Co-Founder & Managing Partner

Di has just stepped into the Chair role at Critical Mass, after 15 years as Chief Executive Officer. Over 23 years with Critical Mass, Di has held many influential positions-managing director, coach, entrepreneur and leader-for teams and clients. During her tenure, Critical Mass and its affiliate organizations grew from 25 people in Canada to 1,000 around the globe. Today, Critical Mass is recognized for its breadth and depth of services, vibrant agency culture, purpose-driven mindset, and an unwavering commitment to client service.
 

Di started with Critical Mass in Stockholm, leading Saab globally. After two years, she relocated to Calgary, becoming CEO in January 2006 and moving to New York in 2015. Prior to Critical Mass, she received an MBA while pursuing a career as a golf pro. 

Di is a founding member of Omniwomen, an organization designed to facilitate getting more women into senior leadership roles across Omnicom.

Di works with startups as both a strategic advisor and angel investor.  She is currently on the board of Communo, and an Advisory Board member for both Pickup and Wholly Veggie. Di is a Selection Committee Member and Advisor for Axis Connect, and an Advisory Board Member for KB Partners Myriad Opportunity Fund II, a VC focused on early-stage opportunities at the convergence of sports and technology. Di has also been Chair of the Board at Fast & Female, focused on empowering girls through sport, and is a past board member at the House of Anansi Press.

Advisor

  After a long career in Financial Services and Leadership Development, Pat currently serves as an Advisor to private families, primarily from Latin America. Most recently, she served as the CEO for the US business of WOBI, which produces the World Business Forum, convening senior executives for inspirational leadership lessons.

Prior to her work at WOBI, Pat held several senior positions in the Financial Services industry, including CFO at AdvisorTech in San Francisco, a company designed to bring financial advisor technology to the international community. She was also a Senior Vice President at Charles Schwab & Company, where she was instrumental in building their international expansion. Pat spent over 20 years at Chemical Bank, responsible for the International Private Client business and representing the bank for their Corporate Finance business in Latin America.

She is an active mentor to entrepreneurs at Endeavor (www.endeavor.org).,  and enjoys farm life in Uruguay with her four dogs and her camera!

Partner

  Carmen Baez is founder and CEO of PRxPR – a private, non-partisan, no overhead fund purposefully created to help rebuild Puerto Rico after the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria in September 2019. PRxPR has delivered aid to thousands of citizens and dozens of communities affected by the historic natural disaster. 

Previously, Carmen was President, DAS Latin America for Omnicom Group – the world’s largest marketing communications company, where she was responsible for company operations in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America. In that capacity, she developed and managed a region that included 78 agency partner offices across 17 countries, leading major client engagement teams and multi-country business development and collaborative initiatives across Latin America and overseeing Omnicom’s multicultural assets.

A native of San Juan, PR, Carmen has over 30 years of experience in advertising and marketing communications working with clients such as Procter & Gamble, Walt Disney, Nissan, Anheuser Busch and ATT. She has been recognized by numerous industry organizations having been named into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s Hall of Fame and an Ad-Industry Legend by the AdColor Coalition. 

Carmen has served as a trustee and advisor to the Puerto Rico Conservation Trust, Pro-Mujer, Simmons College and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Connors Center. She holds a BA and Honorary Degree from Simmons College and is fluent in Spanish, English and Portuguese. She resides in New York City and Boston, MA.

Partner

  Claire has a track record of delivering results as a member of executive teams in both FTSE and NYSE-limited companies, as well as in multiple board Director roles. She is currently the global CCO of IHG Hotels and Resorts (FTSE IHG:L), where she is a member of the executive team responsible for >$27B gross revenue in 100 countries. IHG is one of the largest hotel companies in the world, and Claire is a respected commercial and CX leader in the hospitality industry which represents over 10% of global GDP.

Claire has spent more than three decades helping build businesses across industries including technology, luxury/lifestyle, financial services, and retail. During her multi-disciplined career in finance, general management, and marketing, she has built significant expertise in leading data-driven digital transformations in both B2B and B2C environments at industry-leading companies including Dell and American Express. During her tenure at both companies, they were listed in the Fortune Top Ten Most Admired Companies in America. 

In addition, she has deep board governance experience in multiple board roles including Tumi, where she was a member of the audit and governance committees and participated in a successful sale to Samsonite in 2016. She has served on the audit committee and executive board of the World Travel & Tourism Council, three private equity boards in the e-commerce retail and health/wellness industries, and non-profits focused on diverse leadership. She is currently a member of the Chief Digital Officer board of MMA. 

The consistent thread throughout her career has been a passion for DE&I. She has served in multiple roles supporting inclusive leadership, including serving as co-chair and executive sponsor for American Express DE&I, the executive sponsor for Amex WIN (for women in entry level roles of leadership), and as a previous board member of Public Allies – an organization built on diverse young-adult leadership development and the premise that “Everyone leads.” It is in that spirit and a belief in that premise she became an early investor in the Norma Fund- diversity in leadership is a force multiplier for driving results.

Partner

  A trusted advisor to senior healthcare executives and a dedicated mentor to colleagues

around the world, Sharon is known for being an agile, entrepreneurial, and global

C-suite executive with a proven track record of leading diverse teams through uncertainty

to extraordinary results.

Sharon is CEO of CDM, one of the worlds’ leading healthcare advertising agency networks.

She was previously CEO of TBWA\WorldHealth, a healthcare advertising agency network she founded in 2016. Under her  leadership, TBWA\WorldHealth

quadrupled in revenue and profitability, grew to 12 offices across the globe, and was

named 2019 Agency of the Year by Medical Advertising News. Sharon also serves as Chief

Client Officer of Omnicom Health Group.

In 2019 the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) recognized Sharon as its

Woman of the Year. She has also been honored by the Arthritis Foundation, and was

recently named a PharmaVOICE red jacket honoree in recognition of her three time

appearance on the list of the 100 Most Inspiring People in the Life Sciences Industry. In

2018, Medical Advertising News selected Sharon as it’s Industry Person of the year.

Sharon is an active board member of several corporate and philanthropic institutions,

including: LGBTQ Victory Fund (Chair), GLAAD, HBA, the Arthritis Foundation, Women

Against Alzheimer’s, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) Government

Relations Committee, and the Coalition for Healthcare Communications. 

A frequent speaker on the power of women’s authentic leadership, Sharon co-founded and

continues to champion Omniwomen, OpenPride, and the Black Career Collective, Omnicom’s

employee resource groups, designed to foster the full potential of women, LGBTQ+, and Black

employees within the company.

Partner

   Diane Hessan is an award-winning entrepreneur and innovator in the market research field, and a nationally recognized expert on the American voter. Since 2016, she has been engaged in an in-depth, longitudinal study of the electorate, looking for trends, shifts and common ground. She has written more than fifty columns about her findings for the Boston Globe and has been featured by major outlets like CNN, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbesand Fortune

She is the founder and Chairman of C Space,  the first company to leverage social media to help companies get insight and inspiration from their consumers. She has been honored as a disruptor in the market research industry because of her work in conducting breakthrough research via the internet. Diane recently consolidated all her investment and advisory work into a new company called Salient Ventures, which helps accelerate the next generation of startup companies in tech.

She serves on the boards of Panera, Eastern Bank, Brightcove, Schlesinger Group, Mass Challenge, Tufts University, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In 2017, the Boston Globe appointed her to its editorial board. Diane has received many honors, including the Pinnacle Award from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Most Admired CEO and Boston Power 50 awards from the Boston Business Journal and Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year. She has been inducted into the Babson Academy of Distinguished Entrepreneurs and she received the Asper Award for Global Entrepreneurship from Brandeis University. 

Diane previously coauthored the book Customer-Centered Growth: Five Strategies for Building Competitive Advantage, a Business Week best seller that was published in eleven languages. 

She received a BA in economics and English from Tufts University, and an MBA 

from Harvard Business School. She is also the founder of The Sound Bytes, an a cappella group that sings about business.

Partner

Tracy is currently CEO of Batten & Co, a New York City based consulting firm and a member of the Omnicom Group of companies. 

She started her professional journey in London with Ogilvy & Mather and has worked for each of the top three holding companies in leadership roles. 

She relocated to New York in 2001 and the events of that year, in the Tribeca neighborhood that had recently become her home, led to her leadership in rebuilding and rejuvenating downtown, through the partnership of American Express and the founding of the now renowned Tribeca Festival.  

After over 25 years leading strategic planning in global agencies, she founded Batten and Co in 2010 to focus on building sustainable growth strategies for entrepreneurial organizations from Fortune 500’s to ambitious start-ups. Over the past decade, Batten has and continues to disrupt the traditional approach to consulting, working across healthcare, finance, luxury goods, travel and media.  

Tracy was a founding Partner of G23, an Omnicom ‘women for women’ leadership consulting group and a founding partner of Omniwomen – an organization developed to ensure that women assume leadership roles in greater numbers across Omnicom. 

She served on the board of Equality Now, focused on creating a world where women and men have equal rights under the law and where legal and systemic change addresses violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world, in the US and as UK trustee. 

Her passion and commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion in every aspect of life, made the decision to invest in Norma early on and consistently, a no brainer. 

Partner

Sharon is her 33rd year at TPN, a creative commerce agency, serving as CEO for the past 21 years. She joined the agency out of college, as an Account Executive. Sharon’s academic focus was human behavior and she had plans to pursue a Law degree. But a pause between university and law school introduced her to marketing and its connection to human behavior and she was hooked. 

Sharon started as the 11th employee at the small, independent agency in Dallas, TX and helped grow TPN’s reach across the US and UK, to where it is today – serving clients like Hershey, Clorox, Cricket Wireless, Campari and Bank of America.  She led the acquisition of TPN by Omnicom in early 2000 and has continued to lead the agency by attracting and retaining top-tier clients with the best talent in the industry! Human beings - clients, colleagues and consumers - are Sharon’s passion and keep her energized in her role.

Sharon is a founding member of Omniwomen, a global initiative that champions the role of women in the workplace. She served for 17 years as Trustee of the Women’s Sports Foundation – currently in an Emeritus advising role. Sharon is on the Board of Directors of Access Circles/WHAM! - an organization that supports research on diseases that disproportionately affect women. 

Sharon is a founding Ally member of her agency’s Black Advocacy group, OmniBlack. When not at work, Sharon enjoys hiking with her chocolate lab, Nuna. She loves to cook, garden and travel with her husband, Neil, preferably to somewhere that requires a passport.

Partner

  Kate is a Park City-based Brit, with a 1st class honors degree in Industrial Economics from Nottingham University in England. Kate spent her career in international marketing communications, with a passion for mentoring and developing teams and exploring diverse cultures. She has lived in six countries and worked in Asia, Europe and the U.S. 

She spent the last 20 years at Omnicom Media Group, most recently as the global Chief Operating Officer of OMD Worldwide and a member of the Omnicom Media Group Global Board. In this capacity she led a global change management program comprising fourteen workstreams and personally oversaw the Global Talent workstream. In February 2019 OMD were awarded Global Media Agency of the Year by AdWeek, in recognition of the successful turnaround of the organization.

Prior to that, as President of Global Account Management, she led the Global Client Practice for Omnicom Media Group. Built on a community of talented global account directors, the program created a strong model that managed and delivered on global clients’ media priorities. 

Kate joined OMD as Managing Director for SE Asia based out of Singapore. She was appointed to the worldwide board of Omnicom Media Group in 2007 and was the first women on the board. She was also a founding member of Omniwomen, Omnicom’s program for increasing the influence and number of female leaders across Omnicom.

Kate made her first foray into the international media world as the Global Media Director for Cathay Pacific at Leo Burnett Hong Kong and set up Carat Asia Pacific, building the regional network through acquisition, joint ventures and start-ups.

Kate recently moved to Park City, UT full time and is loving the outdoor life – hiking, biking, skiing and snowshoeing. She also volunteers in the equestrian program at the National Ability Center and is a member of their marketing advisory committee.

Partner

Andrea Sullivan is a Chief Marketing Officer, professor, board member, philanthropist, and C-Suite whisperer. 

She joined VaynerX and Gary Vaynerchuk as its first ever Chief Marketing Officer, overseeing the business and the brand. VaynerX is a full-service marketing agency built for the now, servicing companies large and small, non-profit organizations, cultural icons and celebrities. Founded by entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, VaynerX celebrates his entrepreneurial vision for unlocking underpriced attention by connecting with culture through the latest in marketing and technology. Andrea hosts VaynerX Presents: Marketing for the Now, a video content series commanding a global audience averaging 100k viewers each month celebrating conversations with C-Suite, celebrities and culture shapers. 

Andrea was previously with Omnicom’s leading brand consultancy Interbrand for 16 years, serving as global Chief Marketing Officer and running the iconic Best Global Brands study. Additionally, she was one of the founders of ONE HUNDRED, Omnicom’s non-profit agency dedicated to non-profits. 

She is a proud board member of Creative Spirit, Ad Council, the Miami Ad Schoo, the United Nations Association of New York, the Ad Club, and We.org where she built schools in Kenya! She is also a professor at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts  for 6 years running, working with students and clients including Google, YouTube, PBS, Uber, St. Jude’s Children Research and more.

Andrea has fostered business growth for numerous clients over the years including Adobe, AIG, American Express, Apollo, Bank of America, eBay, Feeding America, FanDuel, Gates Foundation, GE, Harley-Davidson, Hyatt, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Marriott, Natura & Co, Nissan, Mars, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Nintendo, NYSE, PayPal, (RED), The Ritz-Carlton, SAP, St. Jude, Thomson Reuters, USGA, United Nations and others. 

Partner

  Karen Zahorsky is a seasoned executive with over 30 years of marketing/advertising management and business experience. Her comprehensive expertise and substantive leadership extend across agency, entrepreneur, consulting, client, corporate and complex international networks; working with client start-ups to established Fortune 100 companies. 

For 15 years, Karen was President, Diversified Agency Services (DAS) Development, Omnicom Group. During her tenure, DAS grew from $500 million to a $7 billion division contributing over 50% of Omnicom’s revenue. 

With a focus on organic revenue growth, business and talent development, Karen leveraged the diverse expertise of its many companies across its expansive global network, activating collaboration, entrepreneurial spirit, and knowledge share to capitalize on client opportunities, build efficiencies, and enhance innovation. 

Prior to joining Omnicom’s corporate leadership team, Karen ran the Boston office of Rapp Worldwide, the industry’s largest CRM agency and cofounded BZI, a marketing communications consulting firm with clients including Bank of Boston and Omnicom Group. 

Karen is currently a Board and former Chair of Women’s Health and Gender Biology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, and PRxPR, a disaster-aid fund dedicated to assisting critically affected Puerto Rico communities. She has served as Board Member at Colombia University School of Continuing Education, counseling the design of its new Strategic Communications program, and the American Federation of the Arts.

Since leaving corporate life, Karen continues with occasional consulting and mentoring, taking in the joys of travel, and jumping between her NYC and Cape Cod homes with her new Australian Labradoodle, Joe. 

Partner

    Following her passion of “being the change she wishes to see in the world” Ceci is a c-suite executive, strategic/operational advisor, board member, and a ski instructor. 

Currently, Ceci is the Chief Possibilities Officer for BiotiQuest, a probiotic company whose products focus on the ecosystem of the gut, specifically targeting metabolism. She is tasked with driving revenue of 3 recently launched products (Sugar Shift, Heart Centered and Ideal Immunity), while progressing the capital resources needed to grow exponentially. Most recently, Ceci built and launched Gateway Proven Strategies (GPS), a world class cannabusiness consulting firm, striving to be the “McKinsey of Cannabis”, illuminating business focused insights for entrepreneurs, Fortune 500, investors and governments looking to expand into the global cannabis market. 

Ceci sits on the Board of The BioCollective, a company focused on driving improved health and wellness through the standardization of microbiome research and development. She is also a key member of the Genusetics executive team, a science-based diagnostic company, spearheading an initiative to bring new ways to identify early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.
 

Formerly Ceci was the COO of Healthcare at Omnicom, where she developed and activated the global strategies to support Bio/Pharmaceutical and Retail/Pharmacy clients, while managing the P&L of the group’s 42 worldwide operating units, representing $1B in sales. She was also a Principal at Batten & Co., a strategic, c-suite, consulting company. And an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School for 3 years.

Spending most of her career in Pharmaceuticals, she held various senior executive roles at Sanofi and Roche Pharmaceuticals.

Passionate about giving back to her community, Ceci spearheaded the development of OurBrainBank, the first nonprofit focused on turning glioblastoma from terminal to treatable and is Chairman Emeritus of the Healthcare Businesswoman’s Association (HBA) a global nonprofit, dedicated to furthering the advancement of women in healthcare worldwide. Ceci also teaches skiing at Beaver Creek during the winter months.