Three leaders from the top of the food chain on Monday shared lessons learned on the way up at the Women’s Foodservice Forum’s annual Leadership Development Conference.
WFF President and CEO Fritzi Woods sat down with Carla Cooper, president and CEO of Daymon Worldwide; Clarence Otis, CEO of Darden Restaurants; and James White, president, chairman and CEO of Jamba Juice. Each gave an overview of his or her career path, as well as some of the mentors, advocates and sponsors who inspired them. Here are three lessons that stood out.
What you’re doing is more important than your job title. All three executives mentioned times when they knowingly made either a seemingly lateral move or pivoted to a new industry because of the content of the role offered. Cooper mentioned that she once choose a senior vice president role at PepsiCo versus becoming a CEO of a smaller organization because she felt the PepsiCo opportunity offered a larger scope and greater overall impact. (read more…)
SmartBrief welcomed association partners to its office Wednesday to join in an interactive workshop on encouraging entrepreneurship in organizations. The session was led by Babson College President Len Schlesinger and entrepreneurial-studies professor Heidi Neck.
After explaining Babson’s research-based six steps leaders can take to encourage entrepreneurship in organizations, Neck and Schlesinger led attendees in a brainstorming session to come up with ideas for practical actions organizations can take to complete those six steps. Each table of attendees came up with some good suggestions, but everyone expressed doubt that the suggestions would work in their organizations because they run counter to the organizations’ cultures.
Culture is a big problem in getting people to act like entrepreneurs within a large organization, said Schlesinger and Neck, who explained that there are at least three pervasive beliefs in large organizations that make it hard for entrepreneurship to blossom and thrive.
- Employees who act as entrepreneurs within organizations stand out but get fired when they fail.
SmartBrief welcomed association partners to its office Wednesday to join in an interactive workshop on encouraging entrepreneurship in an organization. The session was led by Babson College President Len Schlesinger and entrepreneurial-studies professor Heidi Neck.
Executives at trade associations, corporations, nonprofits and other large organizations are looking to increase the pace and quality of employees’ innovation, Schlesinger says. Some think the best way to do this is to separate creative people from the rest and get them working separately, while others think every employee needs to be innovating all of the time.
While both of those extremes make for a great soundbite, neither is practical nor productive in real life, which is the reason Babson is working to determine how to stimulate entrepreneurial behavior within large organizations, Schlesinger says.
“We don’t want 100% of people to be entrepreneurs, but we do believe more people can be entrepreneurial than are,” Neck said. (read more…)
The brackets are out, so March Madness has officially begun. Hoops mania is spreading rapidly as basketball fans are traveling to games, filling out their brackets and buying snacks for watching the games on TV. The Men’s NCAA basketball tournament tips off Tuesday night, but most fans won’t be downloading the “boss button” or coming up with exotic excuses to miss work until Thursday and Friday. The competition is not only exciting for basketball fans, but also for companies that sponsor teams and the tournament. The games provide opportunities for companies to advertise and sell to avid fans who attend games to cheer their favorites, check their brackets and watch the tournament on TV.
Sponsors and advertisers need to know who the fans are and where they live so they can target messaging to the most profitable customers. Who are the avid college basketball fans? Where do they live?
Attend college basketball games
Consumers across the U.S. (read more…)
Gap International’s Leveraging Genius Conference was held two weeks ago in Scottsdale, Ariz. Nearly 200 global executives and their teams from multiple industries and cultures came together in a weeklong journey to discover and leverage the origins of their own great performance (SmartBrief recently interviewed Gap co-Chief Operating Officer Bob Rothman). The following excerpts come from Gap’s recent post-conference interview with Kaye Foster-Cheek, senior vice president of global human resources at Onyx Pharmaceuticals, about the business impact of this work.
What are some of the main challenges you see business leaders currently facing in today’s businesses environment?
I would say there are a few broad categories or buckets. One is making sense of and managing an organization through all its complexities. A second area is global growth. For other companies, it can be the growth of a sector or a particular market, but, for us, it’s how we would grow a global company. (read more…)
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