People. Organizations. What's Next.
About
Simmi P. Singh has spent thirty years advising boards and building C-suites, with a career that has moved deliberately between the outside view and the inside view.
As a Senior Partner at Egon Zehnder — and more recently as EVP & Chief People Officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts — she has advised boards and founders across twelve countries, built and rebuilt C-suites at organizations including Snap, Inc., and led enterprise people functions through some of the most complex organizational environments of the past decade.
The Burr Oak Group works with a small number of boards, investors, founders, and senior leaders each year.
She is based in Chicago and New York City and her work takes her across the globe.
What We Do
Our work spans four areas:
Board and Executive Advisory
Counsel to boards, founders, and institutional investors on governance, succession, and organizational risk.
Organizational Architecture
Designing and building the leadership structures, team compositions, and operating models that allow companies to scale, turn around, or transition successfully.
Executive Coaching and High-Potential Development
The identification, development, and retention of next-generation leaders and successors — as a coach to CEOs and high-potential successors, and as an outside advisor working alongside an organization's own leadership.
Special Purpose & Fractional Leadership
Senior leadership for pivotal moments - interim, fractional, or special-purpose people or transformation roles for organizations navigating a pivotal moment without a permanent leader in place.
Background
At Egon Zehnder for sixteen years, where she served as Senior Partner, she advised boards, founders, and institutional investors across twelve countries on CEO succession, executive team composition, and governance. She founded the firm's North American Professional Services, Health Services, and Digital Health practices, served as global faculty for the firm's leadership development programs, and spent nine months seconded to the US Department of Health and Human Services as Senior Advisor on Health Innovation.
She has also operated at the C-suite level — as Chief Talent Officer at Snap, Inc., where she helped architect the leadership team that executed the 2017 IPO, and as EVP and Chief People Officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, where she rebuilt over half the top-25 leadership team and ran the people function through the organization's most difficult market environment in decades.
A thread running through all of it: the development of high-potential leaders and successors. She has identified, coached, and built pathways for next-generation leaders across hundreds of engagements — as an outside advisor, as a coach to CEOs and high-potential successors, and as an operator responsible for the bench strength of a 4,000-person organization.
The Burr Oak Group works with a small number of boards, investors, and founders each year.
Our Perspective
What We Believe
We never stop becoming. Neither do the organizations we lead.
Experience gives us pattern recognition, not all the answers. Identity grounds us; potential draws us forward. The leaders we admire understand what has shaped them without becoming captive to it. They see clearly what is, imagine what could be, and lead accordingly — knowing what to preserve, what to change and what to build.
So, what comes next for you?
Contact
The Burr Oak Group works with a small number of clients at a time. If the timing and the work feel right, we'd welcome the conversation.