The true purpose of networking

Hello,

How are you reinvigorating this summer? Recently, I spent four days in Park City, Utah with my amazing Exceptional Women Alliance cohort — also my personal and professional ‘board of advisors.’ Together, we reset and refreshed, essential to my life as an innovator with exciting engagements in progress and up ahead.

Those include a new workshop that guides leaders to enable innovation impact; working with financial services organizations on digital transformation efforts amid changing risks and technologies like GenAI; my revamped “Strategic Advocacy” course at Columbia, and more.

Read on for an inside look into these engagements, and get in touch to discuss ways that we can work together.

Business Leaders: How to Enable Innovation Impact

In our fast-changing world, leaders need to change the way they change — and it’s been a pleasure to nurture those skills in executives with my latest workshop, “Now What? How Leaders Enable Innovation Impact.” 

Emerging leaders at a global corporate events agency especially valued these takeaways:

1. Seeing innovation as viable new ways to solve the real problems of the real people they want to serve. Innovation doesn’t have to be “cool,” unquantifiable, or highly risky.

2. Understanding leaders’ role to foster the diffusion of innovation across an organization. Gone are the days of hierarchical enforcement of old-style change management programs.

3. Embracing new ways of thinking and doing in a hotly competitive sector. This is especially vital where customer and user expectations are rising, and technology is disrupting old ways of delivering.

It’s a privilege to help leaders reframe their perspective on how to execute innovation for stakeholder impact at scale. Interested in bringing this workshop to your executives? Reply to this email.

Today’s Most Frequently Asked Questions

What are the toughest digital transformation topics facing today’s execs?

These are some of the questions colleagues are asking:

• How is generative AI impacting product development and financial institution technology roadmaps?
• How can digital marketing performance improvements keep pace with the market given rapidly changing risks, regulatory oversight, and customer expectations and preferences?
• How should leaders reimagine their roles in an environment where their success will depend more on their ability to build internal and external networks — and not on old notions of achieving power through positional authority?

If these questions are top of mind for you as well, know that you are not alone. In curating Mastercard’s upcoming Digital Safari programs, I’m looking forward to helping financial services organizations tackle these and other pressing topics.

No matter what your industry or role, know this: Networking is not something you do just to find a job.

Networking is the way to establish and nurture relationships to help yourself, your team, and others succeed. After all, as I have learned and continue to preach, network relationships are what drive transformations at speed and scale.

I’m fortunate to be in a network with you, and I always welcome your questions, feedback, and response.

Warm regards,