Carolyn Taylor

Carolyn Taylor Speaker Biography

Carolyn Taylor is not only the founder and executive-chair of​WalkingtheTalk, a company widely identified as leading corporate consultancy, but is also globally recognized as one of the most experienced consultants and speakers on how to change corporate culture having personally walked beside hundreds of organizations and thousands of leaders. Most leaders and their organizations are seeking to change their culture to meet new market conditions: more accountability, customer centricity, innovation, and one-team enterprise thinking. Some enterprises are going through mergers, rapid growth, downsizing, reputation damage, turn arounds or building new organizations. Others still are aspiring to create the best place to work, globalize, and implement an agile way of working– to become faster, more efficient, more trustworthy. Carolyn gives leaders tips on what to do and not do.

The work is very personal and yet spreads across whole organizations. With this approach she has assisted Sheryl Sandberg when she was monetizing Google, David Thodey when he implemented customer-centricity at Telstra, Candido Bracher, now President of Itau Unibanco, over 10 years when he undertook a massive expansion in Latin America, Henri de Castries when he was uniting AXA's multiple acquisitions, and Paul Hudson during his rapid growth of Novartis Pharma.

The meetings she facilitates and presentations she gives are insightful, profound, fun and provocative. She is known for identifying a core issue and raising it in a way that is incisive, but loving. In the past 30 years, she has grown and founded two highly successful consulting businesses, pioneering culture transformation consultancy across the world. Her talks are tailored both to participants and their roles and to the cultural goals of an organization. For example, when invited to speak to a group of finance directors in an organization whose goal it is to become more customer-centric, she will deliver a presentation on how the finance function shapes culture. She outlines what levers finance has to create more customer-centricity, not only within the function but across the whole organization. Carolyn has vast and varied expertise in six culture archetypes and can provide practical advice to leaders on these pillars of company culture:

1. Achievement (accountability, responsibility, focus)
2. Customer-Centricity (service, empathy)
3. One-Team (collaboration, enterprise thinking)
4. Innovation (agility, learning)
5. People-First (engagement, empowerment)
6. Greater-Good (ethics, purpose-led, values-led