About Us

Len Norman

Len Norman is the founder of Conquest Consulting Pty Ltd and the inventor of the SkillSPeak tool. Len worked for several years in IBM in Australia. He had a technical career initially, highlighted by being the first operator in Australia for IBM's revolutionary mainframe systems.  After years of training all new operators in Australia, he moved to systems development where he mastered commercial and scientific programming languages and systems design. He was honoured for exceptional customer service when he received a personal letter of thanks from the Chairman of the IBM Corporation in New York.

Len made a move into the field of Education and was soon appointed National Manager of Customer Education. He remained closely associated with Education for the rest of his career and always held functional management positions. In Education, he pioneered many breakthroughs in thinking, including the case for self-study offload from traditional stand-up classroom, the methodology of determining demand for education and subsequent scheduling, the use of strict continuous quality improvement and alliances to pioneer the outsourcing of training delivery.

The issue of measurement to achieve quality has always been a driving influence. Len developed a new way of recording progress by participants in IBM’s Entry Level Training Programs. Inductees in those streams of training became leaders of the company in later years. The ability to correctly identify their emerging talent was a significant factor in their early development

As Manager of Education, running a successful stream of training required access to the company’s technical leading lights. All these resources were under the control of other departments. This meant that knowing which skills were available was essential so the right resource could be negotiated each time. This reinforced the importance and value of effective skills management. As a result of this interest, Len was asked to head up a team in Hong Kong to invent and develop a skills assessment tool as marketing support for IBM Education. As a result, LISTEN was created. This product was later renamed LiSSEN, after commercial development and has been marketed successfully in North America. It was subsequently incorporated into a training company’s offerings and acquired a new marketing name.        

Meanwhile, Len accepted a position to roll out the new IBM Skills Tool for IBM Global Services Australia. He performed this role for 5 years before leaving the Company in 1998. He gained a deep understanding of the problems faced by organisations wishing to better utilise their skilled and scarce resources. In this period, Len invented the FAMOUS tool used widely in IBM Asia Pacific. This tool provided a wealth of decision support reporting options and gave significantly increased value to all users.

Upon leaving IBM, Len invented and developed skillspeak. The tool compares very favourably with two significant benchmarks, LiSSEN and the IBM Skills Tool. It reflects a very deep appreciation of the problem of tracking complex skill patterns in organisations and brings realisation to Len’s working life motto –

Conquest Consulting is in the business of simply creating experts

Len also had years of experience treading the boards as an amateur actor and has developed a strong personal presentation delivery style. He has invented several business games and has been a great supporter of ABW Enterprise education, helping to develop management games and materials for high school business training.  

Len’s other inventions include:

• A TV Game Show or Board Game
• Training evaluation methodology for continuous quality improvement
• A corporate people ranking process – incorporating a unique 360 ° methodology
• An objective assessment process for line staff
• Training program administration management
• Business Games
• Management Game to demonstrate the need for Customer Service

Len has also developed two powerful one-day training events:

• Conquest over Conflict (utilising the hit movie “12 Angry Men”)
• Professionalism for PROFIT

Len is currently serving on the Board of Directors of a financial institution.