Introducing Stephen Billing
Create dramatic change to improve your business
Stephen works with CEOs, General Managers and others with P&L responsibility to create dramatic change to improve your business. Far reaching change can divert attention from day to day business (business as usual) and your customers and employees suffer when this happens.
Meet Stephen
Stephen Billing helps you to implement change while maintaining a viable operation. His specialties include:
- Organisation design, job design and workload analysis
- Restructuring, consultation
- Changing your organisational culture
- Introducing new ways of working, including technology
- Developing leaders and leadership teams
Results – as fast as possible
Many consultants are (inadvertently) incented to stick around as long as possible (e.g. through hourly rate arrangements). Not Stephen. Stephen sets things up so that you and he both benefit when you get the results – fast.
Typical Client Results
- A compelling organisation design to create lift off for the change your organisation needs
- Restructuring that maximises the desired benefits while minimising resistance
- A review of how your people operate and how you support them that makes you think "I never thought of it like that before"
- Amazing ideas that you never thought of coming from the managers and staff who are closest to the work
- Consultation on organisational proposals that managers and staff RECOGNISE as true consultation
- Implementation of strategy in a way that makes it STAY implemented
- New ways of looking at what is blocking your organisation that can free you up to accelerate your organisational change
- Remarkable acceptance of your new technology by those who have to use it and make it work
- Establishment of new business units in harmony with the current arrangements
- Establishing new ways of working (commonly known as ‘culture change’)
- Implementing sales and service culture (i.e. improving sales and service performance permanently)
- Establishment of a corporate Learning and Development function that accommodates general, organisation-wide and business unit specific needs
- Design and implementation of learning interventions – i.e training and effective improvement of performance
Experience
Having been working in this area for the last 20 years, Stephen’s facilitative style enables him to work with you and those in your organisation to figure out how to tackle complex or difficult situations where no one knows the answer. Since establishing Exponential Consulting in 2004, he has attracted a loyal client list that includes Ministry of Justice, Inland Revenue, Māori Land Court, ACC, AMP Financial Services, Fisher and Paykel Finance, Wellink and the Royal Forest and Bird Society of New Zealand.
He holds a Doctor of Management degree in organisational change from the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He conducted his research into the facilitation of organisational change while simultaneously undertaking a full range of client work with Exponential Consulting. He is a graduate member of the Complexity & Management Centre at the Business School, University of Hertfordshire.
Stephen is an adjunct faculty member of the Centre for Social Sciences at the Open Polytechnic of NZ.
Recent speaking engagements include:
- HRINZ Special Interest Group on Organisation Development, Wellington, February 2009 "Complexity and OD."
- European Group for Organisational Studies (EGOS) conference, Amsterdam, July 2008 “Gossip, Power, Ambiguity and Ideology: Organisational Processes of Revealing and Concealing” (with Margaret Miller)
- HRINZ Special Interest Group on Change, Wellington, April 2008 "Complex Organisational Change"
- Academy of Management’s Management Consulting Division conference, Copenhagen, May 2007 “Inside the Client / Consultant Relationship: Consulting as Complex Processes of Relating”
- LIKE seminar, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, Oct 2006 “The Contribution of Small Group Sessions to Organisational Change and the Implications for Facilitators”
Stephen was also a reviewer for two articles in the International Journal of Learning and Change special edition – "Complexity, Leadership and Change Processes," forthcoming.
An avid tennis enthusiast, he is still waiting to hit the perfect forehand.
The Doctor of Management degree
…becoming aware of how you are thinking about change enables you to be a more effective change leader… 
Stephen Billing
The Doctor of Management is a professional doctorate, and this is different from a traditional PhD. PhDs are anchored in academia while professional doctorates such as the Doctor of Management are built around practice. Although they both enjoy the same academic status, professional doctorates are a more recent response to the need to integrate practice and theory.
Participants in the Doctor of Management exemplify the concept of the scholar-practitioner. They are required to remain in full time employment while enquiring (researching) into their practice in organisations. The research is inexorably based on practice through a narrative approach. This is truly taking experience seriously. Candidates take as their starting point narrative accounts (i.e. stories) of their practice as provocation for an in-depth enquiry into the experience of their practice and the literature, locating their practice in relation to the different traditions of management thinking.
Stephen’s thesis was titled “Facilitative Consulting in Organisational Complexity: Detached Involvement in Political Change Processes”.
Stephen completed his Doctor of Management between 2004 and 2007.
Contact Stephen:
Email sbilling@exponential-consulting.com
Publications
"The Role of Propaganda in Managing Organizational Change: Ethics, Conflict and Compromise in Consulting,” in Complexity and the Experience of Values, Conflict and Compromise in Organizations, Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin, Editors, 2008.
"Inside the Client / Consultant Relationship: Consulting as Complex Processes of Relating," in Client-Consultant Collaboration: Coping with Complexity and Change, Editors Anthony Buono and Flemming Poulfelt, forthcoming.