Amrita Subramanian

Faculty, Organizational Dynamics, The Wharton School

Amrita is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a recognized trailblazer in the field of post-disruptive growth. As a renowned author, speaker, trusted advisor for firms across Asia, Europe, and US, she channels more than 24 years of business leadership experience and a contagious passion for teaching and collaborating with senior Boards and Executive teams to flourish and thrive in turbulent environments.

Amrita’s life mission is to empower a global movement that helps people, communities, and self-sustaining organizations flourish amidst crises. As the President and founder of Suvarna (Golden); a niche global firm that concentrates on fostering post-disruptive growth in the aftermath of crisis (such as the Covid-19 pandemic). She is constantly invited to speak the world over to myriad humanitarian crises, human decision making in high-stress environments, complex cross-cultural assimilation for organizational scaling, and future complexity of multiple generations of workforce influenced by increasingly sophisticated AI. Her trusted and curated clientele includes reputed government entities, corporations, and philanthropic institutions across the globe.

Amrita co-creates psychologically safe environments for clients & senior executives to consider the most volatile “messy and necessary” conflict and anxiety-laden themes – critical for growth and scaling for maximum impact within time constraints. She helps senior leaders learn and activate empathy-informed strategies to lead beyond crisis, enabling them to scale organizations to higher levels of functioning without burning out themselves or their teams. Her core values are approaching chaos with humility and wisdom that can be instantly applied, practically, and consistently.

Amrita has the joy to serve as the Co-Chair and Lead faculty for the Penn’s flagship program Leadership and Organizational Coaching (LOC), leads high profile executive education programs for Wharton Executive Education, and instructs courses on Organizational Paradoxes and Post Disruptive Growth. Her teaching centers on deciphering patterns of chaos in complexity, the evolution of adaptable social networks, relational equity and decision-making in unpredictably complex scenarios.  She collaborates closely across the University, including the Wharton School of Business (Executive Education), Penn Medicine, Penn Law and Penn Engineering.

Her continuing business experience over two decades took her to 32 countries in roles including senior leadership roles, in multiple industries, leading diverse functions – business & quality operations, banking services, strategic planning, and regional talent and leadership management—across Asia Pacific and Europe. She often leads Boards and Executive Committees through turbulent transitions of ownership in new environments of business partnership and organizational growth.

In her own time, she travels to novel places, writes, collects spices, stories, poems, connections, and has a cache of adventures across 32 countries to regale her close friends, family, and colleagues. Her little-known passions are Astronomy led by Carl Sagan’s work, and Mythology by Joseph Campbell.