A warm welcome to Ant Howard, Be. Lab’s new Executive Director. Ant is a long-standing member of the Be. Board, and we are delighted that he has joined our team to bring his vast business and governance expertise to this mission, to ensure accessibility impact at all levels of organisations, including leadership and governance.
A former CEO of Wang New Zealand (later known as gen-i), which under Ant's leadership reinvented itself from a product company to become one of the country’s most innovative and successful systems integration and services companies. It listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange as part of this process.
Ant's broad experience with public and privately owned companies gives him depth and breadth of expertise in strategy development; go to market planning and execution; corporate governance; corporate restructuring; mergers and acquisitions; capital raising; business strategies and planning. He has particular expertise and passion for building highly effective leadership teams and facilitating a strong and constructive working dynamic between all stakeholders.
Ant is looking forward to bringing his experience into the next phase of Be. Lab:
"For 10 years, first as Be. Accessible and now as Be. Lab, we have invested in leadership development within the access community. Last year we celebrated 150 alumni of the Be. Leadership Programme.
Building on this success we intend taking this forward with a programme to develop a community of access leadership in governance roles throughout Aotearoa New Zealand.
We know the value of accessibility as a strategic and leadership advantage, and through this programme we will be seeking to embed accessibility into every aspect of leadership and governance starting at the top – quite simply we want to see disabled leaders and leaders from the access community on boards throughout New Zealand.
I’m delighted to be able to bring my leadership and governance experience both from my own work, and as a member of the Be. Institute Board, to this next phase of Be. Lab’s development and growth. After 10 years of working hard to make change in accessibility we have lost none of our passion, or energy for making Aotearoa New Zealand the most accessible nation in the world."