Meet Diana Czentye
Manager, Deloitte Middle East
The Faces of Deloitte TMT is a series of articles exploring the personal histories of our people, sharing experiences that have defined their values and highlighting why they do what they do. In this story, Diana shares how her perseverant approach to life has led to professional success.
Giving up. Taking the short or easy route. Staying in one place. These are concepts unfamiliar to Diana Czentye, a Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) manager with Monitor Deloitte Middle East. Born in a small town in Romania, Diana knew from an early age that she wanted something bigger—a drive that’s led her around the world to Albania, Hungary, Belgium and now Dubai.
Diana pursued an MBA at Belgium’s Vlerick Business School and has spent more than ten years focusing on the financial services industry while sitting on the client’s side of the table. In 2020, she joined Deloitte Belgium—a fast-paced environment with extensive opportunities for learning and travel. But 2020 had other plans. In pandemic lockdown, she remembers, “the only travel I did that first year was from my bedroom to my sitting room!” Undeterred, she dived into client projects with enthusiasm.
Today Diana is a strategy consulting manager at Monitor Deloitte Middle East (MDME), where she leads a team of consultants from around the world. Working out of the Dubai office, she says, has increased her flexibility, honing her ability to adapt to different cultures and ways of doing business. The secret sauce of successful collaboration, Diana believes, is the ability to anticipate client needs and adapt to local business norms. In the Middle East, that means tempering her direct, results-driven approach with a softer, more flexible style.
Why TMT?
“Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes life chooses for you.” When a TMT project came along in Dubai, Diana took the leap. “I moved to Dubai and started working on interesting projects with great people, many of whom have become my friends. Looking back, I have zero regrets” Dubai, she says, is host to a fast-paced business landscape shaped by quickly evolving technologies, making it rife with both challenges and opportunities: “New developments such as GenAI will shape our futures more than ever. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?”
Diana believes in investing in yourself to maximise your contribution to the world—an attitude that inspires her to keep pushing her personal limits. In 2016, she took a sabbatical to walk the length of the Camino de Santiago, a 750-kilometre pilgrimage across Spain that took her 29 days to complete. The experience, she says, gave her “an amazing time of reflection and a story to tell for a lifetime.” She’s also an avid practitioner of Kundalini Yoga, in which participants hold poses or asanas, for up to 20 minutes. The practice, says Diana, rewards grit and perseverance: “There comes a moment when you just want to give up. You basically train your brain to get past that moment—and the more you train, the more it becomes a habit.”
Diana brings similar perseverance and intensity to her work at Deloitte, where she’s developed media sector and IoT platform strategies and worked on smart city use cases for a range of international clients. “You touch on so many domains—smart logistics, smart parking, smart lighting, smart disaster management. The latter being a hot topic in the Middle East currently.” She finds the work rewarding for, among other things, it’s clear, measurable impact. “You have an immediate effect on peoples’ lives by reducing congestion, waste, energy consumption and CO2 emissions and much more.”
Diana brings a unique value proposition to the market, whereby leading multi-disciplinary teams, she is enabling clients ‘to flying the plane as it’s being built’. In any given engagement, her team helps the client develop go-to-market strategies, supported by proof of concepts and product go-lives, while simultaneously building and extending the client’s future pipeline. “We bring clients to the next level, build their relationships within the broader ecosystem and make their offering relevant in the market from day one.”
Whatever challenges Diana encounters next, it’s fair to say that this rolling stone will gather no moss. Whether she’s hiking Machu Picchu or finding new ways to support her next Deloitte client, she will bring an abundance of persistence, curiosity and international business acumen to any adventures that come her way.
