You’ve spent over 25 years shaping commercial and organizational strategies and driving operational excellence across industries. Looking back, what core principles have consistently guided you through such a diverse leadership journey?
Over 25+ years leading transformation across GE, IBM, Intel, BCG, and now Eightfold, three principles have consistently guided me.
Talent as the ultimate strategic lever. Not just who you hire, but how you architect organizations to unlock human potential at scale and, increasingly, how you design the collaboration between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. The leaders and companies that get this right will define the next decade.
Transformation over optimization. I’ve always been drawn to inflection points, moments when the underlying logic of an industry is shifting and when rethinking systems, not just improving them, creates disproportionate value. We are living through one of those moments right now, and I find it one of the most exciting times to be a leader.
Self-awareness as a competitive advantage. The ability to understand your own motivations, your impact on others, and where your blind spots lie—and to lead with that clarity rather than despite its absence—is what separates leaders who scale from those who plateau. I’ve seen this truth hold at every level, from early-career talent to C-suite succession.
The ability to understand your own motivations, your impact on others, and where your blind spots lie—and to lead with that clarity rather than despite its absence—is what separates leaders who scale from those who plateau. I’ve seen this truth hold at every level, from early-career talent to C-suite succession.
What drew you to the chief growth officer role at Eightfold, how has it expanded your scope beyond talent, and how do you balance building long-term capabilities with the need for speed in a high-growth environment?
My path to Eightfold wasn’t linear, it was intentional. At BCG, I served as chief talent officer, leading a global talent function, and I co-designed the talent intelligence strategy that became the foundation of our AI-powered workforce platform work. I was, in effect, both architect and early believer. Joining Eightfold as CGO felt less like a career pivot and more like a natural convergence.
What drew me wasn’t just the product; it was the moment. We are living through a fundamental redefinition of work itself. AI is no longer a tool that sits alongside human effort; it is becoming an active collaborator, executing tasks, making recommendations, and operating autonomously across workflows. My role has expanded well beyond talent into product strategy, go-to-market architecture, agentic AI activation, and category creation. I think about how organizations need to be redesigned, not just optimized for a world where humans and AI agents work in genuine partnership.
Balancing long-term capability-building with the speed a high-growth environment demands comes down to one principle I return to constantly: build for the future but deliver value today. The two aren’t in tension if you’re disciplined about which decisions are reversible and which are foundational.
Throughout your career, what’s one talent initiative that worked far better than expected, and one that didn’t? What made the difference?
What worked far better than expected was the move to skills-based talent models.
At IBM, where I was designing a global talent model across 170 countries and a $150 million budget, we made a deliberate shift away from role-based structures toward skills-based architecture. The initial goal was efficiency, but what emerged was far more powerful. It unlocked internal mobility, accelerated reskilling, and created a more dynamic and inclusive view of talent.
“Scale didn’t dilute quality it amplified it. When you design systems around skills, you don’t just fill roles you continuously redeploy potential.”
What didn’t land as expected was an earlier high-potential development program I led. On paper, it was flawless rigorous selection, executive sponsorship, structured learning. But it underperformed.
The realization came when I saw participants return energized and capable only to re-enter environments that hadn’t changed. The system absorbed them back into old behaviors. I had underestimated something fundamental: we had designed for individual transformation, but not for contextual transformation.
You’ve been deeply involved in defining next-generation skills. What capabilities do you believe organizations are still underestimating for the future workforce?
There are three that I believe are chronically underinvested:
Agentic literacy. Not AI awareness in the abstract, but the practical capability to work with autonomous agents—knowing when to trust them, when to interrogate them, and how to amplify human judgment through them. Most upskilling programs are still teaching prompting. The frontier has already moved to orchestration.
Contextual judgment under ambiguity. As AI absorbs more of the repeatable cognitive work, what becomes irreplaceable is the human capacity for nuanced decision-making in high-stakes, incomplete-information environments. This is a buildable skill, but almost no organization is building it systematically.
Self-intelligence. I use this term intentionally as the ability to understand your own purpose, motivations, and navigation style—and to lead from that clarity. As AI takes on more of the what and how, the differentiator becomes why we lead and how we show up. Self-intelligence is the capability that makes all others compound.
Emotional connection at scale isn’t about warmth as a personality trait. It’s about intentional design. The best leaders and the best organizations don’t stumble into connection; they architect it.
You emphasize emotional connection as a leadership priority. How does that translate into tangible actions in large, complex organizations?
Emotional connection at scale isn’t about warmth as a personality trait. It’s about intentional design. The best leaders and the best organizations don’t stumble into connection; they architect it.
This belief shows up in my professional work and in something quite different that I’ve built outside of it. My husband and I own The Montana Club, a landmark property established in 1885 in Helena, Montana, where I created The Garden Room, a curated tea and champagne experience designed around beauty, ritual, and the art of intentional gathering. The Garden Room was built on a simple but profound belief: that in a world accelerating through technology and change, there is an equal and urgent need to design spaces where people can slow down, be present, and feel genuinely connected. It is, in many ways, the human counterpart to the work I do in AI: one reimagines how we work at scale, the other reimagines how we gather with intention.
I ask the same question of both: do people leave feeling more connected than when they arrived?
In large organizations, connection looks like this: knowing the names, contexts, and ambitions of the people you work with not as a management exercise, but as a basic expression of respect. Being honest when things are hard, not just present when things are celebrated. Creating space in operating rhythms where people can say what’s actually true.
At GE, IBM, Intel, BCG, and now Eightfold, the teams that performed best were never the ones with the most resources. They were the ones with the highest psychological safety paired with the clearest expectations. Those two forces, held together, are what make organizations extraordinary.
In a world being optimized for efficiency, connection becomes the true differentiator.
BCG gave me two gifts I carry everywhere: the discipline to think rigorously under pressure, and the deep conviction that the best answers emerge from working alongside the people closest to the problem.
For BCG alumni and leaders navigating rapid change across technology, talent, and business models, what advice would you share based on your experience?
BCG gave me two gifts I carry everywhere: the discipline to think rigorously under pressure, and the deep conviction that the best answers emerge from working alongside the people closest to the problem, not above them.
Don’t let your expertise become your ceiling. The leaders I’ve seen struggle most in transformative moments are the ones most attached to the model that made them successful. Expertise is a foundation, not a destination. Hold it lightly enough to keep building.
Learn AI as a new way of working, not just a new tool to manage. The executives who will define the next decade are the ones who understand agentic systems from the inside who have gotten close to the architecture, the workflows, the activation challenges—not just the strategic narrative. Get close to the technology. It will change how you think.
Stay anchored in purpose. The future of work will not be defined by technology alone. It will be defined by how we choose to lead alongside it; how we design organizations that are both intelligently automated and deeply human.
BCG is where I learned to think at that level. Eightfold is where I’m building the future of work. The Garden Room is where I’m reminded, every month, why it matters.
The future belongs to leaders who can hold both intelligence and humanity in the same design.
