Nadya Zhexembayeva
Called ‘The Reinvention Guru’ (In Ventures magazine) and ‘The Queen of Reinvention’ (TEDx Navasink), Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva is a business owner, educator, speaker and author — specializing in reinvention.
As a business owner, Nadya oversees 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.
As an educator, Nadya personally contributed to the development of nearly 5,000 executives from over 60 countries and 20 industries via small group executive education sessions, custom-made seminars, and long-term corporate reinvention projects.
She 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 (France) 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 in Austria, Slovenia and the US.
Nadya is a member of the Resourcefulness Advisory Board at OMV, an oil and gas company, 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 as the President 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 55 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 Collegeand 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.