Jim Hemerling

BCG Senior Advisor & Senior Partner Emeritus

Jim Hemerling is a Senior Advisor and Executive Coach with Boston Consulting Group. He has more than 30 years of experience working closely with senior leaders to unlock personal performance and potential while delivering and sustaining breakthrough organizational results. A former BCG managing director, senior partner, and BCG Henderson Institute Fellow, he led large-scale transformation programs, post-merger integrations, and the development of high-performing organizations, leaders, teams, and cultures.

Jim's approach to transformation is holistic and human-centric, focusing on envisioning and aligning an organization’s purpose and vision, inspiring and empowering people, and executing and innovating through enabled teams. He has worked with clients worldwide in technology, consumer, health care, financial services, insurance, and manufacturing industries, and has lived and worked in the US, Canada, Mexico, and China.

Jim is a co-author of Beyond Great: Nine Strategies for Thriving in an Era of Social Tension, Economic Nationalism, and Technological Revolution and Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything. His TED Talk, "5 Ways to Lead in an Era of Constant Change," has been viewed over 3.5 million times, and his work has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Fortune, Forbes, The Economist, Manager Magazine, and on CNBC.

Contributions

  • Life science leaders face a plethora of challenges as their companies grow, both internally and externally. Outside the organisation, the funding environment, the war for talent, shareholder expectations, and political imperatives like climate protection are driving change, while internally the recent pandemic has dramatically shifted workplace culture and employee expectations at a time when digitalisation and AI are transforming the biotech workplace.

    Over the past few decades, companies have found themselves in an ‘Always On’ state of transformation. To handle this, BCG conducted a survey asking companies what they need from leaders in this new environment and followed it with how can they help develop leadership in the right direction.

    Jim talks about the major findings from their survey and how living up to the organisation’s purpose and vision was a big predictor of sustained transformational performance. He talks through the framework BCG uses to guide leaders. Jim also shares an in-depth look at how Satya Nadella completely changed Microsoft’s culture over a few years by implementing a human-centric transformation.