John Lester is a Partner in Oliver Wyman’s Digital practice. He joined the firm in 1999, and has 20 years of experience serving global companies and mission-led organizations with their highest impact change initiatives related to technology, analytics, data, and strategy.

As a leader of Oliver Wyman Digital, John helps large organizations harness data, analytics, and technology to confront rapid competitive and social changes. As a co-author of Oliver Wyman’s 2017 flagship report, Transforming for Future Value, he has advocated that digital tools have made it easier for firms to compete as specialized providers in a richer, more modular ecosystem of service providers. He is passionate about using technology to make the world a better place. He works with large incumbents to evolve new capabilities to meet changing demands in a way that is rooted in the economic and operational fundamentals of their business.

He also plays a core role in building and deploying Oliver Wyman’s specialized engineering and data science teams. He leads integrated teams of specialists and consultants to deliver solutions into production while accelerating agile culture and in-house capability building at clients. He has led agile development teams to build client solutions for anti-money laundering and financial crime, revenue forecasting, trading, strategic planning, and stress testing. John taught his first programming class when he was 7 years old, and he still likes to roll up his sleeves on technical problems. He has contributed to codebases in Python, R, Swift, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Ruby.

John holds an A.B. from Harvard University.