Dr Peter Stone
Peter Stone is Chief Customer Officer and Group Executive Business Solutions at the Bureau of Meteorology. His work history includes farm management, scientific research, food industry consulting, grain marketing and corporate governance. He has worked as an agronomist throughout Australia and abroad. Peter’s core skills are in devising science and business strategy, often in the context of large-scale and complex public and private sector initiatives. He has extensive experience in advising and working collaboratively with senior bureaucrats and Ministers in state and federal government, often to establish major science initiatives that directly inform policy and practice.
Peter is a graduate (B Agr Sc, PhD) from the University of Melbourne. His current role is Chief Customer Officer and Group Executive Business Solutions at the Bureau of Meteorology with a focus on customer engagement and business systems. He contributes to the general leadership and management of the Bureau via membership of the Executive Team and Major Transactions Committee.
Recent roles include:
As a Company Director of AgResearch NZ Ltd, one of the world’s largest pastoral research institutes (ca 700 staff, annual revenues of $155 m and $270 m in assets), he contributed to major institutional renewal that included: a transformational science plan; renewal of all business systems and processes; revised rewards and promotions process, introduction of health and safety governance; relocation of >300 staff; >$100M building program; >$200m in property transactions.
As General Manager Agriculture at the Bureau of Meteorology he established a customer-facing agriculture strategy and capability that, in its first year of operation, had generated ca $3M in external revenue and, via regular briefings to the Prime Minister, Minister for Agriculture and Coordinator-General for Drought, established influential political and bureaucratic relationships that directly informed a range of national drought policy initiatives.
In various roles at CSIRO, he established a portfolio of strategic research and relationships that directly influenced government policy, industry practice and billions of dollars of investment in the fields of regional development (northern Australia), infrastructure (prioritisation of investment in road, rail and water storage) and energy policy (shale and coal seam gas).
As Manager of Industry Development, Research and Global Technical Services at AWB Ltd,he was responsible for devising and implementing the Australian wheat industry’s Shaping the Future strategy (that changed the basis upon which Australian wheat was graded, marketed and sold) and for all technical activity related to the acquisition, segregation, marketing, sale and delivery of the 15-20 million tonnes of Australian wheat sold annually in global markets.