Tony is married with three children and two step-children. His social life is focused around family, church and the local community.
Tony has been active in a wide range of sports and played competitive field hockey for many years. Captaining teams at all levels and serving on his club's committee for some 30 years including the role of Chairman. He has a life-long interest in music, nature and travel.
Tony believes in corporate social responsibility and Living Streams is currently:
- Undertaking a voluntary webmaster role for Transition Town Marlow
- On the campaign committee for High Wycombe to become a Fairtrade Town
- Sponsoring and maintaining the website for CSSI Indian charity; Tony is a trustee
- Giving time and financial support for Bucks New University's annual enterprise festival
- Giving voluntary support for Wycombe Lighthouse
- Mentoring start-up businesses for the Open4Business project
Living Streams Consultancy UK Ltd
Tony left the corporate world in 2005 to start his own internet consultancy company serving primarily in the Thames Valley and West London. Living Streams offers SME owners a unique consultancy combination of business experience, internet marketing and engineering principles: (i) transparency and flexibility, (ii) value for money, (iv) business target based performance measurement, (v) the latest thinking of world specialists, (vi) guarantees and (vii) pro-active solutions to practically optimise clients’ profits through better use of the web.
Dream Plan Achieve
Tony's experience over the last 5 years has shown him that UK SMEs are often misled by web jargon and out of date ideas. He is especially concerned that many SMEs do not adequately understand the revolution in marketing brought about by Web 2.0 and the rise of Social Media / Networking. He has become part of Dream Plan Achieve with Mike Ricketts and Dr Sadie Reynolds to address this situation.
Tony Thornby
ACADEMIC / PROFESSIONAL PROFILE
- Tony developed his core skills at Imperial College, London – entering on a Scholarship and leaving 3 years later with BSc(Eng) Hons and Associated Membership of City and Guild Institute (ACGI).
- Five years later, Tony decided to top up his engineering knowledge with formal business education – choosing a management science masters degree over an MBA and gaining his M.Tech (O.R.) from Brunel University.
- By the time he was 30, Tony had added work experience and achievements to his academic qualifications to become a Chartered Engineer, MIEE (now IET) and a full member of the BIM (now CMI).
CORPORATE CAREER PROFILE
Tony’s corporate career consisted of 25 years with BT and 8 years with Nortel. Role highlights included:
- Managing the BT team which which took over design authority for one of the UK first electronic telephone exchanges (TXE4) from STC
- Heading the southern UK unit (accounts, configuration, installation, maintenance, hotdesk, training, consultancy and accounts) of a embryo BT PC business as it grew from 30 people to 150.
- Leading the managers responsible for BT’s operational relationships with big switch suppliers.
- Being headhunted into Nortel’s Knowledge Services Unit to solve management problems with one UK training group and rising to be Director of the unit for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa)
MAJOR CORPORATE ACHIEVEMENTS
- Senior project team member for the design and implementation of the first BT fully computerised system from order credit check to system maintenance
- Won a major BT quality award, nominated by his own staff, for his leadership in renegotiating the support contracts with manufacturers of all large business switches maintained by BT
- Smooth operational changeover from BT’s traditional large business switch range to Nortel’s Meridian 1
- Negotiating BT’s first support contract where a suppliers committed to software ‘bug’ clearance times
- Took two large operational units, one in BT and one in Nortel, to ISO9001 accreditation
- Led Nortel EMEA Knowledge Services to industry leading customer satisfaction levels
VALUES
Tony believes in team-working, continuous improvement and practical solutions.
