Stratos Ponderings

Alone in the Marble Foyer in Australia’s Parliament House

Stratos Consulting was incorporated in 1996 to enable its founders to focus their combined energies on clients. Co-founder, Ian Gatenby, spent the year traveling to Melbourne, 46 trips in all, to develop Victoria Police’s Customer Service strategy and leading the Police Board team developing a performance management program for policing. These major programs were set against a difficult backdrop – a significantly higher level of police shootings in Victoria compared to other states and a paucity of information about where to apply resources for best effect. The results were stunning, praised as world-leading and resulting in ongoing improvements in policing that are still at the forefront of police management. These projects encapsulated our drive for innovation.

Fast forward two decades and our CEO, Ian, is still twisting himself into aircraft seats and still innovating. He was recently commissioned to program manage the world’s busiest international airport’s Growth Enablement Program. Dubai Airports needed to make significant improvements to be ready for even more growth, with improvements needed in ICT, Procurement, Finance, Legal and many more areas. Managing this entailed planning and managing the programs of 50 external consultants and co-ordinating communications and programs internally, initially with 800 of the airport’s 3,500 staff whilst appreciating the needs of the entire 90,000 workers at an airport that now caters to over 80 million international passengers a year.

We choose projects that aren’t for the faint-hearted. We employ, consult and work for the best. No task or location is too difficult, too strange, too challenging. We’ve found ourselves alone in the famous Marble Foyer in Australia’s Parliament House.

Over the years, we’ve particularly enjoyed out international experience, working on assignments in places as remote as the Canary Islands, Hawaii, New Guinea, Sumatra and even into the back blocks of Laos. We’ve hosted delegations and been hosted by many fine politicians, public servants, business people and academics. Here’s one of our earlier experiences, with the Minister for Energy and Construction of the People’s Republic of China, way back in August 1992

We’ve gone on to work in the world’s largest office

We’ve also found ourselves deep in the jungle, traversing the missing link along the Thai-Burma border, working with refugees in the camps there, gaining an unwelcome understanding of dengue fever and what it’s like to live in a camp for an extended period.