Kathy Varol

Kathy Varol didn't learn how organizations really work from a book. She watched it happen. From the bottom of the hierarchy, gutting fish in an Alaskan cannery, cleaning hotel rooms, pouring pints in Australia, teaching kickboxing in Morocco. And from the top, leading strategy inside a multibillion-dollar company and standing on Fortune 500 stages. From both ends, the same thing kept surfacing: the gap between what an organization says it values and what it actually rewards, punishes, and repeats every day.

At adidas, a $37 billion brand, Varol spent seven years building strategy that moved the business, first the global basketball and global women's strategies, then the company's global purpose strategy across sustainability, DEI, and social impact. This was no token feel-good exercise. It further established adidas as a leader in retail sustainability, provided access to sport for girls around the globe, developed new products, and initiated bold corporate actions to stand against inequality (including equal bonus pay for Women's World Cup winners, and supporting the fight for racial justice in the USA). This work helped earn the company an ESG score of 85 from S&P, placing it among the top 10% globally within Textiles, Apparel & Luxury Goods.

But Varol kept seeing the same thing across companies. Most change fails, even when everyone wants it. The strategy is sound. The leaders mean it. The teams are capable. And the organization does the old thing anyway.

Since 2019, Varol has been coaching executives one-on-one and co-leading C-suite mastermind groups. She was using a framework to help individuals change when she felt a specific kind of recognition. The kind that arrives when a pattern you've been watching for twenty years suddenly has a name. Organizations were stuck in protective strategies just like individuals. The same architecture. The same cost.

Most people writing about organizational change have only the corporate room; most who write about individual conditioning have only the coaching room. Varol's Organizational Nervous System framework came from sitting in both long enough to see the pattern that ties them together.

In her upcoming book and newest keynotes, Varol gives leaders a way to see what's actually running their organization, and change it. Today, Varol speaks to leadership teams at companies like PepsiCo, AT&T, and Salesforce. She hosted the Purpose and Profit podcast for 100 episodes, ranked in the top 2.5% globally, in conversation with leaders like Doug Conant (Campbell Soup), John Replogle (Burt's Bees and Seventh Generation), and Yancey Strickler (Kickstarter). Called "a force for change" and "a transformative storyteller," she holds an MBA with honors from Georgetown and has spent twenty years working with brands like Microsoft, MillerCoors, and adidas, learning what makes organizations move, and what keeps them stuck.