Wonder Woman in Business, Karen Walker

Karen Walker

Karen Walker is an executive coach and consultant who advises CEOs and senior leaders on thriving in hyper-growth. She has worked with clients including Aetna, AWS, Pfizer, JPMorganChase, and BMC Software, as well as many Inc. 5000 startups. 

Karen is also a board advisor, keynote speaker, and the author of No Dumbing Down: A Guide for CEOs on Organization Growth. As employee 104 and a global VP at Compaq, Karen helped lead the then-fastest growing company in American history, growing it from $0 to $15 billion in revenue.

Karen has been published in Harvard Business Review’s Ascend, and quoted in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Karen has a B.S. degree in engineering from Texas A&M University and graduated from the ODHRM program at Columbia University. She has served in an advisory capacity to startups, Rice University, Texas A&M University, and on the executive board of The Alley Theatre. 

She resides in Jupiter, FL, although (until recently!), she was most often be found aloft in seat 2C.

No Dumbing Down: A No-Nonsense Guide for CEOs on Organization Growth is a book for a company's senior-most leaders looking to make improvements when aligning the organization's internal and external strategies for fast, profitable, and sustainable growth.

This book combines the author's impactful and formative experience with leadership and strategy best practices, helping the reader master the counterintuitive art of actually delivering on the promise made to customers. Readers will learn how and why to put these strategies to work-taking direct aim at pitfalls that can trip up even the most stellar companies.

BUY THE BOOK

Enjoy the podcast.

Karen Walker

Most recent articles for Harvard Business Review’s Ascend:

How To Know If You Work on a Toxic Team

Four Questions to Consider When Choosing a Mentor

How to Stop Babysitting Your Team

Connect with Karen:

Email: karen@karenwalker.us

All social media:  karenwalkerus

Website: www.karenwalker.us

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Wonder Woman in Business, Ruth Gotian, EdD, MS

Ruth Gotian, EdD, MS

RUTH GOTIAN, Ed.D., M.S.
Inaugural Assistant Dean of Mentoring

Executive Director, Mentoring Academy

Chief Learning Officer in Anesthesiology

Assistant Professor of Education in Anesthesiology

Weill Cornell Medicine

Dr. Ruth Gotian is Assistant Dean of Mentoring and Executive Director of the Mentoring Academy at Weill Cornell Medicine, Chief Learning Officer and Assistant Professor of Education in Anesthesiology. Dr. Gotian received her B.S. and M.S. in Business Management from the University at Stony Brook in New York and certificates in Executive Leadership and Managing for Execution from Cornell University. She earned her doctorate at Teachers College Columbia University where she studied Adult Learning and Leadership and focused her research on optimizing success.

Dr. Gotian publishes in both medical education and adult learning journals on topics ranging from diversity and inclusion, networking, mentoring, leadership development and optimizing success. She is the co-editor of a book on medical education and won numerous mentoring awards. She has personally mentored 302 undergraduates and 304 MD-PhD students during her career. She now oversees the success of nearly 1,800 faculty members at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Dr. Gotian credits two of her mentors for their unwavering support. Dr Bert Shapiro oversaw all MD-PhD Programs at the National Institutes of Health. When Dr. Gotian approached him about her idea to return to graduate school and to study successful physician-scientists, he fully embraced the idea and encouraged her wholeheartedly. Most importantly, he checked in with her regularly to provide support and guidance.

Her doctoral advisor, Dr. Marie Volpe, a true renaissance woman, pushed Dr. Gotian further than she ever thought possible. She helped make the impossible, possible. 

Enjoy the podcast.

Ruth Gotian, EdD

Stories by Ruth Gotian, EdD:

Mentoring During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Ruth Gotian

nature.com — Credit: Adapted from Evgeny Karandaev/Shutterstock The coronavirus outbreak has left many of us feeling frightened, worried and overwhelmed. This is affecting people in different ways, but concerns relating to a lack of focus or productivity are not uncommon. Mentors should always provide a support system for trainees and encourage them to prioritize their health above their productivity: especially in testing times such as these.

How Perceptions of a Successful Physician-Scientist Varies with Gender and Academic Rank: Toward Defining Physician-Scientist's Success

By Ruth Gotian, Olaf S. Andersen

bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com — AbstractBackgroundPhysician-scientists (the physician-scientist workforce) are aging, and there are too few physician-scientists in the pipeline to replace those who retire. Moreover, the pipeline is leaky because some trainees and junior physician-scientists choose other career paths. Significant attention has been directed toward patching the leaking pipeline, thereby increasing the quantity of physician-scientists.

Five ‘Power Skills’ for Becoming a Team Leader

By Sarah Groover, Ruth Gotian

nature.com — Leading a diverse team requires effective communication and organization.Credit: Getty Many scientists will oversee a team at some point in their careers, whether it is one or two undergraduates doing a summer internship, an entire research group, or a department with students, technicians and postdoctoral researchers. Scientists are trained in their discipline, but are rarely, if ever, trained in how to manage and mentor trainees.

Put Participants First in Conference Design

By Hannah Turbeville, Ruth Gotian

nature.com — Credit: Adapted from VictoriaBar/Getty Picture this: it’s 7:30 a.m., and conference participants are barely awake. Coffee in hand, they blink sleep away as they enter the room. Rows of chairs lead to a distant stage, and large monitors display the speaker’s slides. One hour of information-packed slides rolls into the next, and attention begins to wane. Students look around eagerly, wondering how they’ll manage to connect with academic luminaries in the five minutes between presentations.

Networking for Introverted Scientists

By Ruth Gotian

nature.com — Credit: Alashi/Getty Many scientists struggle with networking. If you’re one of them, don’t despair. A structured, scientific approach could be all you need. Networking starts at home. Before you go to a conference or another event, identify a core group of people, likely to be there and whom you’d like to meet to advance your career. These might be potential collaborators, employers, funding sources or future conference program organizers.

What Happens When Female Physicians Gather?

By Ruth Gotian, Rache Simmons

blogs.scientificamerican.com — Credit: Robert Daly Getty Images On a recent warm fall day, hundreds of female physicians from all of the New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) campuses in New York City convened for the first time at the New York Academy of Medicine to discuss the overt and covert benefits and challenges of being a female physician in academia. This was not a meeting that encouraged or even provided a platform for whining or preaching to the choir.

Why You Need a Support Team

By Ruth Gotian

nature.com — Credit: Adapted from Wei/iStock/Getty It’s crucial to have a ‘personal advisory board’. This is a group of dependable, reliable, clear-eyed peers — who can be nearby or scattered worldwide — from whom you can seek advice, counsel, support and perspective (and to whom you can, in turn, offer those things). Sometimes, perhaps even often, others’ points of view can help to inform your own decisions, and can prompt you to find a solution to what might otherwise have seemed an insurmountable obstacle.

Three Steps to Landing an Undergraduate Research Internship

By Ruth Gotian, Ushma S. Neill

nature.com — Credit: Adapted from Getty Research-intensive internship programs for undergraduates offered by medical and graduate schools are always in high demand. Here, based on our 25 years of collective experience running these programs in the United States, we outline the three most essential components of a successful application.

Lame Advice for Female Professionals

By Ruth Gotian, Ushma S. Neill

blogs.scientificamerican.com — Even Olympic athletes have coaches. So it stands to reason that two fairly accomplished academics who have given their fair share of public talks might attend a seminar about how women, in particular, could improve communication skills, or at least, be aware of how we are often perceived so we can adjust accordingly in an effort to ensure that a message is delivered effectively. The presenter was a communications expert experienced at training C-suite executives.

Academics Should Provide More Platforms to Learn from Each Other at Their Own Institutions (essay)

By Ruth Gotian

insidehighered.com — During my academic career, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to receive three degrees from two educational institutions; one was a state institution, the other an Ivy League. And for the last two decades, I have had the distinct privilege of working with three top-tier institutions of higher learning. I led classes and workshops, participated in meetings, and learned formally and informally from spectacular, award-winning faculty members. The best part?

Contact Ruth Gotian, EdD:

Ruth Gotian, EdD, MS

www.ruthgotian.com

https://twitter.com/RuthGotian

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rgotian/

https://www.instagram.com/ruthgotian/

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SPECIAL EDITION: Resilience During the Coronavirus Crisis with guest, Renee Branson

Renee Branson

Certified Resilience Coach (CReC)

As a mental health professional and Certified Resilience Coach (CReC), Renee Branson provides clients with immediately usable tools to increase resilience, well-being, and optimism in the workplace. She works with lawyers, legal marketers, business professionals, non-profit leaders, and others to help them understand and incorporate resilience in their own professional lives and in the teams they lead.

Enjoy the podcast.

Renee Branson

Contact Renee:

Email:

rb@reneebranson.blog

Website:

https://reneebranson.blog/

LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneebransonmancc/

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Wonder Woman in Business, Karen Catlin

Karen Catlin

#womenhelpingwomen

After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears.

Today, Karen is a vocal advocate for inclusion, a leadership coach, a keynote speaker, and the author of three books: "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking" (with Poornima Vijayashanker), "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," and "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring." 

The Better Allies Approach to Hiring

Are you struggling to diversify your workforce? Is your company consistently missing its diversity goals? You may hear colleagues saying, “We’d hire more women or people of color if we could find them,” but the pipeline isn’t truly to blame. There are proven approaches for connecting with qualified candidates from underrepresented demographics. And when you know how to design a hiring process that will set them up for success, they’ll be eager to accept your offer.

Building on the momentum of her book, "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," Karen Catlin has created this helpful hiring guide filled with best practices to recruit and hire people from underrepresented ethnicities and genders, with non-traditional educational backgrounds, with gaps on their resumes, or from older generations. With examples, stories, checklists, rubrics, and guidelines galore, this unique tool will help you transform your hiring process to attract and retain diverse applicants.

Read this guidebook for actionable steps you can take to fill your pipeline with candidates from underrepresented groups and ensure you have an inclusive interview process that paves the way to a more diverse workforce.

Buy The Book

Better Allies

Are you looking to build a workplace culture with a certain buzz about it? Where employees are thriving and engagement survey scores are through the roof. Where people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, ages, and abilities are hired and set up for success--and they all want their friends to work there too, because it's so awesome.

One secret to creating this kind of workplace is allyship. And it's something anyone can do.

In Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, you'll learn to spot situations where you can create a more inclusive culture, along with straightforward steps to take. Leadership coach Karen Catlin will walk you through how to be a better ally, including:

• Hiring and retaining a diverse workforce

• Amplifying and advocating for others

• Giving effective and equitable performance feedback

• Using more inclusive language

Read this book to level-up your ally skills using the Better Allies™ approach and create a culture where everyone, including you, can do their best work and thrive.

Buy the book

Present! A Techie’s Guide To Public Speaking

The ultimate interactive public speaking guide from tech speakers Poornima Vijayashanker and Karen Catlin that prepares and encourages techies to discover their expertise, confidently share it, and successfully level up in their careers. Techies around the world can now jump start and grow their speaking careers with the book,

Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking, written by tech leaders, Poornima Vijayashanker and Karen Catlin. The book serves as a resource for technology professionals who want or need to develop the skills to communicate their expertise effectively, whether in a meeting at work or delivering an engaging talk at a conference. Poornima, who is the founder of Femgineer and the founding engineer of Mint.com, collaborated with former Adobe vice president and founder of Karen Catlin Consulting, Karen Catlin, to compile and share their lessons, tips, and techniques learned from their own experiences as professional tech speakers. “Karen and I wanted to write this book so that our fellow techies would have a comprehensive resource to help them with their own public speaking endeavors. So many folks in the tech industry have amazing ideas and experience, but they often feel stuck on how to present them effectively.

Also, our hope is that more women will be inspired by our stories and encouraged to get out there and share their own valuable expertise through public speaking in order to boost representation of women tech speakers,” Poornima said.Present! covers public speaking from A to Z. Through stories, examples, and interactive exercises, Poornima and Karen dive into topics including, overcoming stage fright, exploring personal speaking style, creating the right talk for the right audience, polishing presence and delivery, and nailing any type of talk, whether it’s a lightning or long-form talk or being part of a panel. Karen said, “Even though Poornima and I are professional speakers, we felt it was important to share our own feelings of nerves and uncertainty, and bumps we’ve had along the way - and sometimes continue to experience. It was important for us to communicate that no one is perfect and it really is okay when talks don’t always go according to plan. Our hope is that by being open, we’ll be able to give others the confidence and the techniques to handle situations when they arise, deliver an amazing presentation, and most importantly, have FUN”!

Buy the book

Enjoy the podcast.

Karen Catlin

Contact Karen:

Karen Catlin (she/her)

Coach | Speaker | Author | Advocate for Inclusive Workplaces

karencatlin.com

betterallies.com

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Wonder Woman in Business, Dr. Diane Hamilton

Dr. Diane Hamilton

Dr. Diane Hamilton is the Founder and CEO of Tonerra, and Co-Founder of DIMA Innovations, which are consulting and media-based businesses. She is a nationally syndicated radio host, keynote speaker, and the former MBA Program Chair at the Forbes School of Business. She has authored multiple books which are required in universities around the world, including Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential. She is the creator of the Curiosity Code Index® assessment, which is the first and only assessment that determines the factors that inhibit curiosity. Her groundbreaking work in the area of curiosity helps organizations improve innovation, engagement, and productivity. Thinkers50 Radar chose her as one of the top minds in management and leadership. Her work has been endorsed by some of the most respected names in leadership, including Steve Forbes, Keith Krach, Ken Fisher, Dave Ulrich, and Verne Harnish.  She is a highly sought-after keynote speaker who has shared the stage with top speakers including Marshall Goldsmith, Martha Stewart, Daymond John, Travis Bradberry, and Jeffrey Hayzlett. She has been featured on Forbes, INC, Investors Business Daily, First for Women, Investopedia, SHRM, International Institute for Learning, International Coach Federation, HR Virtual Summit, Flerish YOU app (in association with Reid Hoffman), Cross Knowledge (Wiley), Training Industry, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox.  

Helpful Links

https://drdianehamilton.com/news-and-media/

https://drdianehamilton.com/curiosity-code-system/

Social Media @drdianehamilton

Questions

1.     I understand you have a background in behavioral issues in business.  What led to your interest in studying psychology-based issues in the workplace?

2.     You created the first and only assessment that determines the factors that impact curiosity. What made you curious about studying curiosity?

3.     Why do we lose curiosity and how do we get it back?

4.     Why is curiosity important to engagement, innovation, and productivity?

5.     You serve on multiple boards.  How have you incorporated your work with curiosity and behaviors into how you help with your work with boards? 

6.     You teach, speak, and run your organization to help train people to be curious.  You also have a nationally syndicated radio show.  How did you get involved in that?

Take the Assessment

Enjoy the podcast.

Dr. Diane Hamilton

CRACKING THE CURIOSITY CODE

The Key to Unlocking Human Potential

Buy the book

Contact Diane

Diane Hamilton, Ph.D.

Nationally Syndicated Radio Show Host, Speaker, and

Author of Cracking The Curiosity Code and the Curiosity Code Index (CCI)

Thinkers50 Radar

602-616-7867

https://drdianehamilton.com

https://curiositycode.com

Media One Sheet

Social Media: @drdianehamilton

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Wonder Woman in Business, Michelle Wimes

Michelle Wimes

Chief Diversity and Professional Development Officer

Michelle P. Wimes serves as the Chief Diversity and Professional Development Officer at Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, P.C., one of the nation’s largest labor and employment law firms.  In her role, Michelle leads the firm’s efforts to attract, develop, retain, promote and advance a diverse group of attorneys across the firm’s national platform of 53 offices in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean.  Additionally, Michelle leads the firm’s attorney training and professional development efforts.  She is based in Ogletree Deakins’ Kansas City office.

Michelle has extensive experience in delivering strategic leadership, client development, and talent management programming.  She is deft at implementing change management strategies necessary for comprehensive and effective diversity and inclusion and professional development initiatives and programming.  Previously, Michelle practiced law for 14 years where she handled all aspects of employment litigation while serving as an equity partner at a Kansas City-based firm.  She focused on matters involving employment discrimination, harassment, and civil rights issues while representing clients before the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Missouri Commission on Human Rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as local, state and federal courts.

Later, Michelle spent four years on the senior management team of a premier Am Law 100 law firm as their Director of Strategic Initiatives, spearheading diversity and inclusion strategies and programming for lawyers across nine offices in the United States and Europe.

Prior to a career in law, Michelle was an elementary and middle school teacher in Kansas City.  She received a B.A. from the University of Missouri and performed graduate work at the University of Seville in Spain and undergraduate work at the University of Xalapa in Veracruz, Mexico.  Due to her studies and her extensive legal work in Latin America, she is fluent in Spanish.  Michelle earned her law degree, with trial advocacy honors, from Tulane Law School.  She is the proud wife of federal district court judge Brian C. Wimes and the mother of three daughters, Sydney, Gabrielle, and Saige.

Michelle with her younger sister, Raquel “Kelly Rae,” a former radio personality and now a sound engineer.

Michelle all bundled up for her youngest daughter’s soccer game in Kansas City.

Michelle, her hubby, the Honorable Brian C. Wimes (appointed by Barack Obama in April 2012) and their oldest daughter, Sydney, a professional dancer and May 2019 graduate of Oklahoma City University.

The immediate family.

The whole family with Michelle's mom (Marilyn Scott), far left, her sis (Kelly) next to her, me, her hubby & 3 daughters.

Michelle & her mentor, Maurice Watson, Esq. & former Managing Chair of Husch Blackwell in KC.

Michelle & hubby with youngest daughter, Saige, a soccer player at 2019 Women’s World Cup in Le Havre, France.

Enjoy the podcast.

Michelle Wimes

Connect with Michelle

LinkedIn; https: in/michellepattersonwimes

E: michelle.wimes@ogletree.com

P: (816) 410-1801‬

4520 Main Street

Suite 400

Kansas City MO 64111

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