"Drawing on deep consulting experience and advanced academic expertise in digital strategy and AI, I bridge practitioner judgment and scholarly rigor to guide current and future leaders through rapid technological and organizational change."
Shama Patel, PhD, is the founder of Drive Change, an organizational change and digital transformation consulting practice she has led since 2009 — and, before that, from 2001 to 2005. She is also an adjunct faculty at NYU Stern School of Business, where she was awarded the Provost's Postdoctoral Faculty Fellowship recognizing scholars with exceptional promise to contribute to academic excellence.
Her path to Drive Change runs through two decades of management consulting leadership — as a Principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers building the firm's aviation Business Intelligence practice, as an Associate Partner and Global CRM Practice Leader at Accenture, and as Managing Director of Corporate Strategy and Planning at United Airlines. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School, where her dissertation examined how digital media activate individuals and publics to drive community and societal change. That combination of boardroom experience and academic rigor is what she brings to every Drive Change engagement.
Awarded the NYU Provost Postdoctoral Faculty Fellowship, which recognizes scholars with exceptional promise to contribute to academic excellence.
Ph.D. dissertation, Summer of 2020: Situating Digital Media in Scaling Affective Contagion — A Case of the George Floyd Video, investigates how digital media activate individuals and publics to drive community and societal change. It demonstrates why certain digital artifacts leave a lasting social imprint and introduces a novel theoretical and methodological approach for studying pivotal media moments that shape digital organizing.
Founded an organizational change and digital transformation consulting practice, guiding leaders from strategy through implementation in building teams and governance models that deliver measurable results, including $47M in incremental growth through data-driven personalization and omnichannel initiatives. Established scalable program and change management practices that align autonomous units and translate insights into coordinated action.
Led business integration for a $300M cross-airline technology transformation, aligning United, Lufthansa, and Star Alliance partners around a shared customer platform. Repositioned the initiative as a value-driven business change program, identifying $150M+ in annualized benefits through process re-engineering and technology enablement. Drove cross-division and cross-border alignment, reduced application development time, and eliminated 40 person-years of development through process re-engineering.
Served as Global CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Practice Leader for the aviation industry, leading the development of industry-wide CRM blueprints, roadmaps, and scorecards that positioned the firm as a leader in airline transformation. Built and scaled the CRM practice by defining a distinctive industry point of view, commercializing analytics-enabled CRM capabilities, and coaching managers, generating $2M in new revenue and winning strategic engagements. Led CRM strategy, organizational alignment, and customer-focused marketing and technology initiatives for airline clients across the US, Europe, and Asia.
Played a key role in building the Business Intelligence practice for the aviation industry, advancing early data warehousing initiatives into analytics-driven solutions that addressed complex business problems. Led large, multi-year systems integration and data platform transformations, including migrations from mainframe to distributed architectures. Progressively assumed senior leadership roles across engagements in the US and Europe, managing teams of up to 80 and multimillion-dollar programs, while scaling a $200K contract into a $5M multiyear account and creating a $15M+ annual consulting revenue stream through data management and analytics capabilities.
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Northern Illinois University, USA
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