Katzenbach Center Community of Practice Biographies
DeAnne Aguirre is a partner at Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting business, and the head of US and Mexico strategy consulting and the global leader of the Katzenbach Center. Based in San Diego, she has over twenty-seven years of client service experience. She has written extensively on the topics of organizational culture, teaming, leadership, and talent strategy, and her most recent coauthored research and articles include “10 Principles of Leading Change Management” and “Culture and the Chief Executive.” DeAnne has a passion for how all industry systems—and health-care systems in particular—require a delicate balance between the individual and the collective and how bold symbolic acts of leaders can make all the difference.
Reid Carpenter is a director at PwC and the US leader for the Katzenbach Center Global Leadership Team, based in New York City. She has fourteen years of experience working with clients and is coauthor of “How to Unlock the Full Potential of Diverse Teams” and the author of “How to Find and Engage Authentic Informal Leaders.” She considers herself a natural, lifetime observer of groups—their norms, patterns, and values—and appreciates how the center’s work allows her to educate others in this practice and to help organizations make daily life and work more meaningful for people.
Varya Davidson is a partner at PwC’s Strategy& and represents Asia-Pacific on the Katzenbach Center Global Leadership Team. She has worked primarily in the energy, utilities, and resource sectors globally. She has been consulting for over twenty-two years. Varya’s passion is working proactively with organizational cultures to unlock enterprise value and accelerate change. She believes boards and executive teams must inform their strategic choices with cultural insights to truly harness an organization’s potential. Varya has authored multiple articles and reports including “How Starbucks’s Culture Brings Its Strategy to Life” in Harvard Business Review and the 17th Annual CEO Succession Study: Australian Boards Leading the Way on CEO Succession.
Diana Dimitrova is a member of the global leadership team of the Katzenbach Center and a Munich-based director with PwC’s Strategy&. With a master’s in economics and doctorate in psychology, Diana has a deep passion for advancing leadership consciousness toward more sustainability, diversity, mindfulness, and intrapreneurship. Diana has more than ten years’ experience consulting with clients on their transformation journeys, with a special focus on digital, and has coauthored articles such as “Building a Digital Culture” and “The Rise of Wellcare.”
Kate Dugan is a PwC manager and former Katzenbach Center fellow on a mission to rid the world of bad management. In her role in the Katzenbach Center, Kate aspires to develop and inspire the next generation of emotionally agile leaders. She is the author of “Teaming with Young Guns” and “What the Ironman Taught Me about Communicating Goals” and coauthor of “Virtually Alone: Real Ways to Connect Remote Teams,” all in strategy+business. Kate enjoys learning about psychology and economics, which fuels her quest to improve human performance and effect large-scale behavior change. In her spare time, Kate trains for endurance sports, coaches a triathlon team, and advocates against animal cruelty.
Jaime Estupiñán is a New York–based partner at PwC’s Strategy& serving clients in health care and across industries in strategy and operating model transformation. He has supported health clients in creating sustainable, consumer-focused models impacting health care for millions of consumers and writes frequently on this topic. An engineer by training, he did his doctorate research in design of orthopedic implants at the Cornell Hospital for Special Surgery Program in Biomechanics. Jaime cares deeply about elegant approaches to complex problems and focuses on pragmatic, multicompetency solutions to align organizations to strategy. He is a native of Colombia and grew up in Brazil and has supported clients in Latin America and globally.
Amanda Evison is a director at PwC’s Strategy&, a member of the Katzenbach Center Global Leadership Team, and a former Katzenbach Center fellow. She has more than ten years of experience helping clients achieve organizational coherence—the alignment of strategy, operating model, and culture needed to deliver top performance. She has a passion for new ideas that radically challenge the status quo and harness the energy of the organization to drive behavior change.
Kristy Hull is a director at PwC’s Strategy& and a member of the Katzenbach Center Global Leadership Team. Based in Washington, DC, she has more than twenty years of experience working with clients and is the author or coauthor of “Getting to the Critical Few Behaviors That Can Drive Cultural Change,” “Use Culture to Pave the Way for Change,” and other articles. She loves to help clients figure out how to revitalize their organizational culture to both accelerate their strategy and inspire their people to excel.
Michelle Kam is an Australian-based partner at PwC’s Strategy&. She has a doctorate in psychology and is passionate about leveraging her understanding of human behavior to provide clients with strategies to realize potential through people. Her primary focus has been on leading whole-organization transformations, defining the operating model, culture, critical capabilities, people, and performance required to support strategic intent. She has diverse experience across sectors, including education, financial services, retail and consumer goods, the public sector, airlines, media, utilities, and health care.
Per-Ola Karlsson is a Dubai-based partner with Strategy&. He has more than thirty years of consulting experience, including leadership experience such as serving as a board of directors member for Booz & Company and as leader of that firm’s European business and global people and organization strategy business. He was a founding member of the Katzenbach Center and has been active in it ever since. Relevant published works include “The Value of Getting CEO Succession Right,” A Culture of Success: Using Culture for World-Class Results in GCC Companies, and “Are CEOs Less Ethical Than in the Past?”
Paolo Morley-Fletcher is a coleader for the Katzenbach Center in Europe, part of the Global Leadership Team, and a director with PwC’s Strategy&. As both a consultant and an executive coach, he has spent more than fifteen years advising leaders and organizations internationally on leadership strategy, culture evolution, and transformational change. Paolo believes today’s world demands a shift in leadership consciousness and organizational culture, wherein leaders focus inward. Paolo’s written work includes “Transforming Leadership: How to Reduce Fear, Create from Uncertainty, and Make a Difference in the World.”
Carolin Oelschlegel, one of the longest-standing core team members of the Katzenbach Center, is a director at PwC’s Strategy& in San Francisco. She believes that companies that constantly evolve and refine their corporate culture will outgrow their competitors and deliver market-leading shareholder returns. Carolin has more than fifteen years of experience in management consulting with global organizations. She coauthored “10 Principles of Organizational Culture” with Jon Katzenbach and James Thomas, which has become one of the most read articles ever in the magazine strategy+business. Carolin recently led the Katzenbach Center’s comprehensive Global Culture Survey 2018.
Frédéric Pirker is a Munich-based partner with PwC’s Strategy&. Frédéric has more than fifteen years of consulting experience and leads the organization strategy practice in Europe. He is a member of the Katzenbach Center Global Leadership Team and coleads the center’s European activities. He focuses on organizational transformation and buildup, including operating model review, organizational design, culture evolution, capability development, and implementation. Frédéric serves clients in the areas of consumer and retail, industrial products, health, telecommunications, and automotive.
Roger Rabbat is a Beirut-based director with PwC’s Strategy& and a member of the Katzenbach Center global leadership team. He has over ten years of experience in management consulting and three years of experience in the construction industry. Roger has led a number of culture change and change management programs in the Gulf Cooperation Council and through this experience has built a deep belief that such programs lie at the heart of transformation efforts happening across industries and sectors, and throughout the region overall.
Barry Vorster is a South Africa–based partner at PwC. He has more than twenty-five years of consulting experience and has been enmeshed in helping organizations within the ambit of human resources, organizational culture, HR technology, learning, and the future of work. His passion is organizational learning, and he is fascinated by the interplay among organizational learning, technology, and large-scale behavior change. He enjoys the challenge of supporting organizations to act their way into new ways of thinking and behaving and is currently working on an article on the culture element of technology transformations.
Alice Zhou is a manager at PwC, a former Katzenbach Center fellow, and a member of the Katzenbach Center core team. She is based in Philadelphia and has ten years of client experience. She believes strongly that culture, just like strategy and operating models, involves deliberate trade-offs and that an all-purpose “ideal culture” does not exist. Alice’s published works include “Improving Company Culture Is Not about Providing Free Snacks” and “How to Harness Employees’ Emotional Energy.”