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So many fascinating anecdotes, we had to create a Part II Click here to listen to Part I of this two-part series: Episode 14: Former Cisco CTO Monique Morrow on Using Tech To Do Good (Part I) A quick refresher on Monique Morrow: She is a former CTO at Cisco and the current President at two tech start-up firms based in blockchain. She is the President and Co-Founder of The Humanized Internet, a non-profit organization focused on providing a digital identity for those individuals most underserved. She is also the President of The VETRI Foundation, whose mission is to empower individuals by providing them with trusted digital identity solutions they can fully own and control (ie, no other big business owns your data anymore – YOU own it!).  Monique has been recognized for her work with phenomenal awards, including: Forbes top 50 Women globally in Tech 2018Top 10 CIO2017 laureate of the Committee for the Henley & Partners Global Citizen Award Top 100 Digital Shapers 2018 in Switzerland.Top 10 Influential IT Women in Europe In This Episode In this episode of Level Up Your Leadership, Monique and I talk about: How YOU have the power to make small changes right now that can save the world The mindset difference between success at a large company and success at a startupWhat surprised Monique most about becoming an entrepreneurMonique’s career advice for leaders todayWhy everyone has the right to dignity and the right to work … and how governments need to be part of making that happen To learn more about Monique, check out her website or connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re interested in how we can shape the future of tech to serve us, you’re going to want to tune in to this episode of Level Up Your Leadership wherever you love to listen to podcasts.   OR you can read the full transcript below. Enjoy! Lisa If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play  – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! Monique: If you see that what you are developing is probably not going to be for the greater good, then you need to sort of call it out and or you say this is the intentional use of what we developed and for what purpose just as you would for a brand of cigarettes that would cause you cancer. Be declarative about what it is you do and then you have fair data, you have some sort of social good stamp, it doesn’t matter if you work for a big company or you work for a small/medium enterprise, we all are responsible at the end of the day. Lisa: That’s Monique Morrow speaking. Welcome back to part II of my interview with Monique. I’m your host Lisa Christen welcoming you back to this episode of Level Up Your Leadership, the podcast on how 21st century leaders acquire the skills they need to thrive in the ever-changing digital workspace. Now as I mentioned last time Monique Marrows had a stellar career, she was the former CTO as Cisco and she is running two companies right now. She’s the president and co-founder of The Humanized Internet, helping people to keep their digital identity. So what does that mean? You’ll have to listen to find out! Also, she is the president of the VETRI Foundation, where they’re creating new tools to help us have control over our digital selves. So you heard already from Monique all these interesting stories about where she came from, what she studied, what’s interesting to her and now in this next episode, we keep digging deeper. What can we do to do more good with our technology? What can we do as leaders to make sure that we’re shaping technology in the way that we want it to be shaped? So enjoy listening to part two of this episode of Level Up Your Leadership with the president of The Humanized Internet and VETRI Foundation, Monique Morrow. Lisa: What was the biggest surprise for you? I guess I want to ask this in two ways: what was the biggest surprise for you being CTO at Cisco? Maybe you didn’t expect to be the boss. Also, I want to know the biggest surprise once you became an entrepreneur and the president of your own organization. Monique: So, you know, at Cisco I was straddled across the organization. So, I was the first to distinguish consulting, engineering, I mean I really went up the technical track of growth to CTO in services to CTO to in service provider, etc, etc to CTO in new frontiers to technology, etc. So going from there, I mean one of the things that you have in companies is that there are, well when you have a company that’s the size of 70’000 people plus, you have to look at how you’re going to hit for the biggest impact. Because there is not a problem, if you will, of ideation. Ideation but ideation for impact. You need to look at how you’re going to monetize it, and how it’s going to create a million-dollar business, etc. So that was probably very challenging because it’s all about… Nice, but where’s the business model? You really have to go focus for that. Because it’s also how you take the company, like Cisco and pivot to new areas and in a way one can argue that that’s entrepreneurial in itself so you know you have an environment that allows that and certainly allows you to grow your skillsets etc, certainly allows you to go up and pitch when you have to pitch, we had wonderful programs that actually nurtured that type of thinking. But bear in mind you still have that sort of Cisco mind-frame and mindset involved here. On the other hand, when you set bound and you’re a full-time entrepreneur and you’re the president of the organization, you’re looking and how you do monetization, how you make an impact, it’s a different set of a problem in the sense of – you’re extraordinarily focused, because you have basically said – This, this and this are the areas I want to tackle. And I want to tackle up with a super ecosystem of people who have the same mindset. Now, can you fail? Absolutely you can fail, you can actually come to the point where you say – Ok well looks like we kind of hit that wall a little bit. Can you think about what a monetization model would look like? So, for example, you and I are sent to that, if you are a nonprofit, you are a nonprofit. You’re three people. Well, you know, what do you do? Well, we were writing a book, for example. We have one co-founder who’s in Toronto, and one is in Switzerland. So obviously we’re thinking about how we ideate for impact and also look at how we monetize. That’s one part. In VETRI Foundation, VETRI is the nonprofit arm of Procivis.ch which is really doing this of e-government as a service, e-ID plus there you have to take on a different lens and get that how you now think about what is the funding model of like between, you know, now and the end of October, or so and so forth so here you’re hunting with you collogues for investors and you still have to kind of do this pitch and so and so forth. It’s a different level of focus but you actually have to refine your narrative constantly and that’s I think is most important as you’re constantly refining your narrative. Lisa And you’ve mentioned always learning and always trying to get better, what other leadership advice would you have for someone listening, for how they can continue to refine and grow their careers. Monique To some extent, it’s sort of a mortal sin to say this, but there is humility. I think you have to be on some level of servant leadership. I’ve heard this spoken by Bracken Darrell who was the CEO and chairman at Logitech, servant leadership is extremely important. There was a case study that was done at Harvard business school where I think 90% of exam grade was based on the answer to a question “Every day at 16:00 you’ve been exiting out this class, who’s the person sweeping the floors in the hallways” If you cannot engage in conversations up and down, or whatever the stack looks like with people, assert leadership and being able to ask constantly for feedback about what it is you’re doing and how can you improve yourself in humility and so on, you brace yourself for a huge fall. And it’s being able to handle that level of servant leadership which we lack a lot in our society. Lisa Well, I can tell that it served you well to follow the servant leadership model, I mean you have one I don’t know how many countless awards, so I going to list just a few if that’s alright with you. I’m not even sure where to start; Forbes World’s Top 50 Women in Tech. Top Ten CIO, Top 10 Influential IT Woman in Europe, Top 100 Digital Influencers in Switzerland, I think people are starting to get the idea. What award was the most exciting for you to receive? Or the most meaningful? Monique Oh gosh, I mean I just received one from Cyber Security Top 100 People, you know it’s not about – I know this is cliché to say it’s not about you, but it is, seriously it is. And I think Forbes Top 50 Women in Technology was one that I had no idea, right, I literally had no idea. And in any of these, I had no idea to be quite candid. The recognition you know – we are a human species that thrives on recognition so let’s put that on the table, yes that’s all great. With Forbes, that’s really one that stood out the most because its Forbes and so to be in that category was quite humbling in itself. Lisa Where were you when you found out about this award? Monique I was traveling at the time when I received this, and I had no idea where that was coming from and I said “Oh, wow okay” and they had collected it through scientific data, they went down the patch where they scientifically and with statistics looked at how these women were being put together so on and so forth. So I was traveling and I went “Oh, okay that’s interesting” Lisa So which one are you most proud of? Monique I mean each one in their own right was a hugely important honor and, you know, again I could ask myself would I have been recognized accordingly had I stayed at cisco, and I doubt it. Lisa That’s right! High risk, high reward. Monique And that’s true, that’s is very true. Lisa And so because you’re such a big-picture thinker, I have another big-picture question for you; if I were to say I have this magic wand, I could remove every hard barrier, every constraint in the world, what project would you want to see created, or what would you want to create next? Monique I think the project that I pointed out was one that I think is a really hard problem to solve. And that is that we have our digital keys and digital assets and we take care of them and we need to create what storage would look like. Something happens bad and there’s an event that’s created, wouldn’t that be a cool thing to work on. And we can go anywhere with those sets of – we’ll call it memes and persona. That would be fantastic. I also believe that we need to think about just giving people the right to work. I think there are people that would love to continue to work. I don’t know about why people have to retire at age 65 other than the fact that Van Bismarck said in the 19th century that you should retire at age 60 when people were living beyond 50. And I think that we have just gone out of that, and I think I can see communities from all walks of life whether they are just coming out of college, whether they are working collaboratively together doesn’t matter who project leads, like for example at VETRI. I have a person who is just out a college and who’s past retirement. It’s fantastic. I let him run with it because I don’t want to run with that. He should do it. I think that we need to think about that. Is that moonshot? We’re so in this environment of – you now need to take your money and retire and I see people around me and I think  we touched upon it when we were at the Deloitte event, where the dignity, there is a human rights dignity to work, and I think people would love to continue in some way form or fashion. Rather than having set constraints. I do believe that companies have to be responsible, I think you should asses social good tax, it’s not just about pace. I think people are people and they have to be treated fairly rather than just sort of disposed of at will to bring stock prices up. Lisa Exactly! This is what is going to be happening more and more, and this is actually what I hear because I’m working with lots of different organizations, and what I hear, middle management – the biggest fear they have with technology is that their jobs are going to be replaced, they’re going to have AI come in and do their jobs and so you know they’re thinking, what would a right to work look like for us. Monique I think that we need to change that narrative. Do not subscribe to the narrative – Oh it’s going to be tougher before it gets better. We’re here today. There’s something that a group of us had written in the People-Centric Economy, the ecosystem of work, where we could think about that if you bring value to an organization, the organization should bring value to you. So I could imagine creating some sort of algorithm, where maybe with certain inputs that you provide, of course, you have to work with traditional institutions outside to say – okay we’re going to give you a job, and it’s a job for you and here’s the value. It’s not LinkedIn it’s something completely different and I think that if we can think about disintermediating that and bringing value to people rather than the other way around, I think that would be a really cool thing Lisa So someone listening, quick, quit your job. Monique Well, I mean there has to be a will with governments and organizations to want to do this and there has to be a, you know, to look at it from the collective good of a society, how we have to handle these levels of problems. Because we are frankly in a perfect storm. And the recent elections, especially in Europe, are just sort of pointing in at what we’re seeing. And in the United States, so wherever, we are kind of seeing a narrative that really challenges whether or not the system as we know it can still hold the types of values they were intended to. And we have to be able to challenge ourselves. Yes, we put someone on the moon, we also have to have moonshots for the collective good of our society and perhaps going to the top of the discussion, this is where technology can come in play. Lisa How do they get people who are, you know, just heads down just trying to survive, trying to keep their job, with fewer people, more tasks to be done, they’re busy, busy, busy, how do we get them to take a pause and go – look at what’s happening around you, look at the bigger picture. I specifically think about climate change, where we don’t touch it every day so people think it’s not really that bad since it’s too distant to imagine. Monique Well, I mean you know, just go to Bali and look at all the plastic in the ocean. It’s not about paying a fee for your airline, it’s not about paying an extra fee for your plastic bags, plastic bags should just be not allowed. I think we have to take a big step right now as a collective society right now and say, oh my gosh, what is happening. It is easy for us to get into what we are doing, but we actually have to have a socially good aspect of what it is we’re doing, top of our discussion once again, and climate change is one of them. It is core to why people are migrating, why they are migrating. It’s not just happening in wartime. So climate change is one of them and we have to think about, you know, what can we as an individual do. When I go to a store here, I don’t want plastic bags. I’m going to take my own bag and I think plastic bags should be, well just not allowed. I think we need to think about what insecticide we’re using in our agriculture. Right now, bees are dying, and we have to think about that. We have to think about how we can do our bit but also stay politically engaged. We have to do that. And if you don’t like it, you have to step up and see how you can become the changing factor. Otherwise, we will just continue down this spiral. The fact is that we’re living in a very fragile society when it comes to climate change. Lisa And it’s interesting because as you’re speaking and talked about your career, how you went from this fantastic CTO of Cisco and branched out to peruse what was in your heart, what was for the social good. So, while some people might think “Oh, me being political, me worried about climate change, that’s different from my job. You’ve actually said, no, that is a core part of my identity. Both are. Monique Oh, absolutely. I think that, and don’t get me wrong, companies should also have a responsibility to care about how they develop technologies and how they’re going to contribute to the good, right. I just believe we should just always ask ourselves, how is it what we’re doing contributing the greater good. Facial recognition, for example, does serve for the greater good. It could be unfortunately abused. And in some cases, it is. We have to ask questions around government models surrounding these technologies. What do the government models look like? And who’s governing whom is really the big questions we have to ask. So, for example, I was with a group of developers at a conference in Vienna around a year and a half ago and they said: “Oh we’re just developers, we just do what we’re told”. But you know just doing what we’re told – where did we hear that in history? If you see that what you are developing is probably not going to be for the greater good, then you need to sort of call it out and or you say this is the intentional use of what we developed and for what purpose just as you would for a brand of cigarettes that would cause you cancer. Be declarative about what it is you do and then you have fair data, you have some sort of social good stamp, it doesn’t matter if you work for a big company or you work for a small/medium enterprise, we all are responsible at the end of the day. Lisa And we all can have our miniature impact even though not everybody can form an awesome blockchain company that saves the world, but we can all be in our jobs doing something. Monique Absolutely, absolutely Lisa Is there any question you wished I had asked you, but I didn’t get to? Monique First of all, I’ve very much enjoyed this discussion of who I am and what makes me tick every morning and not sleep at night, and it is a constant urge to want to think about the transformation and changes we want to encourage. I think you’ve asked really the core questions of me, and I appreciate that discussion. I think we are on the cast of something very purposeful. And I think my call out to all the listeners, is to just do something good with what it is you develop. You’re all leaders. And don’t forget to get a great coach Lisa Well, thank you. I have to say on behalf of my two young daughters as well, and probably all future generations – Thank you for all of the work that you’re doing to ensure we’re using technology as intended… as its meant to do good for our societies and thank you for keeping that on track. Thanks, Monique Monique Thank you, Lisa! The post Ep. 15: Former Cisco CTO Monique Morrow on Future of Tech (Part II) appeared first on Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Change Management Consulting | Lisa Christen in Zug, Switzerland.

Monique Morrow Knows Tech Monique Morrow is a former CTO at Cisco and the current President at two tech start-up firms based in blockchain. She is the President and Co-Founder of The Humanized Internet, a non-profit organization focused on providing a digital identity for those individuals most underserved. She is also the President of The VETRI Foundation, whose mission is to empower individuals by providing them with trusted and compliant digital identity solutions they can fully own and control (ie, no other big business owns your data anymore – YOU own it!).  Monique has been recognized for her work with about a gazillion awards, including: Forbes top 50 Women globally in Tech 2018Top 10 CIO2017 laureate of the Committee for the Henley & Partners Global Citizen Award Top 100 Digital Shapers 2018 in Switzerland.Top 10 Influential IT Women in Europe Monique is a former CTO at Cisco who has worked tirelessly to align technologies to society’s needs. My conversation with Monique was so great, we couldn’t squeeze it all into one episode, so today’s episode is just Part I. Monique shares with how she came to tech with a unique background and why this unique perspective shaped the work she does with tech. In This Episode In this episode of Level Up Your Leadership, Monique and I talk about: The types of big global problems that technology can help solve.How to think “BIG” and go beyond day-to-day small thinking.How to have a non-linear career (and take big career risks).The types of big global problems that technology can help solve.Why you should own the rights to your data — and how you can monetize those rights.Women in the field of tech and how to overcome the glass cliff.How continuous learning will fuel your career unimaginably far.The fears and worries that keep Monique awake at night.Why you should have a “Plan B” for your career beyond a safe corporate job. To learn more about Monique, check out her website or connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re interested in how we can shape the future of tech to serve us, you’re going to want to tune in to this episode of Level Up Your Leadership wherever you love to listen to podcasts.   OR you can read the full transcript below. Enjoy! Lisa If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play  – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! Ep. 14: Former Cisco CTO Monique Morrow on Using Tech To Do Good (Part I) 0:00 – 05:06 You have to get your narrative out there you have to get your brand out there, you have to look at how you solve for a problem out there, you have to be able to collaborate very strongly, partner because this is an ecosystem waiting for people to solve for very, very hairy problems. That’s Monique Morrow speaking. Monique is a former Chief Technology Officer at Cisco and is the current president and co-founder of The Humanized Internet, a non-profit organization focused on providing a digital identity for those individuals most underserved. I’m your host, Lisa Christen, welcoming you back to another episode of Level Up Your Leadership, the podcast exploring how 21st century leaders acquire the skills they need to thrive in the ever-changing changing digital workplace. Monique Morrow really knows tech. As I mentioned, she was the former CTO at Cisco, one of the world’s largest tech companies, and is currently president of not just the one Humanizing Internet but another technology organization utilizing blockchain. She’s also president of The VETRI Foundation, helping you by providing tools so that we each have control over our digital selves. Now Monique has been recognized for her work with about a gazillion awards. She was a Forbes Top 50 Women Globally in Tech. She was a top ten CIO, top hundred digital shapers in Switzerland, top hundred IT women in Europe. This is all in the last couple of years, she has plenty more in the background there. So I think you get the idea.   And what makes Monique really so unique is that she’s out there influencing global digital policies. She’s tackling difficult, mind-warping topics, like how the handle ethics in AI. She is one of the digital influencers who is shaping and changing how not only we will interact with technology today but how our children and our grandchildren in the future will. And thankfully, we’re very lucky because Monique is on a mission to help us figure out how to use tech for good. Now, I had such an interesting conversation with Monique that this is just Part I and I’ll also release a Part II because she had so many nuggets of information to share that we couldn’t fit it all in one episode. So if you wanna learn more Monique, how she progressed in her really amazing stellar career and how she’s shaping the future of work, I hope you enjoy listening to this Part I episode of Level Up Your Leadership with President of The Humanized Internet and the VETRI Foundation, Monique Morrow. Monique, I’m thrilled to have you on the show today. It’s a thrill to be here, by the way, Lisa We got to know each other recently in a Future of Work panel discussion about the human factor in blockchain, and it was sponsored by Deloitte, so it was a really great event. I was the moderator and you were one of the panelists and I have to tell you, I left that evening thinking, oh my gosh, this is a person who is truly, truly changing the world. And I was inspired, I couldn’t sleep that night, and I thought I have to get in touch with Monique, I have to get her on the show and I need to pick your brain. I wanna know how all of us can do more and do more good in the world. So first of all, I want to say, first of all, it’s a pleasure to be here and also you did a fantastic job. It’s not always said but a fantastic job in moderating and preparing us for that wonderful panel and that wonderful discussion. So kudos to you and what you do. Yes, I’m looking forward to this particular discussion around technology and technology for good and how to up your game in the leadership space. Fantastic. I have the very first question that popped into my head, because you have the stellar career and we’re going to go through bits of it, CTO at Cisco. I mean, you’re the president of not one but two companies right now, but you actually have like, that golden thread that goes through everything in your career. You’ve built it around aligning technologies to society’s needs. What does that mean? So, yes, and one thing I will say is that your career is never going to be linear, I think we discussed that at the panel. I believe that we have to embed some notion of social good in what we do in technology. As we know or, perhaps so to state, maybe we don’t know, technology has no agency. It’s all about looking at how we define what is the purpose of the technology itself? How is it intentionally – or should be intentionally – used? What kinds of problems should we as an industry be solving for society? And this is not about corporate social responsibility or CSR, as we know it, it’s about all of us in the space being responsible, holding a level of accountability for technology. There’s just a quite a bit of spaces and let’s say opportunities that we need to solve for, especially in the humanitarian area. 05:14 – 10:03 And I’m glad you mentioned that because I’m so impressed by at least one, but both of your companies, but this one about The Humanized Internet. It really embodies all of what you’re saying, which is we take technology, we look at society’s challenges, and we use the technology to create good. And maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this ambitious project that you’re working on with The Humanized Internet. So The Humanized Internet is a Swiss-based nonprofit, and it really is focused around some buckets that we all care about. One of them is your identity. This is around whether or not you’re in control of your identity. Sovereign identity. The other is around the use of artificial intelligence and ethics. And the third component is around, I would say, cybersecurity. So you could see some of its weaving if you will. The notion around The Humanized Internet is to weave in a humanitarian purpose. One of the members on the board happens to be a refugee. So when you talk about refugees in the space, you have to talk with people in mind. These are individuals. Some things can happen to you; one day you wake up – whether or not it’s war or destruction. We know we can all say to some extent we may be refugees, we’re just mind-reading constantly. And so people don’t like particularly this kind of label, but it’s looking at some of the problems that he experienced. For example, in the 21st century, it didn’t matter that he had copies of his documentation, whether it was his passport, whether it was his university degrees on Google Drive. When he got to Berlin, they simply were not accepted. Because people thought you could falsify it. And, yes, that’s a problem with regards to documentation. But we need to think about how can you use technology like blockchain to credential. Whether or not you have something that happens to you in an earthquake or a hurricane. Think about Puerto Rico, think about terrible earthquakes that happened in Italy. One day your documents and the institutions no longer exist. So Humanized Internet is around looking at how we solve for these big problems around the humanitarian space, but also in looking at how to solve in terms of distributed storage of your documents. Instead of having them being held in a bank or a tresor or somewhere, that you can think about some level of a digital storage box a lockbox of some sort, and you can share the digital keys with members of your family. It’s a really hard problem to solve for but I think we can get there. Yeah, and exactly that. It’s such a critical problem to solve for because what we’re looking at right now is, there are large organizations who basically own our data, that’s their business model. So if you said, banks, immediately what comes to mind is Facebook. And so that’s their business model. What happens if we take back the ownership? What happens if we own our data? And that’s what I love about the other organization that you’re the president of, the VETRI Foundation. Because one of the goals of what you’re working on is how can people own their data and then, again, choose who they share it with and get rewarded. Get rewarded. So I should demonstrate that to you after the interview. What we’re looking at with the VETRI Foundation is the frictionless exchange of data between data consumers, being for example companies, and you being the data owner. And by the way, we are talking about fair data trade. That’s what we mean by frictionless. And you should be able to control in the next level where you want that data to go. Not just your attention, you can call it an attention token to some extent, is interrupted and it’s gamified, and you’re getting VETRI coins or whatever. But it’s also looking at how we can take this platform, and rather than you trying to respond to all kinds of questions about from all kinds of organizations, it’s one central place. I don’t want to say central because it’s distributed, we never hold the data. But what it is, is that there will be consumers or companies that will be very interested in having an exchange with you, and that’s up to you whether or not you wanna have that exchange. But here’s the thing, when we look at to read the book by Shoshana Zuboff, this is the whole notion of Surveillance Capitalism. It’s more egregious than we care to think. These companies, whether or not Facebook or Google, we are just meta-data, meta-data, meta-data. And we’re living in this bubbled world and our data is being exploited. We have to take sort of control, some level of control of our data. I mean, it’s leaks, and we hear about these egregious leaks all the time. So if we can now look at how we have a frictionless, let’s say, level of exchange. 10:03 – 15:06 It’s gamified. And we choose to participate in that exchange on the condition that we can control the flow of data. We see that happening in Estonia. You can say, I want to go to this doctor but not that doctor, then that takes us to a level up. The fear I have, or the concern I have in our societies, is that people are so immune to being hacked. And they don’t care until something egregious happens – until their Bank account is emptied, until their identity is truly stolen. And then they have to really climb to get their identity back, to get their level of what I’ll call assets back because you are a human asset, back as an entity. So we’re very proud of what we’re doing at The VETRI Foundation with VETRI as a whole. We believe that we’re very much ahead of the game in what we’re doing. We believe also that we won’t be the only entities in our society to be gravitating into this space, which is a good thing because it’s not about VETRI in so far as it’s about an industry standard. People getting into something called fair trade and fair trade is really important. Do I trust these big companies to do fair data trade? Probably not. I think this is more about companies really self-policing. We’ve already seen how they self-police. They just don’t! It’s not, and I have friends in all of these companies, but they just don’t. We have to be able to say, we are responsible entities. And let me take it a step further. I was, if I may say. Please, please I’m fascinated. I was in a discussion yesterday with a lady who was actually involved with a particular organization, she also wants to look at VETRI. And this is around children’s rights, children’s digital rights. Children, they’re the most under-served. They are actually getting quite we would say, poached on by pedophiles, especially online. So how do we now look at creating some kind of institution or node here in Switzerland where you would look at people caring about children’s rights, watching what’s going on. A network and advising parents and young adults and children, on responsible use of technology. So, could we see an intersection here with regard to data privacy, because it’s also important and this frictionless exchange of data, which again is gamified. I think we’re going to see that more and more. I have to take a step back and just ask: how do you think so broadly about technology? This is not like, how do we use it today? You’re saying, we’re the first company, or one of the first companies, doing this because we’re thinking about the future. How do you think so broadly and so big? Right, so, let’s break it down a little bit. First of all, it’s not like you sit in a room and sort of ruminate. I think it’s more about, I’m personally an observer of how people use technology. I also believe that just, on the personal side, learning is lifelong. I also when I look at somebody who is of a certain age, we don’t care, understanding how they use technology. I think it’s very important to look at geographies, travel. And also, you know, it’s important for people to read. I think it’s read and continuously have the exchange and live this kind of situation, where we see or – can see for me – looking at how we can solve for very interesting problems. I just constantly- I am very curious, posing, posing questions of why? Why not? Are the institutions that we know today valid institutions? I was just recently in an event last Thursday, where we were asking the question, we’re migrating people. And I go back to the migration situation because it has been predicted because of climate change, people will be migrating constantly in 2050 and beyond. So we’re going to see the situation of migration and, unfortunately, it plays out to a very negative political narrative. But what we were looking at is a situation, for example, between Venezuela and Columbia. How do you create corridors for people to just have the right to work? When our forefathers traveled to the United States of America, which they did. They just came with a dream to do something. Could we not keep that spirit? Because it’s about the spirit, not so much about the technology. And say hey, these people have the right to work. Because what’s happening now in the situation in Venezuela, which is a horrific situation, you have people, women, particularly women are and children are vulnerable. Women, particularly who have studied law and are lawyers, are crossing the Venezuelan-Colombian border to prostitute themselves. Because they can’t feed their family anymore. 15:06 – 20:17 So could we not have a will to create corridors that you have the right to work? Most of the people I met, whether or not they were in refugee camps in Jordan or happen to be in these certain situations, want to contribute to society. And we certainly have technology as enablers to do that. So for me, it’s about looking at these institutions we have to be able to challenge those institutions. I’m curious to know, did you get this love of thinking globally, being curious, thinking about people in other countries – did you get that from your parents? Because I know your mom is from Lebanon, your dad is American, you’ve now been living in Europe since the nineties? Are you a global person? Yes, I would say I am a global person, growing up speaking a couple of languages and representing, I think, what the melting pot is particularly in the United States. And, of course, traveling quite, that all has opened my eyes up. I mean, I’ve been traveling since I was born, but I spent a year in Paris as a student abroad. Which, I think, if everybody can afford gap to do a gap year, they should because it really just broadens your scope in terms of how you see the world. And sort of, you know, learn a little bit. So, yeah, I think the global view has been very important and through my stint at Cisco, which were sixteen wonderful years, I spent five years in Hong Kong. And so I had responsibility for half of the world. I was in India, southeast Asia, China, Australia, New Zealand, Japan. If anything, it’s tested my colleagues’ knowledge of geography, which, you know, I think this intersectionality between social, sciences computer science, political science, philosophy is coming back together again. We should be thinking in those terms in education. Which exactly brings me to something that really piqued my curiosity when I was learning more about you, is: you don’t actually have a technology background. You studied French! That’s right. I like to say I am an accidental engineer.  I mean, my aspiration during the time was to actually go into the diplomatic role. Now, the diplomatic world actually helps me when I’m actually looking at how we deal with technology at a UN level. But here you are with this undergraduate degree in Silicon Valley. And what do you do? So, it was a bit of luck. It was a bit of a challenge. And a bit of luck, I would say, where I got into a semiconductor company, which was hugely conservative, and discovered this immense world of networking, which was quite nascent to the time. Cisco was a private company at that particular time. And I fell in love with it. Networking was the way to go. I went on to get another master’s degree. And this is what I mean. Go on to your certifications and credentials – make yourself credible in the industry and learned so much about what this internet was all about. And that undergraduate degree coupled with a couple of master’s degree. I’m just getting a new one – masters of science in digital currency at the University of Nicosia, we’ll be participating in graduation ceremonies on June 27.  So there you go! I like to think about, what I don’t know, I don’t know. So, yes, an accidental engineer. At the time, you know, if we looked at ourselves in the mid-’80s, there were just no forebearers, especially for women. In a hugely conservative company like a semiconductor firm. But, I was working with extraordinary colleagues, and I have to say, this is extremely important for me to say, my best coaches and mentors – yeah, I would say best coaches and mentors have been men. And they basically have pushed me to go beyond my comfort zone – and I hate to use that term comfort zone – but really pushed me to say, look, you can do this, and really fed in my curiosity of how wonderful this technology can work. And I’m giving back in terms of mentorship and coaching. And by the way, because you are coach, I do believe in coaching. I believe coaches are lifelong. I have a coach. Cisco actually institutionalized coaching, which I think, is extremely important because it’s all about you facing your own, you know, it’s a reflection, facing your challenges, what are the triggers that you have to care about that may be negative. These are things we have to work on for our life long. Thank you for adding that in because I really – I know I’m biased – but I really believe that if you’re human, you have blind spots, you have fears, you have doubts, you have insecurities. Sorry! If your brain is functioning normally, that’s what you have. And coaches and mentors and great colleagues can help you break past that. And it sounds like maybe even in the face of being in a male-dominated field, in an industry that is tricky without initially having the educational background, that you found support networks and you just found ways to keep moving forward by following your curiosity. 20:18 – 25:05 Yes, I mean so kudos to coaching, let’s just say that for the moment for all those people listening. Get a coach, I’m speaking to a wonderful one now. I think that you just brought up something that’s very, very important. It is a male-dominated industry and the statistics are going in a negative way, unfortunately. And I think it’s not because we want to portray women as victims here, it’s because women are trying to come into an organization that just wasn’t meant for them. Especially if they’re parents or they have partners, so on and so forth. You have to look at how the foundation is, and when we’re talking about, for example, a glass ceiling, here we’re talking about a glass cliff. Because when they leave the institution or technology groups, because it can be brutal. They leave for good. And there has to be a study of correlation and loss of talent here. I mean, there have been some studies, especially Stanford University, they’re looking to find out how do you define that, masculinity. Those types of interesting social science problems that we have to look at. How can we make it a very welcoming organization, and without the sort of brutal way that sometimes I hadn’t encountered in the beginning, how people talk with one another. And so it’s…  there is a jargon that you have to learn etc. But I think what we have to do is change the game a bit. And I believe that men extraordinarily have to be part of this great conversation, particularly because it’s all about the end here and they can break down to authenticity, etc. The way I count or frame up this level of discussion, is basically to say, is the organization that you are building reflective of the society around you? And if not, that’s already a red flag. So we have to constantly question ourselves. Especially for founders, especially for dealing with teams, and developers. You know, we have to constantly believe that this is the power of anti is extraordinarily important. And I go back to women and children because they’re the most vulnerable in these situations. And then you can actually couch it with ageism, who gets thrown out first, and how and why and so forth. What we have to look at, what is really fundamental in this entire discussion, is dignity. The dignity of work, the dignity of organizations, the dignity of how we communicate with one another. And I notice that each time you speak. So we’re talking about how was your career? How did you get up? And instantly, you almost zoom out, and you see the bigger picture. What’s the culture like there? What’s the culture of the whole society? What is this really about? This is about dignity. How do you go or how can other people who are listening, go from whatever’s happening in their everyday life and start to get that bigger picture and to use that bigger picture to help them persevere in the face of whatever they’re facing in the moment? I think the situation that we’re faced with at a macroeconomic viewpoint is that people who were in organizations or in traditional companies. There are some people who are there because of very strong economic reasons. And they have fear. They see the stuff around them, maybe they don’t like it. And we know that you were good insofar the relationship you have with your manager, so on and so forth. I mean,  I make a distinction between leaders and managers. Leaders are really inspiring. I mean, they’re inspiring all the way through each of us, whether or not the developers have the potential for leadership. Let’s start with that, number one. Two: if the culture is that toxic, and you go home and you have ulcers, and you can’t focus, then you have to think about maybe just leaving. And of course, easier said than done. I had a chance to actually step away from a very traditional enterprise company, which had been very good to me, to go and do sort of a start-up/NGO kind of world and to learn what that is like because you really want to follow what it is you can do to better develop and grow. And I would have to say, in that path, I did it. I mean, I really went to, you know, this Red Pill and Blue Pill, well some called it the Violet Pill. I think it’s very important to say that I really stepped up but I have grown as a result of it. And don’t think for one minute that I didn’t have to dig deep, I mean really deep, for courage. It isn’t that easy to do that because people can just be very comfortable with this, I’m here for the moment, and I’m taking the check because I have to take the check.   25:14 – 29:09 But what happens when the rug is pulled underneath you? You have to think about, you know, what is Plan B? What is Plan C? And Plan D? So question culture around you, if it’s toxic, look at alternatives to exit out. Have an exit strategy also. And be able to eventually learn from that, grow from that, and also monetize what it is you do at the end of the day because we want to do that. We don’t live here for free. We have to be able to think about what monetization looks like. I’m so glad that you mentioned that it took a lot of courage because so often, what we all look at externally, we go wow, Monique, huge success. Incredible. She must never be scared. She must know what she’s doing. She must have it all together. And of course, like I said, as long as you’re human and your brain is functioning normally, you have fears and doubts as well. So I think it would help everyone to feel better. But specifically me. What was the biggest fear or challenge or moment when you were like panicked? This is not going to work. It’s always fear of failure. We actually put a lot of pressure on ourselves. We want to be perceived as, you know, you are constantly… how do we define success? That was one. The other one is fear of the unknown because you are now stepping into a business that is completely different. And you have to really think about, when you’re in a start-up kind of world, there’s no Saturday or Sunday. Because it’s constant, you’re looking at the next thing and the next thing. But at the same token, you have to be able to create some kind of healthy lifestyle around you. Because if you don’t you can be consumed, subsumed by all that. The thing of it is that you don’t have this… you have a variable… your income can be extraordinarily variable, so you have to look at how you handle that reality, and then, of course, within, you have to think, how can I grow? What are the areas where I can grow? Could I be writing a book or co-writing a book, which we are. Could I be doing X, Y, Z, in a space or tapping into a particular problem, which we can, which a group of us did solve with MIT in frontlines for healthcare, how we used the narrative of a shortage of caregivers in the world and could we not credential, for example, with refugees. So, with it in mind, if you’re operating a foundation or a nonprofit, it’s a business. That’s an important thing to state. It has a different model but it’s a business. And you come with a different type of skills that you learn from it, and I would say you’re not limited by what a corporate requires of you or from you. So I think that’s been enriching, but really, really, really the fear factor had kicked in. I had sleepless nights, really sleepless nights. But I think when you go through it and continuously go through it, you grow as a result. I have to state that categorically. You do. You have to get your narrative out there, you have to get your brand out there, you have to look at how you solve for problems out there. You have to be able to collaborate very strongly, partner because this is an ecosystem for people to solve for very hairy problems. Thanks for listening to another episode of Level Up Your Leadership. If you’re interested in learning more about today’s guests and the topics we’ve discussed check out the show notes on www.lisachristen.com/podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, please go to iTunes to subscribe, while you’re there, it’d be great if you could rate and review the show. And if you really like the show, I would appreciate if you shared the word on social media as always. Thanks again for listening! The post Ep. 14: Former Cisco CTO Monique Morrow on Using Tech To Do Good (Part I) appeared first on Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Change Management Consulting | Lisa Christen in Zug, Switzerland.

Peter Metzinger Knows Marketing PETER METZINGER is the Owner & Managing Director of Business Campaigning, a strategic consultancy specializing in «impossible missions» in branding, marketing, and communications. He’s also the co-founder of evAI Intelligence, helping companies develop tailor-made Artificial Intelligence solutions. Peter’s trademarked business campaigning® model was used at the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Open Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In today’s episode, Peter shares with us his unusual take on the future of marketing: partnering with the customers as the experts in identifying what they want + using AI and technology to customize and enhance their experiences. A Fun Fact About Peter Metzinger I couldn’t resist sharing: Peter has always been a pioneer in using digital tools. In 1987 – this is seven years before launch of the World Wide Web —  police were tapping the phone lines of an anti-nuclear network Peter had founded. So what did Peter do? He set up a computer network across many different cities and he wrote an encryption software to be able to continue coordinating campaign activities without the police being able to find out what they were up to. In This Episode In this episode of Level Up Your Leadership with Mr. Mission Impossible himself, Peter and I talk about: How AI and technology will change marketing and communications in the future Why you can’t find the right solution without considering the human element Why it’s important to speak with your audience (and not to your audience) Is AI already using psychology to convince me to buy things I don’t need? Why you, the sales or marketing expert, aren’t really the expert at all. How customers will get even more used to customization… and what lines that might cross on privacy How to solve impossible missions To learn more about Peter, check out his website, connect with him on LinkedIn , or purchase a copy of his book, business campaigning (available in German only). If you’re a marketer OR a consumer (or a human!), you’re going to want to hear about the future of marketing. Tune in to this episode of Level Up Your Leadership wherever you love to listen to podcasts.   OR you can read the full transcript below. Enjoy! Lisa If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play  – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! Ep. 13: The Future of Marketing is AI + Humans with Peter Metzinger 00:00:00 – 00:05:14 That’s Peter Metzinger speaking, co-founder of evAI intelligence and owner and Managing Director of business campaigning. In today’s episode, Peter and I talked about some really interesting things. Peter is just this fantastic guru of marketing and how marketing is for the people, of the people, by the people. And he is an interesting twist the way he does marketing because he’s spent his entire life being a pioneer using digital tools. And he’s now in this artificial intelligence, AI bandwagon. He’s got this separate company working on artificial intelligence, and he really knows what the future of marketing is going to look like. Instead of telling you about how great he is and all the stuff we talk about, which you can listen to yourself, I wanted to share this fun fact about Peter that didn’t come out in the interview, but is just so cool I wanted to share it with you. So, I mentioned Peter, he’s sort of always been a pioneer in digital tools, way back in 1987. So, you have to imagine this is seven years before the launch of the worldwideweb. Police were tapping into the phone lines of an anti-nuclear network Peter had founded. So what did Peter do? He set up a computer network across many different cities and he actually wrote an encryption software to be able to continue coordinating campaign activities without the police being able to find out what they were up to. What I love about Peter is, he says that business campaigning is a company, a strategic consultancy, they specialize in impossible missions. And I like to call Peter Mr. mission impossible himself because he seems to be able to make everything happen. So enjoy this episode learning from Peter Metzinger. — Welcome back to another episode of Level Up Your Leadership, the podcast exploring how 21st century leaders acquire the skills they need to thrive in the ever-changing digital workplace. I’m your host, Lisa Christen, and I’m here today with Peter Metzinger, co-founder of evAI intelligence and owner and managing director of business campaigning. Welcome, Peter! Hello wherever listening. So Peter and I are having a bit of a funny moment here. I have to admit this to all of you listening. We recorded this entire podcast… except we didn’t record it. So we are currently on take two of this podcast. And we’re going to see does this lead to the same place we went to last time or did more questions open up. Let’s see. But Peter, I do have the same first question to start with which is that you say that business campaigning is a strategic consultancy that specializes in impossible missions. What does that mean? What is an impossible mission? Actually, that’s something that others say about us to repeat because it explains very well what we are doing. We’re finding solutions where others don’t find and it has to do with the approach we are taking. I studied physics I have a Masters in science in physics, and what I learned there was to ask critical questions, to really understand the system. So, very often when people don’t sell something, what they do is they spend more money advertising. But maybe that’s the completely wrong thing. For example, the World Economic Forum (WEF), in 2002, they gave me a call because they had an issue with their brand, with their image. People were on the streets protesting and they didn’t get the message through that their mission was to improve the state of the world. They tried with PR, they tried with advertising, and they didn’t see any change in public perception. They heard about this specialist for “impossible missions” and they called me. And then we applied the business campaigning model. That’s something that I created in 1998. It’s the mixture of processes and checklists that you fill in, in a certain order, and that guides you through the process to ask the right questions at the right time. And the outcome of the analysis and the strategic thoughts was the Open Forum, which is since 2003 platform were NGOs ^, the public, and the inner circle of the leaders of the World Economic Forum, the closed society come together and discuss have a dialogue. And that opened up the whole discussion and helped them to reclaim the image and to get the message through. And what was so different about the way that you engaged people? What’s different about the business campaigning process? I learned in the 1980’s already that the target audience is not somebody you send information to. They are people who help you. 00:05:15 – 00:10:07 So, if you try to sell a product, you send them information and you think, if you send them that information, that will convince them. If you see these people as people who are helping you to achieve your sales goals, you have a totally different approach because you know, if you want somebody to help you, you have to understand that person really well. You need to know how to approach that person, which language, which tonality, at what point of time, through which channel with which message, and it’s a totally different approach. It leads to us having workshops with the target group where the target group develops the strategy, the campaign strategy for themselves. We’ve used that in internal campaigns, named change management projects, and marketing campaigns or PR campaigns, branding. The idea behind it is the experts are the target audience themselves. They know how they receive information, how they process information, what triggers them to which action. And it’s so interesting what you’re describing because you’re not saying, and you’re a consultant, you’re not saying, I’m the expert I come in and I give the information.  You’re not saying, I go to senior management, I work on a senior management strategy and we roll it out top down. What you’re saying is, we go to the people. We got to the people who are affected and we work with them because they are the people who know the answers.  That’s wild. I love to say we’re experts in being non-experts and we are professionals but we’re non-professional. Because it you’re professional, it’s about a certain profession. So if you studied marketing or advertising, you will be professional in that area. So but, as the example that I gave, if you don’t sell something because it’s not the wrong message or not the the wrong channels, but it’s maybe the organization behind it, you might even get a lot clients out there, but the internal processes don’t allow to sell more. As a professional, you need to open, you need to find a broad variety of tools, also management tools. Once I even had somebody who called me because her sales figures were going down and she wanted an advertising campaign to turn it around. At the end of the discussions, I recommended trauma therapy. Because I knew what trauma therapy is good for. Turned out, it was a small company, 4 employees, it was a headhunter, so it’s a people business. Trust is very important. She had a car accident with whiplash trauma as a consequence and two weeks later, problems in the company started and the sales figures went down. And I thought, there could be a connection, so I recommended to her first have a look at her trauma, and once that problem is solved, then maybe run an advertising campaign, or maybe not. In the end it wasn’t necessary. She had 3 trauma therapy sessions and the figures went back up again. Amazing! And this goes to a really important point, which is, you know, campaigning, marketing professionalism jobs in general. There’s such a human element to it. And we have to look at the whole person whether they’re we’re the one selling or whether we’re the ones receiving, there’s a very human element to it. Authenticity, the human element, these are all things that are very important if you want to find the right solution. You need to understand who that person is and you only find that out through dialogues. That’s also difference between us and, I would say, many communication companies from the last century, I like to say it like that because they are all about sending instead of being the dialogue. Yeah. And I love that. This is the future of communication. You’re actually very actively involved in the future of communication, because you are the co-founder of an artificial intelligence company, and you’ve really taken campaigning and marketing to that next level by including artificial intelligence. What does marketing or communications what does that look like in the future? I would say there are two important aspects: 1. We will much better at understanding the audience we’re talking with not to. I know it’s grammatically not really correct but with includes the dialogue. Who is sending information? Exactly,  it’s two directional. I just wanna say, that you’re talking at someone, that’s one to the other. You’re talking with someone, it’s both.   I’m talking with you now that means I can’t talk with my wife now but AI can do that. A computer has so computing power that a machine can talk to many people at the same time. So what it allow us will be to send individually-tailored, personalized messages to individuals. 00:10:07 – 00:15:02 Not only the message might be different, but maybe also the point of time because I know that one person is easier to reach at let’s say one o’clock, and the other person at two fifteen. Something we’ve been using ready two years ago when we started using AI in campaigns in social media, we got this analysis done by the neural network telling us which Twitter influencer was best to be in dialogue with at what time because it was the time when his followers were active. Of course you can also do that by yourself do that kind of analysis, but the huge amount of Twitter files out there to analyze would have gone beyond our capacity. And AI and that’s the other aspect, AI will allow us to do things we are not capable to do today because of the lack of man power, lack of man and computing power.  I have to say, there’s a little bit about this AI stuff that scares me. And I know I do a lot of work with AI, but I also am a little bit concerned when I talked about marketing and communications and AI because I’m nervous that they’re gonna know the best of human psychology and they’re gonna know exactly how to persuade me into buying something that I do not need and have a lot of stuff in my closet that I do not need. So do you see that that’s going to be happening with AI? That is already happening today with AI. It’s requires only five hundred to six hundred words that you publish somewhere and then your network can produce a very precise psychological profile of you, telling me exactly how to sell you what and how to influence you, what are the key words to avoid, and the key messages to deliver. That’s happening today, we’re actually using this in PR, like before I contact journalists I don’t know. I found out what kind of person it is so I know exactly how to talk to that person. And the same in sales but the other thing you mentioned that you will be convinced to buy things that don’t want to buy that’s the mission of advertising ever! It’s always been the mission. It might become more sophisticated, but it can also be used for something else. And that is to protect you from messages that you don’t want, that are irrelevant for you. If an AI understands your personality and knows what you want and what you don’t want, that AI can actually block messages for you. So it depends very much on how we use it. And knives can be used to cut bread and to kill someone. So ethics is a very important topic. At every AI conference that I’m at, ethics is a central topic. And I read just before on LinkedIn that the European Union has today, published some ethical standards something that everybody who works seriously in the AI work will work on. Because if we get it right with the ethics, AI will have a future and we’ll have a better future with AI. If we get it wrong, we will not be able to use its potential, and we’re screwed. Or worse. I can really see some – I hear about some game over scenarios, as I also attend some of these AI conferences. But this really brings us back to the human element and why, sort of, bringing your humanity forward is so important in this age of digitalization. Can you tell us more about the business campaigning model, I mean, you don’t have to go through the whole thing, but what are the elements that are included in there? Well, I’m a physicist, and when I worked for Greenpeace I was the last three years was campaigns director of Greenpeace Switzerland. And I had to reorganize my department. And I realized that it doesn’t matter if I want to stop a nuclear power plant’s operating license or change the culture of my department, I used the same strategies and I used the same approach. And I realized it’s all about changing people’s knowledge, attitudes, or behavior, or maybe all together.  And when physicists discover something like this, they love to develop theories, to make predictions. If I do A then the outcome is B. So I had this idea of creating a model that’s what I did in 1998. I created a model that helps to train, to educate campaigners, or change makers, whatever you want to call them. And, at the same time, helps you to plan, execute, evaluate campaigns or change processes, whatever you want to call it, in the end, it’s doing something that brings a change. And independently from the topic and the goal that is involved it describes, like a cookbook, it tells you if you use salt and these vegetables now will treat them like that. And the outcome is a dish, and it’s the right dish for the right person. 00:15:00 – 00:20:05 We love on our website, we have a mix up and vegetables, because that’s what do you call it. Like a smoothie or something of that sort. That’s it, like a smoothie. The right smoothie for the right person in the end. Yeah. Exactly. So how do we get our hands on a copy of this, or how do we know because it sounds like it’s just a very easy plug and play, and something that a lot of us would be interested in – how to run change management or how to run better campaigns, business campaigns, marketing campaigns. For the German speakers, it’s all published in my book. titled Business Campaigning, published by Springer, Heidelberg, but it’s not in this order. It explains the model but it’s not like a cookbook. I’m currently working on something like working title How to do Business Campaigning. I have all these checklists already ready so somebody could order that already but I’m working on explanations, with which somebody can work without me being there, without me explaining something. So really like a cookbook. And hopefully it will be available in few weeks. Maybe by the time you publish this podcast, I don’t know when it’s going to be available already. But you find out if you go to businesscampaigning.com, you’ll see it there. So I’ll put a link for everyone listening. I’ll put a link in the show notes. I’ll put it in the blog posts and we’ll send you over. I’m a huge fan of online courses and what you’re describing is only people who have a lot of money to spend on this campaign could then afford to hire you as a consultant. And what you’re saying is, for the rest of us, there’s now an opportunity where we can almost bring our own Peter home with us who says okay, do this, okay, do this. Are you going in the right order? So I appreciate that. But we need to make sure that it has a picture of your smiling face on it because there’s an energy that you bring as well that might not translate in the book. When I was working with Greenpeace, our mission was that the world wouldn’t need us anymore. And that’s still the vision and this will be like, a gift to the world, to they can don’t need us. Don’t need me anymore. I love that. And as you speak about mission. I mean, you are a very purpose driven person. How did you find your purpose? Or how did you find a way to align a purpose with a business? Well, that’s a long story, actually, it was my grandfather taking me for walks and explaining to me how nature had changed due to chemistry, and you know, chemical pollution and everything. That already gave me a sense of the importance of sustainability. And my very first campaign in 1982 was to protect a pond in our village, or next to our village. And then I joined Greenpeace and I worked for Greenpeace for 13 years, then with this model I started my own business in 1998 and then for a while my business was my purpose. But it was never really enough. The mission of my company since 1999 had been meaningful campaign for meaningful ideas. But like the fight, fighting to save the planet, fighting full sustainability was not at the core. And that has kind of changed. When we were on Kuai in December and January, I don’t know, Kuai has a transformational… it does something with you. And it brought me back to the question of what is really lighting me up? Where do I get my energy from? Where is my motivation and that is actually in driving sustainability in working towards a sustainable economy. And this whole, this is where I’m gonna put more energy. And what advice would you have for listeners about how they might be able to find purpose or infuse more purpose into the work that they’re doing? They have to ask themselves yet the question of why. Why am I here? But I know many people ask it and they don’t find an answer and then I would say find a coach. I didn’t even pay you to say that. I would not be that coach but I could mentor people. That I know and that I appreciate people who are specialized in that. Go to Kuai, friends of mine organize trips on Kuai, and this actually is why we were there, because they needed marketing support here in Europe. And I said, I need to know that program in that actually is all about finding your purpose. Finding your talents and removing all the blockages that are there that keep you from living your purpose. So, that would be an option. So one way is to escape that everyday life and go into a reflection mode. And maybe you have some friends or a coach or just some other external folks to speak with and to try to find that. Meditation can also be something. What’s one piece of advice that you would share with listeners that you’ve learned either the hard way yourself or you’ve just noticed has worked throughout all of your years of experience in business. 00:20:06 – 00:23:15 That’s one question that has always been at the center, and that’s the why question. Because, very often, you know, you start a campaign, even if it’s only about sales or marketing, very often if I asked the question of why do you want to achieve that goal often enough, totally different solutions come up. Because the real goal behind it is not what was obvious in the beginning. And the same applies to us as human beings. We have ask that question over and over again. And the more machines and robots take over work from us, the more important it becomes to identify what makes us different from them. What makes us different as humanity in why am I here? What value can I add to society? Because jobs will change. Jobs will not be jobs anymore, but we will try to find people who add their personal value to our society. When we don’t need to work anymore, we don’t need an income anymore, and that will happen. Then what are we doing there? And we’ll do things that explore the world, we will create art, we will develop further, and there it will be great. But we have to know why and who we are. So if I’m hearing you right, there are two things that sort of define you, which is maybe you know, this, maybe you don’t, you’re really curious. Why, why is… I’m interested. And you’re also an explorer, so you’re not just gonna stay within your bubble you’re gonna go out why? what’s that about? what’s that about? Let me hear more about that. Let me go to Kuai and figure that out. There’s a lot of curiosity and questioning and experimenting going on for you. Is that how you live your life? I’m a physicist. I never worked as a physicist. But yeah, let’s always been a central part of my life. And I can recommend everybody. Stay curious. Really, stay curious! If you want to find out how to, to get your business to the next ten years, stay curious. And be open to new solutions be open to changes in society, and changes of value, and be curious about solutions. Never stop asking those questions.  And your cookbook will guide us through the process of what kinds of questions to ask, how to, so it’s not just a big lost why, like a big lost, what is my purpose, but rather you’ve given us that formula. So we know exactly what questions to ask in the right order, and so we can get to a meaningful answer. Thanks for that. Well, thank you very much Peter for your time today. It was really great having you on the podcast. Thank you and thank you to the audience or the watchers who watch and listen. The post Ep. 13: The Future of Marketing is AI + Humans with Peter Metzinger appeared first on Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Change Management Consulting | Lisa Christen in Zug, Switzerland.

Who Is An Agile Leader? How do charismatic leaders like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk capture an audience? Hint: it’s not by getting up on stage and talking about their own wants and needs. No, the secret to great leadership is this: great leaders understand their audience (employees, peers, bosses) and speak to their audience’s needs. In other words, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk practice agile leadership. What An Agile Leader Can Achieve An agile leader knows how to successfully motivate and influence their teams to accomplish amazing feats. You’ve been tricked in the past if you’ve been told to “play to your strengths”. That’s not great advice when talking about managing people because everyone has different communication / motivation preferences . To be an agile leadership, you can’t lead in a fixed way. Leadership Agility is actually about being a flexible enough leader that you can flex to meet the needs of your audience. In this episode of Level Up Your Leadership, I break down: What agile leadership is (and isn’t)Why agile leadership can significantly improve your leadership ability The proven 4-step agility method How to be a more effective influencer, communicator, motivator, and overall people leader. If you’re ready to get agile with your leadership to create greater results, tune in to this episode of Level Up Your Leadership wherever you love to listen to podcasts.   OR you can read the full transcript below. Enjoy! Lisa If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play  – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! Ep. 12: How To Be An Agile Leader 00:00:08 – 00:05:01 Welcome back to another episode of Level Up Your Leadership, the podcast exploring how 21st century leaders acquire the skills they need to thrive in the ever-changing digital workplace. I’m your host Lisa Christen, and I’m here today to talk about leadership agility. Why is leadership agility so important? And what exactly is it? This is a tool that’s going to help you to be infinitely more effective in how you motivate people, how you influence people, how you communicate with people because it helps you to understand How can I have the impact that I want to with these people in a new way that they’re going to be open and ready to listen and hear what I have to say? So hope you enjoy the next few minutes, where you learn the practical tools and tips on how to be agile in your leadership. Welcome back to another episode of Level Up Your Leadership. I’m your host Lisa Christen and today, I’m here to talk about leadership agility. I know this is a hot topic because very often, people say to me, oh, we’re trying agile in our workplace and I’m sorry to disappoint. Today is not about agile as in the set of principles that our work processes that can help your team to move faster and innovation et cetera. This is about leadership agility, which I think is actually, possibly even more powerful and important, so you listen to this episode and you let me know what you think in the comments. So what is the leadership agility when I talk about it? It’s this ability for leaders to really be able to think quickly, to act nimbly, and really remain flexible in responding to whatever challenges are coming up and coming their way. And why is that important? Why is that a skill that’s needed in the 21st century?. I think I don’t need to convince any of you who are working now that we live in this VUCA world, and I know that’s jargon. It’s this Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous world. We just don’t know what’s going to come up, what’s going to happen, how we’re going to have to change paths. And by the way, everything that we’re working on has usually never been done before. So we don’t actually know what the result will be or how we can quite measure it, what success will look like. It’s like everything’s up in the air and the World Economic Forum puts out this list of skills, you’re going to need to survive and thrive in the future of work in the skills that they listed for the year, 2022 it’s things like leadership and social influence, emotional intelligence, creativity and originality and having self-initiative. These are all the things that leaders need to be successful in the future, particularly with this digital era. So I want to show you today what leadership agility is, and I don’t want to just tell you about this theory. I want to tell you, how you can practically start applying and using it in your work. So I’m going to start with an example with a person will call her Andrea and she works in pharmaceutical sales. She has this boss, John, and he sends out weekly emails to everybody on the sales team. And he’s talking about this bonus that’s going to be paid and how they have to really meet their quotas, because they’re going to earn lots and lots of money for meeting their quotas for anyone that works in sales. Maybe that sounds familiar to you. But there’s a problem with the way that John is motivating his team because Andrea, she’s not motivated by the money. So the intention, what John’s trying to do is to motivate her. But he’s assuming that she and other team members are motivated by money. And in fact, the actual impact that he’s having is actually de-motivating to Andrea because she’s not only not interested in the money, she’s a little bit offended that someone thinks she would be doing the job just for the money. So the intention is to motivate and the impact is that he’s not motivating the team at all. They’re being successful, perhaps in spite of his leadership. So what’s number one most important lesson to know when trying to apply leadership, agility? It’s this: the golden rule, which we all learned as children do unto others as you would have done unto you. So in sort of easier words to find out treat others the way that you’d like to be treated. But that’s wrong. I know, I know, I know, you’ve been told all your life, treat others the way you’d like to be treated. It’s wrong. You really want to follow what’s called the platinum rule. 00:05:01 – 00:10:06 And the platinum rule is to treat others the way they want to be treated. Notice the slight difference. John might be motivated by money. So he says good, I’m motivated by money. I’m going to treat Andrea as though she’s motivated by money. But she’s not, and if he wants to get the most out of his team members, he has to treat them the way that they choose and want to be treated, and that’s at the heart of leadership agility. So there are four steps to actually being able to do the real how of how do I start applying leadership agility, and step one is to have a self awareness of what are your preferences? What are you likely to try to impose on somebody else, and then step two is to gain an awareness of other people’s preferences. Now, sometimes you have the ability to actually just ask them: how would you like to be spoken to? how would you like to be treated? But often people leave clues. And if you’re just open to reading their clues in playing a little bit of detective, you can find that out on your own. Step three is to strategize. So how do I close that gap between what I’m likely to want to say someone or do to someone and what is it that they want? And then how do I bridge those two or how do I switch? Or what does that look like to be able to have the impact on that other person that I’d like to. And then step four is actually being skillful enough to flex out of your preference and into meeting the preferences of another person. So for any of you who are avid listeners, and you listen to my episode number 11 about authenticity, I want to make sure that we take a pause here to talk about flexibility does not mean being fake. It does not mean pretending to be something that you’re not. So there are certain things that you definitely don’t want to flex on which are things like your moral standards, your personal values, your life purpose or life vision. Those are things that you really want to keep. You don’t want to flex away from those. But there are areas that you do want to flex about yourself. And that’s a lot of times things like your personality. So your personality is just sort of your habits that you’ve built up over time, things that you prefer, how you prefer things to be, and it’s very comfortable if you can act aligned with your personality, but you do want to be flexible in there, because your personality should not actually always be dictating your behavior and agility is not about becoming a different person. I’m not saying you have to change your personality, but you want to recognize when your personality is getting in the way of serving a greater purpose or a bigger goal. And in that moment, flex to meet the needs of someone else, and you’re going to be surprised at what kind of results, you can get while still feeling authentic to yourself. So I want to take you through these four steps that I mentioned. Having a self awareness of your preferences, having an awareness of others preferences strategizing, how to bridge that gap. And then getting flexible actually doing the work won’t take you through a real example. And this is a very common one. So we’ll go back to Andrea and her boss John, and I want to talk about influencing. Because that’s really what John is trying to do with Andrea and his team is motivating them, trying to influence them and the way that they work. So courtesy of the Influencing Style Indicator, which is an assessment that I use when training corporate leaders or sometimes private clients. It breaks influencing down into five really simple styles for influencing. So one is rationalizing just being rational focusing on data numbers facts to as a certain. So sometimes if you have the authority, you just say, I’m the boss just do it. If you’ve ever heard me talk to my kids, I try not to use this one but sometimes it sneaks out. Just put your shoes on (!!!), right? Number three is negotiating. So you want to talk about, okay, I’ll give this up, you give this up. But it’s both sides can get somewhere and move forward. Number four is inspiring. So we want to tell this great story we talk about our shared values. We have this big vision for how the world might be different. And then number five of influencing styles is bridging, so connecting with other people belting, relationship building coalitions. And we just break influencing down into these five styles and most people have a preference for one or two of them. So pop quiz, which style are you thinking is the best to use for influencing: rationalizing, asserting, negotiating, inspiring, or bridging? And the answer to that question is: all of them AND none of them No one of them is the best to use. 00:10:06 – 00:14:46 You might have a preference but you want to use them flexibly, depending on the situation. And that’s what’s happening with John and Andrea. So step one for John is to have a self-awareness. He probably has a preference for rationalizing. He’s very logical. Here are some numbers. You hit the numbers, you’re going to get this payout. That’s nice. Let’s do that. So often what people will do when they have a preference for a certain influencing style, like, John, he’s going to impose that on other people. So he’s going to say well, facts and numbers influence me. They convince me so that must work for other people. And by the way, people who don’t have awareness about flexibility will usually double down. So John says, I’m going to go to Andrea, I’m going to tell her about the money. Andrea’s not looking motivated. I’ll just keep showing her more facts and more data until she gets it. By the way, that style doesn’t work because Andrea may never be convinced by just the number. She needs something more. So John goes to step two: what’s the awareness of Andrea’s preferences, and he’s going to play detective. What does Andrea talk about when she’s talking about her job and what motivates her? So she often is talking about the patients that she’s helping. She’s talking about the community. She likes to go and visit the hospitals to experience, you know, the medicines being administered firsthand. These are styles that are more aligned with maybe inspiring, or she likes to have this greater purpose to what she’s doing. And bridging, she really cares about the people. She wants to connect with the people at a deeper level. So now John’s going to go to step three and he’s going to strategize. How can he learn to flex into the styles that Andrea prefers? So how can he move more towards using inspiring styles and people bridging styles when he’s trying to influence and motivate her? So then step four is actually being skilled enough to flex John says, maybe in this newsletter that I’m sending out to my teams to motivate them, instead of just saying you hit your numbers, and you get your money he’s going to now start including a client story in the mmail so they can talk about the impact. He might include some testimonials from doctors about how important and meaningful the medicine has been so that there’s more of that human touch, more of what’s going to influence Andrea. Again, the whole point of leadership agility and being flexible is to find a way to fulfill the intention that you have, so you intend influence and motivate people. But often the impact that we have is that we don’t influence them because we’re using our preferences our habits and instead, we want to take our intention of influencing, and we want to find a way to have maximum impact, and that’s what John has done with Andrea and… guess what? Andrea is now a motivated employee! She’s doing great work. Nothing else really needed to change. Except for the way that John was flexible in motivating and influencing Andrea, and yes, it does take a little bit extra time for leaders to find these individualized programs for each of their employees for each scenario. Let’s say you’re going into senior management. That’s going to look very different for what you present to them than to individual contributors who are new to the organization. Take the time to have just a few minutes to strategize who’s the audience what do they want what they care about? What’s impactful for them and be flexible in meeting the other people’s needs and you’re going to find that your leadership is taken to an absolute next level. So I hope you have enjoyed this lesson. I hope you can use these lessons in your everyday life. Let me know send me emails, alright? I love to get feedback. If you have questions, be in touch, I’m always here to help. The post Ep. 12: How To Be An Agile Leader appeared first on Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Change Management Consulting | Lisa Christen in Zug, Switzerland.

Can You “Do” Authenticity Wrong? Yes! If you’re using “authenticity” as an excuse for justifying your bad habits and behaviors, then you’re definitely misusing it. Authenticity is not about sharing or acting on every thought that comes into your mind. Authenticity is not about trying hard to be unique among a crowd of people. Authenticity is not justifying thoughtlessness by saying “that’s just who I am”. So How Do I “Do” Authenticity Right? You do authenticity right by figuring out what is most important to you: what impact you want to make on the world and what kind of person you want to show up as in your life. In other words, how to intentionally and purposefully choose who you want to be and not just default to who you are without putting in any intention or thought. In this episode of Level Up Your Leadership, I break down: The mistakes most people make when trying to be authenticWhat authenticity isn’tWhat authenticity really is How to become a more authentic leader If you’re ready to find your true voice and show up authentically, tune in to this episode of Level Up Your Leadership on iTunes or Google Play.   Enjoy! Lisa If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play  – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! The post Ep. 11: How To Be Truly Authentic appeared first on Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Change Management Consulting | Lisa Christen in Zug, Switzerland.

Why Goal-Setting Usually Doesn’t Work Do you ever have that panicked feeling of being overwhelmed by a mounting to-do list or is that just me? Where do I start? What’s the next step? Agh! In this episode of Level Up Your Leadership, I break down for you three easy steps to goal setting that bring about clarity and an easy way to make quick wins. Trust me, this is different from the goal-setting you’ve heard in the past. The 3 Steps to Goal-Setting Success I include tips and info on how to: Set goals in a new wayBreak free from anxiety about not knowing where to startGet clarity on what is actually within your control to achieveKnow your next steps and exactly what you need to do to make progress If you’re ready to break free from the stress of floundering in a list of goals with not a lot of progress or success, tune in to this episode of Level Up Your Leadership on iTunes or Google Play.   Enjoy! Lisa If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play  – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! The post Ep. 10: How To Make Succeeding At Your Goals Look Easy appeared first on Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Change Management Consulting | Lisa Christen in Zug, Switzerland.

A New Format Since launching the Level Up Your Leadership podcast, many people have asked me why I interview other people but don’t share my own tips and experience. Great question! Let’s change that! In this episode, I am sharing my most fundamental secret to successful business and executive coaching: my proprietary coaching method framework. WHY . WHAT . HOW In this episode, you’ll learn about: What the WHY . WHAT . HOW framework isHow to use the WHY . WHAT . HOW framework to make decisions that are more fulfilling, more certain, and more aligned with your life’s ambitions Examples from leaders like you and how they’ve applied the WHY . WHAT . HOW framework Here’s your free WHY . WHAT. HOW template I love to share my work — that’s the whole point of WHY I do what I do! I want to make an impact as many people as possible and help you to live a more meaningful, fulfilling life. That’s why I am sharing this document with you absolutely free, no strings attached. Coaching-Why-What-How-FINAL Interested in hearing more details about WHY . WHAT . HOW and real examples from my clients about how to put it into action? Be sure to listen to Level Up Your Leadership Episode 9 on WHY . WHAT . HOW here on iTunes or Google Play. Enjoy! Lisa If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play  – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! The post Ep. 9: The Executive Coaching Formula that Leads to Success Every Time appeared first on Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Change Management Consulting | Lisa Christen in Zug, Switzerland.

David Cipullo is the Vice President of BRAND Sales, Intelligence & Consulting and on the Group Management Board for the global sports marketing firm Infront Sports & Media. David started his career working for sports powerhouses like the US Olympic Committee and Washington Wizards NBA team, and moved into senior roles with Team Services LLC, a stadium naming rights agency, and Liverpool Football Club. And this Pro in sales shares what 21st century skill is needed for success: the empathy to be able to think like the client and anticipate their needs (sometimes before they even know it’s a need!). What Makes a Great Salesman David is an exceptional salesman exactly because you never feel like he’s selling you anything.  He’s not the too-smooth talker that you feel a little bit unsure about trusting. He’s never the pushy expert who knows best and forces his ideas on you. He’s just a funny, humble guy who genuinely cares.  And that’s the reason David is so successful — he shows that he thinks about (and cares about) his clients when nobody else does. It’s easy, David notes, to congratulate a contact when they post on LinkedIn about their new job. You and 87 other people will be congratulating at the same time, though, ultimately minimizing your impact. That’s why David’s advice for how you can Level Up Your Leadership is this: Be there when nobody else is. That’s the secret to standing out from the crowd. You don’t want to be 1 out of 87; you want to be the person who the clients feel comfortable enough to confide in that they’re looking for a job… and then you want to be the person who helps them find it.    The Hand-Written Thank You Note Sales Metaphor Take, for example, the hand-written thank you note. Rarely does anyone take the time to write a hand-written thank you note in business these days, so that’s an exceptional act in and of itself. But David sends a hand-written note when he loses the sale.  Because David is there when people aren’t expecting him to be – and they love it. Call it good sportsmanship or sales genius, David focuses on simply creating value in a long-term relationship. And sometimes that means thanking the client for the time spent together, even if this round wasn’t a win. Want to learn more insider tips on how to develop trust in sales and build long-term relationships that bring you success? Be sure to listen to Level Up Your Leadership Episode 8 with David Cipullo here on iTunes or Google Play. Enjoy! Lisa — In this episode, we also discussed: March Madness Jerry Maguire (movie) Bob Costas (sports announcer) YMCA Julis Erving “Doctor J” (basketball star) Washington Wizards US Olympic Committee James Madison University Amy Van Dyken (swimmer) George Washington University Sports Management Monster.com Liverpool Football Club Pittsburgh Steelers Tom Hicks and George Gillett (owners of Liverpool FC) “Drink the Kool-Aid” (phrase) Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands. By Terri Morrison and Wayne A. Conaway Schranner Negotiation Institute Wanda Group Abbott Laboratories World Marathon Majors WD-40 Tim Ferriss Speed Reading If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play  – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! The post Ep. 8 – VP of Brand at Global Sports Marketing Co: Be There When Nobody Else Is with David Cipullo appeared first on Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Change Management Consulting | Lisa Christen in Zug, Switzerland.

Performing Under Pressure Phillip Burns knows how to perform under pressure. He’s a former professional soccer player (goalkeeper) who played for many English soccer clubs, including Manchester United Youth Team, Huddersfield Town, Readings FC, and Sheffield United. After his professional career, Phil re-channeled his love of sports and fitness into founding and running two Muay Thai kickboxing studios (one in Thailand, one in Mexico). Most recently, he’s joined Global Premier Soccer, a soccer club with ties to Football Club Bayern, as their Technical Director for Southern California, USA. Phil also serves as a talent scout for the US Soccer Federation for girls. Success Lessons I asked Phil what major success lessons a former pro soccer player and coach of rising star athletes has learned over the years. His answers boiled down to this:  You’ll only succeed if you don’t let the pressure get to you. If you’re the goalkeeper and you let the other team score a goal in the first minute of the game – how do you handle the next 89 minutes!? Do you spend the rest of the game rattled? Do you lose your focus and ability to stop the next shot? Are you tormented so heavily by the anxiety that by the second half of the game your body is completely exhausted? None of that leads to your best performance. Phil’s advice to Level Up Your Leadership performance: Get a giant erase button. Whatever happened a minute ago is irrelevant. Play now, in the moment, and erase all of the memories that might affect your game. You let a goal in, now let it go and focus on minute two. Another anxiety that keeps good players from being great is the fear that they’re not good enough. Phil believes that everyone should try their hardest, test their limits, and accept whatever the resulting truth is. Maybe there ARE players better than you. Maybe you DO belong one league down or at a club that’s not as competitive. That’s okay! Be confident in the abilities you do have and don’t waste your time and energy worrying about the abilities you wish you had. My Take You can’t have a prolific career if people remember you for what you couldn’t do. Find a way to be at a level where you can perform at your best so people can remember you for what you could do. This is especially true in the business world where, too often, leaders are promoted to their level of… ahem… incompetence and then left there to suffer (along with the team members below them). Focus on your talents, skills, and abilities and what you CAN do and an excellent reputation will follow. For more about Phil’s wild life story and some great success tips from a pro baller, be sure to listen to Level Up Your Leadership Episode 7 with Phil Burns here on  iTunes or Google Play . Enjoy! Lisa PS I promised to include some Muay Thai kickboxing videos.   In this episode, we also discussed: Mezcal World Cup 2018 England 2018 World Cup Team Croatia 2018 World Cup Team Cricket Manchester United Football Club Leeds United Football Club Portsmouth Football Club Huddersfield Town Football Club Muay Thai Kickboxing Christian Alpha Course Chiang Mai home for boys Gym Bangarang Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Global Premiere Soccer Bayern Munich Football Club If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play  – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! The post Ep. 7 – Former Pro-Soccer Player: Don’t Let The Pressure Get To You with Phil Burns appeared first on Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Change Management Consulting | Lisa Christen in Zug, Switzerland.

Jennifer Thamm is the former Global Head of Change & Transformation Governance Risks at UBS. In addition to being a corporate executive, she’s also a wife, new mom, travel addict and sports fan. Jennifer has spent over 20 years working in finance, IT and risk management across the financial,  insurance and consulting industries. Prior to her roles at UBS, Jennifer worked as a Senior Managing Risk Consultant at Thomson Reuters and managed several strategic and global programs at Zurich Insurance, including serving as Head of the Zurich Way and Growth Office. So what keeps a risk expert at a major bank like UBS up at night? If you think it’s cyber risk, fraud, money laundering, the markets, or crippling regulations, you’re right. But you may be completely overlooking another critical risk factor that plays a huge role in your company’s financial success: your people. After working for years in risk management, Jennifer has seen what can happen when employees aren’t provided the environment to perform at their best, whether it’s due to stress and burnout issues or working in a constant environment of fear. She believes (and I agree) that the companies who focus the most on their people are the companies who will ultimately perform the best financially. Jennifer gives some great perspectives on how companies and employees can build high-performance cultures (which simultaneously mitigates their risks!) to create an environment that ensures you and your people are performing at your best: A great company comes out of a great company culture. When the culture is based in fear, people are absolutely unable to perform at their best and the company suffers. Jennifer shares a (quite frightening!) experience of hers when a senior leader boasted that his best leadership ability was to fire employees and replace them with better talent. Yikes! And her stories where fellow colleagues were suspicious of her because she was smiling at the office? A company culture where you can’t smile is definitely an atmosphere that’s not set up for greatness. Great performance comes out of great leaders – and great leaders focus on developing their teams. The culture is set, for better or for worse, by the leaders inside it. Period. Nothing else matters like the actions of the leaders. So leaders have an opportunity and a responsibility to act in the way that best supports their teams and the company in achieving their goals. A focus on the people by the managers is a key indicator of what a successful leader will look like. Don’t forget that YOU as a leader are one of those people you should focus on. Excellent leaders can often be so focused on their team members that they forget to prioritize a focus on themselves. Like the cliché of putting on your own airplane oxygen mask before assisting others, leaders must remember that they themselves are a vital member of the team and need to prioritize their own health and wellbeing alongside the goals of their employees and the company. Health and wellbeing (both physical and mental) are keys to resilience and success. It’s easy to get caught up in the 24/7 nature of the modern business world. Barely sleeping, emailing at all hours, sitting with immense pressure on your shoulders all the time, year after year – it can all lead to an unhealthy lifestyle and burnout. Jennifer personally knew several CEOs and Senior Execs who have died or gotten extremely ill immediately after retirement… and two who committed suicide. Choosing the healthy lifestyle that fits your needs and interests is a key way to build up your stamina, reduce your stress, and keep you resilient and strong in the face of challenges. Your people are your greatest asset and your greatest liability. Too often businesses focus on their investors, their customers, their products, and their competitors – at the expense of their people. One way to keep leaders focused on what matters most is by setting Key Performance Indicators about their teams and tracking them over time. Resilience and success will come from staying focused on the end game, having patience, and keeping positive influences around you. Enjoy! Lisa   In this episode, we discussed: What made Jennifer start her career in the field of risk Jennifer’s unique view towards risk (hint: she’s not the police wagging a finger at us, telling us what we can’t do!). Why risk management’s job is to be the CEO’s best friend – and how they help the CEO to achieve more goals. How Risk Management is just like American Football (and they’re the offensive linemen). About Jennifer’s entrepreneurial family, including her grandfather who started a successful business during the Great Depression. The timeliness advice Jennifer’s grandfather left her with to be resilient and successful at anything she pursued. Not just how or where to invest but WHEN to invest time, money, and resources to a project (hint: most big corporations get this one wrong!). How a great Risk Identification Process up front can save you from catastrophic results after a major project or change transformation at your company. Why one of the biggest risks across all organizations and all project are their people risks AND what you can do about it. What true leadership looks like (hint: it’s not authoritarian). Why the culture of the company is shaped by the leaders and authority figures period. Nothing else. Why a Balanced Scorecard helps to keep leaders – and companies – accountable and how to find the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to include on your scorecard (hint: you don’t need to find the perfect ones to find success). How finance organizations have changed in terms of culture and leadership since the 2008 crisis. Why a culture of fear makes it extremely difficult to get high performance out of your people. How smiling can get you strange looks (or even in trouble!) when the culture is fear-based – and why you should keep doing it anyway. How a “work family” can help to get you through the tough, stressful times on the job. How senior management are like the thoroughbreds at a horse race (and why they’re not taking care of themselves health-wise the way we would a thoroughbred, ending in sickness and even death!). Why it’s great that senior management are going to coaches and looking to prioritize themselves and their well-being Why all leaders should manage their physical well-being with mental well-being for their personal benefit as well as to support their teams. How knowledge about health and wellness gives your brain the extra power to make a conscious health choice instead of letting default (bad) habits run the show. How Jennifer made a conscious choice for her health to quit smoking from one day to the next. Jennifer’s #1 piece of advice for leveling up your leadership: focus on the people and relationships in an organization AND don’t forget that YOU are one of those people you should focus on! How we’re at a major precipice for big shifts in the workplace related to what the market is going to look like and how companies are structured. Why, when you love yourself, it’s so much easier to take care of others and why the best thing you can do in a VUCA world is to take care of yourself and take care of your people. Why Jennifer created a Personal ROI performance measurement sheet to track her success metrics over time. Why tracking the most important metrics on a daily basis helps you to stay focused on what matters most. How resilience can come from staying focused on the end game, having patience, and keeping positive influences around you. Why it’s important to stop every once in a while and acknowledge and be grateful for the successes you have achieved.   Links Risk Management Zurich Insurance American Football U.S. Great Depression Simon Sinek YouTube video – Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe We Were Soldiers (Vietnam movie) Balanced Scorecard Continuous Improvement Jack Welch 2008 Financial Crisis Swiss Women’s National Softball Mount Kilimanjaro A-type Personalities Google Search Results on “Health and Wellbeing” ROI (Return on Investment) Personal ROI Spreadsheet (more details coming soon!)   If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play  – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! Website | Twitter | LinkedIn The post Ep. 6 – The Biggest Operational Risk You’re Completely Overlooking with Risk Expert Jennifer Thamm appeared first on Executive Coaching | Leadership Development | Change Management Consulting | Lisa Christen in Zug, Switzerland.