profile kim powell

Kim Powell

Kim is a Principal at ghSMART, a leading talent advisory firm. Over the last ~25 years, she has worked extensively with her private equity and corporate clients in areas of accelerating and improving executive hiring, leadership development and coaching, and scaling sustainable organizations and cultures. She advises boards, executives and investors on their most important leadership challenges. Kim co-leads the CEO Genome Project, which was featured in a cover article of Harvard Business Review. She also co-wrote the New York Times bestselling book The CEO Next Door, published in 2018, which is based on the research of the CEO Genome Project. The research explores paths and behaviors that lead to the top, typical setbacks CEOs encounter and ways to prevent them. She has a passion and deep experience working with founders and CEOs who aspire to successfully and sustainably scale their businesses.

Prior to joining ghSMART, Kim was a senior manager and senior knowledge expert with the Boston Consulting Group, focused on driving transformational change and corporate strategy for Fortune 500 clients. She led teams that assisted clients in creating and executing growth strategies, restructuring, turning around operational performance, building high performance cultures, maintaining high employee engagement and change management.

She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame with a BA in History and French and earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.