Set within the Kaga Domain in the Edo Period in Japan, the Funaki family have swapped swords for kitchen knives in 2013 film A Tale of Samurai Cooking.

Mr Funaki laid the foundations for Kaga clan cuisine as a “kitchen samurai” who prepared food for the nobility. Discovering the amazing cooking abilities of Haru, he arranges for her to marry his son Yasunobu – heir to the Funaki family, who craves to be a samurai warrior and has no interest in becoming a chef. The unlikely love story starts to take shape and, with the help of her new mother-in-law, Haru begins to teach Yasunobu the ways of the culinary arts.

The film, based on a true story, features meals made according to the Funaki family’s recipe collection and recreates the workings of samurai family kitchens at the time.

A Tale of Samurai Cooking will screen at Massey University’s Auckland campus at Albany on Wednesday May 2. The monthly Japanese films play on the first Wednesday of the month, at 6.15pm. Preceding the main feature is a short documentary on life and culture in Japan, which starts at 6pm. Unless specified, the films are screened in the Atrium Round Room on the ground floor of the Atrium Building. There is free parking available on campus.

A Tale of Samurai Cooking is rated PG – parental guidance recommended for younger viewers

Director: Yuzo Asahara

Running time: 121 minutes

For more information on the Japanese films visit the Consulate-General of Japan in Auckland website here.

Dr Ralph Bathurst.

When corporations replaced religion

Perhaps the most important and enduring leadership text was written in 1842 by Thomas Carlyle. It was Carlyle who introduced the great-man-as-leader into our consciousness, advocating the leader as a hero figure who would be admired (Carlyle uses the word “worshipped”) by followers and who would bring transformation. Carlyle was trying to find ways to achieve social cohesion through secular, non-religious means. He believed that society still needed heroes, men with strength of character who could guide organisations and nations.

Since Carlyle’s time, religious institutions in the West have gradually declined in importance, and the corporation has filled the vacuum. Business organisations provide a similar sense of identity and belonging that the church used to offer, adopting the familiar forms that characterised faith-based groups. As with religious affiliations, enterprises offer a sense of family to staff, replacing loyalty to a divine being with another higher power, the firm. It is not surprising, then, that business is resistant to alternative leadership practices that supersede those old religious structures.

Why strong leaders can lead to weak organistions

Indeed, most of today’s leadership theories are versions of Carlyle’s ideas, defaulting to a strong, determined and visionary person at the top of a hierarchy. Despite fashionable flavours like ‘transformational’, ‘authentic’ and even ‘servant’ leadership, these theories are still rooted in Victorian ideas and attempt to solve problems from that perspective.

However, a strong leader atop a hierarchy is actually weak because, regardless of their bluster, their vision is limited and constrained, and people beneath them are hamstrung. One way through this dysfunction is by co-leadership, where two people together as equals share responsibility for the firm. Before you argue back and say, “That’s impossible; it simply won’t work!” let’s take a closer examination of Harvey and Mike from Suits and see if there might be useful clues towards effective co-leading. 

In this series of articles, I will explore co-leadership from a variety of perspectives, using Suits, and Harvey Specter and Mike Ross as exemplars. Sure, they are fictional characters but that serves our analytic purposes; they help us detach from, and then to look back on, our real-life worlds. In taking this approach, we will explore the zeitgeist of our times and use insights from the fictional world of Pearson Hardman to examine the issues we struggle with in our age, beyond the Victorian traditions that have stifled leadership thinking.

Learn about the Master of Advanced Leadership Practice

New Zealand has more people living with long-term health conditions, an increasing older population and health inequalities that continue to persist, particularly for Māori and poorer communities. But despite the declining rural medical workforce, New Zealand has been slow to develop nurse practitioner services.

In her thesis, Dr Sue Adams, a senior lecturer from the School of Nursing,explored the experiences of rural nurses on their journey to becoming nurse practitioners. Dr Adams researched how the development of nurse practitioners in rural communities was restricted by the structure and organisation of health services, including general practice.

Internationally, it has been demonstrated that nurse practitioners are an effective and appropriate health workforce delivering primary health care services to underserved and rural populations. Dr Adams’ research identified that fragmented health service organisations, and the ongoing policy commitment to doctor-led care, limited the opportunity to improve primary health care services through using nurse practitioners to meet the health needs of rural communities.

Dr D’Souza’s research into the cyberbullying of nurses has lessons for other profession

Research by School of Management lecturer Dr Natalia D’Souza into workplace cyberbullying has found that nurses not only experience bullying by other staff, but also by patients and their families.

Dr D’Souza says the nurses who participated in her study described specific differences between cyberbullying and traditional face-to-face bullying, including the ability for people outside their organisation to bully them constantly.

While her thesis focused on the nursing profession, she says its implications would apply in other workplaces.

“One of the things that clearly emerged from my research is that cyberbullying is still an unknown problem and organisations are not sure how to deal with it. A lot of organisations have social media policies that outline what staff can and can’t do, but they don’t have policies to protect staff from external abuse.”

She recommends explicitly including cyberbullying in workplace bullying and harassment policies.

Head of the Institute of Education, Professor John O’Neill, is one of five experts recently appointed to an independent taskforce panel by the Education Minister, Chris Hipkins, to review the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms introduced at the end of last century. Based on the Picot Report (headed by Brian Picot), Tomorrow’s Schools dismantled centralised education administration by making schools into autonomous entities, managed by boards of trustees.

Professor O’Neill hopes the taskforce will find ways to address growing social and economic gaps that undermine children’s learning and achievement, and that have led to “gated and gutted’ communities.

He says his own academic career in education policy scholarship at Massey has been “greatly shaped by the watershed Tomorrow’s Schools reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and their practical effects on learners, families, local communities and the work of diverse education professionals.”

The taskforce will make recommendations to ensure the education system is fit for purpose now and in the future to reflect significant social and economic shifts since Tomorrow’s Schools, which he says was introduced “very rapidly through ‘trial and error’ with almost nothing by way of small scale pilots.”

“In that sense the Tomorrow’s Schools architects had a strong conviction of what they no longer wanted in terms of the old Department of Education’s so-called monolithic bureaucracy but only a vague concept or ideology of what should replace it,” says Professor O’Neill. “Tomorrow’s Schools was a review of, and for, its time. After thirty years we have a lot of evidence of the strengths and weaknesses of a completely devolved school system experiment. It really was an experiment.”

New era for NZ education?

He says New Zealand’s education system and culture have evolved since Tomorrow’s Schools thanks to the influence of events such as the ratification of United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as the impact of new national curriculum documents, the public education service commitment to being te Tiriti-led, and greater economic and civic engagement by iwi and hapū. 

“We are also a far more ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse population than in the 1980s. That’s wonderful for the health and vibrancy of our society,” he adds. “Sadly, though, we are also now far more divided socio-economically, between what I often call ‘gated and gutted’ communities. One in four children live in material hardship and income poverty.” 

“That knowledge occasionally makes me weep and daily reminds me of the magnitude of the task if we want to create a more level playing field for our youngest members of society. Schooling has a role to play but it cannot in and of itself fix the harms caused by an inequitable society. In terms of our immediate taskforce work, though, these too are certainly major challenges to grapple with when we think about systems and processes to promote meaningful school governance and administration that makes a difference in kids’ lives. Tomorrow’s Schools certainly hasn’t caused educational inequalities, but I think it’s fair to say it has contributed to a greater divide between the haves and the have nots.”

Big questions ahead for taskforce

Along with other taskforce members Bali Haque (Chair), Barbara Ala’alatoa, Mere Berryman and Cathy Wylie, Professor O’Neill will advise on changes within a “very broad remit, effectively allowing us to make recommendations on most aspects of the schooling system as we see fit. Essentially, the requirement is to ensure that the schooling system is re-purposed for this and the generations of tamariki and mokopuna that will follow.”

He says the Minister and the Ministry have been at pains to emphasise that the taskforce is genuinely independent. “That’s great to know but also more than a little intimidating given that the schooling system involves something like $10 billion annual government expenditure and that there are around three quarters of a million students in the system at any one time.”

Professor O’Neill says he was “very surprised to receive a phone call out of the blue from the Secretary of Education saying that the Minister of Education would like me to be a member of the Independent Taskforce. It is such an honour, and a privilege, to have been shoulder-tapped.”

His “fundamental moral compass” is to ask “how does the system work in all children’s best interests and materially advance the rights of each and every child? How do we govern and administer state schooling as a coherent national system of provision so that children learn richly and holistically and are fully prepared to grapple with the environmental, social and economic ‘wicked problems’ that may otherwise be our only legacy to them?”

The taskforce members will attend the national Education Summits in May and will also be consulting as widely as possible in the time available before reporting back to the Minister by November 2018.

The review will explore the following key themes: 

• The ability of governance, management and administration of the schooling system to respond to the education needs of the future; 
• The ability of schools to respond flexibly to their local communities and the need to balance this with every child’s right to a responsive education at their local school, regardless of where they live; 
• The roles of governance, management and administration in schools, and how they could better support equity and inclusion in the educational progress and outcomes for all children throughout their schooling; 
• Giving active expression to te Tiriti o Waitangi by exploring the impact of the governance, management and administrative system on the ability of schools to meet the needs of all Māori students and assessing its effectiveness for Māori medium students. 
• The environment within which schools operate, including the roles of the Ministry, ERO, NZQA, Education Council and NZSTA in supporting schools (and the yet to be established Education Advisory Service and the Leadership Council). 

More information on the review, including the Cabinet paper is available at http://www.education.govt.nz/tsr

His win netted him nearly $12,000 worth of prizes, including an XR150 Honda farm bike.

The rural consultant was raised on a sheep and beef farm at Gropers Bush in Southland. It was his fourth time competing in a regional final. The event saw eight finalists tackle a series of gruelling modules, including a fast-paced agri-knowledge quiz.

“Hopefully I can do Aorangi proud,” Mr Black told the crowd. “I’ve got a good support crew who came from all over the country to be here.”

He also won the coveted Ravensdown Agri-Skills Challenge, the AGMARDT Agri-Business Challenge and the Meridian Energy Agri-Knowledge Challenge. 

His partner Soraya Zohrab received special mention in this acceptance speech.

“I think she probably knew more of tonight’s answers than I did, given the number of times she’s grilled me on quiz questions over the last month,” he said. 

William Green, who’s a farm manager on an 840-cow dairy farm at Fairlie, won the Massey University Agri-Growth Challenge.

The Young Farmer of the Year is an iconic agricultural contest which began in 1969 and is now celebrating its 50^th year.

Cameron Black hard at work on one of the challeneges.