About

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.

Adrian Dellecker is a senior research writer working on the impact of biodiversity for business at IMD’s Center for Sustainable and Inclusive Business. Before joining IMD, Adrian was Head of Program, Strategy and Development at the Luc Hoffmann Institute (now Unearthodox), leading its portfolio of innovative projects for nature from 2017 to 2022.

Dellecker was also Head of Policy and Advocacy at WWF International from 2010 to 2016, working on the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the strengthening of the Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD). Before joining WWF and the nature conservation sector, He was a research fellow at the Institut française des relations internationales in Paris, where he wrote on oil and gas in the Post-Soviet space.

Bryony Jansen van Tuyll is a senior research writer on sustainability. After starting her career as a management consultant, she went on to focus on sustainable innovation and strategy. She later founded and ran two non-profit organizations aimed at knowledge sharing among sustainability experts and fashion professionals. Her main interest is to support companies to thrive while safeguarding our planet and its people.

Esther Salvi is Research Fellow at IMD. Her research lays at the intersection of sustainable business transformation, grand societal challenges, entrepreneurship and the corporate world. She combines qualitative and quantitative approaches and focuses on individual, organizational, regional and country levels of analysis.  Her doctoral studies, completed with distinction at the Technical University of Munich, focused on Economics and Social Sciences. 

 Esther brings extensive teaching experience at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Prior to joining IMD, she held roles such as post-doctoral researcher and project leader of impACTup! at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, doctoral coordinator at the SEED Center of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and program manager for international summer and winter schools on sustainable entrepreneurship at TUM.