From Small Beginnings
Back in Auckland city I was feeling quite claustrophobic having left behind us the wide open spaces of the Helensville countryside. I’m not too sure Helensvillians will like hearing I’ve let the cat out of the bag on their best-kept secret of better than average well-being so mum’s the word from here on out, okay? Okay!
We arrived back in Avondale where my neices live with their flatmate Freeman and I got to wondering if there was a little bit of something special in this suburb’s past. As it happens, there was and it just goes to show that from small beginnings great things can happen.
These days, the main shopping area has a distinctively polynesian flavour but it was never always like this. “Avondale was known principally as ‘the Whau’ until 1882. This name was used to describe the area extending to and covering New Lynn, Avondale, Blockhouse Bay, and Waterview areas, as well as up to Henderson and part of Mt Roskill. It had once been a hunting, fishing and foraging ground for Maori prior to the arrival of European settlers and before it was first subdivided in the 1840s.
Fisher & Paykel
In the early 1900’s where the Avondale Library is today there was a wooden store with two shop fronts. This was the Rosebank General Store. It was occupied at the start of the Depression by a family called Fisher. The sons later went into the refrigeration business, that business is now Fisher & Paykel.
Fisher & Paykel was formed in 1934, after two young friends, Woolf Fisher and Maurice Paykel, managed to sell surplus refrigerators that had been imported by Paykel’s family company, Paykel Brothers. With other family members investing capital, the pair opened their first office and showroom on the mezzanine floor of Queen’s Arcade, Auckland. Appliance retailing was in its infancy and the small firm supplemented its income by negotiating agencies for other products, such as record players, vacuum cleaners, irons, and toasters. Today Fisher & Paykel is a billion dollar business.”
Earlier this year as a matter of happenstance I read Keith Davies book ‘Defying Gravity’ the Fisher & Paykel story (2004) and I should like to be forgiven for being four years behind the eight ball in doing so since I’d lived in Australia throughout those years. That being so, it is, in my opinion a very inspiring book, one of the best I’ve read in a long long while of its type.
Company Culture
The thing that struck me time and time again was the company ‘culture’, a have-a-go culture and management that were secure enough in their DNA (you know, the molecules inside cells that carry genetic information and pass it from one generation to the next) to say “If you haven’t got a bunch of mistakes sitting under the bench then you’re not challenging the normal way of doing things” and yet with enough practical nous to also say, “if someone makes a mistake, don’t whinge about it, just fix it.”
In the book I loved that ‘innovation’ wasn’t just a word lobbed about on some social centre court with none of the edginess that comes from wanting to win too and maybe that says something about me or the fact that Woolf Fisher’s classic mantra “I don’t mind somebody failing. Just don’t do it again and again” was directed straight down the line and wasn’t ever intended to be some lukewarm passing shot.
No, from the book, you get the distinct impression Sir Woolf always wanted the shot to be a winner. And why wouldn’t he, in fact why wouldn’t any of us! The thing about small beginnings is that given optimum conditions (or not as the book chronicles), the world can indeed be your oyster and that nagging irritation (whatever it is to do) could one day turn into a real pearler, what do you reckon?
