AUSTRALIA'S FIRST IDEAS CONSULTANCY FOR BOARDS AND CEOS

Australias first ideas consultancy for Boards and Chief Executive Officers has opened its doors in Sydney this month.

Described as a 'personal trainer for Boards and CEOs, Diffusion Pty Ltd works with business leaders, combining strategy with creative thinking to produce strategic convergence across companies, delivering new profitable ideas.

Principals Stephen Byrne and Renay Ringma founded Diffusion after Byrne recently returned from five years in London. Byrne had been working as a strategy director for a number of top UK European digital and brand agencies, including Ion Global and Adera. Ringma was former Marketing Communications Group Manager at Australian Water Technologies before it was rolled back into Sydney Water.

'When I arrived back from London we saw there was tremendous gap in the market between the large tactical management consultancies and the small boutique and brand agencies. No one was really talking ideas and no one was talking to Boards and CEOs, said Byrne.

'We hear constantly of the need for companies to become more innovative, creative and ideas-driven. But the big question for Boards and CEOs as leaders, is how to make this happen and reap the rewards while keeping the company on track, said Ringma.

'We have both worked with large consultancies and weve seen they are primarily tactical facing. They deliver process through big organisational structures, take large fees and require long assignments. We believe in dealing with Boards and CEOs on a one-to-one basis, getting the job done and staying on to advise for the long term.

Byrne said that European CEOs were more interested in working with smaller consultancies as they were more likely to produce different types of thinking and different business solutions.

'After more than 10 years of experiencing the failure of management innovation practices like TQM and more lately the Balanced Scorecard, groundup ideas generation may be politically correct but more often than not, impractical.

'It may go against the prevailing zeitgeist, but the reality is if ideas are to be effectively implemented and have impact on all audiences they usually need to originate, be defined or driven from the highest level.

'What Diffusion does is not only work with Boards and CEOs to come up with new ideas to business problems but provides a path for their development and implementation, as well as helping to ensure they work.

According to the pair, companies should start by concentrating on developing a holistic view of all the customer/stakeholder touch and presence points.

'Due to the history of organisational structures, most western companies focus on single points of influence. They look at an issue as a finance, marketing or IT problem. Often advice and direction received from internal and external consultants exacerbates this silo mentality -- it only gets done for that area and, in many cases, the impact is confined and often looses momentum.

Many traditional management consultancies dont see things holistically, instead they deliver solutions tactically and as a result they cant effectively evaluate the real impacts.

Ringma and Byrne believe that the level of public concern about executive salaries wouldnt be so great if people could see that senior executives actually had great ideas and could deliver on them.

Both Byrne and Ringma believe the need for business renewal and change is greater now than ever before.

'We think that the world has entered a new era, -call it post-construction, or what ever you like. Those business leaders brave enough to respond will leave an important legacy.

Issues for CEOs: competitive brand dilution, corporate reputation, corporate responsibility, ideas and innovation, knowledge management, future strategy, big vision

Contact: Stephen Byrne 61 403 944 642 Renay Ringma 61 417 497 437