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Kathy Varol
Strategy and Organizational Change Expert. Former Head of Global Purpose Strategy at adidas.
In her newest keynotes, Kathy reveals the invisible system running every organization, and gives leaders the framework to change it. Kathy spent a decade building corporate strategy, seven years of it at adidas ($37 billion brand) where she created the global purpose strategy (sustainability, DEI, and social impact).
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Kathy 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, Kathy 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 Kathy 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, Kathy 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. Kathy'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, Kathy gives leaders a way to see what's actually running their organization, and change it.
Today Kathy 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.
Keynotes
Featured Keynote
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Why Organizational Change Fails. Even When Everyone Wants It.
Every leader knows the room. The one where everyone finally agrees something has to change. The buy-in is real. And then, slowly, nothing shifts. The organization quietly goes on doing the old thing anyway.
It's not resistance. It's not bad people. And it's not rare.
Organizations are not machines. They are created and run by people. An organization behaves like a nervous system because it is made of interacting nervous systems. Kathy calls this the Organizational Nervous System (ONS). Real transformation requires understanding both what the ONS has been conditioned to do and whether it is regulated enough to do anything else.
Most change frameworks tell you what to change, without checking whether the organization can change. Usually it can't, and that single assumption is why most change fails.
In this keynote, Kathy reveals the hidden system running every organization, grounded in the neuroscience and psychology of how it forms, and gives leaders a way to change it.
You Will Learn:
- Why good ideas get quietly filtered toward "safe" long before anyone says no, and how to catch the filter that mistakes itself for good judgment.
- Why smart leadership teams flinch under pressure, protecting the optics or the number instead of fixing the real problem, and how to shift the reflex.
- How every company quietly pushes out its most original thinking, the novel ideas and the people who carry them, and how to bring that capacity back before a rival picks it up.
- Why the same team can take a hard truth one week and shut down the next, and how to read the difference before you launch a change.
- The one move a leader can make to reopen a shut-down team (the same small shift that helped double a struggling brand's U.S. market share).
This Keynote Is Perfect For:
- Leaders who have approved sound strategies and watched them quietly dissolve a year later
- Companies stuck repeating the same mistakes despite genuine effort, good people, and real intentions
- Leaders facing a market that's changing faster than the organization can adapt
- Leaders who are ready for a way to see, and shift, what's actually running the business
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