About
Diane’s career philosophy is influenced by Elbert Hubbard, ‘We work to become, not to acquire.’ In a society where results are highly valued, she believes that we too often treat things as a destination when sometimes the point is not arriving, but what we learn along the way.
Diane comes from a non-traditional People & Culture background, with over 15 years of cross-functional and global work experience, including a proven track record of leading teams in executive leadership roles. Her passion is in understanding human behavior and potential, and her practice is based on a foundation of organizational behavior theory mixed with real-life trials and applications. Through full time positions and short-term consulting engagements, Diane’s work has spanned across industries – technology, beauty, retail, consumer goods, and aerospace & defense.
Having spent the earlier part of her career at Boeing, with over 150,000 employees dispersed around the globe, she understands the complexities of working within a matrix structure. Through her time in India and the Middle East, she experienced first-hand, the challenges of successfully implementing people programs at scale. Diane joined Aesop as their Head of Human Resources for the Americas during a period of high growth. She oversaw their people strategy for values-driven frontline retail staff, creating remarkable customer experiences. Afterwards, Diane joined the start-up, Superblue, an industry marker for globally recognized artists within the experiential art economy. As their Head of People & Culture reporting to the CEO, she led the team to reach B Corp certification in April 2020. She created and oversaw their Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) and social impact strategy. Most recently, Diane was VP of People & Culture at two DTC consumer product companies, Pair Eyewear and Prose, in charge of maturing these two start-up organizations by developing cohesive teams who took things from idea to scale.
In each of these roles and more, she’s proven her ability to add value in high growth contexts by building strong relationships with all levels including the C-suite and front-line workers, proactively driving innovative people solutions to challenging business problems. Diane has breadth of knowledge across the field of HR, but above all, her expertise and passion are in the areas of organizational design and creating high-performing teams.
Diane’s interests in social justice and well-considered design transfers to her field as equity-centered design. As the National Equity Project so simply states, ‘any system produces what it was designed to produce.’ Traditionally, design can often fail to address the root causes of inequity and can reproduce inequitable power relationships. Diane advocates for all People & Culture professionals like herself to re-look at the systems, processes, and governing structures organizations have had in place for years. We must reexamine how design-thinking can serve as a force for equity in today’s society.