Paper Presenations: Speakers

Board Effectiveness: The Director's Cut

John Meacock

John is Managing Partner, NSW for Deloitte and a member of Deloitte’s national executive team. In NSW John leads a team of 160 partners and 1800 staff. John has expertise in corporate strategy, business transformation, mergers, acquisitions and alliances, financial risk management and shareholder value. His industry experience involves financial services, transport, property, telecommunications and government. 

In John’s client roles he advises CEOs on strategy, growth and innovation. In addition he undertakes assignments for chairs and directors on board effectiveness. John has recently conducted a major piece of thought leadership on board effectiveness for Deloitte where100+ chairs and directors of ASX200 organisations were interviewed to gain insights on the changing role and structure of boards, trends in board performance and items on the board agenda. 

John has a keen interest in art and has developed a program in Deloitte of ‘rolling’ exhibitions to promote the work of young and emerging Australian artists. This program provides artists with an opportunity to show their work to clients and staff to Deloitte. Deloitte encourages the acquisition of the works by clients and staff and purchases at least 2 works per exhibition for its own collection. In addition to his role at Deloitte, John is the chairman of The Brett Whiteley Foundation and a Director of Wenona School.

Ruth Medd

Ruth has been pursuing a career as a non-executive director since 2000. She is Chair of Australian Ethical Superannuation Ltd and WOB Pty Ltd (Women on Boards) and a director of the National Foundation for Australian Women and The Infants Home Ashfield. 

She has an interest in systematically developing the next generation of Australian directors and uses a wide range of research to identify opportunities. This involves surveying the participation of women in as wide a range of board types as possible. She is an occasional contributor to a range of media outlets. 

She will discuss the latest Women on Boards research as well as strategies fro developing women directors from early in their careers.

Communicating in the Boardroom

Professor Mary Barrett

Mary is Professor of Management at the University of Wollongong. 

Mary started out in academia teaching foreign languages and literature, but later moved into human resource management, working in the university sector and government. Her professional experience includes the US where she held a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley. She gained an MBA and returned to academia as a management lecturer in the early 1990s. She is now a Professor of Management in the School of Management and Marketing at the University of Wollongong. 

Mary researches and publishes in the areas of women in management, workplace communication, family business, leadership and management theory. She has published several books including, with co-authors Elizabeth Baker and Lesley Roberts, Working Communication (John Wiley, 2002). With co-editor Marilyn Davidson she published Gender and Communication at Work (Ashgate, UK, 2006). Ken Moores and Mary Barrett will publish a book on women and family business later this year, a follow-up to their earlier book, Learning Family Business: Paradoxes and Pathways, published by Ashgate in 2002.

Pierina Curties

Pierina has 12 years of experience on Not-for-Profit boards. For eight years, she was the Chair of the Board at UQSPORT, a service organisation at the University of Queensland with a multi-million dollar annual turnover. 

She works full time as the Manager (Business Capability and Support) at TransLink, an organisation that oversees the delivery of public transport in south east Queensland. In this role, she guides the organisation's culture through its people, to ensure it is best equipped to deliver its outcomes. She has an MBA and is a qualified trainer and NLP practitioner.

Bridging the Gap to the Boardroom

Associate Professor Lyn Carson

Lyn Carson is the United States Study Centre’s academic program director. She is an associate professor in applied politics at Sydney University with a particular interest in deliberative democracy and its practical corollary, civic engagement in political decision making. 

She has been teaching, consulting, writing and researching in this field for 15 years. Dr Carson is currently undertaking two major collaborative international research projects with US-based partners and a joint project in Australia, convening a Citizens’ Parliament in 2009. With Brian Martin she wrote Random Selection in Politics (Praeger, 1999). See www.activedemocracy.net for further information.

Rosanne Hawarden

Rosanne Hawarden is a graduate of the Universities of Natal and Witwatersrand, South Africa and is now resident in New Zealand. 

She is a fifth year part time Doctoral student at the Graduate School of Business, Massey University, New Zealand in the Doctorate of Business and Administration (DBA) program. Her doctoral thesis is on director networks from a gender perspective using insights from new knowledge about networks called small world and scale free networks. For the last four years she has organised and presented papers, symposia and caucuses on the topic of Women on Boards at the Academy of Management annual conference.

Her Academy initiatives have been supported by WOB researchers from business schools around the world. She volunteers as a reviewer and is the web manager for the Gender and Diversity in Organisations division of the Academy. She recently contributed a chapter on New Zealand women directors for the fourth Women on Boards book, due out mid 2008. It is entitled Women on Corporate Board of Directors: Research and Practice edited by Susan Vinnicombe, Ron Burke, Val Singh, Diana Bilimoria and Morten Huse and published by Edward Elgar Publishers. 

Rosanne also runs a research website, www.betterboards.biz, a research front for Women on Boards Research. She is Managing Director of a software company, representing an international ERP software company. She has been a committee member of the Canterbury branch of the Institute of Directors, is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and in 2007 ran as a candidate in local body elections.

Fiona Mort

Fiona worked in the field of violence against women for over fifteen years as a social worker, manager and senior policy officer. 

Fiona then began work in the then Department of Human Service later the Department for Families and Communities with the focus on the development and implementation of the Women's Safety Strategy, a five year strategy with a specific focus on the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. 

Her current work as Manager - Policy in the South Australian Office for Women involves managing a range of projects aimed at addressing gender equity issues, Women’s Leadership Initiatives and the convening of the State Aboriginal Women’s Gathering. She also has involvement in the national agenda and liaison with the Australian Government Office for Women in relation to projects such as the preparation of Australia’s 6th and 7th combined reports on the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). 

Fiona has written a number of papers about violence against women including a discussion paper on rethinking dementia and aggression from both the domestic violence and elder abuse perspectives and a paper examining the issue of young people's violence towards their parents, carers or guardians. Fiona has also tutored in social work at the University of South Australia and is involved in a number of community groups including the Women's Legal Service in South Australia of which she is the Chairperson.