IBISWorld founder Phil Ruthven: Australia’s first and most influential ‘futurologist’

Phil Ruthven was one of the great and indeed significant personalities of business in Australia through the last quarter of the 20th century.

Phil Ruthven, who has died at the age of 82, was immensely influential especially among small and medium-sized businesses.

Phil Ruthven was one of the great and indeed significant personalities of business in Australia through the last quarter of the 20th century.

In a word, he was our first, and he remained our most influential ‘futurologist’.

He perfected the art and indeed the science of collating a mind-boggling amount of data about the economy and about business and industry – both back in time, to indeed the early 19th century, and also right across the contemporary business landscape.

He would ‘mine’ the data to both explain ‘the present’ – for the economy, for individual industries, and indeed for individual businesses; and most usefully, to project where ‘things’ were likely to head, across those three horizons, often 20 and 30 years into the future.

Most impressively, in the 100 or so presentations he would give every year at his peak through the 1980s and 1990s, his delivery was crystal clear, highly entertaining, and reassuringly calming. I for one never heard him raise his voice.

His official obituary describes him as “forecaster, entrepreneur and raconteur”. I would add: exactly.

He was immensely influential especially among small and medium-sized businesses, giving them critical information about both their industries and the broader economy that unlike the big end of town they couldn’t possibly devote resources to trying to do themselves.

The tangible outcome of his life’s work was the almost globally unique industry information giant, IBISWorld, with its encyclopaedic historical and contemporary economic and industry data base – which he’d started as a one-man business consulting operation in 1971.

Phil passed away aged 82.