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If we want to grow our businesses, whether by market share, profit, or offering customers better value, we need to grow our people - and growing people means growing big brains. Management guru Tom Peters, speaking at the New Zealand Initiative's annual retreat dinner recently, gave a resounding and impassioned speech on the importance to business of investing in people, first and foremost. Read more

This week the New Zealand Herald reported that Selwyn College has completely turned their figures around, lifting their NCEA Level 1 pass rate from 39 per cent in 2007, to 93 per cent in 2013. But could this relentless focus on figures – be it NCEA, National Standards, or Pisa – be ignoring what is most important? Read more

Recently at the Initiative’s annual retreat dinner, management guru Tom Peters gave a resounding presentation on the importance of investing in people, first and foremost. Education, he argued, must be the number one priority. Read more

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Two years ago, when the New Zealand Business Roundtable merged with the New Zealand Institute to form The New Zealand Initiative, there were a fair share of people who wondered how these organisations would merge. Both were research organisations that had been headed by well-respected economists, the late Roger Kerr and David Skilling, who were perceived to come from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. Read more

Teaching stars: transforming the education profession, our third education report, aroused suspicion, emotion and attention when we released it this week. We dared to say those two terrible words: performance pay. Read more

This week, the Ministry of Education – in partnership with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment – released their Tertiary Education Strategy for 2014-19. The overarching aim of the strategy is to create better linkages between education and employment, especially in ensuring the skills and competencies of graduates meet the changing demands of the labour market. Read more

Last week the QS World University Rankings by Subject were released, highlighting the top 200 universities in the world for individual academic subjects. With as much grandeur and status as the Oscars (or the Rugby World Cup), these rankings are considered to be highly influential worldwide in signalling the quality and reputation of universities. Read more