Ashish is a core leader in McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance Practice and leads our client service on leadership topics including building effective leadership teams, developing adaptability and resilience skills, and driving culture change. He has helped several leadership teams undergo the personal transformations needed to execute new strategies and business models, build new organizational capabilities, and lead in new and powerful ways.
Ashish spent his first two decades leveraging his engineering training and analytical problem-solving tool kit to help clients drive performance in large-scale operational and technology transformations. Over the course of his career, Ashish has served a wide range of industries, including food and beverage, consumer durables, banking, and telecom.
Realizing the significant role that leadership, company culture, mindsets, and capabilities play in the success of any transformation, Ashish became fascinated by the human dimension. He engaged in extensive study of developmental learning to help his clients transform how they handle the challenges they face. Ashish is also a Newfield-certified ontological coach trained to help leaders overcome obstacles through the use of language, mood, and somatics to shift how they observe the world.
Today, Ashish’s focus is helping executives develop new mindsets and capabilities that enable them to thrive in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, and create human-centered organizations where employees are proud to work and grow.
Examples of his recent client work include the following:
- helping the top team of a consumer durables company lead a fundamental business-model transformation to unlock substantial margin improvement
- supporting the senior team of a global distribution company in transforming its operating model and improving its overall team effectiveness
- helping the procurement team of a leading global bank develop the mindsets and skills they needed to unlock double-digit savings on external spending and improve stakeholder collaboration
- helping the operations team of a leading retailer develop adaptability and resilience skills necessary to thrive in the post-COVID-19 world and combat fatigue and burnout
- supporting a holistic operations transformation—including procurement and design to value—for a large consumer company, driving margin improvements over five years through direct materials optimization
- leading merger integration and synergy capture for a large food company, unlocking substantial savings and revenue-growth opportunities
Before joining McKinsey, Ashish was an advisory professional with consulting experience covering innovation, market entry, customer-profitability analysis, growth strategy, process improvement, and technology implementation. He leads our recruiting efforts at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he earned his MBA.
Video
“Ingredient Buyer Workstation,” McKinsey & Company
Published work
“COVID-19 and burnout are straining the mental health of employed parents,” McKinsey & Company, December 2021
“Battling burnout: A conversation with resiliency expert Dr. Amit Sood,” McKinsey & Company, November 2021
“Everyone needs more of this one skill,” McKinsey & Company, July 2021
“Shaping the workforce of the future in retail and consumer goods,” McKinsey & Company, July 2021
“Design to Value: a smart asset for smart products,” McKinsey & Company, March 2012
“Squeezing more ideas from product teardowns,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2009
Past experience
Charter Consulting
Principal
Deloitte Consulting
Senior consultant
Bearing Point
Manager
Keane
Principal consultant
IBM
Consultant
Education
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
MBA, strategy, finance, and organizational behavior
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
BTech; MTech, chemical engineering