The virtual national conventions for both the Democratic and Republican parties were unprecedented and historic in many ways.
Due to COVID-19, there were no in-person gatherings of throngs of delegates, speakers and supporters wearing funny hats and carrying signs. The handling of videos, recorded vignettes plus live and recorded speeches lent a tone of slick production values to both recent weeks of conventions.
Read MoreLori Greiner, the highly successful investor on ABC-TV’s “Shark Tank,” can offer tips and also learn lessons from Zeynep Ekemen, the creator of Silver Defender, a stretchable film that protects any and all surfaces from germs and viruses.
Ekemen, or Z, as everyone calls her, was at her early morning “Breakfast Club” with business friends in a local Fort Lee, New Jersey coffee shop in 2018, when one of her friends returned from the men’s room grossed out by what he saw.
Read MoreIssue 139 — August 23, 2020
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock in your quarantine, or have put yourself on a strict social media and television diet to get away from the political talking heads, you know this year, 2020, is the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment giving women across the U.S. the right to vote.
Thousands of women’s organizations had planned celebrations leading up to this auspicious anniversary, some on the various significant dates leading up to August 26, the anniversary of when the amendment became formally part of the Constitution.
Read MoreForty-seven years ago Bella Abzug’s push to make August 26 Women’s Equality Day a national day of recognition became reality. It is still not a federal holiday. While Americans have yet to reach gender and racial equity, Take The Lead’s mission continues to be equality, equity and fairness for all women.
According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, less than half of Americans, or 49%, “say granting women the right to vote has been the most important milestone in advancing the position of women in the country.”
Read MoreIt’s much more than talk. It’s about solutions, giving back and changing the present and future.
Diving into the urgent global conversations of racial and gender equality in leadership today, Take The Lead launches “Power to Change Conversations,” a new Zoom-based webinar series devoted to offering substantive solutions from leading experts on race, gender and equity.
“There is much necessary discussion about uncovering centuries of injustice against people of color and women,” says Gloria Feldt, the co-founder and president of Take The Lead. “But we saw a need for dialogue on what can be done immediately to right the wrongs, and ‘Power to Change Conversations’ will offer actionable solutions for the issues of the day.”
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 MoreIssue 138 — August 10, 2020
CBS Sunday Morning reminded me, in a piece about President Gerald Ford’s photographer David Hume Kennerly, that August 9 was the anniversary of the date in 1974 when President Richard Nixon resigned from office. Why is this relevant?
Well, it is quite relevant to me, for it marked a major turning point in my life and my career. As it happens, that is also the date on which I was offered and accepted my first CEO position. I became executive director of the small young Planned Parenthood affiliate in West Texas.
Read MoreSeeing nurses and other frontline healthcare workers wearing trash bags to protect themselves during shifts at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic because of a shortage of PPE equipment made Amy Lu upset. It also made the engineer CEO and co-founder of Antlia Systems get to work on a solution for protection.
“It broke my heart,” says Lu, co-founder of Chicago-based Antlia Systems (named after the constellation). “So I used my connections to get more PPE and donate them. Then I was working hard to figure things out with engineering teams to find the best solutions to make safe places.”
Read MoreA vibrant, virtual, free five-day summit is addressing where women are now and how women can move forward toward gender and racial equity begins August 10, thanks to The 19th, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization launched earlier this year.
“The centennial of The 19th Amendment — which gave white women in this country the right to vote — falls at a really pivotal moment in American history, where we're grappling with a global pandemic and navigating a modern-day civil rights movement. There's never been a more important time to spur critical conversations about the role of women in this work,” says Emily Ramshaw, co-founder and CEO of The 19th.
Read MoreIssue 137 — August 3, 2020
What do you think of when you think of a movement?
Picket signs? Pink hats? People marching and yelling? #BlackLivesMatter? Social justice perhaps?
It’s certainly true that we tend to think of movements as being about causes, because they often are causes that people feel strongly about.
Well what if the cause you feel strongly about is YOU?
Read MoreAugust is Black Business Month in this country and it is prime time to check in on the effects of the last four months on Black women entrepreneurs. They have been hardest hit by the economic downturn nationally. It is also time to heed the advice of Black women who have started, maintained and succeeded with their businesses in good and bad tines.
According to the Chicago Tribune, “The number of active Black-owned businesses in the U.S. plummeted 41 percent during the early months of the pandemic from February to April, more than twice the 17 percent level of white owned businesses, research by Robert Fairlie from the University of California Santa Cruz shows.”
Read More“As painful as it is now, the focus is now on meaning. This is a permanent innovative change.”
Jocelyn Kung, CEO of The Kung Group, says her executive coaching and organizational consulting firm’s recent survey of more than 400 startup founders revealed that the ongoing global pandemic has deleteriously affected the growth of companies, but also shifted priorities to a new era of sustainability,
Corresponding to the release of the Q2 Venture Report by Crunchbase this week, that shows the volume of less than $100 million m fundings is down 63% from the same time last year. The number of companies in the second quarter of 2020 is also down form 2,660 in 2019 to 1,254 companies this year.
Read More
