Lucy is sought after for her strategic acumen, providing invaluable advice to C-suite executives on their most significant challenges and opportunities. She builds and scales businesses, excelling in leading impactful and sustainable change initiatives within large, complex organizations, consistently prioritizing human values. Her approach blends strategic thinking with a people-centric mindset, making her a uniquely effective operator and strategist.
A trailblazer in organizational design, Lucy led NOBL, a global consultancy, for over four years. Guided by the belief in meaningful work and achievable change, NOBL redefined organizational design, blending psychology, agile methodologies, complex systems science, and traditional change management. Lucy collaborated with ambitious leaders, including clients like Calvin Klein, Prodigy, Google, and Amazon.
Her global impact expanded with the successful establishment of NOBL in the Asia Pacific region. Lucy's influential keynotes in Australia and collaborations with organizations like Pepsico, Service NSW, Mars Wrigley, and Built underscore her strategic insights and transformative contributions to business dynamics.
Prior to NOBL, Lucy served as Vice President at rag & bone, a prominent fashion company, where she held a pivotal role reporting directly to Marcus Wainwright, Founder & CEO. Lucy led the articulation and execution Wainwright's multi-year vision and origin story. Her contributions included orchestrating large-scale restructuring initiatives and redesigning the end-to-end concept-to-store process.
In 2014, Lucy spearheaded the launch of ustwo's innovative digital product studio in Sydney, overseeing processes and driving initiatives in talent, acquisition, business strategy, development, and operations. Simultaneously, she was on the organizing team for TEDxSydney, TED's largest event at the time, held at the iconic Sydney Opera House.
Early in her career, Lucy managed operations at the New York-based digital strategy firm, Undercurrent. Working directly with Founder Josh Spear (seed investor in Uber and Warby Parker) as a Partner, Lucy helped introduce social media to brands like Pepsico and additive manufacturing to GE. In skilfully scaling Undercurrent’s business, she helped codify what it means for corporations to engage in digital strategy.
Toolkit
Empowering Employees through Ownership Models
Lucy operates on the core philosophy that employee ownership is key to attracting talent, boosting engagement, and fostering high-performance cultures. As she often says, “give them carry and they’ll carry you to your mission.” She has successfully implemented equity schemes at every company she has led, where none existed before.
Driving Organizational Change
Lucy excels at driving change within organizations, where it is often most needed beyond the board and founders, in the daily running of the business. She believes that change happens through strategic implementation, not through presentations. Her unique approach to organizational design involves choosing the optimized structure that best fits an organization's unique requirements—whether traditional, functional, matrixed, network-based, agile, or other design models.
Navigating Founder Dynamics
As a founder herself, Lucy understands that while entrepreneurs create unrivaled value, they can also impede their company’s progress. She specializes in navigating the complex dynamics of founding teams, especially during periods of hyper-growth and transition.
Building and Leading Teams
Lucy will be the first and loudest to say that an organizational structure is only as strong as the people filling the roles within it. Her management philosophy focuses on leading with followership and enabling others to do the same. As a result, Lucy is a beloved people leader and has hired and managed hundreds of people throughout her career.
Transforming Boards and Investors into Strategic Partners
Lucy has helped multiple businesses transform their boards and investors from mere overseers into strategic partners that drive growth and provide valuable advisory support.
Leading Digital Transformation
Lucy is steeped in technology. Although her recent roles have been as a CEO and COO, her career began in digital. At Undercurrent, a digital strategy firm that managed digital transformation efforts for companies like GE and invested in startups like Uber and Path, she developed a strong foundation in digital innovation. This background has equipped her to lead enterprise-wide technology implementations.
Speaking
The Adaptive Leader: How to lead human centred change?
Lucy keynoted at Adapt’s CFO Edge, Adapt’s Digital Edge and Adapt’s CIO Edge in Sydney, Australia. She discussed a new approach to change; one that is human centred. Natural human tendency is to always resist change. Lucy’s talk equipped the audience of 150 CFO’s with answers to the question of how do you face and understand that resistance?
The Adaptive CIO: Lessons in Change
Lucy shared her secrets (remotely) at Adapt’s CIO Edge in Sydney, Australia for breaking down walls, re-writing the rules, and leading change in a completely new way—one which equips organizations to transform while ensuring that your team sees change as a personal opportunity, rather than a threat.
How to Layoff Employees in a Humane Way
Given the unprecedented level of layoffs and furloughs in the past few weeks, Lucy Chung, NOBL Co-Founder and CEO; Jane Garza, NOBL LA Managing Director; and Yair Riemer, CareerArc’s President of Career Transition Services discussed how to make layoffs more humane.
Fireside Chat: Thrown into the Unknown
Jonathan McBride is the former Head of Inclusion & Diversity at BlackRock. Focusing on his leading a team through September 11th, Lucy and Jonathan discuss key lessons that apply to anyone facing a crisis.
Bringing Employee Engagement to Life
Panelist discussing how critical employee engagement is for an organization’s success. Hosted at Udemy for Business.
Distributed Leadership in Teams
Panelist in a roundtable conversation about flat hierarchy, holacracy, autonomy and designing for distributed leadership presented by Ada’s List at IDEO London.
Rewriting the Code
Panelist discussing gender equity in technology and consulting.
Leveraging Loss: leading change with empathy
Lucy keynoted at Leadership Institute’s annual conference in Sydney, Australia. In her talk, she explored how to implement lasting change on a strategic level, with a deepened empathy for the types of loss employees can experience on the journey.
Taking Prioritisation to the next level – Hacking the Eisenhower matrix
At Adapt’s Digital Edge event in Sydney, Lucy ran a roundtable for 25 Executives aimed at optimizing prioritisation and decision making.
2 Parents Working Full-Time & Homeschooling Full-Time w/ Lucy Chung
In this 8x8 podcast episode, Lucy discusses what employees and business leaders can do to help parents navigate the triple challenge of parenting, teaching, and working from home.
Lessons from the Last 20 Years: How Leaders Respond in a Crisis
In his career as an executive coach, Kerry Sulkowicz has coached many leaders through crises, from September 11th to the Great Recession and most recently, COVID-19. Lucy interviews him about how leaders can effectively support their teams through the real pandemic: fear.
The Future of Work: How to Optimize Your Organization For Innovation
A Panelist discussing how to seamlessly bring bleeding edge practices into an organization. Presented at Design Gym, New York.
How to Innovate like Alphabet
A presentation on diversity and Google’s recent redesign Presented at General Assembly, Sydney.
Women in Technology
Hosted panel with Reshma Saujani, CEO & Founder of Girls Who Code about women in technology. Presented at New York Techweek, New York.
Contact Me
Email: lucyblairchung@gmail.com
“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.”
Ben Okri