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 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), ǿմý (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 have seen Nadya speak publicly.
As an author, Nadya has written four books (“Embedded Sustainability: The Next Big Competitive Advantage” in 2011, “Overfished Ocean Strategy: Powering Up Innovation for a Resource-Deprived World” in 2014, "Titanic Syndrome: Why Companies Fail and How To Reinvent Your Way Out of Any Business Disaster" in 2018, and "The Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook: How to Thrive in Chaos in 2020) and contributed to six others, including David Cooperrider's latest volume, "The Business of Building a Better World" in 2021. 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 ǿմý.
A daughter of Kazakhstan, Nadya and her family split their life between the U.S. and Eurasia.