The World Economic Forum last year published a report stating more than 50 per cent of the globe’s workers were going to need some form of re-training in the next three years.

“That’s a massive number,” says Wanaka local Mark Verbiest, one of New Zealand’s most experienced company directors and a speaker at the Festival of Colour’s 2019 Aspiring Conversation: ‘Achieving Peak Performance in the 2020s’.

“In the shorter term the forum’s report means we’ve got to get cracking with re-training programmes,” Mark says. “But in the longer term we’ve got to teach young people how to learn and re-learn. Millennials will probably have to change roles several times in their lifetime so we need to teach them how to do that. That’s got to be a foundation capability.”

Mark, a fit, youthful-looking 60-year-old, has got to be one of the best people to talk to about this topic. Throughout a stellar legal and business career he has taken opportunities and kept changing and growing – and what’s more, he’s not afraid of hard work.

“My parents were Dutch immigrants to New Zealand in the 50s,” he laughs. “I understand Dutch people and their directness. And I understand hard work.”

After getting an LLB at Victoria University, Mark became a partner in a law firm by the age of 28 and was still with it when it merged to become Wellington’s highly regarded Simpson Grierson. His legal career was broad. He was leading work for Brierleys, BP, NZ Treasury and the Rugby Union - in the latter case travelling to the US as part of the team to negotiate the Adidas sponsorship.

Then in 2000 Telecom’s CEO Theresa Gattung (now a close friend) shoulder-tapped Mark to join the company as group general counsel. It was a new challenge and he relished it.

“We had a very diverse team: Men and women, and there was an obvious power in that.”

He recalls some fierce debates in Telecom senior exec meetings. “But Theresa always brought us together to go in a shared direction. And then once direction was set, we didn’t waiver or re-litigate.”

Mark says one of Gattung’s great skills was choosing the right people. “And if they weren’t right, in the words of Jim Collins who wrote Good to Great, she got them off the bus really quickly. I’ve learnt the hard way,” he adds. “When you try, for all sorts of emotional reasons, to give people more time, you take longer to make decisions that are pretty obvious and you always end up wishing you’d dealt with it quickly right at the start.”

Gattung gave Mark lots of opportunity to expand his skills. Aside from legal responsibility there was regulatory and public affairs work, internal audit and risk. “I had responsibility for these corporate teams, and then the comms team. Theresa put me in charge of our investment in Southern Cross Cables (our main internet cable). I was a director, and then chairman of the joint venture company that ran that.” There was also executive responsibility to deliver profits from Telecom’s international arm and the Yellow Pages business.

After 2007, when Telecom was operationally separated into two following government initiatives, Mark was ready to take a step back. But his career continued to grow and change. In 2010 he became chair of Transpower and joined the board of Freightways Limited (which he now chairs), along with a couple of other companies. Then in 2011 he was offered the chairmanship of Spark and a chance to continue his work in New Zealand’s telecommunications industry.

“The role of chairman involves the liaison between the board and CEO,” he says. “You’ve got to earn people’s trust, have a high degree of openness and you have got to be direct in a good way.”

In 2013 Mark joined the board of ANZ Bank Limited and there have been many other roles as well - too many to mention here.

“I need stimulation and I need new challenges,” Mark says of his work raison d’etre. “I don’t like being bored. I know that if something starts to look the same, within myself I’ll start to cruise. In governance roles you can’t do that.”

In 2017 he stepped down from Spark and later this year he will become chairman of the Meridian Energy Board, having joined the board last year. “You look at a company like Meridian. It’s a mature company but its still got room to grow. The challenges are around technology change and climate change. That’s what motivates me. We have a heap of things we need to do in the next ten years. I like growing things,” he concludes.

Today Mark has a flexible working life. If he is not traveling, there are tasks to do – emails, phone calls - from his home with its panoramic views across the lake. But he also makes time to keep his life in balance. The day the Wanaka App visited he was fresh back from a morning bike ride with his wife Sally, and as soon as our interview was finished he was off to a Pilates session.

Mark won the Wanaka Ignite Chamber of Commerce’s inaugural Outstanding Individual Award and he is very conscious of supporting the place he first fell in love with when he came skiing here as a university student in 1978. “Treble Cone was just open and the T-Bars were going.”

Today Mark and Sally live here permanently and Mark lends a hand to many local groups including Southern Lakes Festival Trust (Festival of Colour); more recently the Southern Alpine Rescue Trust (SARs); as well as giving the odd bit of assistance to new start-ups based in Wanaka.

He is looking forward to the Aspiring Conversation panel and the chance to talk in his local community on a subject very close to his heart.

“I think people underestimate how quickly things are going to change and how quickly things are accelerating. In my own profession there will be a lot less lawyers going forward because of automation and artificial Intelligence. Big chunks of legal work can be done by robots or machines, so the business model will change.

“Lots of people hate change, but we shouldn’t be scared by it. We need to think how to navigate it to ensure sustainability (the research does suggest net job growth). Sustainability should be at the forefront in every sense: social, environmental, financial.

“From an economic impetus point of view New Zealand needs to up its economic productivity. Its labour productivity. We’re below the OECD average.

“In order to do that automation can help a lot but at the same time the economy will suffer if we leave people behind.”

The ‘Achieving Peak Performance in the 2020s’ Aspiring Conversation will take place on Saturday April 6, 9am in the Pacific Crystal Palace.

PHOTOS: Supplied