July 13, 2025 • 24 mins
Jon joined the Kiwibank Board as Chair in November 2019. He has had a distinguished career and has held senior roles across a diverse range of commercial and not for profit organisations in several countries, including chair of SkyCity, deputy chair of ASB Bank and Sovereign Assurance Company, director of Mighty River Power and Air NZ, a trustee of World Vision New Zealand, CEO of Brierley New Zealand and Solid Energy, and CFO of Lend Lease in Australia. He retired in September 2019 after 17 years volunteering with VisionFund International, the global microfinance subsidiary of World Vision International, where he was Chair for the last six years.
Jon is a professional director and is currently Chair of Timberlands Limited and a director at Ngāi Tahu Holdings Corporation Limited. He is an ordained priest in the Anglican church in New Zealand/Aotearoa.
He is a Chartered Accountant and Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from Newstalk SEDB. Follow this
and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio, Real Conversation,
Real Connection. It's Real life with John Cowen on News
Talks EDB.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Today. Welcome to real life. I'm John Cowen and my
guest tonight is John Hartley, and he sat at the
boardroom table of many of New Zealand's biggest companies, often
at the head of that table. He's currently chair of
Kiwi Bank and Timberland's and he's got over five decades
of commercial experience. He's had top roles in SkyCity, ASB Bank,
(00:54):
Sovereign Assurance, Mighty River Power, Solid Energy in New Zealand,
and a lot more. But before you let your impression
of John congeal from that description, let me also say
that he's also an Anglican priest a JP, and been
involved at the Wellington City Mission and spent more than
seventeen years volunteering of World Vision than other charities. So
(01:14):
welcome to real life, John.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be here this evening.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Could I ask you do you actually sort of enjoy
confounding those people that like to put people into neat boxes.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I just I think one needs to reflect that we
are who we are and we know it to use
all the gifts we have as well as we possibly can.
And sometimes the door that you knock on opens and
sometimes it doesn't open, and you end up, over a
period of time finding places where you really feel you
can add to organizations, to people, to purposes. And that's
(01:56):
what I've refined doing over a period of time. There
are a lot of scars on my back where it
didn't go as well as you portray it.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
You make it sound like you just sort of like
tumbled along and sort of found yourself in these roles.
But I I get that. I have a stronger sense
that you actually had a sense of vision of it
where you wanted to end up.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
I'd like to say that it was all well planned,
but it wasn't, because I think what one does is
make oneself available and then rise to envisage how that
can actually help others. I think my career probably split
into two in that sense that it was very corporate
(02:37):
until late ninety nine, and then from late ninety nine
it became self employed, which morphed into a far greater
sense that there is more to more to life than
the corporate world, and that was the sort of threshold
change I think.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Okay, i'd like to talk about what pushed you over
that threshold. I'll come to that in a little bit.
But I'm just wondering, you're still very much involved in
the commercial world, and you're still very much involved in
the social just to some humanitarian spheres of interest as well.
Do you have to compartmentalize your thinking on those things
or is it all just you?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
It's all just me? I think others specifically my wife
wonders how you juggle the balls that because they don't
seem connected. But I've over the last twenty years increasingly
formed the view that we lead a single life. We
don't leave compartmentalized lives, and you allow the purpose and
(03:44):
the values of what you're involved with to seep across
into other places. And it's interesting how many times that
seepage actually leads to much richer and set of engagements
and relationships around boardroom tables or on a field visit
or within the church. And bringing the real world into
(04:07):
the church. Church as well as bringing the church, or
more importantly, the gospel into the real world, is part
of the challenge I try and set myself right.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Gosh, I would have thought that the bigger challenge was
bringing the gospel into the boardroom, But now you talk
about it bringing the real world into the church. That's
just making my jaw drop. But but ethically, I sometimes
wonder how you make it work because and you must
have thought about this a lot because you're doing it.
(04:40):
But I'm really interested to know how you work this
through that your responsibility to these companies you serve, your
duty to them is to help them to return a
big dividend to their shareholder. But when you look at
our wider world, where there's such disparity, in such contrast
between the richest few and the poorer majority, can these
big profit driven corporations that you work with really serve
(05:04):
that ethic that you have of helping the world.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I think what you describe is the world that I
was involved with. Up until ninety nine. It was very
much Milton Friedman's the purpose of business is profit. And
then I went through a period of disillusionment with that
corporate world, predominantly triggered by a one boardroom incident where
(05:29):
I encountered lying in the boardroom, which I knew was
lying and it just shook me. And then I started
to work through in my own mind, who did I
want to be around, what sort of organizations did I
want to be involved with? And most importantly, a faith
started to emerge. And there's two or three people in
(05:53):
my life who've helped that emerge, my wife, a guy
called John Hughes, and it led me to the view
that life wasn't all about making money. And from my
point of view, I ended up giving away two days
(06:16):
a week. I literally stopped working for money for days,
two days a week and gave those two days a
week away. I didn't know where they were going to
go John, and that's when I found myself invited into
the City Mission in Wellington, where I spent fifteen years
the last six's chair. And then Wild Vision also involved
(06:40):
me and I got involved in their economic development micro finance,
where you're using your commercial skills for social purposes. And
that broadened my outlook in terms of outworking my faith,
which was to use the skills that I had from
the first fifty odd years of my life in ways
(07:02):
which expanded me into touching the lives of people. So
Wild Vision has a very simple Vision statement. You know,
our vision for every child is life in all its fullness,
our prayer for every heart, the will to make it so,
and that that is that is such an embrasive construct
(07:23):
that if you but that, if you are part of it,
you actually have to leave behind pure profit and that
that then has seeded into my discernment over the last
period of time to want to be involved in organizations
which I see as being driven by purpose. They have
(07:46):
strong values. I really enjoy being around the people that
I'm involved with, and there by what I say systemically
important to New Zealand, others may see meaningful like Kiwi Bank,
like Nightahu Holdings, for example, those are important to this country.
(08:07):
And I think if you have that opportunity to be
invited in, and you are invited in, you need to lead.
You need to be true to yourself in how you
do that. And it's interesting in places like Kiwi Bank.
You know, our purpose is Kiwi making Kiwi better off.
That's not about that is not a profit driven purpose.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
You could draw a parallel between then and the world
and the first line of the World Vision Vision.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
You can, you can indeed, I mean the yeah, yeah,
I mean the reasoning behind putting those two statements, there
is you are expected to be good stewards, you are
expected to be wise users of the resources you have.
(08:55):
But at the end of the day, I think the
impact that you have on people and communities. And increasingly
in my own move as I've moved away from World
Vision and the City Mission to Creation and the Chair
of Creation, I see in a much more broader construct
(09:17):
whether whether the tides of ESG are going against me. Frankly,
I don't really care, because I worry about this world
from the point of view of my children and my grandchildren.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Wow, this could this conversation could go on for a
long time of all these different interests and things that
are that are flowing out of this, And I'm just intrigued.
First of all, that you said that you were already
I think in your fifties when you got this, when
the scales fell from your eyes and you got this
vision that perhaps corporate life wasn't all with the be
(09:53):
all and end all, and that worshiping GDP was the
it wasn't the ultimate thing in life. So you said
it was that came from a bit of a disappointment
with corporate life. But you also said, it coincided with
this onset of was it a research and faith? Was
faith that was something quite new to you or you
had always had a faith? How did that work?
Speaker 4 (10:15):
Well?
Speaker 3 (10:17):
I married Chris who I met when she was fifteen
and was still together with four great children. And Chris
has had always had a strong faith, which I tended
to ignore for a lot of my life, to be
very honest. But what I found was that the disillusionment
(10:38):
with the corporate world me to question, to move into
those inevitable belief bigger questions, which one of the pieces
of music I've chosen will actually point to in the end.
And it coincided with a good friend, John Hughes, who
is a vicar, was a vicar. He is now retired,
(11:00):
but he he introduced me to having conversations about faith
without trying to persuade me about what I should do.
It was really it was really introducing you to the
idea of there's more, there's a mystery, there's a bigger,
transcendent component in life that we're invited into if we
(11:25):
choose to be walking that path. And one of the
things he did was, first of all, he ran an
evening course called Pigs people interested in God, and it
was an open conversation with no conclusion, and that was
really helpful because what it did was introduce me to
(11:47):
the meta narrative of the Bible. Realizing that it wasn't
all printed on the same day, that it was written
over three thousand years, and that, as a consequence, made
me ponder how on earth did this come together? And
I became really interested in the profits and the out
(12:08):
working of the profits through Jesus.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
We're talking pH middle and middle of profits of the.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But but the other thing that
he that he gave me was a book called Halftime,
which I think is quite well known. But Halftime was
written by Bob Youuford, which is very simple to anybody
who follows rugby will understand.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
It was it moving from success to significance, isn't it
the thing?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, that's that's the one.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
But there's a But there's an exercise in it which
I found extraordinarily difficult to do for a long while,
which is to take a piece of paper, draw a
box on the piece of paper, and put the single
most important thing for the rest of your life in
the middle of the box. You can put one thing,
and I've actually used it in corporate environments to help
(12:57):
develop conversations. But he Buford talked about the fact that
he did the exercise and he had two symbols. He
had a dollar and a cross, and he wrestled with
what was he going to put in the box? And
he put a cross in. He was in a multi
(13:18):
multi millionaire but he was very good at making money,
so he worked out that actually he should stay good
at making money, but use that money for missional purposes,
which is exactly what he did as opposed to pure
bottom line purposes.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Right, And so that was a vision that you could
you could tack onto as well.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
And yeah, and I naively thought that having given my
life to Jesus, that I that was a hard decision.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Actually that was led to all the hard decisions, because
that then causes you to recalibrate all that's going on
in your world if you've.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Just joined us. My guest to night is John Hartley,
who is the chair of Kiwi Bank and Timberland's and
has a huge experience on board and leadership in the
commercial sector, but as also an Anglican priest, and I'll
be talking more about his views on commerce, the world
and faith.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
After his break intelligent interviews with interesting people. It's real
life on News Talk ZB.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Welcome back to real life. My guest tonight is John
Hartley and he mentioned in the first half about a
piece of music that represented a significant part of his journey,
and so what are we listening to there? John?
Speaker 3 (14:56):
I think the first piece of music is a piece
of choral music which ten years ago I would not
have chosen. And I've grown to love the choral settings
for variety pieces of music. And this is by a
gentleman called John Rutter, and it's called for the Beauty
(15:16):
of the Earth.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Right, And where does that fit them within your schema
of things, your view of the world.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
I just think it's a wonderful way to bring us
back to the world in which we live, which we
tend to walk past and ignore on a daily basis,
the physical beauty of the world or the love that
is within the world. We live in difficult times, this
(15:44):
ground is in a different in a different and more
fulsome way right now.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
In the first half, you're talking about an awakening of
faith and coming to faith and how that started to
impact your decisions. A lot of people become enthusiastic about
their faith and don't become an Anglican priest. What was
the decision making that that led you to do.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
That, Well, you, I didn't decide. I was invited by
the then bishop because of some of the work that
I was doing with other people, and it was an
outworking of my faith, which was trying to help people
who find themselves in leadership positions remain true to their
(16:31):
faith in the sense of wanting to be saltan light
where they are, and yet leaders find that very lonely.
And so I started to do a bit of work
in that area. And one thing led to the other,
not least of which he happened to be on the
board of the city Mission where I was on the board,
and he saw me as a leader involved in that
and he invited me put my name forward. And it's
(16:54):
a discernment process, it's not a recruitment process. And one
thing led to the other, and I have to say
I was only persuaded that it was the right thing
for me after it happened when I took my first
when I took my first communion.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Okay, I'd say, have you found it useful to be
able to use that office to be able to Has
it enabled you? Is it open doors for you to
be able to help people in a bitter way?
Speaker 3 (17:23):
I'd like to I'd like to think so. It invites questions, certainly,
but I'm much more about Yes, I'm much more about
doing things than trying to explain things, and so certainly
in places like World Vision, it's it's been instrumental in
(17:44):
helping grow my faith but also helping others grow their faith.
Speaker 4 (17:48):
Right.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
But I find myself now drawn into places like the
Wellington Cathedral where I help run services and and I preach,
and that is that connecting bringing the real world into
the church statement I made early on John.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Right, Okay, And the fact that you're still being invited
onto boards and appointed to leadership roles within within various things.
They know that you're a priest, and do they welcome
Are they are receptive to sometimes your spiritual insights into
what a company might be doing or what they might
(18:25):
be doing as people on the board.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
I think they understand that it's who you are, and
as a consequence, you get the whole package, and you
know there will be times where you will ask questions
which may seem strange to others, but you know why
you're asking them or you're making observations. But at the
core of the Gospel are principles which it's really hard
(18:52):
to argue against if you're in the way people live
and can live. Yes, and you know when I recently,
I recently spoke at the cathedral and lamented the way
we now speak of p as opposed to as an
absence of war rather than a way of living. And
(19:17):
those are the sort of insights which I personally feel
I need to and should offer to share, to try
and just move people a little bit away from our
neoliberal world.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Right. The moving into your work with Knight Tahou was
that you come from from Britain, and so the whole
introduction to the world to al Maori, the world of
the Maori. Did you find that interesting challenging as it
(19:50):
opened your eyes? Do anythink that you consider valuable?
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Well, the answer is an absolute yes. I mean it
to be invited in and to be allowed to be
immersed into a different worldview, not be judgmental, but learn
is a is a privileged position. I've often said, how
(20:15):
does a boy from Yorkshire find his way into nightahoo is?
But the values that one lives by are so aligned
to the values of the tribe, for example, that it's
it's not a it's not an abrasion, it's actually you
(20:37):
hold the same values as we hold. The words may
be different, but the way you live, the way you behave,
the way you speak, the way you listen, very importantly
is consistent with how we do things. And I've really
felt privileged to be in that world.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
I'm sure you're also there to enhance their ability to
be stewards of their commas. Do you find that that
works well with our values as well? You can find
a way of being able to do Can I say
do business in a Mai way?
Speaker 3 (21:13):
I think if you understand that are our goal within
Knightahoo is actually to manage the poutia, the corpus of
all that is held by Knightahoo for the benefit of
the future generations, then you are thinking in a different
time frame to the average corporate right.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
I'm very alarmed to say that I can hear the
final song already starting to play in my headphones, and
so we've got to wrap up. But it's been fascinating
talking with you, John, and intrigued in your journey and
what you're doing and what you're contributing, and you can
tell us a little bit about the song that you've
picked a conclude with.
Speaker 5 (21:55):
Well, I'm is it Daughtry song?
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Yeah? Okay, so I picked this song which people probably
don't know. It's called always Heading Home. And Roger Daltrey
was one of my childhood here. I was brought up
in the North of England. The Who was a band
I see they broke instruments on the stage. Dulty now
(22:19):
has recovered from viral meningitis. Who wrote this song? And
it's a spiritual song. It speaks to anybody, everybody, and
I'll just leave it for you.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
It has been a privilege talking with you on a wisue.
Thanks all the best for everything that you're doing.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
This is real life. I'm John Cown, looking forward to
being back with you next Sunday night.
Speaker 6 (22:40):
It's the can't be said in words, balance, the fast,
one in the slow.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
The question and the answer are we head promiating fund
from long to not comer to break? Always heading home?
(23:20):
We're heading.
Speaker 6 (23:27):
From me found to day, from to not farmer? Do
you agree? Always heading home? We're always.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
Hidden For
Speaker 1 (24:02):
More from us talks at b Listen live on air
or online, and keep out shows with you wherever you
go without podcasts on iHeartRadio
You're listening to a podcast from Newstalk SEDB. Follow this
and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio, Real Conversation,
Real Connection. It's Real life with John Cowen on News
Talks EDB.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Today. Welcome to real life. I'm John Cowen and my
guest tonight is John Hartley, and he sat at the
boardroom table of many of New Zealand's biggest companies, often
at the head of that table. He's currently chair of
Kiwi Bank and Timberland's and he's got over five decades
of commercial experience. He's had top roles in SkyCity, ASB Bank,
(00:54):
Sovereign Assurance, Mighty River Power, Solid Energy in New Zealand,
and a lot more. But before you let your impression
of John congeal from that description, let me also say
that he's also an Anglican priest a JP, and been
involved at the Wellington City Mission and spent more than
seventeen years volunteering of World Vision than other charities. So
(01:14):
welcome to real life, John.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be here this evening.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Could I ask you do you actually sort of enjoy
confounding those people that like to put people into neat boxes.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I just I think one needs to reflect that we
are who we are and we know it to use
all the gifts we have as well as we possibly can.
And sometimes the door that you knock on opens and
sometimes it doesn't open, and you end up, over a
period of time finding places where you really feel you
can add to organizations, to people, to purposes. And that's
(01:56):
what I've refined doing over a period of time. There
are a lot of scars on my back where it
didn't go as well as you portray it.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
You make it sound like you just sort of like
tumbled along and sort of found yourself in these roles.
But I I get that. I have a stronger sense
that you actually had a sense of vision of it
where you wanted to end up.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
I'd like to say that it was all well planned,
but it wasn't, because I think what one does is
make oneself available and then rise to envisage how that
can actually help others. I think my career probably split
into two in that sense that it was very corporate
(02:37):
until late ninety nine, and then from late ninety nine
it became self employed, which morphed into a far greater
sense that there is more to more to life than
the corporate world, and that was the sort of threshold
change I think.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Okay, i'd like to talk about what pushed you over
that threshold. I'll come to that in a little bit.
But I'm just wondering, you're still very much involved in
the commercial world, and you're still very much involved in
the social just to some humanitarian spheres of interest as well.
Do you have to compartmentalize your thinking on those things
or is it all just you?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
It's all just me? I think others specifically my wife
wonders how you juggle the balls that because they don't
seem connected. But I've over the last twenty years increasingly
formed the view that we lead a single life. We
don't leave compartmentalized lives, and you allow the purpose and
(03:44):
the values of what you're involved with to seep across
into other places. And it's interesting how many times that
seepage actually leads to much richer and set of engagements
and relationships around boardroom tables or on a field visit
or within the church. And bringing the real world into
(04:07):
the church. Church as well as bringing the church, or
more importantly, the gospel into the real world, is part
of the challenge I try and set myself right.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Gosh, I would have thought that the bigger challenge was
bringing the gospel into the boardroom, But now you talk
about it bringing the real world into the church. That's
just making my jaw drop. But but ethically, I sometimes
wonder how you make it work because and you must
have thought about this a lot because you're doing it.
(04:40):
But I'm really interested to know how you work this
through that your responsibility to these companies you serve, your
duty to them is to help them to return a
big dividend to their shareholder. But when you look at
our wider world, where there's such disparity, in such contrast
between the richest few and the poorer majority, can these
big profit driven corporations that you work with really serve
(05:04):
that ethic that you have of helping the world.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I think what you describe is the world that I
was involved with. Up until ninety nine. It was very
much Milton Friedman's the purpose of business is profit. And
then I went through a period of disillusionment with that
corporate world, predominantly triggered by a one boardroom incident where
(05:29):
I encountered lying in the boardroom, which I knew was
lying and it just shook me. And then I started
to work through in my own mind, who did I
want to be around, what sort of organizations did I
want to be involved with? And most importantly, a faith
started to emerge. And there's two or three people in
(05:53):
my life who've helped that emerge, my wife, a guy
called John Hughes, and it led me to the view
that life wasn't all about making money. And from my
point of view, I ended up giving away two days
(06:16):
a week. I literally stopped working for money for days,
two days a week and gave those two days a
week away. I didn't know where they were going to
go John, and that's when I found myself invited into
the City Mission in Wellington, where I spent fifteen years
the last six's chair. And then Wild Vision also involved
(06:40):
me and I got involved in their economic development micro finance,
where you're using your commercial skills for social purposes. And
that broadened my outlook in terms of outworking my faith,
which was to use the skills that I had from
the first fifty odd years of my life in ways
(07:02):
which expanded me into touching the lives of people. So
Wild Vision has a very simple Vision statement. You know,
our vision for every child is life in all its fullness,
our prayer for every heart, the will to make it so,
and that that is that is such an embrasive construct
(07:23):
that if you but that, if you are part of it,
you actually have to leave behind pure profit and that
that then has seeded into my discernment over the last
period of time to want to be involved in organizations
which I see as being driven by purpose. They have
(07:46):
strong values. I really enjoy being around the people that
I'm involved with, and there by what I say systemically
important to New Zealand, others may see meaningful like Kiwi Bank,
like Nightahu Holdings, for example, those are important to this country.
(08:07):
And I think if you have that opportunity to be
invited in, and you are invited in, you need to lead.
You need to be true to yourself in how you
do that. And it's interesting in places like Kiwi Bank.
You know, our purpose is Kiwi making Kiwi better off.
That's not about that is not a profit driven purpose.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
You could draw a parallel between then and the world
and the first line of the World Vision Vision.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
You can, you can indeed, I mean the yeah, yeah,
I mean the reasoning behind putting those two statements, there
is you are expected to be good stewards, you are
expected to be wise users of the resources you have.
(08:55):
But at the end of the day, I think the
impact that you have on people and communities. And increasingly
in my own move as I've moved away from World
Vision and the City Mission to Creation and the Chair
of Creation, I see in a much more broader construct
(09:17):
whether whether the tides of ESG are going against me. Frankly,
I don't really care, because I worry about this world
from the point of view of my children and my grandchildren.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Wow, this could this conversation could go on for a
long time of all these different interests and things that
are that are flowing out of this, And I'm just intrigued.
First of all, that you said that you were already
I think in your fifties when you got this, when
the scales fell from your eyes and you got this
vision that perhaps corporate life wasn't all with the be
(09:53):
all and end all, and that worshiping GDP was the
it wasn't the ultimate thing in life. So you said
it was that came from a bit of a disappointment
with corporate life. But you also said, it coincided with
this onset of was it a research and faith? Was
faith that was something quite new to you or you
had always had a faith? How did that work?
Speaker 4 (10:15):
Well?
Speaker 3 (10:17):
I married Chris who I met when she was fifteen
and was still together with four great children. And Chris
has had always had a strong faith, which I tended
to ignore for a lot of my life, to be
very honest. But what I found was that the disillusionment
(10:38):
with the corporate world me to question, to move into
those inevitable belief bigger questions, which one of the pieces
of music I've chosen will actually point to in the end.
And it coincided with a good friend, John Hughes, who
is a vicar, was a vicar. He is now retired,
(11:00):
but he he introduced me to having conversations about faith
without trying to persuade me about what I should do.
It was really it was really introducing you to the
idea of there's more, there's a mystery, there's a bigger,
transcendent component in life that we're invited into if we
(11:25):
choose to be walking that path. And one of the
things he did was, first of all, he ran an
evening course called Pigs people interested in God, and it
was an open conversation with no conclusion, and that was
really helpful because what it did was introduce me to
(11:47):
the meta narrative of the Bible. Realizing that it wasn't
all printed on the same day, that it was written
over three thousand years, and that, as a consequence, made
me ponder how on earth did this come together? And
I became really interested in the profits and the out
(12:08):
working of the profits through Jesus.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
We're talking pH middle and middle of profits of the.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But but the other thing that
he that he gave me was a book called Halftime,
which I think is quite well known. But Halftime was
written by Bob Youuford, which is very simple to anybody
who follows rugby will understand.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
It was it moving from success to significance, isn't it
the thing?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, that's that's the one.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
But there's a But there's an exercise in it which
I found extraordinarily difficult to do for a long while,
which is to take a piece of paper, draw a
box on the piece of paper, and put the single
most important thing for the rest of your life in
the middle of the box. You can put one thing,
and I've actually used it in corporate environments to help
(12:57):
develop conversations. But he Buford talked about the fact that
he did the exercise and he had two symbols. He
had a dollar and a cross, and he wrestled with
what was he going to put in the box? And
he put a cross in. He was in a multi
(13:18):
multi millionaire but he was very good at making money,
so he worked out that actually he should stay good
at making money, but use that money for missional purposes,
which is exactly what he did as opposed to pure
bottom line purposes.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Right, And so that was a vision that you could
you could tack onto as well.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
And yeah, and I naively thought that having given my
life to Jesus, that I that was a hard decision.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Actually that was led to all the hard decisions, because
that then causes you to recalibrate all that's going on
in your world if you've.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Just joined us. My guest to night is John Hartley,
who is the chair of Kiwi Bank and Timberland's and
has a huge experience on board and leadership in the
commercial sector, but as also an Anglican priest, and I'll
be talking more about his views on commerce, the world
and faith.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
After his break intelligent interviews with interesting people. It's real
life on News Talk ZB.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Welcome back to real life. My guest tonight is John
Hartley and he mentioned in the first half about a
piece of music that represented a significant part of his journey,
and so what are we listening to there? John?
Speaker 3 (14:56):
I think the first piece of music is a piece
of choral music which ten years ago I would not
have chosen. And I've grown to love the choral settings
for variety pieces of music. And this is by a
gentleman called John Rutter, and it's called for the Beauty
(15:16):
of the Earth.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Right, And where does that fit them within your schema
of things, your view of the world.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
I just think it's a wonderful way to bring us
back to the world in which we live, which we
tend to walk past and ignore on a daily basis,
the physical beauty of the world or the love that
is within the world. We live in difficult times, this
(15:44):
ground is in a different in a different and more
fulsome way right now.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
In the first half, you're talking about an awakening of
faith and coming to faith and how that started to
impact your decisions. A lot of people become enthusiastic about
their faith and don't become an Anglican priest. What was
the decision making that that led you to do.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
That, Well, you, I didn't decide. I was invited by
the then bishop because of some of the work that
I was doing with other people, and it was an
outworking of my faith, which was trying to help people
who find themselves in leadership positions remain true to their
(16:31):
faith in the sense of wanting to be saltan light
where they are, and yet leaders find that very lonely.
And so I started to do a bit of work
in that area. And one thing led to the other,
not least of which he happened to be on the
board of the city Mission where I was on the board,
and he saw me as a leader involved in that
and he invited me put my name forward. And it's
(16:54):
a discernment process, it's not a recruitment process. And one
thing led to the other, and I have to say
I was only persuaded that it was the right thing
for me after it happened when I took my first
when I took my first communion.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Okay, I'd say, have you found it useful to be
able to use that office to be able to Has
it enabled you? Is it open doors for you to
be able to help people in a bitter way?
Speaker 3 (17:23):
I'd like to I'd like to think so. It invites questions, certainly,
but I'm much more about Yes, I'm much more about
doing things than trying to explain things, and so certainly
in places like World Vision, it's it's been instrumental in
(17:44):
helping grow my faith but also helping others grow their faith.
Speaker 4 (17:48):
Right.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
But I find myself now drawn into places like the
Wellington Cathedral where I help run services and and I preach,
and that is that connecting bringing the real world into
the church statement I made early on John.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Right, Okay, And the fact that you're still being invited
onto boards and appointed to leadership roles within within various things.
They know that you're a priest, and do they welcome
Are they are receptive to sometimes your spiritual insights into
what a company might be doing or what they might
(18:25):
be doing as people on the board.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
I think they understand that it's who you are, and
as a consequence, you get the whole package, and you
know there will be times where you will ask questions
which may seem strange to others, but you know why
you're asking them or you're making observations. But at the
core of the Gospel are principles which it's really hard
(18:52):
to argue against if you're in the way people live
and can live. Yes, and you know when I recently,
I recently spoke at the cathedral and lamented the way
we now speak of p as opposed to as an
absence of war rather than a way of living. And
(19:17):
those are the sort of insights which I personally feel
I need to and should offer to share, to try
and just move people a little bit away from our
neoliberal world.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Right. The moving into your work with Knight Tahou was
that you come from from Britain, and so the whole
introduction to the world to al Maori, the world of
the Maori. Did you find that interesting challenging as it
(19:50):
opened your eyes? Do anythink that you consider valuable?
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Well, the answer is an absolute yes. I mean it
to be invited in and to be allowed to be
immersed into a different worldview, not be judgmental, but learn
is a is a privileged position. I've often said, how
(20:15):
does a boy from Yorkshire find his way into nightahoo is?
But the values that one lives by are so aligned
to the values of the tribe, for example, that it's
it's not a it's not an abrasion, it's actually you
(20:37):
hold the same values as we hold. The words may
be different, but the way you live, the way you behave,
the way you speak, the way you listen, very importantly
is consistent with how we do things. And I've really
felt privileged to be in that world.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
I'm sure you're also there to enhance their ability to
be stewards of their commas. Do you find that that
works well with our values as well? You can find
a way of being able to do Can I say
do business in a Mai way?
Speaker 3 (21:13):
I think if you understand that are our goal within
Knightahoo is actually to manage the poutia, the corpus of
all that is held by Knightahoo for the benefit of
the future generations, then you are thinking in a different
time frame to the average corporate right.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
I'm very alarmed to say that I can hear the
final song already starting to play in my headphones, and
so we've got to wrap up. But it's been fascinating
talking with you, John, and intrigued in your journey and
what you're doing and what you're contributing, and you can
tell us a little bit about the song that you've
picked a conclude with.
Speaker 5 (21:55):
Well, I'm is it Daughtry song?
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Yeah? Okay, so I picked this song which people probably
don't know. It's called always Heading Home. And Roger Daltrey
was one of my childhood here. I was brought up
in the North of England. The Who was a band
I see they broke instruments on the stage. Dulty now
(22:19):
has recovered from viral meningitis. Who wrote this song? And
it's a spiritual song. It speaks to anybody, everybody, and
I'll just leave it for you.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
It has been a privilege talking with you on a wisue.
Thanks all the best for everything that you're doing.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
This is real life. I'm John Cown, looking forward to
being back with you next Sunday night.
Speaker 6 (22:40):
It's the can't be said in words, balance, the fast,
one in the slow.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
The question and the answer are we head promiating fund
from long to not comer to break? Always heading home?
(23:20):
We're heading.
Speaker 6 (23:27):
From me found to day, from to not farmer? Do
you agree? Always heading home? We're always.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
Hidden For
Speaker 1 (24:02):
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