Becoming a Gender Bilingual Leader Event Report

In early June, the INSEAD Alumni Association of Switzerland hosted an evening conference featuring alumna Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, MBA’84, who spoke about the strategic topic of gender balancing. Afterwards Dominik Schaller, MBA 01D, Partner, Egon Zehnder Zurich, joined her at the podium for a fireside chat.

There are four major shifts affecting the world around us this century, according to Wittenberg-Cox’ research: Weather (climate change), Web (the Internet’s impact on how we distribute, make and buy things), World (global multi-cultural markets) and Women (massive arrival of women in the workforce).

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox provided several anecdotes from her consulting work, also sharing research notes and observations with the participants. For example, addressing women is a bigger opportunity than the emerging markets of China and India. After outlining the reasons to attribute a high priority to gender bilingualism, Wittenberg-Cox, gave some strategic ideas to work with.

Schaller brought a practical, day to day, perspective to the topic. Some of the practical issues he highlighted were dual career and children and how to measure talent and potential.

Organizations are seeking ways to achieve concrete results in selection and promotion of executives using metrics and measurements to evaluate performance based on merit. It requires change at a high level of leadership, according to Schaller.  Even then it is difficult because in certain industries, the talent pool is 90% male, he said.