Michael Dakin

Michael Farrell Dakin is a retired Royal New Zealand Artillery Captain, Vietnam veteran, management consultant and the creator of Profiles for People, a system of surveys and reports for analysing human behaviour in individuals and groups which came to notice in New Zealand in the 1980s.

Born June 25 1933 in Hobart, Tasmania, Michael Dakin emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 16. In 1954, at the age of 21, he married Elva Jeanne Florence Leach.

Service in Vietnam

He joined the New Zealand Army in 1956, prior to New Zealand's involvement in the Vietnam War, and was quickly promoted to the rank of Captain due to his quick grasp of artillery procedures. Deeply affected by the war, he resigned his commission in 1966.

Growth and Development

Following his decommissioning he was inducted into the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, but he was already developing an interest in the business arena and was soon acting as an employers' advocate for the EMA. Eventually, he took a position in New Zealand Industrial Gases as Group Personnel Manager; but he was restless, and had ambitions to strike out on his own.

Profiles for People

Following the launch of his management consulting company, The Professional Management Consulting Group Ltd, and with few subjective assessment tools available in the New Zealand market, he set AbOUT developing a paper-based system of surveys and reports which he called "Profiles for People".

The system quickly gained popularity in the corporate sector, and the company was kept busy for more than a decade, providing consulting services to a wide variety of companies, including Telecom NZ, a frequent user of Profiles for People.

Michael Dakin retired in 1990 aged 57, having suffered Long term hearing damage caused during his service as an artillery captain. In 2001, he passed the intellectual property rights in Profiles for People to his son Peter, and in 2002 the system was given a new lease of life in its first iteration as a live, interactive analysis system. However the venture was not commercially motivated and was discontinued in 2006.

Other pursuits

Goldcorp, Ray Smith and Promana

In 1988, Dakin founded the Promana Trust, which represented the interests of investors who had collectively lost millions of dollars following the collapse of Goldcorp in the wake of Black Monday (1987). Promana was chosen because it is a portmanteau word derived from the words 'professional' and 'management'. It is also a multi-lingual compound play on the English prefix 'pro', meaning 'for' and the Maori word 'mana', which means 'the supernatural force or inner power within a person or object'.

Goldcorp had sold "unallocated gold certificates", purportedly holding the real gold in its vaults. However it turned out there was not enough gold to pay out all the investors and about 1600 certificate holders fought back, taking both the company's director Ray Smith, and their bank, the BNZ, to court. Fraud charges were laid against Smith, who was acquitted. He later claimed the BNZ had helped squeeze the company dry in the six months before the towel was thrown in.

Military associations

During 1995 and 1996 he advised Brian W. McFarlane on various aspects of artillery matters relevant to his book We Band of Brothers

Between 2007 and 2009, following the death of his wife Elva, Michael dedicated his time to the Royal New Zealand Artillery Association, for which he started, and maintained, the [http://muzzleflashes.blogspot.com/| Muzzle Flashes] blog, and performed many other administrative duties.

External links

• [http://muzzleflashes.blogspot.com/| Muzzle Flashes]
• [http://webandofbrothers.tripod.com/| We Band of Brothers]