About Gardner & Co.

Dr. Heidi K. Gardner is a sought-after advisor, keynote speaker, and facilitator for organizations across a wide range of industries globally. Named by Thinkers50 as a Next Generation Business Guru and one of the world’s foremost leadership experts, she is a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School and former professor at Harvard Business School. She is currently the faculty chair and instructor in multiple executive education programs at both institutions.

With her Gardner & Co. team, Dr. Gardner partners with boards, executive teams, and other senior leaders to boost performance by embedding the practices of smarter, cross-silo collaboration within those groups and across the broader organization and ecosystem. This results in concrete, quantifiable performance improvements.

Altogether, Dr. Gardner has authored (or co-authored) more than 100 books, chapters, case studies, and articles. This includes best-selling Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos and Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work. Her research has received the Academy of Management’s prize for Outstanding Practical Implications for Management and has been selected multiple times for Harvard Business Review’s “best of” collections. It has also been featured in major media outlets around the globe.

Dr. Gardner has lived and worked on four continents, including as a Fulbright fellow, and for McKinsey & Co. and Procter & Gamble. She earned her BA in Japanese studies from the University of Pennsylvania (Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude), a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and a second master’s and Ph.D. from London Business School.

Ivan Matviak has extensive experience transforming and accelerating the growth of complex global businesses through disciplined strategy, product innovation, operations optimization, and cross-silo collaboration.

Currently, Matviak is the CEO of Smarter Collaboration International, a technology company focused on delivering tools to enhance organizational collaboration. He also co-founded Gardner & Co. Matviak is the co-author of the best-selling book Smarter Collaboration: A New Approach to Breaking Down Barriers and Transforming Work (2022) and multiple articles in journals like Harvard Business Review and the Wharton Magazine.

Previously he was an executive vice president at Clearwater Analytics, a publicly traded fintech company, and served as a senior advisor to Boston Consulting Group and the private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC. Matviak was an executive vice president at State Street Bank, serving as chairman and president of multiple fintech subsidiaries and head of Americas for the bank’s data and analytics business.

Matviak has lived and worked around the world including Edinburgh, Johannesburg, London, New York, and Paris with the Bank of Scotland, Bain & Company, Walt Disney Company, and Procter & Gamble. 

Matviak holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA and master’s degree in international affairs from the Wharton Business School, and is a fellow at the Joseph H. Lauder Institute for International Studies.

Matviak can be reached at ivan@gardnerandco.co.

Previously, as global manager and knowledge leader at McKinsey & Company, Ilkei spent over two decades building and leading the firm’s research capabilities across industry and functional practices. She has lived on three continents, worked with private and public clients in forty countries, and built and oversaw a team of experts across the globe.

Ilkei is a highly skilled presenter and facilitator of client sessions with extensive experience translating research into practical actions with executive teams and large audiences. With an MBA from Corvinus University of Budapest, Ilkei is experienced in leading, designing, conducting, and delivering innovative, rigorous, practical research programs.

Ilkei can be reached at csilla@gardnerandco.co.

Previously, Dunne served as client & communications manager at Gardner & Co. And before that she was a consulting editor at Keypoint Intelligence, a market research and advisory firm focused on the print and document solutions industry. In this capacity, she broadened the firm’s approach to generating and delivering insights for clients and partners — through the use of such mediums as video interviews, podcasts, and infographics. She also has deep experience creating white papers, research reports, and survey tools — focused on clients’ top objectives, needs, and opportunities.

Dunne’s other work experience includes reporting business and government news for daily and weekly newspapers and news websites. Based in Syracuse, New York, Dunne has a MA in magazine, newspaper, and online journalism from Syracuse University and a BA in French from Loyola University in Maryland.

Dunne can be reached at christine@gardnerandco.co.