Carolyn Taylor

Carolyn Taylor is not only founder and executive-chair of Walking the Talk , a company widely identified as leading corporate consultancy, but is also globally recognised as one of the most experienced consultants and speakers on how to change corporate culture having personally walked besides hundreds of organisations and thousands of leaders. Most leaders and their organisations 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, turnarounds or building new organisations. Others still are aspiring to create the best place to work, globalise, 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 organisations. With this approach she has assisted Sheryl Sandberg when she was monetising Google, David Thodey when he implemented customer-centricity at Telstra, Candido Bracher, now President of Itau Unibanco, over a 10 year period 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 culture goals of an organisation. For example, when invited to speak to a group of finance directors in an organisation 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 organisation. 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)