I wish to contribute to the growth and development of listed and unlisted private companies using skills developed in my 35 years of professional experience, 25 of which have been in executive committee level roles with and across a wide variety of companies and geographies. I do this as non-executive director, advisory board member or business mentor as appropriate to the size, complexity and stage of development of the company I am working with.
My experience has been gained primarily in the service of a significant Australian listed company having worldwide operations. During this time I transitioned from hands on management, to leadership and to governance in CEO minus one positions with significant board level interaction. To complement my technical, project and business management knowledge, I have developed very good financial skills with instinctual understanding of whether results do or do not make sense. I have crafted my leadership style based on building relationships, in questioning, in coaching and in guiding; I believe all are well suited to board and mentoring roles.
From July 1999 I held a comprehensive variety of senior executive roles with Worley, now WorleyParsons:
During these years I had intimate involvement with the company’s Board, and as a result developed a thorough understanding of the importance of good Board/Management interaction. This experience demonstrated the vital role a board has in contributing to the success of a company through a combination of coaching, advice, review and governance.
I held director positions in subsidiary companies in a wide variety of jurisdictions, where I developed an appreciation of the responsibilities of directors. Roles in this period included;
In the period from 1991 to 1999 I moved from technical and project work to general management roles, starting in my professional discipline and moving in to multi-discipline general management. In this period I honed my management skills and started to develop my leadership style. The companies I worked for in this period were all subsidiaries of listed companies with limited Board and CEO level exposure, however this was the period in which I matured my strategic thinking and customer engagement skills, and understanding of the linkage between employee engagement and performance. At this time I completed my MBA and, through the management of divisions with annual turnover ranging from $10 million to $100 million revenue, I was able to find practical application of my skills in finance, accounting, economics, strategy development, risk and non-deterministic thinking.
For the majority of this time I was a member of the subsidiary company executive committee for:
Across the first ten years of my career I focused on developing a solid professional base, commencing in engineering and technical roles and moving through increasing responsibility for management and leadership at lower and middle management levels. I worked for client, consultant and contractor organisations gaining valuable perspectives of the challenges each of these companies faced;