With over two decades of experience as the CEO of 20-first, Avivah has become a trusted advisor to global CEOs, leadership teams, and executive committees in over 40 countries. Her expertise spans various sectors — from FMCG and financial services to the pharmaceutical and tech sectors. She’s on the Advisory Boards of the UK National Innovation Centre for Ageing (NICA) and the Chartered Management Institute’s Everyone Economy. She’s an Ambassador for the Stanford Center of Longevity and the Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna and an Adjunct Professor at DePaul University in Chicago. In 2023, she was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame.
A regular contributor to Forbes and the Harvard Business Review, Avivah is host of the longevity focused podcast 4-Quarter Lives, and substack Elderberries. She is a Visiting Lecturer at OXFORD's Said Business School, INSEAD and Catolica Lisbon, where she is Co-Director of their innovative new Longevity Leadership Programme. A three-time TEDx speaker, she regularly captivates audiences in companies and at conferences around the globe, including The Economist Conferences, The Drucker Forum, WIN, The Silver Marketing Summit and The WoMen in Finance Summit.
Her books, such as Why Women Mean Business and Seven Steps to Leading Gender-Balanced Businesses, tackle strategic leadership issues, while her graphic series for managers, including 5 Steps to Longevity Leadership and Thriving to 100, offer practical insights for navigating the future of work.
With a strong belief that the personal informs the professional (and vice versa), Avivah completed a year at Harvard as an Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow in 2022, researching and writing about the new demographics and its multiple impacts - on countries, companies, careers, consumers and couples. This work highlights the unique opportunities available to individuals in their 3rd Quarter of life, the 25 years after age 50.
In her own 1st and 2nd Quarters, Avivah grew up in Canada, attended the University of Toronto as a joint Computer Science/ Comparative Literature major, went to Paris for a year (and stayed for 30), completing an MBA at INSEAD along the way. She holds three passports (Canadian, French and Swiss), lives in London with her sculptor/consultant husband and enjoys visiting her two grown, gender-balanced children, a son and daughter in Dakar and New York.
20-first works with C-suite teams around the world — from FMGC and financial services to the pharmaceutical industry and tech sector on Culture, Gender and Generational Balance.
20-first, Avivah’s consultancy arm, works with CEOs and Executive Committees who want to rethink and update their diversity approaches for the 21st century, and strategically balance their businesses to reflect today’s talent and market realities.
For a more in depth conversationHelping people and businesses navigate big societal change is core to Avivah’s passion for her work, and that includes making it better for the next generation.
Avivah supports four charities who are focussed on making a difference.
