Family Business Institute Founders’ profiles
Jon Kenfield and Ross Anderson are FBI’s Founders.
Jon Kenfield
LLB FFBI FIAMA CC MBO
Master Solutionist,
Family Business Adviser & Advisory Board Chair
Facilitator, Mediator & Author
Jon is FBI’s originator and Founding Chair. He’s the world’s first Master Solutionist for Family Business, having developed the concept of Solutionism (the professional practice of solving other people’s and organisation’s problems) over 20 years ago.
Jon has an honours degree in law and has been a chartered accountant for over 40 years. He’s been a partner/principal/director in three chartered firms, including two of the “Big 4”. He’s also a Commercial Arbitrator (grade 1); Advanced Mediator and Conciliator, and English teacher. He was also a professional SCUBA diving instructor and commercial oil rig diver (long ago!).
As a Solutionist Adviser and Mediator he helps business families resolve conflicts, overcome challenges, and generate more clarity, focus, alignment and commitment to the things that really matter to them: their personal, family and business needs.
His book, “The Solutionist Guide to Family Business” (350+ pages), is the definitive Australian workshop manual for business families that want to get things right in their families AND in their businesses.
His FBI-awarded MBO (“Master of the Bleeding Obvious”) gets a big workout on most family business assignments.
Jon says, “I developed Solutionism to provide my clients with the processes and outcomes they kept telling me they were looking for – practical and sensitive solutions that were quick and effective, didn’t break individuals and families, didn’t cause more pain, and weren’t enormously costly. They just wanted a genuinely human, family-friendly, commercially oriented process that was solution-focussed … and they weren’t getting it from their existing, technically oriented advisers.”
He researched, developed, tested and refined a comprehensive family business best practice process model to address those needs. It’s now been used successfully, with a huge range of real family businesses, over several decades.
Ross Anderson
Career Summary
Ross Anderson is an Adviser, Executive Coach and experienced Designer, Developer and Facilitator of development initiatives for a broad range of Family, SME, Public and Private sector organisations.
Ross began his career as a consulting psychologist where he became a leader in the field of trauma management and crisis response. He developed highly advanced skills working with the armed forces, emergency services, large organisations, and primary and secondary victims.
As a former Director of Melbourne Business School’s Mt Eliza Executive Education Program he had responsibility for driving major public sector projects in Australia and around the Pacific region. A particular area of focus was managing large complex change initiatives in Defence, Health and Utilities. He was also responsible for leading a major global change project with BHP Billiton.
As an Executive Coach Ross combines his rich background as a practicing psychologist with highly developed skills in using standardised personality profiling assessment tools to achieve extraordinary results amongst individuals and teams.
Ross has a special interest in developing peak performance in teams (including family teams), and in managing work and whole of life balance, increasing emotional resilience and helping individuals to develop a sense of focus and motivation.
