Though he left school without a single qualification, Dan Walker has racked up some incredible achievements – and he has even bigger plans ahead.
Dan is a cloud solutions executive at the global technology company Microsoft, Deputy Chair of Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Ruanui and Deputy Chair of the Māori Tourism Board. He's also a graduate of Massey University’s ground-breaking Master of Advanced Leadership Practice (MALP).
Academic success may have escaped Dan at high school, but an opportunity to get into technology while working at Dick Smith in Christchurch set his passion on fire. He returned to study with a new focus, completing a Diploma in Business and then a Master of Business Administration. In 2010, he won the Young Māori Leader Award at the Aotearoa Māori Business Leader Awards.
Through all his successes, Dan has been aware of the responsibility of leadership.
“Leadership is a mantle handed down by my ancestors. There’s a reason I have these skills, and I need to use them. I represent my ancestors and I do this for future generations”.
As a student on Massey's Master of Advanced Leadership Practice, he learned an important lesson: that you need to know yourself before you can lead others.
“There are not many programmes out there that focus on the person inside as well as their academic and management skills. I really see this programme contributing to changing leadership in New Zealand, because it focuses on the individual so much. It focuses on how we, as people, can challenge the status quo and challenge ourselves to be better leaders.”
Through the programme Dan has developed a framework that could change the way we look at the digital world. Tikanga Māori ki te Ao Matihiko, or Māori Values as a Framework for Digital Leadership addresses the problem of low engagement by Māori in the digital sector. It proves that embedding tikanga [Māori values and practices] in digital processes can boost engagement and achievement.
Dan hopes that Māori could be the first culture in the world to formally define a value framework based on our tikanga for the digital world – that, he says, would be real digital leadership.