Frances
West
Founder, FrancesWest&Co, Former IBM Chief Accessibility Officer
"Taking It Personally: Leveraging Strength from Your Ethnicity, Your Culture to Lead Authentically "
"Taking It Personally: Leveraging Strength from Your Ethnicity, Your Culture to Lead Authentically "
07 - 11:30 AM EDT/New York (See in local time)
Add to Calendar
05//2025 11:30 AM
05//2025 11:50 AM
America/New_York
#WTGC2025
"Taking It Personally: Leveraging Strength from Your Ethnicity, Your Culture to Lead Authentically "
#WTGC2025
"Taking It Personally: Leveraging Strength from Your Ethnicity, Your Culture to Lead Authentically "
https://www.womentech.net/ringcentral
https://www.womentech.net/ringcentral
"Taking It Personally: Leveraging Strength from Your Ethnicity, Your Culture to Lead Authentically "
"Taking It Personally: Leveraging Strength from Your Ethnicity, Your Culture to Lead Authentically "
Don’t miss out and join visionaries, innovators, and thought leaders from all over the world at the Women in Tech Global Conference.
Vote by Sharing
Unite 100 000 Women in Tech to Drive Change with Purpose and Impact.
Do you want to see this session? Help increase the sharing count and the session visibility. Sessions with +10 votes will be available to career ticket holders.
Please note that it might take some time until your share & vote is reflected.
Session: Taking It Personally: Leveraging Strength from Your Ethnicity, Your Culture to Lead Authentically
In this timely talk, Frances speaks about why bringing your whole life to work strengthens your inner compass and helps manage the challenges of adversity and the disruption of the unknown, based on her personal journey as a trailblazing woman in tech from non-English speaking Asian immigrant to the C-suite at IBM. She covers how to lead as woman in times of change or crisis.Key Takeaways
- Understand why bringing your whole life to work strengthens your inner compass and helps manage the challenges of adversity and the disruption of the unknown,
- Gain Insight that human diversity is at the core of disruptive innovation. It calls for holistic actions across all parts of an institution to respect an individual human’s ability to make a difference not in spite of, but because of their differ
- Listen to personal stories of trailblazer and tech executive and proven blueprint model to operational inclusion and build lasting change.
Bio
Frances is a board member/advisor of both for profit and non profit companies based on her diverse global business management, technology sales, emerging market development and organization growth strategy experiences.After spending 30+ years in various customer/market facing executive positions at IBM, Frances founded FrancesWestCo, a global strategy advisory company working with public, private, non-profit and start-ups to operationalize inclusion through technology as a core business imperative.
She was IBM’s first Chief Accessibility Officer and worked to establish IT accessibility standards, shape government policies, and develop human-centric enterprise technology and solution so that all people can reach their highest potential, regardless their age or ability.
Frances is a globally sought-after authority, a public speaker and strategy advisor on the topic of digital Inclusion, accessibility, women in tech, human-centric technology innovation.
She is also the author of a book “Authentic Inclusion™ Drives Disruptive Innovation”, a book that has been selected by CES and SXSW as the Technology Books of 2019. Because of her expertise, she was invited as the sole IT industry representative to testify before the US Senate on the need to pass the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. She has delivered keynote remarks at business events, policy forums hosted by the United Nations, Department of Labor and led panel discussions at global IT conferences such as Mobile World Congress, Consumer Electronics Show and SXSW.
Frances helps her clients to understand and operationalize inclusion as a business imperative from the very top and guide them in formulating technology innovation and institutional practice strategy to achieve market expansion, brand differentiation and talent acquisition.
