Unlocking the Power of Relationships through Smarter Collaboration
Transform untapped relationship capital into strategic advantage
Opportunities like onboarding lateral hires, expanding into new regions, or managing mergers and acquisitions can be a turning point for your firm. These are the times when relationships and cross-functional collaboration shape outcomes. But too often, teams remain siloed, wasting opportunities to align and activate key relationships through joint business development and account expansion.
In this exclusive webinar, Dr. Heidi K. Gardner (Harvard Law School Distinguished Fellow and CEO of Gardner & Co.), Ivan Matviak (CEO, Smarter Collaboration International), authors of the best-selling book Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work and Dr. Ryan O’Sullivan (Global Account Manager, Introhive), author of Building B2B Relationships will share practical insights into how smarter collaboration and relationship intelligence can help your firm break down these silos, foster cross-functional collaboration, and turn valuable connections into measurable business growth.
With their combined experience working with leaders across industries, our experts will help you understand how to leverage collaboration to drive real results during key moments of firm growth.
Key Takeaways:
SPEAKERS
Dr. Heidi K. Gardner
Chief Executive Officer, Gardner & Co
Dr. Heidi K. Gardner is a sought-after advisor, keynote speaker, and facilitator for organizations across a wide range of industries globally. Named by Thinkers50 as a Next Generation Business Guru and one of the world’s foremost leadership experts, she is a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School and former professor at Harvard Business School. She is currently the faculty chair and instructor in multiple executive education programs at both institutions.
With her Gardner & Co. team, Dr. Gardner partners with boards, executive teams, and other senior leaders to boost performance by embedding the practices of smarter, cross-silo collaboration within those groups and across the broader organization and ecosystem. This results in concrete, quantifiable performance improvements.
Altogether, Dr. Gardner has authored (or co-authored) more than 100 books, chapters, case studies, and articles. This includes best-selling Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos and Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work. Her research has received the Academy of Management’s prize for Outstanding Practical Implications for Management and has been selected multiple times for Harvard Business Review’s “best of” collections. It has also been featured in major media outlets around the globe.
Dr. Gardner has lived and worked on four continents, including as a Fulbright fellow, and for McKinsey & Co. and Procter & Gamble. She earned her BA in Japanese studies from the University of Pennsylvania (Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude), a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and a second master’s and Ph.D. from London Business School.
Ivan Matviak
Co-Founder, Gardner & Co.
Ivan Matviak has extensive experience transforming and accelerating the growth of complex global businesses through disciplined strategy, product innovation, operations optimization, and cross-silo collaboration.
Currently, Matviak is the CEO of Smarter Collaboration International, a technology company focused on delivering tools to enhance organizational collaboration. He also co-founded Gardner & Co. Matviak is the co-author of the best-selling book Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work(2022) and multiple articles in journals like Harvard Business Review and the Wharton Magazine.
Previously he was an executive vice president at Clearwater Analytics, a publicly traded fintech company, and served as a senior advisor to Boston Consulting Group and the private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC. Matviak was an executive vice president at State Street Bank, serving as chairman and president of multiple fintech subsidiaries and head of Americas for the bank’s data and analytics business.
Matviak has lived and worked around the world including Edinburgh, Johannesburg, London, New York, and Paris with the Bank of Scotland, Bain & Company, Walt Disney Company, and Procter & Gamble.
Matviak holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA and master’s degree in international affairs from the Wharton Business School, and is a fellow at the Joseph H. Lauder Institute for International Studies.
Matviak can be reached at ivan@gardnerandco.co.
Dr. Ryan O’Sullivan
Global Account Manager, Introhive
Dr Ryan O’Sullivan is a senior executive, board member, business adviser, startup investor and university guest lecturer. He has spent his career perfecting and then evangelizing a ‘relationship first’ approach to growing revenue. This has resulted in many awards and accolades over his career, including the most net-new clients in a year on multiple occasions, fastest net-new client in the organization’s history, first strategic deal (total contract value over $50 million) in a new country and largest deal in the organization’s history. He has won deal of the year and salesperson of the year on multiple occasions and has been the number one annual revenue earner many times, often for consecutive years.
Ryan started his career generating net-new business and realized early on that focusing on prospect organizations where there was an existing relationship resulted in disproportionate success. Understanding the value of existing relationships led him to the following question: what are the contributing factors that determine a good quality business-to-business relationship? Ryan was so determined to get a well-evidenced answer to this question that he spent seven years researching it, resulting in a PhD. He applied this evolved thinking to great success during his eight years at Infosys – a global IT services firm – and, more recently, where he has found his philosophical home, at relationship intelligence and mapping company, Introhive, where he has worked since early 2020.
He is a regular speaker on the subject of relationship mapping. Ryan is invited to present at corporate and industry events and guest lectures at various universities around the world, evangelizing how mapping relationships will increase your strategic deal wins and make key account management more effective. He also brings this insight to the boardroom, where for a small number of startup companies that have a particular focus on B2B relationships, he is involved as an investor, adviser or board member.
He currently lives in the South of France near Nice with his wife and daughter, where he enjoys long walks along the beautiful coastal pathways and around the many medieval villages; sometimes stopping along the way for a nice glass of rosé.