Diana Ryall AM

After twenty years building the fledgling Apple brand in Australia, Diana reached the top of the business, only to be struck down by breast cancer. Now fully recovered, this tireless leader uses her experience to help other women achieve more, and guides major Australian corporations towards gender balance, inclusion and diversity.

When you don’t know what you don’t know, you’ll simply do whatever it takes to get it done.

That could almost be Diana Ryall’s philosophy on her remarkable journey to success.

Describing herself as an “end of the war gift” for her parents, Diana was born at the beginning of the baby-boom era and grew up at a time when no-one talked about glass ceilings. She didn’t know there were limits placed on her achieving success in the business world and she didn’t know women would find it difficult to get a seat in the boardroom.

And, because she didn’t know, there was no reason not to try.

She joined Apple Computer Australia in 1983 and over the next twenty years worked her way to the top of the ladder.

Diana recalls, “I started by training teachers who were just beginning to get computers in the schools and had no idea what to do with them.

“Then I moved into marketing, and later headed up the whole education division. When I moved out of the education market I did some business development work in Asia.”

Then Diana moved into looking after customer support as well as the company’s developers, and her progression through the senior ranks culminated in the role of Managing Director. A real highlight came in 2000 when Apple won Employer of the Year.

As Diana notes, “It was the first year of the award and we entered because it was a way of getting an engagement survey done by someone else at no cost.

“We didn’t enter because we thought we could win, it was a business decision.”

Diana Ryall was successful because she didn’t know she couldn’t be. She employed that same philosophy when it came time to leave Apple: she weighed up her options and made a decision based on what she thought was best.

The turning point came in October 2000 when Diana was diagnosed with breast cancer. “The more I read and learnt about it, I realised I wasn’t going to be able to continue to have the profile I’d had in the press with Apple.”

At the time, Diana, as Managing Director, worked closely with the Marketing Director and “we went to the Apple people in Asia Pacific and said ‘how about we job share?’ but they weren’t terribly keen. The idea of job sharing the head of a company in Australia isn’t seen very often, even today.”

Again, Diana did what hadn’t been done before – “we did it and it allowed me to have chemo and radiotherapy, and then more chemo. I took on some of the more strategic things within Apple and Ben (the job sharer) took on a lot of the day to day stuff. We made it work – in fact, it worked really, really well.”

During that period Diana began to reassess her life.

“You start to really think about what’s valuable and what’s not. So when I finished my treatment in the middle of 2001 I asked myself ‘do I really want to continue in that role?’. I thought about the fact I’d been Managing Director of Apple in Australia for four years, and what difference would it make if I remained for six years?

“The breast cancer issue played a part: ‘what if it came back?’. So it was a head decision, a very logical decision to quit.”

Diana stayed on for three months doing work for the company in Asia, which she enjoyed, and then left. “I had no idea what I would do,” Diana recalls.

The next step after not knowing what you don’t know is to know what you don’t know. After twenty years at Apple, and even before that, Diana knew there were limits being placed on women. She knew there was a glass ceiling.

Diana knew she was different to most girls back when she was in high school: “at North Sydney Girls all the smart women did languages but they weren’t my strength.”

Her strengths were maths and science, so it wasn’t until the last two years of high school that she started to thrive, and when she pursued those strengths at university it was the first time she noticed a disparity in the ratio between men and women.

“There were lots of young men around and because I was doing science a lot of my friends were in engineering.”

That’s where she met her husband; they dated from her second year in university, “and then we got married, as people of my ilk did, the year after I finished university.”

She followed her husband to America and that’s where the Diana Ryall story really takes off.

Diana wryly looks back at that time; “I wanted to teach but they wouldn’t let me because I wasn’t a US citizen. In fact, the interview took a bad turn when they asked if I could teach the language of my country. I’m Australian – they had no idea I spoke English as my first language!”

Stunned, angry and annoyed, Diana continued her search, and on the strength of her maths and science background stumbled into a job at Penn State University writing computer-aided learning for schools, despite having no background in computers.

Diana was one of three women in an eleven-person team. “They were interested in me because of my mathematics and said ‘we’ll give you a month and if you get the hang of it you can keep the job’, she adds.

“That was the first time I was really motivated to learn quickly. It set my personal vision of how computers were going to change the way we lived. I feel privileged to have been on the beginning of that wave.”

The women’s liberation movement was gaining momentum then. ‘I Am Woman’ was blasting out of radios and Germaine Greer was the public face of the feminist movement, but Diana was almost oblivious to it.

In retrospect, “I guess I just saw that because I studied maths and science, I was one of the very small cohort of women in that field. It was the same at Penn State, so I’d always expected to be in the minority rather than stepping back and saying ‘well, why don’t we have more women here?’”

In hindsight, Diana did notice when the executive team “got a second woman around the table it really changed the dynamics. But to be honest, during that stage of my career I didn’t reflect on gender diversity that much.”

Leaving Apple was the line in the sand for Diana, and then it really was time to ask ‘why aren’t there more women here?’

At the time Diana was “searching for something and talking to a lot of people. Many young women who had come through university were finding the workplace challenging and I thought ‘I’d learnt a lot during that time at Apple about being the only woman.’”

That was the launching pad for Xplore for Success. Diana now knew what she didn’t know, and it was time to pass on that knowledge.

“I knew how to present things, how to get your points across, so I booked a room at the YWCA in Sydney and held an information evening.

“I carried in bottles of wine, cheese and biscuits and sent out emails to friends and young people I knew. I got thirty-five people into that room and twenty-four of them expressed an interest in being involved in a small group to be mentored in a safe and secure environment.”

That was back in 2002 and “at the time we were the only business focused solely on working with businesswomen. Having found a niche, I’ve continued to provide a growing range of services to support women.

“Those first two programmes I ran myself and then over the last fifteen years we’ve grown and now have a team of twenty around the country. We’ve had over fifteen thousand women through the programmes in that time.”

Xplore for Success became Diana’s vehicle to share what she discovered she didn’t know, and now she’s taking it even further.

As she comments, “You can encourage women to put their hands up, or as Sheryl Sandberg said in her book ‘Lean In’ you can encourage them to lean in, but if nobody above is listening it may still be very difficult to get the opportunity.

“So now we’re doing a lot of work with senior leaders to help them understand the importance of diverse views and diverse members in a team.”

Diana now knows firsthand that diversity matters, and “now we’re seeing an appetite in the marketplace for senior leaders to better understand what they can do differently.

“Having people around the table who look the same, think the same and bring the same background, you are likely to have the same outcomes. Managing diverse teams is more challenging for the leader but I believe it can bring innovation and initiative that we need in organisations in Australia to be the best we can be.”

Diana was herself a challenge for one of her leaders while she was still working in the education market at Apple. It was in the early nineties and Apple was experiencing a difficult period when the boss called her into his office.

Steve Vamos was the then Managing Director, “and I still have a vivid memory of walking into his office, being asked to sit down and then being told; ‘Diana, you do realise half the staff are scared stiff of you, don’t you?’ I said ‘what do you mean? I’m five-foot-nothing, I’m friendly, I’m nice’.

“When I reflected on that and got some feedback, it turned out my own team understood me and they knew I was direct, but others weren’t sure how to respond.

“Apparently I would say something like ‘how are you going with that project?’ and their response would be something like, ‘oh! she’s heard about this project and thinks it’s not going well.’”

Diana then learnt how to change her approach in order to be less threatening. “I would rephrase the question along the lines, ‘I’m talking to the States tomorrow, your project is very important, can you give me a two-minute update?’ which totally changed the language and if Steve had not given me that feedback I probably would have continued in the same style.

“It was a great gift to me from a leader who didn’t shy away from a challenge.”

There have been other mentors along the journey like Diane Grady AM and Jillian Broadbent AO, both of whom were members with Diana at Chief Executive Women. “Diane has a similar style to me and has worked in a range of different roles and together with Jillian, the three of us talked a lot about gender equality and how we could facilitate change.”

Currently, “because I’m also really interested in the racism debate, my mentors are younger than me; people who’ve experienced racism – and they give me insights into their lives. Although I can’t go into that space – I’ll always be white – it does allow me to better understand their situation and experiences.”

In summary, Diana adds, “having a range of mentors helps you develop your understanding of others and your own personal style.”

There’s another driving force in her life now: her grandchildren.

Diana has six grandchildren and five of them are young women. Focusing on their future has given Diana “additional momentum to ensure our workplaces simply have to be more inclusive and more diverse by the time they’re looking for work.

“Ideally they will be paid equally, they’ll be promoted equally, they’ll have opportunities equally. That’s very, very important to me.”

Knowledge, not only of the academic kind, will be Diana’s legacy to her grandchildren.

ADVICE

The first thing Diana would say to anyone starting a business is “to think about what you want to achieve. Of course you want to make money, but you have to have a vision, a reason for starting your business.

“My reason for starting Xplore for Success was to make more women more successful in the workplace, so I had a vision, a reason to keep going.”

Then Diana reverts to her Apple era and suggests you should develop Version 1.0 of your business.

This became obvious when Diana was looking after the developer community at Apple. “The developers would keep developing. ‘I’m just going to add this, I’m just going to add that’ but they needed to launch Version 1.0 so they could start a revenue stream, and that was often quite challenging.

“You need people to say ‘it would be so much better if you did this’. So I would say to anyone starting a business, think about what Version 1.0 looks like and get it out in a short time frame and then look at how you can enhance that product or service.”

Other valuable advice is to “of course, watch the cash flow and don’t work for too long for nothing. I see a number women who, even some years after starting their business, are saying ‘I just pour all the money back into the business’, but no, you need to be taking money out as well.”