From a farm in Bavaria to the forefront of global organisational transformation, Larissa Murmann’s career has been one of deliberate reinvention across continents, industries, and paradigms about what human resources can actually accomplish when it stops being administrative and starts being strategic.
Larissa Murmann is the Digital Chief HR Officer for Unilever International, Unilever’s fastest-growing global business unit, with a turnover of €1.3 billion and over 500 employees globally. She is also the Founder of Guide2GOLD, a rapid transformation program designed to disrupt the conventional approach to leadership and culture development. She has keynoted at conferences including Future of Work APAC, the Singapore Fintech Festival, and The Economic Times Future Forward. She recently launched her own LinkedIn Live GOLDCast series. And she carries with her a story that is neither typical nor polished, but genuine.
With over 15 years of expertise across seven countries, she has seamlessly merged strategic innovation with personal growth. Her journey spans Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Asia, not as a tourist collecting stamps in a passport, but as a professional deeply committed to understanding how organisations actually work across different cultures, and what it truly takes to transform them.
Her career is an argument, built over decades, that the future of work depends on HR leaders who think like strategists and act like builders, and that the most impactful transformations come not from templates, but from leaders willing to adapt, learn, and sometimes break generational patterns to create something better.
The Education That Shaped a Global Leader
Larissa Murmann studied at Universität Passau in Germany, an education rooted in Europe but fundamentally oriented toward the world. That international lens would prove defining. She was not educated in a single corporate tradition or a single national business culture. She was educated to observe, learn, and adapt across contexts.
Her early career moved quickly through responsibility levels. Over 14 years in the human resources field, she developed expertise in Business Partnering, Organization Design & Development, Change & Talent Management and Digital Transformation. But the credential list misses the more important point: she was deliberately building capability across every major function of human resources, not specialising narrowly but instead developing a systems-level understanding of how people, culture, and strategy connect.
Building Global HR Expertise
Her career has taken her across the globe from Singapore to Switzerland, the US, Argentina, Spain and Mexico, enriching her approach with a diverse cultural perspective and a global insight into human resources management. That geographic breadth is not incidental. It is the core of her value proposition. She has lived through HR transformation in fast-growing markets (Latin America), in highly regulated environments (Europe), in startup-speed companies, and in multinational enterprises. Each context taught her something different about what actually works versus what merely sounds good in a strategy deck.
The Rise to Chief HR Officer at Unilever
As Digital Chief HR Officer for Unilever International, she brings a solid foundation of over 15 years in human resources, with a focus on rapid culture and leadership transformation, Business Partnering, Organization Design & Development, Change & Talent Management, and Digital Transformation to drive business growth.
Leading HR at Global Scale
The Unilever International assignment is not ceremonial. The business unit has a turnover of €1.3 billion and over 500 employees globally, a scale that requires operational excellence, strategic clarity, and the ability to move fast without breaking culture. For Larissa Murmann, leading HR at this level means being simultaneously the architect of people strategy and the chief translator between what the business needs and what the organisation is capable of delivering.
HR as Business Strategy
What distinguishes her approach at this scale is her refusal to accept the separation between HR and business strategy. She operates as a true business partner, understanding P&L, understanding market dynamics, understanding the capabilities an organisation needs to build to compete. She is not waiting for business leaders to ask for HR support; she is anticipating what the organisation will need before it becomes a crisis.
Guide2GOLD: The Transformation Framework
Beyond her role at Unilever, Larissa Murmann founded Guide2GOLD, a rapid transformation program designed to disrupt the future of leadership and culture transformation. The program is built around what she calls the GOLD formula: Growth mindset, setting bold Objectives, having the courage to Leadershift, and Delighting in your transformation.
The GOLD Formula
The name and structure matter. GOLD is not a framework designed to be comprehensive or to cover every possible dimension of transformation. It is designed to be memorable, actionable, and rapid. Larissa Murmann has observed, across her seven-country career, that organisations often stall transformation initiatives precisely because they are too ambitious, too complex, and too dependent on perfect execution. Guide2GOLD inverts that logic: focus ruthlessly on the essentials, move fast, and let the rest follow.
Making Transformation Stick
The program reflects a belief Larissa Murmann has held consistently: transformation is not about knowing the right theory. It is about having the courage to change your beliefs and behaviours, and then staying committed to the new patterns long enough for them to become instinctive. Most transformation efforts fail not because the strategy is wrong but because people revert to old patterns when pressure arrives. Guide2GOLD is built around creating the psychological safety and peer accountability that makes new patterns stick.
A Woman Who Broke Generational Patterns
Larissa Murmann’s accomplishments are fueled by the strong women who shaped her life. Inspired by the resilience of her mother and grandmother, she has broken generational patterns to achieve financial independence and professional distinction. Their enduring influence motivates her to inspire other women to shape their own future.
Creating Structural Change for Women
That commitment to women’s empowerment has moved beyond personal motivation into professional action. She created the first Women Network in the Mexico Ice Cream business, empowering women to take driving lessons and enter a mainly male-dominated industry. The specificity matters: this was not a ceremonial diversity initiative. It was structural, giving women the practical skills (driving lessons) they needed to enter roles that had been locked to them through simple logistics and gatekeeping.
That same commitment to breaking structural barriers, rather than simply celebrating diversity, defines her approach to leadership development and transformation more broadly. If a system is not designed for certain people to succeed, talking about diversity will not change outcomes. You have to change the system.
Beyond Corporate Leadership
Beyond her professional endeavors, Larissa Murmann’s creative spirit finds expression in unexpected ways. A trained opera singer, she has recorded an album. This detail, a trained opera singer leading global HR transformation, is not decorative. It speaks to someone who has refused to accept conventional categories about what a successful career should look like, what a leader should be, or what dimensions of herself she needs to suppress to be taken seriously in business.
The Future of Work Thesis
Larissa Murmann is an international Digital HR Leader with diverse positions in 8 countries, and her perspective on the future of work is shaped by having lived through rapid change across multiple contexts. She is particularly thoughtful about the intersection of robotics and AI with organisational culture. She has noted that anxiety about AI is actually fear plus uncertainty, and that the more exposure people have to new technologies, the faster curiosity replaces anxiety.
Embracing AI and Change
This is not Pollyanna thinking about AI. It is pragmatic observation: the people most afraid of technology disruption are often those with the least exposure to it. Conversely, people who spend time learning about and interacting with new tools develop a more realistic assessment of what these tools can and cannot do. The implication for organisational leadership is clear: hiding from technological change increases anxiety and resistance; engaging with it directly produces adaptation and often insight.
Rethinking the Future of Work
Her interest in exploring unconventional solutions is driven by a genuine passion for innovation and a curiosity about HR Agility and the Future of Work. She has spoken and published on these themes at major conferences, always with the same underlying thesis: the organisations that will win over the next decade are not those that optimise the old model. They are those that have fundamentally reconceived what work is, who can do it, and how to create environments where people thrive while business accelerates.
A Platform Built to Share
Larissa Murmann is an inspiring keynote speaker and has been featured in events like Future of Work APAC, Singapore Fintech Festival and The Economic Times Future Forward. She recently launched her own LinkedIn Live GOLDCast series. The podcast launch is significant because it reflects Larissa’s philosophy about leadership impact: she could have stayed in corporate roles and built influence through formal channels. Instead, she chose to build public platforms where she could reach practitioners directly.
GOLDCast and Knowledge Sharing
The GOLDCast series brings together her framework, her experience, and her conviction that leadership transformation is a public good, not something to be hoarded inside corporate walls or sold at premium consulting rates, but something to be shared and made available to the practitioners who need it most.
The Bigger Bet
Larissa Murmann is not building a career within the HR profession. She is building one that is reshaping what the profession could be. She is arguing, through her example, through Guide2GOLD, through her keynotes and her podcast, that HR can be strategic, transformational, and genuinely central to how organisations compete.
From a farm in Bavaria to the Digital Chief HR Officer of a €1.3 billion global business unit. From thinking conventionally about women’s roles to building systems that break the barriers those roles have faced. From accepting that transformation is slow to designing frameworks for rapid change. From staying inside corporate hierarchy to building public platforms to share what she has learned.
That trajectory is not accidental. It is a leader who has consistently chosen growth over comfort, who has broken the patterns she inherited, and who is now using every platform available to help others do the same.
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