Hi, I’m Amy.
I’ve spent more than 20 years helping organizations work through consequential change. The problems I’m drawn to are the complicated ones: where the stakes are high, where the root cause isn’t obvious, and where the difference between a good outcome and a bad one usually comes down to someone being willing to see the situation clearly and say what needs to be said.
That’s what I built this practice to do.
“Working with Amy on a complex HR and Payroll transformation project, what stood out to me was how she could hold both the big picture and the operational reality at the same time. She had a way of cutting through noise, understanding the ripple effects across teams and systems, and helping people focus on what actually mattered. What also felt different was that she didn’t just stay at the strategy level. She stayed close to the work and the people doing it, which built a lot of trust across the team.”
~Senior Director, Enterprise Technology
How I got here.
My career started, accidentally, on a Tuesday afternoon in May 2007. I was a junior consultant at Mercer, and my boss and I had just walked into a windowless conference room as our prospective client was telling his colleague, “I don’t need help with communications. I obviously communicate all the time.”
The $6 billion cash transaction announced a day later, and that evening we wrote everything: employee announcements, manager guides, leadership messaging, FAQs, close-day communications, the works. We helped the buyer earn the trust of thousands of people who had just woken up to find their company had been sold. It was complicated, high-stakes, and nothing like the HR communications work I’d been doing. I was hooked.
I spent the next several years at Mercer helping to build what became the firm’s first dedicated change management practice. We started with two senior consultants and grew to a team of more than a dozen, working with some of the most complex organizations in the world through more than 100 M&A transactions. It felt like a small entrepreneurial company inside a very large one, which suited me perfectly.
Eventually, I wanted to see what the work looked like from the other side. I joined Stanford University in 2022 as AVP of HR Strategic Services, hired to build a change management function from scratch and lead it through a major university-wide HR transformation. I built the team, developed the methodology, and spent three and a half years in the middle of one of the most complex change efforts I’d encountered.
What I learned there, and what ultimately pushed me to go out on my own, was something I hadn’t fully appreciated until I lived it. There are things you can see clearly from the inside that you simply can’t fix from the inside. Not because of a lack of skill or effort, but because fixing certain problems requires the credibility and impartiality that can only come from outside the organization. I could diagnose what was wrong, but I couldn’t always act on it.
That realization was the push I needed. My practice exists to do precisely what I couldn’t do as an insider: look at the full picture, say honestly what’s there, and roll up my sleeves to work alongside the people who live in it to fix it together.
My approach.
A few things that define how I operate and why they matter:
I follow the problem, not the discipline. Change management is my foundation. Over 20 years, I've developed a deep understanding of how people and organizations respond to disruption, what actually moves them, and what gets in the way. That expertise sits alongside organizational design, communications strategy, process optimization, and program management, and I draw on all of it depending on what the situation requires. I come with deep methodology and a clear point of view. What I don’t do is apply them as a template. Every situation is different, and the work starts with understanding this one.
I don’t outsource the thinking. When I take an engagement, I do it. You’ll have direct access to senior judgment throughout, not just at the kickoff and the final readout.
I have no pride of authorship. My job is to help my clients succeed. If the best idea in the room came from someone else, that’s a win. I’m not here to be right; I’m here to be useful.
I’m direct. I will tell you what I think, including the parts that are uncomfortable. That’s not always easy to hear, but it’s consistently what clients tell me they value most.
I have no incentive except your outcome. No engagement to protect, no scope to expand, no prior recommendation to defend.
Selected experience.
A few examples of the work I’ve done and the kinds of situations I’ve worked through:
Large-scale M&A integration, global technology company
Following a major acquisition that added more than 23,000 employees, led the change management, communications, and training strategy to integrate the acquired workforce into the buyer’s HR technology platform across core HR, payroll, benefits, timekeeping, and learning. Managed stakeholder engagement at every level across both organizations during a compressed timeline that included a blackout period at peak retail season.
Front-line leadership redesign, academic health system
Assessed the full scope of front-line manager roles across a complex health system: their interactions, responsibilities, processes, and the structural barriers that were limiting performance. Identified the redesign needed to unlock significant productivity gains across the organization, and built the roadmap to get there.
Culture alignment and shared vision, professional services firm
Worked with a mid-sized professional services firm at a critical inflection point, moving from mid-market to large. The leadership team held divergent views on culture and direction. Assessed the current state, facilitated alignment around a shared vision, and developed a concrete action plan to translate that vision into how the organization was structured and how they actually operated day to day.
University-wide HR transformation, major research university
Built and led the change management function for a four-year, university-wide HR modernization effort: the institution’s first major upgrade in more than two decades. Developed the methodology, built the team, and led change management, communications, and strategic portfolio management across the full program. Worked through significant complexity in vendor relationships, institutional culture, and implementation challenges to keep the transformation moving forward.