Advisor Insights: Real Business, Real People

As a vivid advocate and advisor for digital healthcare, Werner Böing is a leader that personifies attributes and experiences to create successful technology and data-enabled new business models. A thirty-plus year background across multiple industries has seen Werner be involved in all stages and facets of business, from an automotive think-tank (his first foray into the advisory world), to serving as an executive and board member for global market leaders in FMCG, biotech, and medtech. Werner's passion for people has encouraged him to use his experience and network through his advisory practice Evisory to support startups and boards co-shaping the digital future in healthcare and beyond.

In this Advisor Insights interview with Advisory Board Centre’s General Manager of Engagement Penny Ellenger, Werner encourages the notion of being self-aware and self-critical to enable continual development and understand your "funnel of relevance" - that is, what people should be seeking your expertise for - and nurture it from the start.

Anouk De Blieck is a highly experienced senior leader and advisor with over 30 years of experience in the technology, payments, and banking sectors, having worked with companies such as Citibank, ANZ, Visa, and SoftServe. With a passion for radical change management, advancing women in business, and improving the global HR community's ability to innovate, Anouk now manages a board portfolio career and believes that companies need access to external collective wisdom to navigate the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) global environment successfully. In her Advisor Insights interview, Anouk discusses the challenges organisations face in the VUCA environment and how advisory boards can help them navigate uncertainties and complexities.

Paul Davies is an experienced advisory professional with a background in financial services. He recently worked with a construction company looking to expand into South Australia, implementing a process to evaluate the company's goals and utilising best practice frameworks to identify the ideal criteria for advisory board experts so that appointing was straightforward. The process helped to give the company more confidence in decision-making and that their board was going to be successful. In this Advisor Insights episode, Paul emphasises the importance of going through a structured process with companies when setting up an advisory board, even if they already have a defined set of goals.

With an eclectic professional portfolio of more than twenty-five years working across multiple dimensions of sport from grassroots to elite, Richard McInnes has held numerous roles within professional sports, and since 2019 has been CEO of Water Polo Australia.

London-based customer marketing guru Dean Lindsay is laser-focused on putting customers' stories at the forefront of an organisation's loyalty, retention, and growth strategies - and with great success. Having first forayed into customer service twelve years ago, Dean's passion for listening to the customer to ensure a business is on the right path has evolved from creating loyalty campaigns to leading organisations' complete marketing strategies.

In this Advisor Insights interview with Advisory Board Centre’s Founder and CEO, Louise Broekman, Dean discusses how his enthusiasm to stay on the pulse of improving business performance has seen customer advisory boards become a crucial element to his profession. With several boards under his belt now for various organisations, Dean has mastered how to maintain the independence of members and a fit-for-purpose focus, which is akin to our own best practice methodology.

Working in the aged care sector as an executive for more than twenty-five years, Cynthia Payne founded Anchor Excellence in 2018 to fulfil her aspiration to give back and create a legacy of improved capability and outcomes for businesses. In four short years, her business has become a national provider of professional services, supporting leaders at governing, executive and management levels. With the 2021 completion of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality & Safety and the subsequent reform agenda, Anchor Excellence has gained particular notoriety in compliance.

In this Advisor Insights interview with Advisory Board Centre’s Director of Talent, Brendan Logue, Cynthia discusses the shifting (and very welcome) change within the aged care sector, and how her long-term experience with advisory boards has empowered her and her business to be a pillar of support for the journey of positive transformation ahead.

For the past three decades, Los Angeles-based Mohamed Amer has become a revered strategic communicator and leader within multiple fields. With most of his career so far taking place with software juggernaut, SAP, he served as a corporate executive, where he later worked his way up to the Global Head of Strategic Communications and Vice President. Since moving to an advisory portfolio career, Mohamed has gone on to aid organisations in their digital strategy, simultaneously educating governance and director boards of the necessity of this snowballing market evolution.

In this Advisor Insights interview with Advisory Board Centre’s General Manager, Penny Ellenger, Mohamed expands on the necessity of possessing a flexible strategy and how advisory boards and organisational leaders need to have unanimous expectations. While advisory boards remain independent of the organisation, the meeting of minds between the two is reflective of best practice, the bread and butter of advisory board conduct.

Serving in a variety of roles, Mike Richardson has amassed an impressive arsenal of skills over his 40-year career so far. From engineer to program manager, to VP then CEO, Mike is no stranger to organisational structure and strategy. In his portfolio career where he has served on the likes of both governance and advisory boards for the past 20 years. Fulfilling many roles within board groups, Mike has been a Chair to several, aiding businesses in the navigation of their enterprise strategy. It’s within these board roles that he learned the value of possessing, as he calls it, an 'agile mindset'.

In this Advisor Insights interview with ABC Director of Talent Brendan Logue, Mike explains the value of possessing this mindset for business strategy, and how it correlates to a higher level of value for an organisation.

With more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry, Andrew Hadley has amassed a seasoned portfolio in strategy development and execution, operations, business development, and marketing. As CEO of Western Australian based P&N Bank since 2014, Andrew is at the forefront of a customer-owned "bank for everyone", with an admirable value proposition of enriching the lives of its members and communities. In 2019, P&N Bank merged with fellow Western Australian bank bcu in late 2019 to establish a unique multi-brand customer-owned banking model that respects brand heritage and supports local decision making and autonomy, while optimising the Group’s size and scale. One of the opportunities Andrew and his team saw during this period was to create a "unique governance arrangement", whereby they put in place brand advisory councils to assist the respective brand general managers.

In this Advisor Insights interview, Andrew explains in detail how "a fresh set of eyes" and representing the voice of the customer through his advisory councils ensured the merger of the two companies, whilst maintaining heritage and identity through separate brands, was a positive and transformative success. At the end of the day, Andrew feels the only way forward in situations of complete business transformation, such as a merger and acquisitions, is to be purpose-driven and take the opportunity for feedback, and an advisory board setting can provide just that.

Having lead the Asia-Pacific arm of public relations giant Ogilvy for the last thirty years, Certified Chair™ Scott Kronick's career portfolio boasts experience and achievements most could only dream of. Scott's career in China has seen Ogilvy emerge as the biggest international public relations firm in the critical market. After stepping back from a seven-year role as CEO at Ogilvy in 2021, he now plays a senior advisory role to the firm in Asia. In this Advisor Insights interview, Scott shares his extensive career experience in the public relations space, and how it's intersected and emboldened his foray further into the advisory space. He values greatly the importance of obtaining an outside perspective through an advisory board for business owners who have "tunnel vision" on what they need to do. Having an "on the ground perspective" ensures the right market insight, with advisors knowing what to do and what to look out for.