Carina Davidson and the education of a trusted adviser

In April 2026, Carina Davidson appeared at a gathering of Blair Academy women in Manhattan and talked about a career that had taken twists and turns. At the time, she was interim CEO of H/Advisors Abernathy. By June, the interim had disappeared. The firm appointed her chief executive of its U.S. business after a national search that included candidates from inside and outside the company. Nearly thirty years at one firm might look like a straight line from a distance. Davidson herself offered a more interesting description.

That distinction matters. Corporate biographies tend to arrange a life into tidy steps, each title apparently preparing its owner for the next. Living the steps is rather less orderly. Davidson has worked in public affairs, advised companies entering public markets, helped executives communicate through changes of ownership, and run parts of the business that employs her. The continuity belongs to the firm. The variety belongs to the work.

Her story also has an unusually long prehistory. To understand the executive now advising boards and senior leaders in New York, it helps to travel back beyond the promotion announcements. There is a school journey across borders, a Dutch grandmother with a law degree, and a recurring experience of other people seeing a possibility before Davidson could see it herself.

A family lesson, with a passport

Davidson is the middle of three sisters. Her father's work for Shell took the family around the world. At fourteen, she left Venezuela, then home, for boarding school in the United States. She credits her parents with raising independent daughters. Those are the bones of an international childhood, without the polished travelogue that can make moving countries sound like a succession of pleasant airport lounges.

Her maternal grandmother graduated from law school in Leiden in 1934 and later became a political attaché in Indonesia. War interrupted the appointment. Davidson remembers her commitment to learning and to women, and describes her as a role model. The family lesson she draws is plain: “hard work and perseverance can make a difference.”

Blair identifies Davidson with its class of 1986. She went on to earn a B.A. in Spanish and political science at Skidmore College. Her professional biography also lists Dutch and Spanish among her languages. Language and politics make an apt pairing for someone whose work would involve understanding an audience as well as addressing it. A sentence can be grammatically impeccable and still land in entirely the wrong place.

“hard work and perseverance can make a difference.”

Carina Davidson · 2023

The assignment before the confidence

Before Abernathy, Davidson worked at Edelman, specializing in issues management and public affairs. Both disciplines concern the point where a company's intentions meet the interests of people outside it. A business can believe its reasoning is perfectly clear while everyone affected is busy asking a different question. Communicating across that gap is an occupation in itself.

She joined Abernathy five years after college. In her account of that period, two mentors challenged her to take opportunities she might otherwise have passed over. She now applies that approach to mentoring younger women. The telling detail is the order: responsibility arrived before complete confidence. Anyone waiting for perfect readiness may recognize the inconvenience of this arrangement.

Years later, when Jim Abernathy died, Davidson wrote on LinkedIn about her gratitude for the opportunities he had given her. It is a small public expression of a relationship in a profession where much of the consequential work happens away from public view. Her comment makes room for a person behind the institution, and for the obligation that comes with having been given a chance.

Mentorship has become part of her work beyond the firm. She is a professional mentor with Women in America and a trustee of Blair Academy. The return to a school community gives her career another shape: someone who once went away to learn now participates in an institution's decisions about the people who come after her.

What happens after the bell rings

Davidson's work on initial public offerings supplies a useful way to understand her profession. An IPO has an obvious public moment: a company enters the market, cameras appear, and a stock exchange provides the sort of ceremony that photographs well. The communications assignment has a much longer life. A bell is excellent theater. It cannot answer an investor's next question.

Her IPO responsibilities have encompassed positioning and messaging, media relations, investor relations, infrastructure, executive recruitment, listing-day coordination and support after the offering. She has also counseled employee-owned companies becoming public entities. The change involves more than a new financial label. A company begins explaining itself to new audiences, under different expectations, while its existing people still need to understand what is happening.

Her representative experience includes Toast's IPO and selected corporate communications work, advice to SAS Institute as it prepared to become IPO-ready, and investor relations counsel for RE/MAX. These are distinct assignments with a shared practical concern: how a business describes itself when the people listening have decisions to make. Some will invest, some will work there, and some will ask questions that the prepared presentation never anticipated.

That is why executive coaching belongs naturally alongside transaction advice in her career. Senior leaders must communicate directly with stakeholders. A presentation can be revised indefinitely; an answer in conversation requires someone who understands what they mean. Preparation has to reach the speaker as well as the slide.

The people on either side of a transaction

In another publicly listed assignment, Davidson advised WideOpenWest on its $1.8 billion sale of five service areas in two transactions. Her experience also includes transaction communications, activism defense and investor relations for WisdomTree. A sale and a shareholder dispute create different pressures. Both put a company's account of its decisions under close inspection.

A transaction announcement must explain what is changing. Activism puts the case for management's choices into contention. Investor relations continues between the dramatic moments, when results and expectations have to be discussed without the benefit of a grand unveiling. Davidson's career crosses those boundaries. It places her near the intersection of finance, governance and the everyday requirement to make sense to another person.

She was listed among participants in Harvard Law School's March 2018 corporate governance roundtable as a managing director and chief operating officer. In 2026, she appeared among the featured speakers at Equilar and Nasdaq's Board Leadership Forum. Its strategic-alternatives discussion addressed the choices boards confront around transactions, restructuring and alignment among investors, management and directors.

The thread through these settings is an audience with responsibilities of its own. Boards need to evaluate a decision. Investors need to judge it. Leaders need to explain it. Communications advice earns its place by helping those conversations happen with a shared understanding of the facts and of what remains open to debate.

Running the place that gives the advice

Abernathy MacGregor appointed Davidson president effective May 7, 2018. She had already spent more than twenty years at the firm and was its managing director and chief operating officer. Her predecessor, Chuck Burgess, moved full-time to Europe while retaining a consulting affiliation. The change combined an internal promotion with a continuing relationship, rather than a clean break with the past.

Tom Johnson, then CEO, described her as “smart, collaborative and committed to her clients.” He also credited her with making operations more productive and efficient as COO. It was a revealing combination of responsibilities. Advising a client and running an advisory business share a building, but each makes different demands on the person doing the job.

An adviser can be occupied by a client's immediate problem. An operator must also consider the organization that will handle the next one: its people, its processes and its ability to do the work well. Davidson's promotion brought both kinds of experience into the presidency. Her own remarks at the time emphasized collaboration and partnership with clients, consistent with the colleague's assessment.

In December 2025, she became interim CEO, with Michael Hotra and Sydney Isaacs as co-presidents. The June 2026 appointment made her leadership permanent as the U.S. business adopted the H/Advisors name. Its six offices stretch from New York and Washington to Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The job now includes leading colleagues across that geography within the wider Havas-owned network.

Returning to the room

The April Blair gathering took place at GH on the Park and marked the launch of the Locke Society, alongside fifty-five years since the school's return to coeducation. Davidson participated with alumni from different generations and professions. Conversations ranged from practical career preparation to mentorship and leadership. Here was a communications executive discussing her own career in a setting devoted to other people's futures.

Her observation about twists and turns is particularly useful coming from someone with such a long tenure. Staying at an organization can conceal substantial change within a working life. New clients, unfamiliar situations and operating responsibilities can make the same company a succession of different jobs. A résumé compresses those differences. A conversation can put them back.

The CEO appointment adds another responsibility to that succession. H/Advisors' leadership has connected its next phase to changing client demands, measurable value and the use of AI. Davidson arrives with experience in both the advice and the organization behind it. The public milestone is a title; the work ahead will take place through decisions, colleagues and client relationships.

There is a pleasing continuity in a career that began with others encouraging her to accept an unfamiliar assignment and now includes doing the same for younger women. It allows achievement to carry a practical obligation. Someone opens a door; eventually, you are in a position to open another. Davidson's story gives that familiar idea names, places and a working life long enough to put it into practice.