Kathryn Byrne

The certificate arrived in June. Strategy Latitudes, registered as a U.S. trademark, No. 8,283,885, arrived after more than a year of waiting. I studied geography at university and never stopped being a geographer. Longitude runs down the map, each line going deeper into one place, which is how most careers get built. Latitude runs across, joining places separated by an ocean that share the same conditions. My career has followed the second kind of line. That's what the company is named for: strategy along the latitudes. Two years in, it's done brand, marketing, and innovation strategy across drinks, fintech, technology, B2B, coffee, fresh produce, packaged food, fragrance, and grooming. More categories than I expected. Global companies, small agencies, collectives, and people who mainly wanted someone to think alongside them. Alongside that: writing, award entries written and judged, teaching, coaching and mentoring, strategic advisory, hands-on work for the nonprofits I care about, and a book, Thinking in Latitudes, out next spring. A company named for sideways travel ought to have the range to match. None of that happened on its own. Thank you to the clients who hired an independent when a bigger name was the safer call. To the collaborators who brought me onto their work, and the people who made an introduction or answered a question. To the people who supported me in so many ways. Two years of good company. The full story of the name is in this week's post on my Substack, Thinking in Latitudes. Link in the first comment.

Happy fifth birthday to wiq! Five years ago, we brought our relationship with Woolworths closer together, combining our data analytics and AI capabilities with Woolworths' retail expertise and scale. Since then, wiq has become part of how so many retail businesses and teams work with data and insights every day. Congratulations to everyone at wiq, past and present.

Two CEOs. Two leadership styles. One thing in common. ✨ Having spent much of my career working alongside and reporting into senior executives, I have watched leadership closely. At Revved., two leaders particularly stood out to me. Different businesses. Different personalities. But a strikingly similar approach. Humility. Accessibility. People first. And the willingness to walk the talk. Nikhil Ravishankar, CEO Air New Zealand What struck me about Nikhil was the combination of technical depth, clarity and genuine humanity. Coming into the CEO role from technology and transformation gives Nikhil a distinctive perspective on how complex organisations need to evolve. But what stayed with me wasn't his career trajectory.  It was one answer to the question; what keeps you awake at night?  “Wasting human potential.” He spoke about leadership as the responsibility to create an environment where people can become the best version of themselves. That is a powerful definition of leadership. When we met afterwards, he immediately picked up that I was from Goa. As someone who also came to New Zealand and made it home, seeing an immigrant leading one of our country's most iconic organisations made the moment particularly meaningful to me. Jason Paris, CEO One New Zealand Jason's leadership lesson is different; be visible and accountable to your customers. He doesn't hide behind the CEO title. He puts himself out there, talks openly about customer issues, showcases his people and calls himself the customer's “personal account manager.” That isn't a gimmick. It sends a powerful message that the accountability starts at the top. I have watched Jason do this consistently over the years, including fronting up personally when things haven't gone right. That level of accessibility and ownership is rare.  As he prepares to hand over the leadership of One NZ after nearly eight years, I wanted to acknowledge the leadership philosophy I have admired for some time. What I took away, "Leadership doesn't become more powerful as the title gets bigger." The best leaders I have encountered don't need the hierarchy to announce their importance. They listen, stay curious, make themselves accessible, own the difficult moments and create space for other people to grow. And perhaps that is the real lesson.  Authentic leadership makes people want to follow not because they have to, but because they trust the person leading them. Thank you, Nikhil and Jason, for reminding us that leadership can be both high-performance and deeply human. And thank you Revved for putting these conversations in the room. Which leadership quality has made the biggest difference to you; humility, accessibility, accountability or something else? #Leadership #AuthenticLeadership #HumanLeadership #NewZealandLeadership #CustomerCentricity

Thank you Mei Heron and team at TVNZ for joining me amongst our 99c avos to talk about the phenomenon that has been Ooshies. It's been so much fun to bring a little joy to our customers, and amazing to see lots of new faces in store to experience everything we have to offer at Woolies. Link to the Business Breakfast interview in the comments 👇 #Ooshies #WoolworthsNZ #Customers Woolworths New Zealand Mei Heron

How do you evolve AI Agents in Production without touching the Base Code? In a newly published paper I co-authored with some of my brilliant colleagues at Google we propose a solution to this problem.  The solution wraps around an AI Agent enabling it to safely learn on the job as circumstances change and new requirements are discovered.  We call it the “Agent Gym”. Read the full paper on arXiv: https://lnkd.in/gri3pcjQ This framework is highly relevant for anyone designing robust, production-grade agentic platforms that require enterprise safety rails.  It’s been proven in the real world and sample code is available. Huge congratulations to my amazing co-authors on this milestone: Pouya Ghiasnezhad Omran, Michael Zimmerman, Ashmita Kapoor, Tanya D. Pictured: me getting ready to train some agents in the gym #AI #AgenticAI #MachineLearning #EnterpriseAI #GoogleCloud #Research #HumanInTheLoop

Can you spot the difference? Same products. Two retail stores. One photo is me at Woolworths New Zealand, holding our products on a mainstream shelf. The other is me in our local Indian store, holding the exact same products. For most of my life these were two separate worlds. If you wanted Indian groceries, you went to the Indian store. The idea of our products sitting in a mainstream supermarket felt like something that happened to other cuisines, not ours. I never imagined this crossover would happen. Then recently, standing in that same ethnic store, I watched a European couple, a Mediterranean couple, and so many other non-Indian shoppers filling their baskets with Indian ingredients. In the store I’d grown up thinking was just for us. Because that’s the truth now. This food isn’t just for Indian people. It’s for everyone. And the photo that undoes me is the last one. Mum and Dad, standing in Woolworths, holding our products in their hands. This is the generation that arrived carrying their whole culture in a suitcase. We would drive across the city for a taste of India, while also buying lunch box snacks at your mainstream supermarket. That’s what this means to me. Two generations, finally able to shop anywhere, anytime, and a whole country discovering that Indian food was always meant to be shared. This is only the beginning, of belonging everywhere.

A few colleagues & friends know that I've loved having a crack at making genai movie trailers in my spare time, which between kids and work is basically 7:30pm - 10pm. Anyway, a few months back Peter H. Diamandis & the Moonshot mates launched the #FutureVisionXPRIZE, a competition to imagine sci-fi futures that aren't dystopian. So I gave it a go. 3 submissions later, one of them has made it through to Stage 1. I'm not sure which one, or what Stage 1 actually is (?), but that doesn't matter. Views do count though, so if you've got 30 seconds, give one a watch! Branch — "In 2077, we solved scarcity, work, and pain, then built a machine that lets you keep your entire life and swap out exactly one piece of it. Ryan has spent half a lifetime deciding what his should be, and just worked out that the only piece worth swapping is the one holding the rest of him together." https://lnkd.in/e5HYuwjX The Threshold — "In a world where everything is provided, three lives intertwine around the Threshold: a voluntary year without something you love, and a chance to discover who you are without it." https://lnkd.in/e3u9gjiC Bee & The Light — "In 2050, the world is imperfect and thriving. A 112-year-old maker must cross it one last time to give her oldest friend, the AI she built, to the light that is tending all life on Earth." https://lnkd.in/eDBrXqWk Nothing will likely come of it (because holy smokes, some of the entries are ridiculously good) but I really enjoyed the process of using Magnific, Kling AI, Google & Runway and watching what I could pull together improve alongside the image and video model improvements themselves (Flux, Nano Banana Pro, Seedance etc).

And this is why I love my job. 4 days at London Business School meeting and working with the most amazing students on their leadership skills including the amazingly positive Ariyani Tiara Kusumaputri. Thanks for making my job so easy!