Welcome to NZ :). I hope you enjoy your visit! Regretfully I am unable to attend the conference, but I look forwards to hearing how things went.

You're bring back fond memories. I've done that walk once or twice, sometimes with a trolly, and found it very civilising.

(The AirNZ lounge is absolutely great, too, if you can get in...)

Dave, it sounds heavenly in Auckland, (sorry a strained link here). As you are travelling all over, I guess you didn't get a chance to catch the Barbarians (note of explanation to non-rugby types - http://www.barbarianfc.co.uk/welcome.shtml) vs South Africa rugby match at the weekend. I don't know if you are a fan of the Baba's concept. I suspect there wasn't a strong enough Welsh contingent on Saturday although Martyn Williams played a blinder.

It was a very good game, but it got me thinking, are the Barbarians (unlike most ofther sports teams) "a crew" or at least a good metaphor for one. They seem to fit your criteria for a crew outlined in previous posts and to my mind throw up some interesting questions about the formation of crews. The Barbarians having a distinctive reputation for exciting play and a long tradition and there is a strange mixture of invitational formality and last minute informality about setting up the team. They are also notoriously effective being able to trouble better drilled teams. I think it also raises some interesting thoughts about the quality of members necessary for a crew - my point here is that in a regular rugby team you only really need to understand how to do your own role. In a scratch team like the Barbarians you need an understanding of how other roles are going to interface with you and the parameters within which they can be expected to operate. Is this perhaps a feature of crews and one which will drive a good crew to contain not just good practitioners, but people who think about the boundaries of their role and the roles of others? What are your thoughts on this?

Yes Dave that walk between terminals is always one of the highlights of returning to NZ, a small ceremony of return among the soft green grass, the cicadas and the clean air mixed with aviation kerosene.

Funny story on this...

I went to Auckland Domestic last week to pick up Julian Carver, chairman of NZKM, and whisk him back into town for a meeting at the Auckland Business School and...

We almost ran over two tourists who were dragging their bags along one of the internal roads back to the city. They had strayed off the path back to the International terminal. Someone had obviously told them that the work would be good for them, but the singposting around there is rubbish and they had missed that liovely path between the terminals.

I had a similar problem myself a couple of weeks ago. I had been to an NZKM strategy meeting in Wellington. To save money, I flew down by Air New Zealand, but came back via Virgin (which had only been going a week). I thus came out of a different terminalk then tried to walk back to my car, which was parked by the other terminal. Not only was all the signage rubbish, but Auckland International Airport Ltd have recently erected pedestrian safety barriers in odd places, so that if you do not get it right first time, you are herded around the corner onto a road you do not want to be on (which is what I think happened to these poor international travellers.) Another case of over designing a system.

I have now decided to write a letter to Don Huse of AIAL suggesting that he hire Cognitive Edge to help redesign the pedestrian accesways and de-emphasise all the stuff that they have done to maximise their parking lot revenues, as the parking lots are full anyway and what they really want is to be a better tourist gateway to our beautiful country.

Signed

Angry of Sandringham