Recognising the best in business

Our top business graduates and doctoral graduands who accepted membership to Beta Gamma Sigma this year were inducted into the international honour society at a special event held at the Business School on 7 May 2026.

Beta Gamma Sigma is the international honour society recognising the top students at business schools worldwide and is attached to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). 

We were delighted to have one of our very own business alumni success stories, Sunny Feng, as keynote speaker for the evening. Sunny is Co-Founder of RosterLab, which uses state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques to build optimised rosters for healthcare staff.  

Sunny spoke about  RosterLab's journey, key lessons she’s learned along the way, and what’s next on the horizon. 

One of the great benefits of Beta Gamma Sigma is that every year we are able to induct Chapter Honorees, an opportunity to recognise individuals who have made significant contributions to the Business School, the University and the New Zealand business community as a whole.

This year we were delighted to recognise Dame Theresa Gattung as our Beta Gamma Sigma Collegiate Chapter Honoree for 2026.

Dame Theresa is one of New Zealand's leading businesswomen and philanthropists, as well as a champion of women in business.

She was the first woman CEO of an NZX-listed company when she became the first woman CEO of Telecom New Zealand at just 37!

She was named in Fortune magazine's list of "The 50 most powerful women in international business" several times, and in 2006 was included in the Forbes list of "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women".

She co-founded My Food Bag in 2012 and is Chair of the Board at Tend Health Ltd. She was previously Chair of AIA NZ and AIA Australia and was also the Inaugural Chair of Wool Partners International.

She was instrumental in bringing Coralus (formerly SheEO) to New Zealand - supporting, financing and celebrating female entrepreneurs.

In 2021 she gifted at least $2.5 million over ten years to fund a Chair for Women in Entrepreneurship, to lead the Aotearoa Centre for Enterprising Women at the University of Auckland, which aims to improve support, research, and education for women and entrepreneurship.

In 2023 she co-founded the Gender Investment Gap NZ, closing the gender gap for investment in start-ups.

She has been involved with many not-for-profit organisations, including World Women Charitable Trust (which she co-founded), the Eva Doucas Charitable Trust, the Cambodia Charitable Trust, of which she is Patron, and the Puriri Education Charitable Trust. She was also Chair of the Wellington Board of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

In 2015 she was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business and philanthropy in the New Years Honours and was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame.

In 2018 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Women of Influence Awards and was inducted into the RNZSPCA Hall of Fame.

In 2010, she published an autobiography, Bird on a Wire, about her time as Chief Executive Officer of Telecom and the road that led her to becoming New Zealand's highest-profile businesswoman.