Never settle
Nadya Zhexembayeva began discussing the need for Chief Reinvention Officers in 2015. A decade on, reinvention is more relevant than ever. Nadya Zhexembayeva was 14 when she took a job selling insurance in a country that had never had any. The Soviet Union was coming apart, Almaty was short of money, and most of her […] Never settle was originally published on Emerging Europe .
Nadya Zhexembayeva has been advocating for the role of Chief Reinvention Officers since 2015. In 2015, she was only 14 years old when she started working as an insurance salesperson in Almaty, Kazakhstan, a city that had never had any prior experience with such jobs. The Soviet Union was disintegrating, and Almaty was short on money, leading most of her classmates to take on similar jobs to make ends meet.
Her experience was not unique. Many of her friends took on dangerous or unconventional jobs at a young age, such as dealing cards in a casino. Zhexembayeva's own approach to her education and career was different. She received a scholarship to America in 1998 and began her doctoral studies at Case Western Reserve University. During her time there, she witnessed the collapse of Enron, which made her question why some organizations could come out of crises stronger while others disintegrated.
After teaching executive education at the IEDC-Bled School of Management in Slovenia, she met a CEO who doubted her expertise because she had not worked in real business. This encounter led her to become the first consulting client of Mark Levy, who convinced her to create the title of Chief Reinvention Officer. She explained that it would cover past, present, and future aspects of an organization while preserving its best assets and introducing new ones.
In 2018, North Dakota created a Chief Reinvention Officer position for Julie Cabinaw, an Amazon executive, while Kevin Parker took over the role a year later. However, the office was closed in 2020. Kazakhstan, where Zhexembayeva was born, set up a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development in September 2018, which she sees as part of the reinvention effort rather than the entire solution.
Zhexembayeva believes that the argument for reinvention has been won at the top, but lost everywhere else. In a recent survey, Accenture's chief executive announced that the firm would combine strategy, consulting, technology, and operations into one unit called Reinvention Services. Another large firm, PwC, found in their annual survey of bosses that only 30% of CEOs were confident about revenue growth, down from 38% the previous year.
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