Lorna McPherson builds things in places most people say can’t be done. As founding CEO of PNG Chiefs, she is launching the National Rugby League’s 19th franchise and the first based outside Australia and New Zealand, which takes the field in 2028 at the Santos National Football Stadium in Port Moresby. The club sits at the heart of the Australia–PNG relationship: it is the only NRL club whose launch drew PNG’s Prime Minister, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Pat Conroy and five other ministers. She is building a professional sports club from nothing in one of the world’s most complex operating environments: recruiting players, securing partners, developing facilities and navigating government, all under international scrutiny. She is also the only female CEO in the NRL, and PNG Chiefs is the only club in the competition led by both a female chair and a female CEO.
She came to that role after 16 years in Papua New Guinea with Digicel Pacific, as Senior Vice President she led the rollout of mobile towers into rural PNG, connecting communities that had never had a phone signal, through to the company’s sale to Telstra for US$1.85 billion. Through the Digicel Foundation she oversaw the construction of more than 600 classrooms and health clinics across the country, and she spent 16 years growing elite rugby league in PNG, including the Digicel ExxonMobil Cup and the women’s Santos Cup.
Lorna sits on the boards of PNG Power Limited, the Port Moresby General Hospital and the PNG Rugby Football League, and chairs Port Moresby Nature Park, which welcomes more than 45,000 children a year. Her career has taken her from Saudi Arabia to the Pacific. She writes a widely read series of blunt LinkedIn posts on the subjects PNG prefers not to discuss.
She speaks plainly about what it actually takes to deliver: in boardrooms that don’t function, in markets where the rules change, and in sport, where the scoreboard doesn’t care about your excuses.
Talking Points
From Nothing to Kick-off: How PNG Chiefs is building a professional sports franchise where no playbook exists
In 2028 PNG Chiefs becomes the first NRL club based outside Australia and New Zealand. Lorna is building it from zero: no stadium operations, no player pathway, no commercial base, no precedent. She takes audiences inside the decisions that matter when you start with nothing: who you hire first, which partners you refuse, how you hold a line with government and the governing body at the same time, and what you do when the plan meets Port Moresby. Honest, specific and occasionally uncomfortable.From Nothing to Kick-off: How PNG Chiefs is building a professional sports franchise where no playbook exists
Takeaway: A practical framework for leading a start-up at scale under public scrutiny, and the discipline to say no early.
Delivering Where There Is Nothing: Towers, classrooms, clinics and what frontier markets teach you about execution
Lorna spent 16 years at Digicel Pacific putting mobile towers into villages with no roads and building more than 600 classrooms and clinics across Papua New Guinea. None of it worked the way the business case said it would. This talk is about execution in environments where supply chains break, land is contested, weather wins and the people you depend on have their own priorities. It is about getting the thing built anyway, and what that demands of a leader’s judgement, patience and nerve.Delivering Where There Is Nothing: Towers, classrooms, clinics and what frontier markets teach you about execution
Takeaway: How to plan for failure points, build trust with communities you don’t come from, and keep delivering when the conditions never improve
The Board That Doesn’t Work: What a director actually does when governance fails
Lorna sits on the boards of a national power utility, a public hospital, a national sporting body and a conservation park, each with its own version of the same problem: decisions that don’tThe Board That Doesn’t Work: What a director actually does when governance fails
get made, actions that don’t get done, management that answers with silence. She speaks plainly about the director’s job in that moment: how to ask the question nobody wants, when to escalate, how to hold executives to account without becoming the executive, and what to do when the shareholder is the government. Drawn from live experience, not theory.
Takeaway: A working toolkit for directors and senior leaders who have to make a dysfunctional board or institution function.
Sport as Diplomacy: What a rugby league club means for Australia, PNG and the Pacific
When PNG Chiefs launched, it drew PNG’s Prime Minister, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Pat Conroy and five other ministers. No other NRL club can say that. In a region where influence is contested, a football team has become a statement about who PNG’s partners are and what that partnership delivers. Lorna speaks from inside that project about what happens when sport carries national and regional expectations: serving two governments without becoming a political instrument, keeping a commercial business commercial, and making sure the benefits reach the people of PNG rather than stopping at the launch photos.Sport as Diplomacy: What a rugby league club means for Australia, PNG and the Pacific
Takeaway: How soft power actually gets built, and what leaders in sport, business and government need to get right when a project matters well beyond its own balance sheet.
