PAKRA - Key Persons
Anju Talwar, CEO of Skills Academy, is facing the biggest challenge of her thirty-year career. The challenges of establishing eight different organizations in eight different countries, each with its own language and culture pale in comparison with the steep learning curve she is now facing within her own native India.
As CEO of Skills Academy Anju and her talented team are endeavoring to bridge the skills gaps that hinder the nation's poorest, rural citizens from achieving a modicum of a decent life.
Job Titles:
- VP of Client Success at Reality Works Group
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor in Capital University 's School of Management
- Professor
Dr. Sherry Peck is an Associate Professor in Capital University's School of Management and Leadership. She is helping PAKRA learn the perspectives women in leadership roles.
Dr. Sherry Peck is an Associate Professor of Business in Capital University's School of Management and Leadership. Previously she has served as Associate Dean, Director of Graduate Programs at Capital University's School of Management.
She teaches both adult professionals in Capital University's MBA program and traditional aged undergraduate students. Her teaching has included: Organizational Behavior, Conflict Management, Business Strategy, Women in Management, Introduction to Business and Training and Development.
Sherry earned her doctorate (1993) in organizational behavior, with a minor in strategy from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Before earning her doctorate Sherry worked at Fortune 500 companies in the Chicago area (Whitman Corporation, Baxter). Sherry has earned both her MBA (1982) and bachelor's degree (1979) from the University of Chicago.
Sherry has conducted leadership and management seminars at Nationwide Insurance, Nationwide Children's Hospital, and for many local civic organizations. Sherry has published in: The Journal of Management Studies, The Academy of Management Executive and Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes. She is a frequent presenter at the Lilly Conference on University and College Teaching and has presented at the Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference.
Job Titles:
- Learning Executive and Employee
- Senior Vice President and Head of Employee Engagement
Harlina Sodhi has guts! Harlina Sodhi is now the Senior Vice President and Head of Employee Engagement, Communication and Diversity at Reliance Industries, India's largest private company. Despite its size, it is somewhat unlikely that you are familiar with Reliance, unless you are from India and/or are familiar with the oil and gas industry. Harlina is going to change that! For the past five months she has had a portfolio that includes Leadership development, training, communication, both internal and external as well as employee engagement.
Her ambitious goal is to make people
Jaana Nyström might not fit your visual image of a leader. Jaana doesn't wear a "power suit" or have hundreds of people reporting to her or control a multi-million dollar (euro) budget. However based on any of the following leadership quotations (which are some of my favorites), Jaana Nyström is unquestionably a leader!
It's that kind of agility, energy and seemingly insatiable curiosity that has propelled Jill Konrath from home economics to the corporate arena and then to the life of "a quiet consultant in Minneapolis" and finally to blaze a trail as a widely followed author, speaker and sales guru. Fortune Magazine declared her first book, Selling to Big Companies, a "must read" for sales professionals. Her second book Snap Selling is the top ranked sales book on Amazon.com. Book number three, The Agile Seller will be published in 2014 and book number four, Snapping Back is on the drawing board!
Like many of the women I have spoken with, it is not the path that Jill envisioned for herself or initially embarked upon. Her professional career began as a home economics teacher but it quickly became clear to Jill that this was not the best path for her. However, Jill continues to teach and guide others. Now the life skills that she helps others learn are not sewing and cooking but rather agility, resilience and a sales process that gets results.
Another way that Jill is like the other women I have interviewed is her willingness to take calculated risks. Unable to find a job after she left teaching she decided to start her own business with some other twenty something's who were also searching for careers that were a better fit. Following a year of methodical research they had a plan which they shared with a SCORE member, a retired General Mills executive.
Julie Holt is a Nurse Executive, with a superstar record of transforming patient services in hospitals in the Greater Cincinnati metropolitan area. She achieved this with compassion and constant desire to innovate and experiment. She is currently the Assistant Vice President (AVP) of Patient Services and Center for Professional Excellence at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC).
In the past, she was the Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) at Mercy Hospital, Anderson and at West Chester Hospital and was VP of Patient Services at Drake Hospital and Director of Patient Services at the Jewish Hospital of Cincinnati.
I started our discussion by asking Julie, when she joined CCMCH where she seemingly took a step-down from a CNO title to her current position title of AVP. Julie laughed and said,
"Actually that observation is true on paper but it does not fully tell the story. All my career moves had reasons, though it would be different in each case. Here I had two reasons, why I took the job.
First, I see myself later in life, doing more teaching and research, and so I decided to do a Ph.D. in Nursing. That requires that I had to find the time to do it. Also, as you know CCHMC being third in the country for pediatric hospitals, there was an opportunity where I can lead innovation with a much bigger team reporting to me and with more resources than I had before and be able to make the difference, even though I allocate less work-hours than I did in the past. This idea of being in an environment that encourages research and innovation was very appealing. In that sense, it was a no-brainer. I see it as more opportunities for success while investing in my future career."
Looking at her career path, you can see that Julie is on the fast track of senior leadership. She earned positions of senior to executive positions that are notoriously difficult to get hired into it. Julie had no such difficulty! Why?
Kathryne Reeves should know! Until very recently Kathryne was the General Manager (and Senior Vice President) for Scotts Miracle-Gro.
Kathryne attributes her love of a high performing team to her family and growing up in Jackson, Mississippi. Her parents nurtured her striving for excellence. And they sacrificed a lot to help her achieve it; sending her to Stanford by working "every extra shift" and taking out considerable debt. They focused on the "greater good" that Kathryne could achieve by attending one of the most world's most competitive and academically rigorous schools. They believed in her, and Kathryne "took it from there."
Kathryne pointed out it is possible to have both a career and a family. Like Sheryl Sandberg (same cohort at Harvard as Kathryne) in Lean In, Kathryne has found that through a desire to optimize for the family (rather than one individual's career), hard work and perhaps a bit of serendipity (and I would add undisputed intelligence) the top corporate jobs are attainable and worth the effort.
Kathryne sought that commonality and shared values among colleagues, in part, by never passing up an opportunity to know someone outside their usual role and context. She never turned down an invitation to do something outside of work, even if it was not something that she was naturally drawn to.
Job Titles:
- Customer Support Services and CIO at Cardinal Health, Gives Her Father a Lot of Credit for Laying the Foundation of Confidence Essential in Her Becoming a "Serial CIO."
Patty Morrison, EVP Customer Support Services and CIO at Cardinal Health, gives her father a lot of credit for laying the foundation of confidence essential in her becoming a "serial CIO."
"He patiently sat with me and helped me work out really tough math word problems which helped me develop a sense that no matter how challenging something was I could figure it out."
While his patient encouragement certainly contributed to this confidence, many other things did too!
Patty majored in Math and Statistics at Miami University but she was certainly NOT the stereotypical "math nerd." Patty was an avid athlete and participated in both theatre and music while growing up. All of these activities played a part in her developing the expansive skill set that has made her an effective business and technology leader.
Job Titles:
- VP of Global Maintenance for NetJets
Sharon Daniels cites the role of luck but there is no question that her drive and talent were the keys to her career success. One does not become CEO of a multinational consulting and coaching firm (operating in over 40 countries) simply through luck!