Catherine (Katy) Paul-Chowdhury is an affiliate with Schaffer Consulting. She has spent over ten years consulting
with organizations in the healthcare, financial services, manufacturing,
and mining industries.
She has extensive experience in helping companies integrate their
acquisitions, and loves working with clients to navigate the scale and
complexity of these major organizational events. Her experience and
thoughtful guidance have helped client organizations to integrate their
acquisitions quickly, meet and exceed their performance targets,
accelerate cultural change, and build internal capabilities and skills.
Some clients she has served in this capacity include MeadWestvaco, Timken, JLG Industries, Oshkosh Truck Corporation, and Veolia Transportation NA.
Katy also enjoys helping clients drive major strategic change
initiatives, and achieve targeted performance improvements in areas like
revenue growth and workplace safety. She finds the process of working
closely with a client to plan and orchestrate a significant
organizational change, and adapt to the evolving realities of each
unique situation, to be exciting and satisfying. Some examples of
clients she has worked with in these areas include Johnson & Johnson, the Mentor Network, and Avery Dennison.
The best part of Katy's job is seeing her clients develop and achieve
greater success and acclaim in their organizations. This focus on
people's growth and success always informs her engagements with clients.
It is the reason she co-leads Schaffer Consulting's High-Impact
Consulting Workshop, offered several times a year to help internal and
external consultants develop their ability to deliver results. It has
also led to several projects developing workshops for senior level
executives, on topics like managing rapid growth and scale, building
strong teams, leading turnarounds, influencing the external environment,
and, of course, acquisition integration.
With a long-time interest in organizational learning, Katy has played
a key role in the development of Schaffer Consulting's materials,
including our Results-Fueled Management Development program, and our
Acquisition Integration materials and website. She has also worked with a
number of clients on the development of their own integration and
leadership development materials, books, and websites.
Katy has written many teaching cases and book chapters in the areas
of organizational learning and change. She co-authored with Ron
Ashkenas, David Ulrich, and Todd Jick, The Boundaryless Organization Field Guide
(Jossey-Bass, 1999). She has published articles applying Schaffer
Consulting's results-focused approach in the areas of innovation, risk
management, and workplace injury reduction, and is currently working on
the topics of managing scale and rapid growth. Katy is also very
interested in what makes people happy and successful at work. She is
exploring how creativity, empowerment, and having a sense of achievement
contribute to well-being and happiness within an organization, as well
as those factors which undermine it.
Katy's curiosity about well-being and happiness in the workplace
parallels her interests outside of work. She is a certified Kripalu yoga
instructor, and long-time student of energy, spirituality, intuition,
and creativity. She is also an avid reader, a baker of great brownies,
an enthusiastic but not terribly skilled kayaker, and a
doting aunt.
Prior to joining Schaffer Consulting, Katy worked in investment
banking. She earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Queen's University,
and a PhD in business strategy at the University of Western Ontario,
with her doctoral research focused on how major banks learn from their
sector-specific credit losses.