Leading Sustainable Business Transformation

Chief Sustainability Officer at IMD

Natalia is the Chief Sustainability Officer at IMD. She designs and implements sustainability strategy, develops executive education programs and advisory, publishes research, builds cross-sector partnerships, and communicates IMD’s ambitions and progress.

The Center for Sustainable and Inclusive Business, co-led by Olynec, aims to support leaders and companies to take steps towards a more sustainable and inclusive business world by harnessing IMD’s knowledge and expertise in the area and offering tools to help them deliver systemic, innovative, and impactful responses.

She is particularly interested the intersection of sustainability and leadership, and the changing role of the Chief Sustainability Officer as the driver of business transformation.

Olynec co-leads IMD’s engagement in Business Schools for Climate Leadership, an alliance between eight leading European business schools furthering thought leadership on the role of firms in climate change solutions. She is also co-author of a winning teaching case in the EFMD Responsible Business category.

Olynec is also Non-Executive Director of Jeronimo Martins, a leading global food retailer in Portugal, Poland, and Colombia, and serves on its CSR committee.

Prior to joining IMD in 2016, Olynec was Global Head of Sustainability at Damco, a unit of Maersk Group, where she led cross-functional global teams to increase supply chain transparency and accountability in areas such as responsible procurement, human rights, energy efficiency and product innovation. As Adjunct Professor of Sustainability at SP Jain School of Global Management, she taught graduate courses on Sustainability Megatrends.

On the steering committee of the United Nations World Food Program’s Logistics Emergency Team, Olynec harnessed the unique capabilities and networks of logistics companies in a public-private partnership sponsored by the World Economic Forum to increase the efficiency of humanitarian aid delivery during natural disasters.

Her consulting work on the crossroads of sustainability and investment at a multi-billion-dollar family office and a social enterprise explored how bottom-of-the-pyramid business models and impact investors can contribute to both social and financial bottom lines.

At National University of Singapore’s public policy school, she was founding editor of Global-Is-Asian magazine, with features on experts in sustainability, trade, digital inclusion, and monetary policy.  She produced reports on the impact of the 2008-2009 Financial Crisis in Asia and on the Asian Role in Global Governance, as part of a World Economic Forum Global Redesign initiative.

As emerging markets reporter and editor at Bloomberg in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, during the dismantling of Soviet systems of governance and the privatization of land and business, Olynec witnessed how capital can be both misused and harnessed to drive sustainable development. She interviewed Ukraine’s President, Russia and Ukraine’s central bank governors, CEOs, and fund managers, for print and television. In Moscow, Olynec covered Russia’s debt default, stock market collapse and currency devaluation and subsequent economic collapse and recovery. She also was also a correspondent at major global events such as the G-8, EBRD, IMF, and APEC summits.

Her articles on global corporations, capital markets, and developing economies were also published in the Chicago Tribune, the International Herald Tribune, and Economist Intelligence Unit. She has edited and written books and chapters on leadership, negotiation, digital innovation, and financial instruments.

Olynec holds a Master in Public Administration from the University of Singapore, specializing in leadership and the public roles of the private sector, and a Bachelor’s degree in political science from McGill University, Canada.