World changing Kiwi

These days Kaila is known for her transformational leadership courses and her successful company Boma. However, her career path started out quite differently. After graduating from Cornell University with a degree in hospitality Kaila says all she only knew one thing.

“When I finished my degree all I knew was that I didn’t want to be in the hospitality business. I was really glad I studied what I did because it was an incredibly valuable degree, every single skill was so transferable. It really focused on two things, leadership and service and those two things have carried into every aspect of my life.”

After graduating Kaila moved to Miami where she started one company, and then another, neither really took off and so she returned home and worked in sales for awhile before deciding to move to New Zealand with her Kiwi partner. A move Kaila says she is eternally grateful she made.”

“My husband and I are no longer together but I am so grateful he introduced me to my home. I feel so, so deeply connected to this place now, and I am just forever grateful for moving here. When I first arrived it was hard, there were all these little things that I had never had to think about that all of a sudden I needed to know. For example, I didn’t know what courgette was, I had never had to light a fire or hang clothes on a line – you don’t do those things in New York, so there was a real learning experience there.”

Over time Kaila fell more and more in love with New Zealand, but is was after the earthquakes that she truly realised Christchurch was her home.

“When the first earthquakes hit, I was in Florida on my way to speak at a TED event. My husband and I were watching things unfolding from afar and we felt so helpless, we were wishing we were back there to support people. All of my heart was back in Christchurch and I ended up changing my TED talk on the spot and giving a three minute talk on Christchurch and how the city could rebuild. This idea that the rubble of our city might also contain its promise.”

Once Kaila was back in Christchurch she threw all her energy into the city’s recovery, organising a TED x event focused on the rebuilding of the city which offered perspective from global leaders.

“We decided to bring together leaders to take part in this event focused on the future of the City. We ended up getting Art Agnos to come. Art had been the mayor of San Francisco during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. He had made some really difficult decisions including demolishing a highway that had been damaged. At the time this was an incredibly unpopular decision but today is widely regarded as the catalyst for the revitalisation of San Francisco’s waterfront. He was able to speak with this incredible hindsight, and it ended up being this really impactful experience for everyone.”

Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel says Kaila has been instrumental in the way the city has moved forward since the quakes.

“I don’t think we would be as forward thinking if it hadn’t been for the way that Kaila commanded our attention at a time when we needed to be inspired and we needed to be optimistic for our future. She’s injected that sense of optimism, that sense of confidence in ourselves. I can talk about Christchurch on the world stage now. I’ve literally just returned from Singapore where I have been doing that. People were really interested in what our city is doing and we’ve got a lot of credit going Kaila’s way for that.”

After her success with TEDx Kaila was able to attend a Singularity University event in Silicon Valley which had her so inspired that she returned to New Zealand and held Australasia’s first summit which was attended by more than 1400 people.

Matt Brown, Founder of “She Is Not Your Rehab” has worked with Kaila on multiple occasions and says she is someone who really brings people together. 

“I can only sum her up as a pou, a magic pillar that we all look up to. I think she’s changed the narrative and what relationships look like should look like. When I think of Kaila, I think of a Samoan proverb that says leadership is through service.”

These days Kaila runs her own company Boma, which uses extensive worldwide networks to help leaders be more intentional, intelligent and courageous about the future.

“I believe that if we want to change the world, what we have to do is establish a new playing field, establish ourselves on that new playing field and then do something that’s very counterintuitive. We have to invite everybody else to come and play on our new playing field because if we don’t do that, nothing changes. So Boma’s transformation framework really focuses on walking companies through that.”

“Specifically Boma is focused on running executive programs. We have a two day transformational directors program, we run a three day program for executives and senior leaders and we have a major event called, E Tipu, which is about the future of food and fibre in New Zealand, it’s become the largest food and fibre summit in the country.”

Along with creating great leaders in New Zealand, Kaila and her team are also looking to share New Zealand’s lessons and perspectives on a global stage. Currently, they are working in partnership with the Canterbury Crusaders to inspire global rugby coaches and management teams around the world.

“We are working on a coaching leadership program, it’s a global online course for rugby coaches from high school to professional level, leveraging not only the Crusaders incredible history of success in rugby, but also the crusaders incredible history in terms of dedication to culture and belonging.”

Kaila says what drives her is the idea of being able to connect people to create positive change not only for Christchurch but also for New Zealand and the world.

“When I think about the work that I’ve done with TEDx and with Singularity University, and now with Boma, one of the mental pictures that I come back to over and over again, is this idea of widening the pipes, widening the pipes between Christchurch and the rest of Aotearoa and widening the pipes between Aotearoa and the rest of the world. I think there are so many people out there doing so many amazing things and if we can all share that knowledge then the world will be a much better place.”

The daughter of actor Kate Harcourt and writer and actor Peter Harcourt, Miranda Harcourt says as a child people naturally assumed she wanted to be an actor. She started acting on TV at age 2, playing the child Katherine Mansfield in a documentary and then on the radio at age 8, reading boys’ parts because there weren’t many roles for girls. However, while she loved acting, what she really wanted to be was a teacher. 

“I think teaching is a vocation. If you don’t want to be a teacher then you don’t get it, but if you want to teach then you totally get it. I’ve always been really passionate about helping other people understand things and I have always had this very core skill of being able to explain something to people that may be a bit tricky to get your head around. While I started out as an actor and then a director it wasn’t until I became an acting coach and was able to blend acting with teaching that I think I truly found my calling.”

Miranda’s career has been expansive, spanning both acting, directing and coaching. She has often broken new ground. She and her husband, writer Stuart McKenzie pioneered biographical theatre in New Zealand and in the early 90s she was credited with bringing verbatim theatre to New Zealand, something she describes as a career-defining moment. 

“After spending a year studying the use of drama as a therapeutic force, actor and writer William Brandt and I decided to create a solo show to take into the New Zealand prison system. We interviewed people who had committed violent crimes but we then also spoke to their families and friends. We figured people in the prison system would be more interested in hearing what the characters had to say if they heard voices that were aligned with their own experiences, their mothers, their sisters, their fathers, their children, and their girlfriends. So that’s what we did. And it

turned out to be very successful. For me it was really about seeing the real-world impact the show was having because you don’t just want to occupy a silo of performing arts, you want to be out there using the value of a story to have a more global and social impact.”

Her move into coaching allowed her to better experience that impact and over the years she has taught at top performing arts and drama schools all around the globe including Toi Whakaari — New Zealand Drama School, where she was head of acting for seven years. These days she works as an independent coach and teaches everyone from students to top actors including Nicole Kidman, Juliette Binoche, Dev Patel, Melanie Lynskey, Ritu Arya, Erana James, Erik Thomson, and Miriama McDowell to name a few. As well of course as Stuart’s and Miranda’s own daughters Thomasin and Davida McKenzie.

Kiwi actor and star of Two and a Half Men and Yellowjackets, Melanie Lynsky says Miranda taught her things as a young actor that she still uses to this day. 

“Miranda has shown me invaluable techniques, ways of going within yourself to find your own emotion and your own truth and ways of looking at people around you to use this inspiration for your character. And she’s also just a really kind, loving and supportive person. I feel so lucky to have worked with her.”

Fellow actor Eric Thompson has worked with Miranda since the beginning of his career and says he has come to trust and rely on her. 

“I’ve been coached by Miranda for various roles, you know, and I know she’s got a really strong perspective on me as a performer. She’s seen my career develop and I know her, so there’s an implicit trust in her words and I know that they’re based in the context of mutual respect and honesty.” 

Miranda describes her work as all about connecting and says what she is really passionate about is using her own personal story and her own personal skills to help other people achieve their best. Over the years she has created a series of exercises, which are fast, quick, quiet, easy and can be done anywhere to help actors better connect with the people around them and connect to the environment they’re in. It’s a programme that she originally created in New Zealand but has since been used with actors all over the world. 

“When I was working at Toi Whakaari I realised that I could devise this system to help actors get to where they want to be fast and easily, but I always envisaged that would be within the context on New Zealand, it didn’t occur to me at that time that I could take the system to a global audience and that people would take it very seriously. Like most New Zealanders I think we see ourselves as little Kiwi at the end of the world and although we secretly know we have superpowers, we don’t necessarily expect that other people will understand that. Whereas actually, I think that other people look at New Zealanders and see us much more clearly than we see ourselves.”

From her thirty year career Miranda has a strong network of fellow Kiwi around the world, and she frequently uses this network to help the next generation of Kiwi stars get a leg-up. 

“There are so many people who are willing to help connect young Kiwi, whether it’s people like Melanie Lynsky helping someone like Erana James or Juliet O’Brien (a Kiwi and a very successful theatre director in Paris) who, over the years has helped me place a whole bunch of young, New Zealand performers into internships all over the world. We have such an amazing Kiwi network of willing, passionate people who want to help give other Kiwis a leg-up. I reach out to these people and say, do you want to help a young Kiwi performer step up and try and create an international career? And they say of course I do.”

“I look at the next generation of talent coming out of New Zealand and I think who are those people? How can I connect that person with that person? How can I create that sense of connectivity between achievement and potential? It’s about having the imagination and the courage to reach out and ask the successful people if they’re prepared to reach out a hand to new people with potential and because of who we are, the answer is always yes.”

Miranda says the future of New Zealand’s creative talent is bright and right now the opportunities have never been better. However, in order to really embrace the future of what we can offer the world, New Zealanders need to have more confidence in themselves. 

“The world has turned around and looked all the way over to our corner of the Pacific and said –  ‘You guys are funny, you’re talented, you’re authentic and you’re grounded.’ Kiwi have a special quality, which right now the world is very hungry to see. We’ve moved beyond the nineties and the early two thousands when it was all about slickness and everyone looking the same, now it’s about diversity, representation, authenticity, being able to own your story and reach out and connect with other people through that story. Kiwis are naturally really good at all of those things, so this is our time.”

“But in order to maximise our time, what do we have to change about ourselves? We have to change our sense of confidence in ourselves, we have to change the way we see ourselves and we need to change our sense of self. Because if we can get to a place where we know we deserve it and we have something important to say, then we can step up and make those connections and really get our product onto the world stage. My hope is that I can help some people do that.”

Listen to Miranda Harcourt’s interview with Mike Hosking from the NewstalkZB Mike Hosking Breakfast show – audio link below.

In this edition of our World Class New Zealand speaker series, Angela Kearns talks to top performance coach and best selling author Owen Eastwood.

Owen has worked with some of the top teams in the world including the England Men’s Football team, NATO Command, South Africa Cricket, Scotland Rugby, the Royal Ballet, and Team GB. He’s also the author of ‘Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness’ which sets out his methods of unlocking success and looks at how those methods can be adapted to different groups and teams. He talks about how businesses can get the most out of their people no matter their size and why it’s important to create a culture that allows people to thrive.

Watch the full webinar below. 

The aim of our speaker series is to highlight the incredible stories of our World Class New Zealanders and inspire other Kiwi to push the boundaries of their own business goals and expectations. Our World Class community are keen to use their insights and learnings to help others achieve the same heights of success that they have experienced

This month Kea spoke to New York based Kiwi Ronnie Peters. Ronnie is one of the internet’s original designers who was working in UX before the job even existed. He is also the Founder and CEO of 360 Design and one of the creators of the Flat White Meetups.

Ronnie has used his UX design and strategy expertise across a number of world leading and cutting edge projects including creating a 3D virtual movie theatre, complete with smell-a-vision for brands such as  Disney, AppleTV, Amazon and Hulu during the pandemic and working as Creative Director on the Hyperloop for HyperloopTT  a high-speed transportation system in which commuters could travel 650kms (the distance from Auckland to Wellington) in around 1 hour or less.   

Ronnie shared his advice and learnings on the future of design and UX and discussed what makes good design and why it’s so important to make it a cornerstone of your business. It was particularly interesting to hear Ronnie’s take on the importance of design for both B2B and B2C businesses. He also discussed the benefits of virtual reality and the rise of the metaverse, and gave some good examples of how these are being explored by businesses.

Watch the full webinar below. 

The aim of our speaker series is to highlight the incredible stories of our World Class New Zealanders and inspire other Kiwi to push the boundaries of their own business goals and expectations. Our World Class community are keen to use their insights and learnings to help others achieve the same heights of success that they have experienced

This month Kea spoke to China-based entrepreneur Jennifer Ma, founder of ‘Little Oasis Group’ a family lifestyle and education business which is based on the New Zealand principles of education and play. Her company operates 15 family clubs across 11 locations in China. Recent changes to China’s education policies have meant she has had to pivot her business model to keep up with changes regulating education providers from charging for tutorial based services.
Jennifer is also in the process of launching a children’s beverage line and as part of giving back to her community, works to get Chinese mothers back into work and helps Kiwi businesses understand the tough Chinese market.

Jennifer talks openly and honestly in our latest World Class New Zealander speaker series,
including how she has had to adapt the business with Covid as well as navigate social and political changes in China, and her advice for Kiwi businesses looking to enter the China market.

Watch the full webinar below. 

The aim of our speaker series is to highlight the incredible stories of our World Class New Zealanders and inspire other Kiwi to push the boundaries of their own business goals and expectations. Our World Class community are keen to use their insights and learnings to help others achieve the same heights of success that they have experienced