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Gemma D’Auria

Senior PartnerMilan

Gemma D’Auria

Senior PartnerMilan

Supports organizations in the retail, fashion, and luxury sectors in driving transformations for higher performance and health, including building capabilities and developing leadership capacity

Gemma is a senior partner based in our Milan office and has over 15 years of consulting experience. She began her career at the firm at the New York office and worked in the Middle East before moving to Italy where she now leads our efforts in consumer retail, fashion, and luxury sectors in the Mediterranean.

She is also one of the global leaders of our People & Organizational Performance Practice, where her areas of focus are organizational learning and leadership development, which are two of the most critical levers in driving sustainable and long-lasting change.

She has coauthored a number of articles on organizational topics and is also one of the contributors to a book recently published by McKinsey called Leadership at Scale, which is focused on how to effectively enhance leadership in organizations.

Recent engagement experience includes the following:

  • driving a performance acceleration program at a leading retail organization in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
  • leading a holistic digital and advanced-analytics transformation with a prominent B2C conglomerate across several industries including grocery, retail, luxury shopping malls, and leisure and entertainment with meaningful impact on both performance and health
  • defining a lifestyle ecosystem strategy and supporting its implementation for a leading retail group in EMEA
  • establishing a corporate academy for a private-sector conglomerate encompassing a school of leadership, analytics and technology, and customer experience
  • transforming the operating model and culture of a prominent family-owned business, changing its operating model from a passive investor to a strategic architect

Before joining McKinsey, Gemma worked in the investment banking division of a multinational investment bank in London, and she now lives in Milan with her husband and four children.

Published work

La spesa e gli italiani: scenari e impatti sul sistema Paese [Shopping and Italians: Scenarios and impacts on the country system],” GS1 Italy, June 2022

How CEO Alain Bejjani, an emerging-markets leader, models resilience,” McKinsey & Company, February 2022

Grocers can fuel growth with advanced analytics,” McKinsey & Company, June 2021

Sustainably shifting how an organization leads,” blog entry, McKinsey & Company, July 2020

Reimagining the post-pandemic organization,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2020

Tuning in, turning outward: Cultivating compassionate leadership in a crisis,” McKinsey & Company, May 2020

Leadership in a crisis: Responding to the coronavirus outbreak and future challenges,” McKinsey & Company, March 2020 

Education

Stanford Graduate School of Business
MBA

LSE (London School of Economics)
BS, government and economics