THOUGHTFUL BIO

I’ve always been a bit of a behaviorist. I grew up playing tennis and always preferred to play doubles rather than singles because it was much more involved and, in my mind at least, much more strategic. I had to understand my strengths, my partner’s strengths, my partner’s tendencies, and my partner’s abilities in order to maximize our play. I also had to quickly figure out our opposition – what were their tendencies, what shots do they leave open, how do they handle balls up the middle, etc. Given all of that information, now the fun begins – how do they react if I slice the ball wide on the deuce court and my partner shifts left to better cover the alley? What if I kick it up the “T” to the ad court and come in behind it? This cat and mouse game was fascinating to me. It wasn’t until my study abroad experience at LSE that I had a name for this – game theory.

As I learned about game theory, I also learned about behavioral economics, which really piqued my fascination with logic and rationality. By this time, I knew I had an interest in consulting for all the stereotypical reasons (interest in problem solving, wanting a mentally challenging career, etc.), but learning about these different frameworks for decision making made it clear that consulting would also give me a career to continue exploring people, processes, and decisions through the lens of a company.

I’ve had some great experiences in my career as a consultant and some of my favorite types of projects are:

• M&A, particularly Post Merger Integration

• Projects with complex financial tracking (e.g., TCO, M&A planning, bankruptcy emergence planning)

• Assessing and evaluating data for future use (e.g., categorizing seismic tomography data to help project storage growth needs, help value wells for selling partial interest in wells; calculate hardware, software, and support costs for IT assets at generation facilities to support divestiture efforts)

• Leading large teams implementing complex change