Umbrex is pleased to welcome Steve Rooks.  Steve Rooks has spent the last 25 years driving value creation across many different industries as a private equity portfolio advisor to TorQuest Partners, AMP Capital, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP), Sun Capital and TPG Capital, an executive at Avaya and Bell Canada, and a management consultant at Bain & Company.  His most recent PE portfolio efforts were for TorQuest Partners and AMP Capital to lead value creation in their respective North American…

  With COVID-19 still plaguing the globe and the threat of a second wave looming, Kaihan Krippendorff has customized a strategy to address, prepare for, and build a strategy for the future. We are dealing with unprecedented change invoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. What we need more than ever is a sense of hope. So, we’ve taken The Outthinker Process – a strategic process that helps business leaders step outside of conventional thinking to redesign their business models and strategies…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Rijul Takkar. Rijul Takkar is a Strategy and Operations Consultant specialising in the Metals and Mining sector. He worked with a boutique consulting firm, The Smart Cube, for four years where he led the business transformation programme for the largest steelmaker in the UK. He has extensive experience in setting up transformation offices, driving operations excellence and managing change in large-scale manufacturing organisations. He also worked as a Specialist Consultant with BCG in their Industrial…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Mike Mortensen with Tandem Analytics. Mike has advised business leaders at the intersection of strategy and technology for more than a decade. His experience in business transformation comes from three perspectives: business strategy at McKinsey & Company, machine learning implementation at IBM, and as a business executive responsible for growth at a global conglomerate. Prior to Tandem Analytics, Mike led teams of business consultants and data scientists to support IBM clients in developing analytics and…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Igor Buchatskiy.  Igor is a Managing Partner of BGlobal Capital. Prior to joining BGlobal, Igor has run large farming companies in all the major sectors of agriculture – animal husbandry, row crops and sugar production – and worked as a consultant specializing in Strategy, Operational Improvement and Digital Innovation for McKinsey & Co in Brazil and for Bain & Company in CIS. Igor has also co-founded an FMCG company that today is the leading producer…

  Luiz Zorzella takes an adventurous look at two choices innovation-based businesses may or may not choose to pursue to illustrate how emotion is an underlying driver of innovation.  Companies that decide to compete on innovation-based businesses have 2 potential paths to choose from: with or without “emotion”. Years ago, my wife and I traveled to the NorthEast of Brazil. There, we went on a tour on the sand dunes on a buggy. Fifteen minutes into the tour, I was…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Elias Boustani. Elias is a Strategy Consultant with 13 years of experience. He has led the design and implementation of Tech entrepreneurship programs for the World Bank, General Electric, the American University of Beirut (AUB), Expo 2020 Dubai, MCIT KSA, and Beirut Digital District among others. Prior to that, Elias was a Senior Associate for Strategy& (previously booz&co) working in the Telecom practice on Corporate strategy, Marketing strategy, Demand analytics, Business Planning, Human Capital and…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Brenna Rauw with Vulpine Strategies.  Brendan Rauw was a project leader at BCG in the private equity and healthcare practices, and spent ten years after BCG leading technology commercialization for universities.  Brendan has particular expertise in intellectual property, licensing, and entrepreneurship in the life sciences. Brendan lives in Portland, OR, advising private equity investors and pre-revenue life science companies across the country on strategy, partnering, and market assessment.  Brendan is particularly interested in healthcare and…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Jeff Boschwitz with JSB Consulting. Dr. Jeff Boschwitz has spent the last four years as an independent consultant focused on growth/new product and operations strategy for healthcare companies. Prior to that Jeff was COO of Personal Genome Diagnostics, EVP of Operations and Corporate Development at PLUS Diagnostics, VP Sales and Marketing for Orchid Cellmark and Director of Marketing Strategy and Analysis for Quest Diagnostics. Prior to going to industry, Jeff spent 10 years in consulting,…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Mika Malin. Mika has broad experience in line management and business development roles, as a senior executive and as a management consultant.  He’s tackled complex board level as well as factory floor level business problems as a consultant at the BCG, in a boutique consulting firm and as an independent consultant. Mika has a track record of successfully leading businesses and people with a P&L responsibility, as well as planning and executing strategy and M&A…

  During times of crises leaders must make the tough decisions, but choosing the right way to go is not always clear cut. Zaheera Soomar identifies three practical approaches to serve as guidelines for ethical decision-making. During a recent conversation with a senior executive, she expressed a sentiment that many of us share: “When the pandemic has passed, I want to be able to say that, at the hardest of times, I did my best to do the right thing”….

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Swan Sit.  wan Sit is an independent consultant specializing in digital, marketing and strategy. Having spent the past decade of her career accelerating digital into legacy companies, she held two key roles as a Vice President at Nike — overseeing Global Digital Marketing during the Emmy-winning “Dream Crazy” campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, and running Digital Operations, Product, Supply Chain and Service for a $2B ecommerce business during the Air Jordan 11 Concord launch, the largest…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome George Nahra with GZN Consulting.  George spent four years in the Chicago office of McKinsey, in the retail and sales & marketing practices, serving predominantly retailers and other consumer-facing clients. After leaving McKinsey, he spent several years as a Senior Management Associate at Bridgewater Associates. He then returned to retail, re-joining Abercrombie & Fitch (where he started his career several years earlier) and building the company’s first Strategic Planning function. He then move to Chico’s FAS, a…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Brett Pentz. Brett has 12+ years of management consulting and client services experience, delivering a range of strategy engagements for corporate, private equity, and public sector clients across industry, mostly focused in Healthcare and Technology. Brett’s management consulting work spans formative skills and credentials developed at Bain & Company, followed by contributions to position Teneo’s management consulting capabilities to reflect its brand as the global CEO advisory firm. Brett also possesses strong implementation and value…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Uma Sethi. Uma was a Founding member and Principal at BCG Digital Ventures, where she led multi-disciplinary teams to innovate and launch new startups, digital products or experiences. Prior to that, she was at McKinsey for nearly 10 years. She served as the America’s Retail Practice Manager for 4 years and the remainder as a classic strategy consultant. Uma was also a Founding Member of globalgiving.com. Uma currently lives in Redondo Beach, California with her…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Brendan Kelly.  Brendan Kelly has more than 15 years of professional experience across multiple sectors and industries including public affairs, top-tier consulting, and financial services. Following an early career as a lobbyist for the Irish financial service industry, he joined the Dublin/London office of McKinsey in 2010 where he worked primarily on strategy and operations for clients in the banking and insurance sectors. On leaving McKinsey in 2014 he worked initially as an independent consultant…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Rezzan A Kose. Rezzan is an operations, organizational design, and strategy leader and the founder of Ares, a boutique advisory and consulting firm. Before starting her own practice, Rezzan was the business product owner of an AI-based technology platform at Citadel, a global hedge fund. Prior to that, Rezzan was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Co. focusing primarily on business transformation, process redesign and operations across different sectors including financial services, insurance and pharmaceuticals….

  Luiz Zorzella shares a survival guide to Clay Christensen’s opus, including impressions, recommendations, and thoughts on how business leaders can use his ideas to drive success, growth and transformation. If you work with innovation and strategy and are responsible for the future of your business, you probably read Clayton Christensen’s 2 most famous opi: The Innovator’s Dilemma and Competing Against Luck (aka the “Jobs To Be Done” book).  If you have not, do it and you will improve your…

  Gaelle Lamotte’s company blog identifies the issues that can stop the execution of strategies and provides a framework to drive alignment and focus.  How often do you win with your strategy? Strategy development is useful for defining long-term goals. A good strategy is only as good as the capability to implement it and how well it delivers the desired outcome. Various research concludes: Organizations on average realize only 50 – 63% of the financial performance promised by their strategies….

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Deepak Batra.  Deepak was at Bain for 6 years, predominantly based out of India working on global projects, and had an opportunity to work out Amsterdam and Boston. While his work was sector agnostic, Deepak specialized “functionally” in Private Equity due diligence. Post his consulting stint, Deepak worked with OLX, India’s leading online classified platform (Craigslist counterpart) in several roles ranging from Analytics, Strategy to General Management. He is based out of New Delhi, India, working as…

An evergreen post from Gaelle Lamotte to kickoff 2020 and help you prepare for what lies ahead.  In a world of disruptive businesses, overwhelming information and relentless change, companies have to master the art of strategy execution to be agile enough to capitalize on growth opportunities. Excellence in execution is what makes the difference between good strategies and success in the marketplace for your customers, partners and employees, and ultimately investors and shareholders.   Points covered include: -Understanding the organization’s…

Discover how Amazon’s battle with Netflix is teaching us to rethink competition and question how business should be defined in this article from Stephen Wunker’s company blog. For many years now we’ve seen the dangers of defining your business too narrowly. Think about Borders, which pioneered the book megastore model. Rather than using the Internet’s rise to consider how new technologies or business models could allow it to better satisfy customers’ jobs to be done, it defined itself as a…

Three key points in ninety seconds from Amanda Setili on how to avoid strategy execution melt down.Strategy execution is where everything goes haywire.   We can always come up with a good strategy, a good plan for what we want to do, but when the rubber meets the road and you’re actually implementing, that’s where you find out all the things that you maybe didn’t plan for. Frankly, it’s impossible to anticipate everything. One of the keys to effective strategy…