Where Change Can Lead

Tobias “Tobi” Kirchebner has spent his career helping organizations adapt to changing technologies and markets and rethink how they work. The University of Nebraska at Omaha alumnus most recently served as Agile Lead at PwC Austria in Vienna, where he focused on organizational agility and transformation. His career has also included consulting and research.

Kirchebner grew up in Austria, and Nebraska wasn't part of any career plan he had drawn up. He came to Omaha through a partnership between UNO and his university in Austria that allowed him to spend a year earning his MBA. He arrived in 2019 at age 24 with three other students from Austria. None of them had family in Omaha, and Kirchebner had few connections to the United States and didn’t know quite what to expect.

“I didn’t have any touch points to the States or, specifically, Omaha beforehand,” Kirchebner said. “But I thought, if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere.”

Omaha felt comfortable to him almost immediately. “The hospitality that I received here stayed in my mind,” he said.

Kirchebner began his UNO MBA in summer 2019. By the following spring, COVID-19 had disrupted life worldwide, classes had moved online and international students were returning home. He had to decide whether to leave Omaha, and he decided to stay. The choice was difficult at the time, but looking back, he believes the uncertainty made his Omaha experience more meaningful.

“Especially through those challenges, you learn most for yourself, but also about yourself,” he said.

Staying also deepened the relationships he had built, and those relationships are a large part of why Omaha remains important to him years later.

“I found a new home, not just with my degree here at Mammel Hall, but also in Omaha with all the people that I got to know,” he said.

His time at UNO also let him explore ideas that have since become central to the business world. Working with Erin Bass, Ph.D., and his home university in Austria, Kirchebner researched trust in expert systems and their role in business decision-making. The work began in 2019, before generative artificial intelligence became part of everyday conversation, and the resulting research was published in 2021.

Coming from Europe, he found that many business fundamentals crossed borders, though people could approach them differently.

“We can look at it from different angles,” he said. “We in Europe see different situations from a business perspective a little bit different than here in the U.S.”

After graduating from UNO in 2020, Kirchebner chose not to return immediately to his hometown. He moved to Vienna and continued building his career there. More recently, an opportunity through PwC’s Global Mobility program took him to Paris for three months before he returned to Austria. Each move reinforced something he first discovered when he left Austria for Omaha: he was comfortable being uncomfortable.

“I gained the confidence to have the capability to start out new from zero,” he said.

His career has taken him across countries and into opportunities he didn’t anticipate, and he says PwC was one of them. At 23, he hadn’t planned on a future there.

“I eventually never thought of ending up with PwC or any other of the Big Four companies,” he said. “It just happened.”

When he thinks about what he would tell his younger self, job titles and five-year plans don’t come up. He talks about patience. He likes the saying that people live life forward but understand it backward, and it fits his own path.

“Somehow you also need to trust the process and just be patient because things will work out,” he said.

Now Kirchebner is preparing for his next step after PwC, a transition he approaches with the same patience that has guided him so far.

Looking back, he can trace his path to a decision to take a chance on a place more than 4,000 miles from Vienna. He earned an MBA, conducted research and built friendships in Omaha, and he learned that he could start over somewhere unfamiliar and be OK. More than six years later, he still carries that confidence.

“Go your own way,” Kirchebner said. “Do your thing, go your own way, and then wonderful things will happen.”