Money To Raise Management Capability Welcomed

For Immediate Release
May 24, 2004

Budget Money To Raise Management Capability Welcomed

The New Zealand Institute of Management has welcomed today’s Government announcement of a $2.4 million budget provision to help raise management capability, adding that it sees the initiative as supporting the work it has already done to identify and tackle the problem.

“The NZIM Management Capability Index which we created last year was a vital step in the process of lifting both Government and industry awareness of the relationship between management capability and the country’s economic performance,” said NZIM’s immediate past National Chairman and author of the Index, Doug Matheson.

“This move to provide funding to help business and organisations like NZIM to build management capability is overdue but it is even more important that the commitment to lifting management capability is now being made,” he said.

“Our other research and the Capability Index provide a good deal of evidence to suggest that there is a link between the capability of individual managers, the performance of their organisations and then the performance of the economy as a whole. We know that New Zealand managers are not performing at anything like their full capacity. In general terms they perform at something like 66 percent of their capability.

“Now we need to understand why that is, what is unique about the New Zealand business environment, what would motivate them to perform to a higher level and then, how we can work with them to achieve both the full personal potential and to fully realise the potential of their enterprises.

“NZIM’s vision is to have New Zealand management ‘world class’ by 2010,” Mr Matheson said. “We agree with the Government that this initiative will contribute to strengthening our economy which in turn will raise the living standards of all New Zealanders.

“We are happy to work with the Government and other industry groups to lift management capability, and to help businesses build a sustained competitive advantage and grow their operations. We have been pushing for this approach for some years now and believe that the work we have done to date will prove invaluable to the process.”

The expenditure is part of the Government’s four year $500 million Growth and Innovation budget package and includes $1.2 million of funding for the next two budget years.

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