Nadya Zhexembayeva, PhD

Nadya Zhexembayeva, PhD is a business owner, educator, speaker and author—specializing in reinvention.

Zhexembayeva oversees a group of companies active in real estate, investment, and consulting. As a consultant, she 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.

Zhexembayeva has 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).

Zhexembayeva 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.

Zhexembayeva 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 the Weatherhead School of Management at 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.

Zhexembayeva is the author of Embedded Sustainability: The Next Big Competitive Advantage and Overfished Ocean Strategy: Powering Up Innovation for a Resource-Deprived World and contributor to five other books. In an effort to reinvent corporate approaches to sustainability strategy, Zhexembayeva and her co-author Chris Laszlo, PhD, professor of organizational behavior, 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.

Zhexembayeva received her BA in management and BA in psychology from Hartwick College and her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Weatherhead.

A daughter of Kazakhstan, Zhexembayeva and her family split their life between the US and Eurasia.