Karola Sakotnik

Karola Sakotnik, pleasure to meet! Just call me when strategy alone is no longer enough. I offer cultural intelligence, trust, execution. My work focuses on leaders when uncertainty is high, pressure is real, and strategic direction must become real movement. Through strategic storytelling, positive future images, and leadership language that people can connect to, I make the future not only understandable, but followable. This is how transformation gains clarity, commitment, and execution power. One thing out of a bouquet of skills and expertise you get with me: A profound experience on stage, a love for live experiences and a seasoned strategist who performs with the skills of a theatre person. Having entered the world of stage at the age of five, I have been running shows, hosting conferences and speaking over 100 events worldwide. Plus in my role as artistic director I was the chief live experience designer of more than 7000 events. Just that stage was not enough for me, I wanted to create impact, make the world a better place and went on my personal heroes´ journey. A pioneer at heart born into with a curious father, a born leader, and a nest warming mother, both born during WWII and affected by its turmoils, I had so many questions I searched answers for. How to lead a happy life, how to learn languages (I now speak four fluently and some more at the side), how to activate people so together we can create something worth living, I engaged in very different directions of careers and many of them successfully. Heavy events had me being exposed to disruption several times in my personal life as well as in my career. I became an expert in deaing with uncertainty. Lost my 42 year old dad due to a heart attack at the age 21, I moved from Austria to Switzerland to study six months later. Getting divorced at 29 from my seriously deppressive widower husband was the start of me concentrating on my artistic career successfully. The latter I had to leave at the age of 35 from day to the next due to health reasons, so I went back to University and completed a Master Degree of Culture and Media Management and an MBA with honors in International Culture Management. This opened doors to the "real thing", I finally had found something where I could impact the way people experienced life. From a thriving career as corporate artistic director in the luxury cruise industry responsible for innovation of the experiences both culturally and touristically I proceeded to build up and implement a project in international refugee camps offering psychosocial support through humor and clowning for survivors of war and torture. Both showed me how strong people are on one hand and how thankful we as species are when we experience meaning, being heard and seen, belong to a comunity with good conversations and when we can express ourselves meaningfully. This is what I have been offering since - leadership, a sparring partner for leaders as well as leading myself in various settings, with Non For Profit organisations as well as in business or arts. I am deeply convinced that in order to be ready for a good future we must evolve our human side. I advocate for our calling to owning what it means to be human intelligent, what it means to are the ones who make the decisions, what it implies as of knowledge, spirit and space. Business and arts are both the center of a world worth living - lets shape that well and foremost: lets combine the knowledge of both.