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Women Leading Innovation in Silicon Valley and Beyond

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women-leading-innovationFountainBlue’s October 14 When She Speaks, Women in Leadership Series event, on the topic of Women Leading Innovation in Silicon Valley and Beyond. Please join me in thanking our gracious hosts at FireEye and our panelists! 

  • Facilitator Linda Holroyd, CEO, FountainBlue – Executive Coach, Tech Adviser and Leadership Consultant
  • Panelist Vijaya Kaza, Senior Vice President, Cloud Business, FireEye
  • Panelist Indira Joshi, Director, R&D Engineering – Memory, Samsung
  • Panelist Sunitha Kumar, Technical Leader, Software, Security & Trust Office, Cisco Systems
  • Panelist Sangeeta Relan, Sr Director, Engineering – QA, Nutanix 
  • Panelist Lucia Turpin, Sr. Director of IT Governance and Strategy, Polycom

Below are notes from the conversation.

We were fortunate to have such an energetic, forward-thinking and accomplished range of innovators on our panel. Although they represented a wide breadth of academic and social backgrounds, upbringings, roles and companies, they had much in common:

  • They learned early about their passion for technology and the magic that it can create.
  • They invite opportunities to learn and change and shape the technology and business landscape.
  • They embrace opportunities to lead people, products and technologies.
  • They generously share their wisdom and insights, believing that educating and enabling others makes things better for everyone.
  • Get feedback and insights from others, especially if they don’t think like you do.

Below is a compilation of their advice and recommendations.

Know yourself and your value-add

  • Have the self-awareness to know what you do well, what you like to do and how that intersects with companies, people and products.
  • Invest in yourself. Take the time to rejuvenate, to refresh, to learn and do something new.

About innovation

  • Technology continues to evolve quickly, so embrace opportunities to change and shift with it, quickly providing viable and practical solutions.
  • Embrace the opportunities to become uncomfortable. Beware those who hang on to the status quo.
  • Know what market your innovation will be entering. Confirm that there’s a valid and paying customer in that market. Collaborate with them to deliver that innovation to a larger market. 
  • Having new use cases for the same technology can be a valid innovation.
  • Hear the music, the magic by expertly filtering out the randomness, the noise.
  • Innovation is not just about technology – it’s also about the needs of the customer, the implementation hurdles and challenges, the timeline and roadmap. So don’t just ask ‘can this innovation be done’, ask also ‘is it a compelling need and is it practical to deliver what they need?’
  • In today’s world, the market will speak forcefully and quickly. There’s an innovate-to-stay-relevant mindset and leaders must embrace that mentality to stay relevant.

About Leadership

  • Be clear, transparent, trustworthy, and communicative. Truly care about the people you work with.
  • Select carefully for each role on your team. It does take a village to make something work, and everyone needs to perform and have great energy and attitude in order for the team to succeed.
  • Align everyone from the executives to peers to team members and partners on the strategic vision. Communicate clearly on goals and progress toward that shared vision. Enable all parties to succeed in achieving their part of the vision.
  • It’s unrealistic to expect innovative thinking and acting all the time, every time from everyone. Everybody has a role in the innovation pipeline, and the leader expects everyone to fulfill their role in a manner that works best for each party.

Pay it Forward

  • Develop a culture of innovation, one that encourages people to think differently and to apply practical solutions to real problems.
  • Embrace the geeks-rule mind-set for both genders, at all ages.
  • Raise the bar for all those around you.
  • Make it fun and cool and magical to innovate at all ages, in all roles.

Trends and Predictions:

  • Expect continued improvements with hardware and software so that we can better connect and communicate with each other. 
  • With that said, expect a wide range of offerings around managing privacy, security, scalability and access. Social, mobile, analytics and cloud solutions will be huge.
  • Accept that there will be breaches in security sometimes and quickly mitigate any breaches while proactively managing risk.
  • The agile method of development will continue to rise and there will be increased standardization which would make it easier for customers to plug and play hardware and software solutions from different companies.

Resources:

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Please join us in thanking our panelists for FountainBlue’s October 14 When She Speaks, Women in Leadership Series event, on the topic of Women Leading Innovation in Silicon Valley and Beyond and our gracious hosts at FireEye. 

  • Facilitator Linda Holroyd, CEO, FountainBlue – Executive Coach, Tech Adviser and Leadership Consultant
  • Panelist Vijaya Kaza, Senior Vice President, Cloud Business, FireEye
  • Panelist Indira Joshi, Director, R&D Engineering – Memory, Samsung
  • Panelist Sunitha Kumar, Technical Leader, Software, Security & Trust Office, Cisco Systems
  • Panelist Sangeeta Relan, Sr Director, Engineering – QA, Nutanix 
  • Panelist Lucia Turpin, Sr. Director of IT Governance and Strategy, Polycom
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This entry was posted on October 14, 2016 at 11:00 pm and is filed under When She Speaks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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