Reinvent Yourself and Your Company, Every 3.5 Years

Part of the Innovate New Albany TIGER Talks Series: Our presenter is Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva, global business leader, educator, speaker, and author — specializing in reinvention. Ask any manager on Planet Earth, ‘What is your key challenge?’ and among many different responses one will be repeated with remarkable consistency: 'Staying afloat.' This answer is one you’ve heard before: We must consistently remake who we are, what we offer, and how we deliver our offerings to the world. Putting it simply, we must reinvent. But what you may not have heard before is this: Today, the frequency with which our reinvention must take place is staggering. Essentially, each company must become a new company every 3.5 years. Called ‘The Reinvention Guru’ (In Ventures magazine) and ‘The Queen of Reinvention’ (TEDx Navasink), Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva leads a group of companies active in real estate, investment, and consulting. As a consultant, Nadya has helped such organizations as The Coca-Cola Company, ENRC PLC, IBM, CISCO, Erste Bank, Henkel, Knauf Insulation, Vienna Insurance Group and many others to reinvent their products, processes, and leadership practices. Nadya further built her skills through a corporate leadership opportunity with a long-term client, ENRC PLC, a 75,000-employee mining and metals company. ENC invited Nadya to join the executive suite to curate business transformation efforts. From 2013 to 2016, Nadya oversaw all aspects of the transformation as the company went from public to private and from a financial to a hands-on operational holding under the new brand, ERG. She continues to support the Group in an advisory role. As an educator, Nadya personally contributed to the development of nearly 5,000 executives from over 60 countries and 20 industries teaching and developing via small group executive education sessions, custom-made seminars, and long-term corporate reinvention projects. Nadya has served as the Coca-Cola Chaired Professor of Sustainable Development at IEDC- Bled School of Management, an executive education center based in the Slovene Alps, where she continues to teach courses in leadership, strategy, change management, design thinking, and sustainability. In addition to IEDC, Nadya has taught in other business schools, including CEDEP-INSEAD (France), Case Western Reserve (USA), and IPADE Business School (Mexico). As a speaker, Nadya has shared her insights with audiences worldwide through keynotes, panel presentations, and workshops. She has delivered three TEDx talks, one each in Austria, Slovenia and the US. Over 100,000+ professionals have seen Nadya speak publicly. Nadya is a member of the Resourcefulness Advisory Board at OMV, an oil and gas company, a member of the Academic Council at CEDEP-INSEAD, as well as a member of the Advisory Board of Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. She also serves on the Board of Challenge:Future, a global student think-DO-tank and innovation competition that unites 35,000 members from 242 countries and territories. As an author, Nadya has written two books (“Embedded Sustainability: The Next Big Competitive Advantage” in 2011 and “Overfished Ocean Strategy: Powering Up Innovation for a Resource-Deprived World” in 2014) and contributed to five others. In an effort to reinvent corporate approaches to sustainability strategy, Nadya and her co-author Chris Laszlo coined the concept ‘embedded sustainability’, which was virtually non-existent when they started in 2009. Today, it produces 25+ million Google search results and has become a staple for corporate sustainability efforts. Nadya received her BA in management and BA in psychology from Hartwick College and her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University. A daughter of Kazakhstan, Nadya and her family split their life between the US and Eurasia. Connect with Nadya on Twitter @NadyaZhexembay and learn more from her YouTube channel, 'Chief Reinvention Officer.'