Odin Muhlenbein shares a report he co-authored with Florian Rutsch, Katharina Wagner, and Paul Ziesche on how governments can unlock the potential of social entrepreneurs for the common good.  One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seem further out of reach, it is clear that the need to find, fund and support transformative solutions for the challenges we are facing has grown more urgent. In January 2020, Ashoka and…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Robert K Armstrong with Epicural.  Bob Armstrong has 15+ years experience consulting to startups, DoD, PE firms, established healthcare market leaders, state and federal government, and Fortune 500 companies. He provides corporate outreach for, and is executive director of the Sentara Center for Simulation and Immersive Learning at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia. Prior to EVMS, Bob was an embedded DoD consultant to DoD customers, where he helped restructure Navy fleet synthetic training and…

Steven Koltai shares an article that explores the reasoning behind President Biden’s nominee for USAID (United States Agency for International Development) administrator. When a new president taps a former U.N. ambassador, National Security Council member, and Pulitzer Prize winner to lead a battered, uncelebrated agency, something big is expected. With all due respect to her 18 predecessors, Samantha Power, President Biden’s nominee for USAID administrator, is by far the most high-profile executive to ever head America’s international development agency.  What…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Waldemar Maj with Metropolitan Capital Solutions. Waldemar is a Founding Partner of Metropolitan Capital Solutions, a strategic consulting and transaction advisory company, founded in 2009. He has over 20 years of experience in consulting, banking, industry, and government. He worked for McKinsey & Company in Warsaw, Poland. He served as a member of numerous supervisory boards of listed and unlisted companies, including Warsaw Stock Exchange. He spent over 10 years in investment and corporate banking…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Anushia Kandasamy with Samanea Asia Consulting.  Anushia is a management consultant and senior leadership facilitator based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with 11 years of experience at McKinsey & Company. Anushia has extensive experience working with in the public sector, as well as with larger SMEs in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. She has also served United Nations agencies on Change Management and Leadership Development. As a versatile problem-solver, Anushia works across a range of topics related…

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…

Michael Wise recently co-authored this article for McKinsey that explores how best-practice purchasing is now an even more potent source of value creation for private-equity leaders. A careful review of purchasing is typically part of any private-equity (PE) playbook, with procurement savings factoring prominently into 100-day and longer-term business plans. As part of the process, procurement professionals are typically charged with finding and acting on low-hanging opportunities like requesting price reductions and volume discounts from suppliers. Leading PE firms are adopting…