Kaijia Gu is a leader of the Oliver Wyman Forum’s City Readiness initiative and is a partner at Oliver Wyman. Kaijia has 15 years of strategy consulting and management experience. She has lived in major cities around the world most of her life including Beijing, Xi’an, Ithaca, Boston, New York, and London, where she currently lives with her family.

Kaijia has routinely helped companies harness their potential in the midst of market-shaping disruptions. She has advised executives in a wide range of industries across Europe, North America, and Asia on strategies, business designs, pricing, sales, and operations. She has planned and supported transformations at leading B2B and B2C services companies. Kaijia has also developed innovative business designs for a number of large businesses in the media, technology, consumer goods and insurance sectors that have enabled them to reinvent their business model and thrive despite shifts in consumer demands, technological innovations, and new competitors.

As a leader of the City Readiness team, Kaijia collaborates with business leaders, academics, and policymakers to identify ways that cities can transform potential waves of disorder into new opportunities for innovation, in part by tapping into the potential of their diverse networks of people and organizations. She has a passion for improving the interactions and dynamics between technology and people and is particularly interested in the “human angle” of city readiness.

Kaijia holds a Master of Public Administration with Honors from Cornell Institute for Public Affairs and a B.A. in Economics from Peking University. She is fluent in Chinese.