Tag: WomenLead

IBM’s Bluemix Girls’ Night and Leadership Panel

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I confess.

I am a bit of a Meet-Up junkie, but I like to call myself a ‘life-long learner’. At the BlueMix Girls’ Leadership and software demo on March 11 at IBM Innovation Center, Foster City the group satisfied both the geekie tech side with a socially acceptable “Girls’ Night Out” theme.

We were a bright, warm and humorous group of tech women (developers and users) that showed up at this Meet-Up event. Opening the evening was a panel discussion with Joanne Bohigian, President & CEO at Foster City Chamber of Commerce; Jeannice Fairrer Samani, PhD, MBA, MDE  Full Scholar & Professor of Higher Education AACSB University; Sara Rauchwerger, Founder TechLAB Innovation Center Cultivating Technology Companies / Accelerating Business Growth; Alyssa Simpson, Sr. Product Manager – Mobile at IBM. 

In the competitive PaaS (Platform as a Service) arena there’s a new kid in town:  Bluemix is IBM’s open cloud development platform that competes with Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure. It’s clever that IBM is targeting women developers to use and/or switch platforms by hosting this evening’s event. As I understand it, BlueMix is an open source  platform that allows users to develop and run on their Cloud IoT. Anyone can develop apps using: OpenStack (Virtual Machine), Docker (Container) and CloudFoundry (Instant Runtimes). More information here.

One really competitive (and fun) api feature is the IBM’s  Watson Personality Insight

The Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to infer the personality characteristics, intrinsic needs and values of individuals from communications that a user opts to make available via mediums such as email, text messages, social media, forum/blog posts, and more. These insights help businesses better understand their clients and improve customer satisfaction by anticipating customer needs and recommending future actions. This allows businesses to improve new client acquisition, retention, and engagement, and strengthen their relationships with existing customers.

The following is a brief description of the three kinds of personality insights that are provided by this service:

  1. Personality characteristics: The service can build a portrait of an individual’s personality characteristics and how they engage with the world across five primary dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (also known as Emotional Range).
  2. Needs: The service can infer certain aspects of a product that will resonate with an individual across twelve needs: Excitement,Harmony, Curiosity, Ideal, Closeness, Self-expression, Liberty, Love, Practicality, Stability, Challenge, and Structure.
  3. Values: The service can identify values that describe motivating factors which influence a person’s decision-making across five dimensions: Self-transcendence / Helping others, Conservation / Tradition, Hedonism / Taking pleasure in life, Self-enhancement / Achieving success, and Open to change / Excitement.

And as Tableau seems to lead data visualization, I really enjoy the simplicity of Watson’s Personality Insight’s circular wheel as shown above. I think we will see more emphasis on usability design in the years to come from IBM if Watson is the showcase example.

You can try pasting some text here and test Watson’s Personality Insights api yourself. —  Let me know if it’s accurate for you!

So you wanna #LeanIn and be a board member, ladies? Good. Here’s the scoop!

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On the topic of increasing diversity in the work place, let’s consider several points on the subject of gender diversity on the board of corporations (private/public).

  • Companies perform better: Companies that have women on their boards performed better than an all-male board, suggesting that mixing genders may temper risky investment moves and increase return on equity. – Bloomberg 2012
  • Companies behave better: Companies that invest in gender diversity at high levels are less likely to fall prey to fraud, corruption, and other scandalous episodes. – ThinkProgress 2014

Should quotas be mandated in the U.S. private boards as they are in other countries?

There seems to be the trend as we see the European Commission considering to impose quotas across the EU (Norway introduced a 40% quota, Germany is 30%, and in Southeast Asia, Malaysia is 30% female directors).

#ExecFocusCircle March 19

#ExecFocusCircle grp discussed Women on Boards of Directors with speaker Katarina Bonde on the legalities, the expectations and why more women need to #LeanIn #WomenLead #Entrepreneurs

 

Thank you to Petere Miner of MinerConnection for inviting me to join the #ExecFocusCircle #LeanIn grp.

Last night’s topic: Women on Boards of Directors.  Katarina Bonde was our speaker for the evening. Katarina pitched her startup, Glides, to the Forum of Women of Entrepreneurs, and has since founded several tech companies and has served on 15 Boards.  She also owns West Wines in Healdsburg.

Questions asked:

  • Did you find the Boards or did they find you?
  • How did you determine which Boards to serve on?
  • What is the typical remuneration for a role on a Board?
  • What are the educational requirements for being on the Board and what are the liabilities?

 

 

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Wendy Wallbridge on a mission to re- pave the road to success for women.

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Online digital thought leadership comes in many forms to express one’s area of expertise, but it works best when one connects online as well as a HIRL (Hang-Out In Real Life).

A good friend recommended that I attend Wendy Wallbridge‘s book launch for the book titled “Spiraling Upward”.  On a personal note: I’ve been going through several transitions in my life lately, and in truth, often not feeling good about myself which has lead me to deeper exploratory questions of how I want to redefine my professional and personal life. As Wendy spoke of her own personal struggles of health and not aligning her work with her personal values it made me think of Brené Brown’s talk on the power of vulnerability and how real and significant it is bring these (otherwise known as) feminine traits to light.

The “Spiraling Upward” Mini-workshop and book launch party was held March 12, 2015 at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto. I’m really looking forward to sitting down and absorbing this book and working through the exercises. Below is her TEDx Talk on the topic #SpiralUp!

Wendy Wallbridge's new book, Spiraling Upward

Ready for @WendyWallbridge’s #SpiralingUpward: The 5 Co-Creative Powers For Women on the Rise. #womenLead #IAmEnough Work => Love

For women, our own road map to whole-hearted success, is rarely straight and narrow. We women are at a turning point and are ready to birth something new. We want to lead lives that make a difference and that are fulfilled. For many of us that means becoming an entrepreneur of our own life so that it becomes more authentic, meaningful and expansive.

Women are particularly well suited for re-invention. It’s no accident that our bodies are designed to create… Strengths like collaboration, empathy, humility, flexibility, compassion and connectivity are a new competitive advantage.

But the paradox is that after study after study that show greater employment and educational opportunities correspond to decreases of  overall life happiness for women compared to men.