Shirley Santoso is a Senior Partner at Kearney and the Partner and President Director of Kearney Indonesia. She also serves as the CEO of the firm’s Indonesia office. With nearly 25 years at Kearney, she has built a career centered on helping boards, CEOs, and senior leaders drive meaningful and lasting transformation.
Shirley Santoso | Senior Partner | Kearney
Shirley Santoso is a Senior Partner at Kearney and the Partner and President Director of Kearney Indonesia. She also serves as the CEO of the firm’s Indonesia office. With nearly 25 years at Kearney, she has built a career centered on helping boards, CEOs, and senior leaders drive meaningful and lasting transformation. Her work spans private enterprises, family-owned businesses, multinational corporations, and state-owned companies across a wide range of industries. At EliteX, we are proud to have Shirley Santoso as part of the edition: Impactful Women in Consulting, 2026.
In her consulting work, Shirley focuses strongly on large-scale transformation, both from a business and organizational perspective. This includes strategy development, operating model redesign, people and talent transformation, and complex change programs that require strong leadership alignment. In recent years, much of her work has also sat at the intersection of business, government, and society, where strategic decisions have broader national and social impact. Her industry experience includes financial services, healthcare, energy, consumer and retail, as well as extensive work with public-sector institutions on national and industry-wide initiatives.
True leadership is about growing other leaders and creating environments where people can thrive.
Alongside leading the Indonesian practice, Shirley has held several regional leadership roles within Kearney. She previously led the firm’s Leadership, Change and Organization Practice in Asia, co-led the Transaction and Transformation Practice in Asia, and headed Asian talent, diversity, and inclusion initiatives. Outside of Kearney, she is a board council member of Sampoerna University in Indonesia and an Independent Commissioner at HSBC Indonesia. In 2023, she co-founded a pro-bono initiative called IGNITE Professional Women Network and Mentoring, together with Egon Zehnder. The initiative has since received the Change the World award from Fortune Indonesia, as featured in the Fortune December 2025 edition, recognizing organizations that demonstrate how business can be a force for positive societal impact. IGNITE now includes more than 100 member organizations and focuses on empowering women leaders through mentorship, networking, and leadership development.
Shirley did not begin her career with a clear plan to become a consultant. What first attracted her to consulting was the opportunity to learn quickly, work across industries, and solve a wide range of problems while creating real impact. Over time, she became deeply committed to the profession because of its ability to influence important decisions made by organizations and governments. She believes that when consulting is done well, it can shape outcomes that affect not only individual companies but also communities and society at large. This sense of purpose was reinforced by her upbringing, where she was taught that meaningful work should always aim to make a difference.
You can design the best strategy, but without people ready to change, transformation will not succeed.
One of the most defining periods in her career came when she temporarily stepped out of traditional consulting to take on a part-time role in management services while raising her son. At that stage, the travel demands of consulting were intense, and she wanted to be more present as a mother. What could have been seen as a step back became a formative experience. She led teams across HR, marketing, staffing, and operations, gaining a deep understanding of how the firm functions internally. With strong support from the firm and mentors who sponsored her growth, she later returned to consulting and was even promoted while working part-time. This experience shaped her leadership style, strengthening her empathy, systems thinking, and belief in creating environments where people can thrive at different life stages.
Much of Shirley’s client work involves helping organizations navigate moments of transition, such as organizational restructuring, cost transformation, digital change, or major disruptions. She believes that while strategies and systems matter, most transformation challenges are ultimately human. Without alignment, capability, and readiness for change, even the best strategies fail. For this reason, her work often sits at the intersection of strategy, transformation, and people. She is also increasingly involved in national and ecosystem-level initiatives, including industrial roadmaps, digital economy strategies, and public-sector transformation programs.
Shirley’s consulting approach is grounded in impact, integrity, and empathy. She places great importance on listening deeply, understanding not just what the problem is, but why it exists and what constraints people face. Trust, authenticity, and long-term partnership are central to how she builds client relationships, many of which have lasted for decades. She believes effective consulting is about helping clients make progress they can sustain long after a project ends.
Resilience, adaptability, and authentic leadership have been critical to her success, especially as a woman in a demanding profession. She encourages women to embrace non-linear career paths, seek mentors and sponsors, stay curious, and pace themselves over the long term. Looking ahead, Shirley sees consulting becoming more impact-driven, outcome-focused, and collaborative across sectors. Through her work, she hopes to help build stronger institutions, empowered leaders, and inclusive environments that support Indonesia’s long-term development and future generations.
Consulting allows you to shape decisions that affect not just one company, but society at large.