ACS Industry Insights Leaders Series - Steve Vamos

Steve is the CEO of ASX-listed tech giant Xero, where he leads the business’s growth and performance.

ACS Industry Insights Leaders Series features some of the ICT industry’s most respected leaders. The series explores innovation, challenges and opportunities in tech and considers what might be in store in ICT’s constantly evolving world.

Technology doesn’t innovate, people do! Technology isn’t disrupting your business, people are!

The world is now a highly connected and fast changing economic and social system, as are the organisations within which we work.

Information and communications technology has amplified the potential of people (and the organisations they work for) as the internet, low cost computing devices and communications networks connect people with others of common interest and new sources of knowledge and information.

People, their knowledge, relationships and the extent to which they are encouraged and enabled by management to create and innovate, increasingly determine how value is created for their organisation. This is a big change to embrace because traditionally we hired people to do what they were told, and now we want them to create, collaborate and innovate.

As a result, organisations that don't focus on enabling their people to create the future and innovate will find it tough to succeed in the future.

Join us at this upcoming ACS Industry Insight Leaders Series event on Thursday 4 June, where our speaker Steve Vamos, will talk on the leadership and management consequences of the changes are going on in the world and outline approaches business leaders and their teams can employ to drive creativity and innovation in their organisation.

About the speaker

Steve has been CEO of ASX-listed tech giant Xero since April 2018, where he leads the business’s growth and performance with a team of more than 2,700 employees.

Steve is a member of the Advisory Board of the University of Technology Sydney Business School. 

Steve has previously served as a non-executive director of Telstra, Medibank Private and David Jones and as a non-executive director and advisor to a range of Australian organisations, which span from start-ups through to large established companies.  Steve has also been Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Australia and New Zealand, ninemsn, Vice President and Managing Director of Apple Computer Asia Pacific, and Managing Director of Apple Computer Australia.

In his role at Microsoft as Vice President of worldwide sales and international operations for Microsoft Corporation's Online Service Group, he was responsible for the organisation's international business in more than 30 countries around the world. 

Steve was the founder and President of the Society for Knowledge Economics (SKE), a not-for-profit think-tank that operated from 2005 to 2014. SKE aimed to encourage and promote new and better leadership and management practices, which would enable innovation, productivity and sustainability. 

Steve holds a degree in Civil Engineering (with Honours) from the University of New South Wales.