Business futurist packer turns dead at 82

“Phil Ruthven has a big vision for the future of Australian business based on facts and research,” he said. “We will miss his advice and advice.”

Ruthven was everywhere in the 1980s, when she was for a time Australia’s highest-paid professional speaker, partly because she used her understanding of statistics and macroeconomic trends to tailor every address.

When Packer had $805 million to play with after selling his television interests to Alan Bond in 1987, it was Ruthven and IBISWorld that he turned to for advice.

The fortune teller was instrumental in Packer’s decision to expand his pastoral holdings with an emphasis on cotton, cattle and wool, to the point that he became Australia’s second largest landowner.

“Agriculture is going through an interesting watershed that will see the industry reborn,” said Ruthven Australian Financial Overview reporter Martin Peers at the time.

“This is one of the most underrated industries in Australia.”

The asset sale of Packer’s Consolidated Pastoral finally helped James’ heir survive the 2009 global credit crisis.

Born and raised in Sydney’s Baulkham Hills, Ruthven moved to Melbourne in the late 1960s.

The first decade of his career was spent in the food industry, but while running the Edgells factory in 1967, Ruthven took a Rotary study exchange to the US that inspired him to change course.

Demand forecast

He visited the “war room,” a concrete bunker under the airport runway in Oklahoma, and was amazed by the amount of disparate information sourced to aid America’s struggle in Vietnam.

“It was like something out of Dr Strangelove, it surprised me,” said Ruthven Era in 2014.

“I thought, one day, I wanted to start a company that was going to be the most information-intensive company ever.”

Ruthven returned to Edgells and traced the company’s entire production record to 1926. By plotting historical trends and cycles on graph paper, she immediately estimated demand for Edgells’ 220 product lines better than the marketing department.

When Ruthven took her fortune-telling skills and left Edgells to form IBISWorld, the concept of a specialist market research firm was still new.

But it is growing in line with the professionalization of corporate life in Australia, and overseas where IBISWorld will eventually have three satellite offices and the source of most of its revenue, which by 2020-21 is nearly $100 million a year.

Thousands of businesses are starting to trust Ruthven’s ability to pick trends early.

He often claims that his best calls were made in the mid-1980s, when he predicted that families would increasingly pay outsiders to babysit, cook, and mow for them.

“The business world laughs at me,” he said Sydney Morning Herald 20 years later, at that time the Australian outsourced household services market was well on its way to becoming the $510 billion-a-year behemoth it is today.

Ruthven acts like a futurist. In 1987, Financial Review reports that he has hosted one of Australia’s first satellite teleconferences, providing post-budget analysis for businesses in WA’s remote mining towns.

Rules for success

Ruthven passed executive control of IBISWorld to her children in 2001, and stepped down as chairman in 2015.

In 2014 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia, in recognition of his service to business and society. He never stops speaking for free on Rotary, in gratitude for that life-changing journey in 1967.

Ruthven devoted much of her later life to The Ruthven Institute, which helps clients refine their business strategies based on her patented “12 rules for business success”.

“Phil has a deep understanding of what Australian businesses can do better. We researched his ‘rules’ and found that he has refined the core strategy lessons very well,” said Andre Sammartino, a professor at the University of Melbourne who helped found the institute.

“He wants the next generation of business leaders to be wiser, and we hope we can achieve this legacy.”

Ruthven is survived by three sons by his ex-wife, Robyn (deceased) – Shane, Justin and Kerryn, their spouse and eight grandchildren, as well as his long-term partner, Deborah Light, a former magazine editor. Financial Review.

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