Editor’s Letter – Jul/Aug 2022

In this issue, we cover an interview that I did with Mark Rocket at the recent M2 Summit, alongside some other awesome Kiwi entrepreneurs and visionaries. Not only was it an honour to share Mark’s journey with a live audience, but it’s also a privilege to share it here in print. This overt fan-boyness is not so much because Mark has been an early driving force for the New Zealand space industry. Nor is it so much that he is now leading the charge for our aerospace industry and the power of Stratospheric level operation for earth observation – which by the way, have a whole lot of profound implications for climate change mitigation, regen farming, marine monitoring, and the like.

This is all cool, but for me what is most inspiring is that he has drawn a line in the sand based on his ethics that has governed how he conducts himself in business. This has meant that he has walked away from big opportunities because they don’t align. I think for a lot of us, that line can be variable – and I’m including myself in this.

In business, it can be easy to retrofit a line of ethics and then build a story around why it was still important to do a certain deal or work with a certain company even if it was a tough swallow. And while we do seem to talk a lot about ethics in business these days and we have metrics for environmental and social impact and governance factors which we can share with our investors and shareholders and stakeholders, we also have convenient ways of shuffling these when we need to, even beyond loading up on the carbon credit button. To make inconvenient, hard and costly decisions based on set ethics for no other reason than they fit with those ethics and are not part of a press release or corporate positioning, that’s truly next level.