Joanna is a Director in McKinsey & Company’s New York office. Since joining the firm in 1980, she has served a broad range of consumer-facing clients on mergers and acquisitions, corporate growth strategy, performance transformation and organization effectiveness. Joanna founded The McKinsey Centered Leadership Project in 2007 to unlock the potential of talented women (and men) leaders. Based on five years of research, she co-authored the business best-selling book, How Remarkable Women Lead: The Breakthrough Model for Work and Life published by Crown Business (2009), which has been translated into a number of languages, including Mandarin Chinese. Its paperback edition will be published in December 2011.
Joanna is a strong advocate for women at McKinsey and beyond. In 2002, she was appointed to the New York City Commission on Women’s Issues by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She also created "Living Portraits," a video archive of 125+ interviews with women leaders from around the world and led McKinsey’s research effort with The Wall Street Journal’s Women in the Economy Executive Taskforce in April 2011. Her awards include the Girl Scouts Council Woman of Distinction Award and the National Council for Research on Women Achievement Award.
A dedicated contributor to the New York community, Joanna has served the Partnership for New York City, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Manhattan Theatre Club, as well as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Alaska Conservation Foundation. She has been a trustee of Sesame Workshop, the education organization responsible for Sesame Street, for 16 years.
She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar.
Joanna is passionate about many things, but at the top of her list is women’s leadership. She has two wonderful daughters, Gaby and Jetta and a husband (David) of 20 years.