities as Mäori societies.

Whakapapa is about relationships based on experiences in the past and present that help to shape the future. For me, writing Whakapapa and the State has been a way of reflecting on how past and present experiences and relationships, both from whakapapa and from external forces, have helped to shape future identity. Therefore the thesis offers an opportunity to explore themes of identity, challenge, and compromise that are changing both the Ngäi Tahu and the wider Mäori worlds.

Some thoughts as to the shape of this thesis: Contributions and acknowledgements

One of the difficulties of writing this thesis has been the use of my own iwi, Ngäi Tahu, as the main case study. I often thought that I should have been writing from a third person, observer position. But, as both an observer and a participant in the changes that are occurring within my iwi, I found it difficult to separate out my personal experiences and observations from the reality of my participation in the iwi’s modernising process. Therefore I make no apologies if parts of my writing are personal and subjective. After all, the thesis is about whakapapa and relationships, and these are often fuelled and shaped by subjective processes.

Another difficulty that had to be overcome in the writing process concerned the idea of whakapapa bringing together the past, present and future generations. Sometimes it was difficult to know what tense to use when writing about particular matters. In order to explain matters concerning whakapapa it may appear that I have confused tenses, but this may be because some whakapapa-based systems are very much part of contemporary Mäori societies. In the nature of whakapapa, the past is with us in the present and the past has not been replaced by the present. If referred to in the past tense, the subject will become locked into the past and have no active connection with the present. In some cases, such as Mäori leadership, this is not the case. There are many examples of tradition-based leadership roles still operating efficiently and effectively; Te Ariki of Tuwharetoa, Tumu te Heuheu is one such example.

In all whakapapa, there are many layers that interweave and add to the experiences and dynamism of its many relationships. That is also the case with the whakapapa of this thesis. In order to both explain existing relationships and concepts, and develop new ones, several alliances have been undertaken between me and interested parties. The alliances have created new opportunities for expansion and development of the thesis itself, just as each new layer added to a whakapapa expands and develops the relationships layered within it.

Special thanks should go to my supervisors who have helped shape my thoughts into this thesis. They are Emeritus Professor Sir Hugh Kawharu, Department of Mäori Studies, and Professor Andrew Sharp, Department of Political Studies, at the University of Auckland. Others who offered advice and contributed to the early stages of my writing were Professor Ngapare Hopa and Professor Patu Hohepa. Tënä koutou kätoa i ö koutou tautoko, i ö koutou awhi ki ahau.

The thesis would not have had the same depth to it if people had not agreed to be interviewed and share their thoughts on the very complex topic of whakapapa, and to openly discuss the changes occurring within their own iwi. The interviewees were chosen because of their connections to various themes of the thesis. Edward Te Kohu Douglas, Ngäti Mamoe and Ngäi Tahu, and Tumu te Heuheu, Te Ariki of Tuwharetoa, were approached for participation because of their connection with the Volcanic Interior Plateau claim [VIP]. Ted had worked on the ‘Find a Whanau’ project that was conducted to help each hapü find a process for locating all their members. Tumu was a member of the VIP taumata and one of the claimants listed on the initial claim. Margaret Mutu is the Kaiwhakahaere of the Ngäti Kahu rünanga and she was able to further explain the issues surrounding their former membership of the central governance group, Te Rünanga o Muriwhenua. Margaret explained the development of Ngäti Kahu since the disbanding of Te Rünanga o Muriwhenua, and how they were planning to operate post-settlement as Ngäti Kahu. Mark Solomon was interviewed in his capacity as Kaiwhakahaere of Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu, and as the rünanga representative of his own rünanga at Kaiköura. Mark was able to explain issues surrounding the tension between operating as mana whenua, and operating as a democratically elected member of a central rünanga collective. Both Kelly Tikao and Reina Whaitiri are Ngäi Tahu taura here living in Auckland, but have also lived within their hau kainga areas. They were able to talk about their experiences as hau kainga and as taura here in their relationships with the wider iwi, Ngäi Tahu.

The interview questions were primarily to do with what each participant thought whakapapa was, and how they saw it as operating within their own particular context. For example both Ted and Tumu responded as was appropriate to the VIP claim that they are involved with. In the course of the interview, Tumu also spoke about his role as ariki of Tuwharetoa, because he found he could not separate his role from his responsibilities and comments concerning VIP. Each participant was also asked about their thoughts on the modern governance structures of their prospective iwi groups. The taped interviews were then transcribed and edited for grammatical purposes only. All the interviewees were given the opportunity to examine the transcriptions and revise the information, make suggestions as to content, or have information excluded from the thesis draft. I also explained how I had incorporated their interview material into the main thesis and in what contexts this had happened. Their co-operation and further suggestions were very helpful towards writing the final draft of the thesis. Therefore, mihi nui aroha ki Edward Te Kohu Douglas, Tumu te Heuheu, Margaret Mutu, Mark Solomon, Kelly Tikao, and Reina Whaitiri. Tënä koutou kätoa.

Many of the stories that feature in Chapter Two were taken from evidence given before the Waitangi Tribunal during hearings for the Ngäi Tahu Claim, the Whanganui-a-Orutu Claim, the Pouaki Report, the Muriwhenua Fisheries Claim, and the Te Roroa Report. All these reports are on public record and are held in the Canterbury University Library [Ngäi Tahu claims evidence], and the University of Auckland General Library.

The following people have also contributed their thoughts and their stories over the years spent in writing this thesis and their comments and guidance were much appreciated. Their contributions were not the result of formal interviews, but each were given the opportunity to further discuss the information and how I had incorporated it into the thesis. Terry Ryan, Ngäi Tahu, is the kaitiaki of Ngäi Tahu whakapapa and heads the Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu whakapapa unit. Terry contributed informally over the four years spent writing the thesis, providing insights and comments about various experiences he had had while working with the whakapapa of Ngäi Tahu. Isobel Roderick is from Ngäti Hikairo and Ngäti Rangiwewehi. Her contributions were as a result of many discussions and conversations during family gatherings. Miki Roderick is my partner and as with Isobel, his contributions were from the many conversations we have had over the years spent writing the thesis. Maruhaeremuri Stirling, Ngäti Mamoe, Ngäi Tahu and Te Whänau a Apanui, and Huata Holmes, Te Rapuwai, Ngäti Mamoe, and Ngäi Tahu are two of my whanaunga, who have been supportive and willing to share their knowledge of various things relating to whakapapa. Hineira Woodard, Tuhoe, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Ngäti Awa, Ngäti Porou, are colleagues at the University of Auckland who offered advice and comments on various issues surrounding their experiences of whakapapa. Ngä mihi aroha mai ahau ki a koutou katoa.

I have chosen not to follow standard academic procedure to refer to people by their surnames, when their contributions have appeared in the thesis text. The personal relationships that I have with each of them deemed it more appropriate to use their first names. However, when I have quoted or referred to an academic journal or text, the author(s) has been cited in the usual way of using the surname, date of publication, and page number.

The support I have received from friends and colleagues in the Department of Mäori Studies, University of Auckland, was valued and appreciated, particularly their tolerance and understanding during the long, long, long process of writing a thesis. Ngä mihi nui aroha ki a Merekaraka Gillman, Jane McCrae, Rangimarie Rawiri, Ann Sullivan, and Deanne Wilson, Roberta Wilson, and to PhD and MA members of the post-grad room in Mäori Studies who shared thoughts and ideas during visits to our alternate PhD venue, ‘Gloria’s.’ Mihi nui ki Susan Healy, Tane Mokena, Dinah Paul, Hazel Petrie, Verity Smith, Yvonne Sutherland, and Te Aroha Rountree. No reira, tënä koutou, tënä koutou, tënä ra tatou katoa.

On reflection then, this thesis is very much about people and relationships and the challenges that have brought changes to the way they organise themselves socially, politically and economically in order to meet the expectations of an emerging modern national and global Mäori identity. The people are my people, Ngäi Tahu whänui, and the many other Mäori people whose whakapapa remains at the key to their identity. The challenge has been, and always will be, the way it is allowed to remain as the key to Mäori identity, and Whakapapa and the State attempts to provide some insights into the lessons of the past, and how they may contain pathways for the future. The challenge will be how to learn from past lessons and develop new pathways without losing sight of who Mäori are as people.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

The practice of whakapapa and the contexts of challenge: Introductory remarks

Illustration – koru (spiral)	13
Method	18

CHAPTER TWO

The living tradition of whakapapa 31

2.1	Whakapapa stories	32
	Photo – Matiaha Tiramorehu	34
	Photo – Mataura river falls	41
	Ngäi Tahu Seasonal gathering round	53
	Illustration – Matariki	55
	Photo – Making kelp bags	55
	Photos – Tïtï islands	56
	Illustration – Häkari stage	77
	Illustration – Pätaka	81
2.2	Changing the face of whakapapa: Disconnecting the worlds	87
	Table – ‘Kinship terms’	90
2.3	Imposed restrictions: Mystifying whakapapa	94
2.4	Interruptions to whakapapa: Internal changes	99

CHAPTER THREE: The State 103

3.1	Land legislation	103
	Fig.1 – Grey’s rünanga plan	110
	Fig. 2 – The Runanga Iwi Bill	116
3.2	The Rünanga Iwi Bill: Redefining and re-organising iwi	121
3.3	The Rünanga Iwi Bill and participation: Choosing a layer of co-operation	123
3.4	The Rünanga Iwi Bill and Kotahitanga: The National Mäori Congress	131

CHAPTER FOUR

Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu 139

4.1	The Institutionalisation of the Ngäi Tahu tribe	139
	Fig. 3, Ngäi Tahu Mäori Trust Board structure Fig 4, Te Rünanganui-o-Tahu structure; Fig.5, Proposed TRONT structure; Fig. 6, TRONT Vision 2025 structure.	139
4.2	From the House of Tahu to TRONT	153
4.8	Beneficiary lists: Redefining whakapapa tïpuna	172
4.10	Is legal-rational-bureaucracy the way forward? Case studies of The Volcanic Interior Plateau claim, and Ngäti Kahu.	185

CHAPTER FIVE

Whakapapa and the State: Closing remarks 197

Glossary 207

Bibliography 212

Prologue: Positioning myself into the dialogue iii

Some thoughts as to the shape of this thesis: Contributions and acknowledgements vii

Pronunciation guide xiv

Language and translation conventions xiv

Mäori terminology xv

MAPS

New Zealand Insert page 1

Ngä Runanga o Ngäi Tahu Insert page 1

PHOTOS/ILLUSTRATIONS

‘takarangi’ spiral Insert p. 13

(Harrison, Paki, 1988. Tane-Nui-A-Rangi Auckland: University Printing Services Ltd)

Matiaha Tiramorehu, ATL. F-162572-1/2 Insert p.34

‘Falls of Mataura River,’ATL. E-174-031/032 Insert p.41

Diagrams: Insert p.53

Seasonal gathering round (Anderson A 1998: 117)

Wakawaka boundaries (Anderson A 1998: 115)

‘Matariki’ (NZ Herald 15/7/02) Insert p.55

Poha manufacture, HL E-2918/10 Insert p.55

Tïtï Island photos and map Insert p. 56

(Wilson, Eva., 1979. Titi Heritage. The Story of the Muttonbird Islands. Invercargill: Craig Printing Co. Ltd.)

ATL: F-147221-1/2; c/n E6772/42A; E 2918/11; c/n E6773/40A

‘The Feast, Bay of Islands, New Zealand’ Clarke 1849 Insert p. 77

(Bell, L., 1992. Colonial Constructs. European Images of Maori 1840-1914. Auckland: Auckland University Press)

‘Whatas 1847’ ATL PUBL-0014-30 Insert p. 81

(From: The New Zealanders Illustrated, plate 30, F.G. Angus)

‘Flow diagram of the 1861 Runanga Scheme’ Insert p. 110

(Cox 1993: 82)

Flow diagram of the Runanga Iwi Bill (my own) Insert p. 116

Flow diagrams of the Ngäi Tahu structures (my own) Insert p. 139

ABBREVIATIONS

AJHR Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives

ATL Alexander Turnbull Library

HL Hocken Library

FoMA Federation of Maori Authorities

NZPD New Zealand Parliamentary Debates

SNZ Statutes of New Zealand

TRONT Te Rünanga o Ngäi Tahu

UAL University of Auckland Library

VIP Volcanic Interior Plateau

PRONOUNCIATION GUIDE²

The vowel sound in the Mäori language is essential to the correct pronunciation of Mäori. The vowel sounds are constant except in cases where they vary in length. The lengthened sound is indicated by a macron over the vowel, e.g. ‘a’ becomes ‘ä’.

The vowel a is pronounced as in the English far. Avoid all trace of the flat a as in hat.

The vowel e is pronounced like the ea in leather. Avoid the double sound of the vowel as found in hay and may.

The vowel i is pronounced as in the Latin languages. It is equivalent to the vowel sound in the English words me or he.

The vowel o is pronounced as the English word awe. Avoid all trace of the English pronunciation of oh!

The vowel u is pronounced like the double o in moon. Avoid saying it like the ew in few.

When two vowels occur together, begin by practising each separately until you can speed up without spoiling the clarity of the vowels when they are run together, e.g., ‘koe’ should be practiced as ‘ko-e’ until the vowels can follow each other smoothly.

The consonants:

r must not be rolled. It is pronounced quite close to the sound of l in English. The tongue is near the front of the mouth.

p is generally softer than in English, not an explosive sound.

wh is usually pronounced liked f. In some districts it is spoken like an h (e.g., in Hokianga) and in others like a w (e.g. in Taranaki), in others again like the wh in when.

ng is a softer sound than the English, especially with regard to the g. The sound is similar to the middle ng in singing.

Language and translation conventions

I have used the macrons where appropriate to indicate vowel length; however there are some instances where I have not used them. For example, I have not added macrons to quotes if the author has not used them. Secondly, I did not add them to Mäori language manuscript material, but chose to transcribe the manuscripts as they appeared in the original form. I have not added macrons to place names or proper nouns if they do not appear in the original research material because it is inappropriate for me to suggest how the hapu or iwi pronounce their place names or ancestral names. Some of the titles for government departments that appeared in official documents such as AJHR documents, did not use a macron, therefore I have not added them.

Mäori language is made up of different dialects. One of the main dialectal differences in the South Island is the use of the allophone, [k], in place of the phoneme, /ng/. This occurs in words such as Ngäti, which is often pronounced, Käti, in the Ngäi Tahu dialect. I have used the [k] substitution only where it has appeared in quotations and where my informants have used it. This is primarily because there is on-going debate even amongst Ngäi Tahu whänui as to the authenticity of the [k] substitution.³

In the transcriptions of Maori language manuscripts I have added words into square brackets for clarification and where there appears to be a misprint in either grammar or spelling. Otherwise I have transcribed the manuscripts as they appear in the original material. Each manuscript is footnoted with details of translation sources.

Maori terminology

A Glossary is included in the thesis. However, it must be made clear that the glosses for each word are as they appear in the context of this thesis only. I realise that many of the terms used are terms that represent concepts surrounding Mäori processes and cannot be defined by a simple English phrase or one word. Many of the words have more than one meaning and not all are given in the Glossary.

Throughout chapter two and the other chapters of the thesis Mäori groups will be referred to as “tradition-based” societies rather than using the word “tribe.” The word, “tribe,” is problematic because it assumes that each group is a closed society whose beliefs make it difficult for the entity to adapt and grow when faced with challenges and changes from outside its closed reality. A main argument in this thesis is that instead of the word, tribe, Mäori societies are better described as tradition-based societies. This type of society is more capable of movement and development because knowledge and values that are based in the past do not limit or inhibit growth or adoption of new technology or ideas, but form part of a framework of knowledge and experience that can be drawn from in order to move a group easily into a contemporary situation. Likewise the terms, whänau, hapü, iwi and waka are defined as whanaungatanga relationships, or layers of co-operation between groups. This concept allows for the fluidity of whakapapa to be expressed when the thesis discusses the various layers of relationships, and does not characterise the groups as immovable social structures.

1 The Ngäi Tahu Claims Settlement Act, 1998: part 2, sec. 9:36-37.

2 Ryan, 1992:161.

3 See Waymouth, 1998: Chapter Three; and Harlow, R., 1979. Regional Variation in Maori, in New Zealand Journal of Archaeology, Vol.1: 123-127, for further discussion on the South Island dialectal differences.

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