Carly Vivian
Leadership and organizational change advisor. Thirty years advising senior executives through transformation, restructuring and leadership transition at Fortune 50 organizations.
I advise senior executives through restructurings, transformations and leadership change. The work is organizational. What drove results before the change. Which of those conditions survived it. How to rebuild the capabilities it disrupted. Mergers and post-deal integration are part of that work, not the whole of it.
My career spans thirty years in those rooms including roles at McKinsey & Company, Coca-Cola, Slalom and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and I served as Chief Operating Officer and Principal Consultant at Cogency Group. I have advised C-suites at Fortune 50 companies on mandates with a combined value above $100 billion.
I sat at the table when organizations faced their most consequential decisions: mergers, transformations, leadership transitions, enterprise reinventions. I was the person who said what others would not. Who named the dynamic everyone was dancing around. Who shaped the architecture for what came next.
The transformation work that I’ve led has touched thousands of people, and built change management strategies that held under the most unforgiving conditions. A track record spanning Fortune 50 boardrooms and enterprise mandates, built from the inside out.
Education and affiliations
I am a Sloan Fellow of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. I am certified in change management by Prosci. I have served on the boards of the American Heart Association and Americans for the Arts.
The book
Lightning Strikes Twice™ is my book on why senior leaders who produced result in one set of conditions often stall in another, and what an organization can do about it. It is forthcoming.
Where this comes from
A national healthcare organization - marketing. I was brought in to help reimagine the function. The visioning work made clear that the real work was governance and the operating model, so that is where we went.
What we built worked. Regional leaders and enterprise leaders who had operated separately came together as a team and started making decisions together. That was the win.
Then a company-wide decision moved the organization from a decentralized structure to a centralized one and expanded the shared services model. The structure changed underneath what we had built.
Consolidation produced duplication, and there were fewer roles on the new chart than there were people to fill them. Placement was decided through a calibration exercise against boxes that existed, and those decisions had to hold.
Capable leaders landed in roles that did not match where they were in their careers. Nothing about their capability had changed.
What changed was the environment those capabilities had been developed inside, and each of them was left to work out alone whether what they knew how to do still applied.
That gap is the work I do now.
What clients say.
Carly is one of those rare and very talented people who have incredible technical skills — one of the keenest minds I have ever worked with — and a soul and approach that is warm, real, inviting, and captivating. Carly is tough when she needs to be, and supportive when she needs to be. She was the one who said the things that others would not. I would work with Carly anytime, anywhere.
Carly has always delivered excellent results. She quickly became a trusted partner. I am impressed with her ability to interact with colleagues at all levels and quickly establish expert credibility. She has always worked to make the assigned project a high-level success and truly cares for the success of the company and individuals involved. I strongly recommend her as a strategist and advisor.
I found Carly to be insightful in building high-level strategic recommendations and also recommendations on actions to improve engagement, motivation and morale. She is able to translate years of organizational research into simple, relatable anecdotes. She is smart, energetic, and has an incredible attention to detail.