Daniella Levitt’s passion is empowering transformational change. She can’t help but wonder if it had something to do with growing up in South Africa and experiencing the terrible institution of apartheid, as well as the amazing journey of dismantling apartheid. Talk about living through real transformational change, and the impact it has on economies, industries, organizations and individuals. It doesn’t get bigger or more complicated than that.
Daniella visited the United States for the first time in the winter of 1993 and fell in love with Chicago despite the freezing temperatures. In 1996, after twenty-six years in South Africa, she moved to the US to build a new life for herself, making Chicago her new home. It’s been an incredible journey. Her corporate path includes Anderson Consulting, Deloitte, and Aon as a Senior Vice President. Her entrepreneurial path includes founding two ongoing successful companies.
Ovation Global Strategies, launched in 2008, works with corporations on large scale strategic transformation initiatives, serving Fortune 500 clients as well as mid-market organizations. Daniella applies her unique combination of regulatory, technology and organization change experience to assist her clients with adapting to a world in which their business are subject to an ever-changing, constantly expanding web of government mandated regulations which impacts their business strategy, their people, their business processes, their data and reporting. (www.ovationglobalstrategies.com)
Daniella Levitt Enterprises, launched in 2013, is focused on development and advancement of women in the workplace through strategies of cross-generational collaboration, providing women with positive strategies to take more risks in their careers, and providing leadership teams in organizations with positive strategies to support those women in their risk-taking. The company offers unique programming anchored around cross-generational collaboration and risk-taking, as well as related consulting services. gen-xyb™ High Tea is an innovative year-long leadership development program to which companies send cross-generational pairs of women. gen-xyb™ Coaching Trees is a cross-generational group-based coaching and mentoring construct. Daniella’s first book, Ready, Set…RISK! – Positive Strategies and Tactics for Women to Turn Career Risk into Opportunity, was published in May 2015. She is an engaging and talented speaker – delivering keynotes, breakout sessions, workshops and participating in panels. (www.daniellalevitt.com)
Daniella is a Board member of Access Community Health Network where she chairs the Quality Committee, and the Chicago Sinfonietta. She served on the 40th Anniversary Committee for Women Employed. She is a past Board member of the Anti-Defamation League, and was a member of the host committee for the Anti Defamation League’s Annual Women of Achievement Awards Dinner for five years. Daniella served on the Healthcare Policy Team in connection with Toni Preckwinkle’s bid for Chicago’s Cook County Board President in 2011.
Daniella received her Bachelor of Commerce at the University of the Witwatersrand and her Postgraduate Business degree at the Business School of the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Daniella and her husband Steve live in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. In off-hours Daniella can be found running half-marathons and teaching group cycle classes, encouraging participants to challenge themselves, to go somewhere they haven’t been before. For both organizations and individuals, Daniella is clearly all about change.