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.
Nadya also appreciated an opportunity for corporate experience when a long-term client, a 75,000-employee mining and metals company, ENRC PLC, invited her 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.
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-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 in Austria, Slovenia and the US. Over 100,000+ professionals saw 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.
283: Nadya Zhexembayeva, part 2: The Reinvention Guru
Nadya indulged me in taking this podcast in new directions after listeners said they’d like to hear more unscripted conversation for a more human conversation.
Before starting recording, we talked about the difference between celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and the 50th anniversary of walking on the moon. You’ll hear that we spoke and got along swimmingly for a while.
Then we began misunderstanding each other for about half the conversation, talking past each other. It wasn’t my intent, but conversations like it happen all the time. Sometimes I’m in them, others I hear others get stuck in them.
I don’t know if you’ll find it entertaining, tragic, or what. It was certainly frustrating in the moment, but Nadya and I were doing this not to annoy but to understand.
By the end, we didn’t wrap everything up, but I think we came out okay. Before posting I asked if she was okay with it and she responded with an enthusiastic yet.
So by popular demand, you get to hear how conversations on the environment often go, even after years of practice, even between people who overwhelmingly agree with each other.
I think she genuinely meant it about recognizing the process of coming to understanding, which she differentiates from agreement, necessitates the kind of conversation we had. I’m realizing I have to speak accurately every time, though I recognize that even then, people misunderstand each other.
In any case, amid our talk about mines and litter, she took her challenge seriously and didn’t give up on it. On the contrary, she added to it, and, as I heard, it augmented the rest of her life.
189: Nadya Zhexembayeva, part 1: Sustainability is not enough
Nadya and I mostly talk about business and sustainability. She describes what she saw growing up in the dissolution of Kazakhstan, where she saw the opposite of sustainability.
I can’t describe what she saw, but you’ll hear the craziness of collusion, economic collapse, political collapse, and so on.
She talks about how business works best when sustainable. I tend to agree. Tangential to what Nadya and I covered, when companies influence government to distort a market — say with subsidies for fossil fuels, paying for a military to maintain supply lines that everyone pays for, roads that I agree I benefit from but don’t use nearly as much as others yet I pay for, and farm subsidies for meat, I could go on — unsustainable companies can profit.
So companies that pollute but the public pays to clean up, or for other reasons we don’t accurately account for their costs, can sustain themselves profitably while not have a sustainable business model.
As a matter of accurate accounting, a prerequisite for capitalism, I support taxing pollution and extraction. I can’t believe people who support capitalism aren’t clamoring for these taxes, while relieving taxes in other places — I’m not saying more taxes: accurate taxes.
Anyway, Nadya loves business, as she describes and she cares about environmental sustainability.
We talk about this sort of thing: accurately, mutually beneficially, creating value.
I’m glad she values meaning and how we can create it for each other in the style of Victor Frankl. She talks about how we treat sustainability as a chore. It’s not enough.
She talks about he we need to create meaning in everything, certainly our environmental action. I agree. That’s why I name this the Leadership and Environment podcast, where leadership means involving meaning, value, purpose, passion, joy — missing from the conversation, crowded out by coercion, compliance, doom, and gloom.