What New Zealand taught me: 4 lessons from a global MBA journey

By Kamran Ahmed ’26 Evening & Weekend MBA Program 

This past March, I joined 40 of my Kellogg classmates and Professor Birju Shah on a two-week study trek to New Zealand to explore the theme of “Building International Intelligent Products.” We traveled across the country engaging with corporations, startups and farmers to learn how New Zealand approaches product innovation. We also explored how the country leverages its unique competitive advantages and navigates the challenges of global scaling. 

This trek was especially significant to me because it represented the topic and career area that Kellogg helped me realize my passion for and the area that I desire to pivot into. As an engineer by soul and by education, solving problems for people has always excited me. I tend to look at the world objectively. Identifying problems, whether in engineering systems and processes or lifestyle and convenience, has come as second nature to me.  

With an ability to think creatively and equipped with a user-first mindset, Kellogg showed me how combining these two skills is an asset; especially when it comes to building intelligent products to solve problems for any user.  

Building products transcends countries, cultures and communities, which made the trek’s topic of developing global intelligent products a perfect educational and professional opportunity for me. With a successful product developer and entrepreneur like Professor Shah teaching the course, I knew I could gain valuable knowledge from his experience and perspective. 

Here are four things New Zealand’s Global Initiatives in Management (GIM) trip taught me: 

Number 8 wire mindset

The “Number 8 Wire” mindset is a national identity representing ingenuity, resilience and a whatever-it-takes attitude. It’s named after a type of wire farmers used to fix anything on the farm. We saw this firsthand when visiting farmers who just broke records for the highest global crop yields despite being small players on the global agricultural stage and constrained margins.  

The country’s isolated location has resulted in increased farm production costs. Farmers are paying a high premium on just shipping to import commodities, such as fuel and fertilizer to support their livestock and land, and to export their goods globally. 

However, the New Zealand market isn’t large enough to offset these high production costs. With a population of just 5.3 million, domestic scalability is not sustainable. As a result, farmers are pressured to produce as some of the world’s largest yields to provide for New Zealand and support exports, which means more inputs and ever-growing production costs. 

Tighter environmental and sustainability compliance laws from large corporations have also shrunk margins. So, farmers have turned to genetic engineering for dairy farms and crop farms, developing more efficient fertilizers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enable faster regrowth of crops and grass. New Zealand farmers have innovated their way out of these constraints and resulted in global record high yields in 2024. Innovation here is born from necessity and resilience. 

Untapped opportunity

New Zealand is full of talent and ambition. From the work of Mark Bregman to Zach Warder-Gabaldon and the team at Ministry of Awesome (MoA) — one of the largest and most successful New Zealand start-up accelerators — there’s a growing ecosystem focused on unlocking Kiwi potential for global impact. Start-ups like Orbica, Kea Aerospace, and those found in the MoA represent the awesome potential in New Zealand. 

Bregman, a successful venture investor and mentor, has built his career in helping American and New Zealand start-ups drive growth and coaching executive and leadership teams. We met with Mark to understand his mission for helping New Zealand and hearing his passion for helping the country’s start-ups grow and scale globally was infectious. He is embedded in the start-up community and is dedicated to breaking down the geographical and cultural barriers hindering New Zealand’s growth. 

A Stanford graduate Zach Warder-Gabaldon has dedicated his mission to investing in New Zealand. An angel investor in several local start-ups and the head of programmes at  MoA, Warder-Gabaldon is helping the entrepreneurship community expand sound validation and product development in global markets.  

At MoA, each student group was paired with a start-up whose founders had developed an “ask” for us to research. My group’s founder was developing technology that could retrofit into existing buildings that were threatened by natural disasters like earthquakes, helping stabilize their structure. We provided him with ideas on how he could enter the United States market and begin to scale. We saw first-hand the founder’s passion to help the country’s start-up ecosystem through the MoA. 

Gaining traction as a launchpad 

New Zealand’s market is ideal for testing products. Its size, acceptance of innovative technology and consumer behavior that mimics western markets makes it a prime testbed to provide early feedback and iteration before global scale. 

For example, Uber initially rolled out one of its products in New Zealand to test the market and see how consumers responded. They made iterations and proceeded to launch it in the United States and other western markets. We had touched on this during some of Professor Shah’s lectures since his previous experience includes developing Uber’s products in New Zealand. 

Staying grounded 

What I think sets New Zealand apart the most is its soul. The influence of the indigenous Māori culture is immediately apparent upon arrival at Auckland International Airport. There’s bilingual signage in both English and Te Reo Māori, the Māori language, guiding travelers through the terminals. Airport staff greet people with a warm “Kia Ora” which means “hello,” while also using English expressions such as “hello,” “good day,” and “thank you.” These are often accompanied by the Māori phrase for “good health.”  

Māori culture and values are also embedded into business and government. It’s spoken consistently: respect for the land, care for future generations and having a strong moral compass. What moved me was how we were always greeted in Te Reo Māori before in English, as we visited companies and participated in city tours. 

At Fonterra, New Zealand’s largest and most influential dairy farming co-operative — company leaders spoke passionately about how their local culture has influenced their mission — infusing Māori principles into business practices. 

Each company including Fonterra, AgriTech and the Tāwhaki National Aerospace Center, touched on how the Māori belief of connectedness and respect for land is of utmost importance and that making decisions to benefit future generations is a key tenet to their operations.

This experience made me reflect on the power of being grounded in morals and values and how it can be used for innovation. It not only shapes who we are as humans but what we build, how we build it and who we build it for — a theme I saw many local businesses embrace. To build meaningful and useful products, we must “build global, think local.” 

While attending classes, participating in group discussions and deeply analyzing meaningful case studies is extremely valuable, I encourage all students to seek out experiential learning opportunities through courses like GIM. Learning about concepts is just one dimension of knowledge, but stepping out in the real world and applying the concepts adds a deeper understanding.  

Conversing with real people to understand their core values, beliefs and motivations will transform the way you look at education and the application of what you learn in the classroom. Real world experience will take you a step ahead in your pursuit of personal and professional self-development. 

Capturing my New Zealand GIM experience

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