Courtney McKenzie Newell in 2011 named her first agency Crowned Marketing & Communications, where she is founder and CEO because she was a crowned beauty pageant winner as a student at Florida International University.
Winning Miss Palm Beach County, and later competing in Miss Florida as part of the Miss American pageant series, McKenzie Newell says, ““I took that money and started my business and paid homage to where ti came from.”
Read MoreIssue 144 — October 5, 2020
I’ve gotta tell you, I get really tired of people complaining to me about something they saw in the news coverage of women. Whether it’s criticizing or loving Kamala Harris’s Chucks or the tone and timbre of a female leader’s voice, and don’t get me started on Hillary Clinton’s ankles and yellow pantsuit, women in leadership roles are scrutinized and stereotyped much more often than men. That’s surely true.
Read MoreNever mind your cat crawling over your keyboard or a partner walking behind you in pajamas—or less. But the new realities of working from home and zooming for most of your business day present challenges. And not just when you get the alert that your Internet connection is unstable.
When body language is literally unseen, and all someone can ascertain from you are facial expressions, business communication is fraught with possible landmines—and it is particularly perilous for women, who are judged more harshly on their appearance, their responses, even tone of voice.
Read MoreWith the projections that the “normal life” of pre-pandemic may not return until the end of 2021—if ever—is causing enormous anxiety, affecting most everyone from a remote contract freelancer to a CEO of a global enterprise.
“Are you OK?” is a question leaders can ask at the start of a Zoom conference calls, but it no longer affords a simple, quick response.
Read MoreThis must be about more than selling Frida Kahlo t-shirts once a year.
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson initiated a week to honor the influence and legacies in the arts and culture of Americans with heritage origins in Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America. President Ronald Reagan turned it into a month celebrated from September 15 through October 15 by law, inaugurating Hispanic Heritage Awareness Month.
Read More“As an organization and an individual, you have to stick to your North Star,” Soledad O’Brien, founder and CEO of Soledad O’Brien Productions, told a virtual convening of two cohorts of Take The Lead’s 50 Women in Journalism Can Change the World.
“The story of one’s arc of one’s life is to figure out what your values are,” says O’Brien, award-winning journalist, speaker, author and philanthropist who anchors and produces the Hearst Television political magazine program, “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien.”
Read MoreFrom the age of five, Jennifer Brown was performing. On stage, she was singing and dancing as a child growing up in Southern California in a musical family, then as an adult pursuing a singing career.
“I love the adrenaline, I love being under pressure,” says Brown, the CEO and founder of Jennifer Brown Consulting, a global strategic leadership and diversity consulting firm that coaches business leaders on critical issues of talent and workplace strategy. “Which is good because I have three 90-minute keynotes online today,” Brown says.
Read MoreHow can women leaders deal with the issue of workplace stress among their employees?
Nearly every employee today is experiencing work stress, perhaps in varying degrees and in different forms. This is especially true given the current global health crisis brought on by COVID-19 and the resultant changes in today's workforce.
Even prior to COVID, a 2018 Fidelity Investments survey found that in America, the workplace has been deemed the top stress factor among employees. In the U.S. workplace stress is responsible for losses of up to $300 billion.
Read More“Just start.”
That is author and renowned journalist Heather Cabot’s advice to entrepreneurs as well as her own motto.
With her latest book out this month, The New Chardonnay: The Unlikely Story of How Marijuana Went Mainstream, hitting a bestseller list on Amazon recently, Cabot is taking stock of her successes as well as looking for what she will tackle next.
Read More“Jump and learn how to fly.”
That is Sarah Saffari’s advice to anyone feeling trapped and stuck in a job or remote work. The founder of CEOwned, an online business consultancy, knows from personal experience how to succeed during a quarantine.
For the last five months, the Canada-based Saffari has been working to help online business owners scale and succeed in their businesses from Medellin, Colombia, where she was traveling when COVID-19 restrictions hit. Not able to emerge from quarantine and return home, she is succeeding in place.
Read MoreSimone Biles is on the new August cover of Vogue. Viola Davis is on the August cover of Vanity Fair. It’s a good month for visual representation of strong BIPOC women leaders in mainstream media. But it’s been a long time coming. And it’s not nearly enough.
Even as the Biles’ photo shoot was criticized for how the lighting reflected the athlete’s skin tone as photographed by Annie Liebowitz, the trend of celebrating a wider range of women leaders is positive. Davis’ cover story was the first ever by a Black photographer, Dario Calmese.
Read MoreTwo months into a cultural reckoning that reached a tipping point with the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police officers and the global protests that followed, companies, organizations, non-profits, institutions, universities and celebrities have made public mission statements of intention to address racial inequities.
An intensifying renewal and resetting of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts is in the works across the country—and the world. And rightly so. But are these DEI efforts working?
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