About Steve
Some careers follow a straight line. Steve's has always followed the scenic route.
He started as an accountant and auditor — a rigorous foundation he’d draw on for decades — moving through investment banking, corporate lending, management and IT consulting. He advised companies on strategy, led major transactions, coached executives through career-defining moments, and ultimately ran the Australian arm of Imagination, the world-renowned creative business. Along the way he has been client and consultant, banker and borrower, CEO and corporate coach. He has built, bought, merged and sold companies, and on occasion had to bury them.
Today Steve works as a Non-Executive Board director and senior advisor, bringing 25 years of multi-disciplinary experience across digital strategy, innovation, business transformation and culture to the organisations he works with. His keynote talks draw on this depth to help senior teams translate strategy into decisive, coordinated action — and to navigate the intersection of organisational culture and evolving technology, where responsible AI policy and adoption now sit.
He is the author of It’s a Dog’s Job: A Manifesto for Clients and Consultants (2014), a candid guide to management consulting that is read in both boardrooms and business schools. His first book, White Blue Wilderness (2013), recounts the Patagonia-to-Antarctica voyage on which he supported a modern re-enactment of Shackleton’s survival journey.
The adventures were never a detour from the work — they were another way of doing it. The terrain has been real: the summit of Kilimanjaro, 3,500 kilometres on foot along the Camino de Santiago, half the Annapurna circuit, a Shackleton re-enactment in the Southern Ocean. Remote, unforgiving places strip a problem back to its essentials, and what they teach travels surprisingly well into a boardroom — how to read unfamiliar ground quickly, hold a team together when conditions turn, and make the call when the information is incomplete. Steve has come to see the expedition and the boardroom as two versions of the same test.
Steve lives in Sydney with Kerry. He is listed with Saxton Speakers and Celebrity Speakers Australia and is available for keynote engagements, board & advisory roles and strategic consulting assignments.
