Women’s Leadership Summit 2024

Mind Body Yoga (optional)

Breakfast

General Session (timing breakdown below)

Summit Opener

They Don’t Want What You Want

Two-thirds of women under 30 aspire to top jobs but have different needs, values, and expectations than prior generations. How can you connect, engage, and inspire them?

Embrace Your Why: Empowerment, Sisterhood, and Giving Back with Malinda Williams

Join Courtney Harrow and Whitney Wolder, the entertaining co-hosts of the "Hey Sis, Eat This" podcast, as they sit down with the multi-talented Malinda Williams—actor, author, and entrepreneur—for an inspiring main stage session. This conversation will explore the significance of focusing on the "why" rather than the "how" in both personal and professional realms, emphasizing the essential role self-esteem plays in shaping our lives and careers. They will celebrate the strength of sisterhood, encouraging women to support, collaborate, and advocate for each other, while discussing practical ways to give back at the summit and in our communities. The session is designed to inspire, uplift, and unite women leaders in their journey towards empowerment.

The Boundary Blueprint

This workshop empowers you to break through self-imposed limitations by setting healthy interpersonal boundaries. You'll learn to identify your goals, understand what is holding you back, and build communication skills to establish boundaries that will help you live a more balanced life.

Lunch + Workshop

The Boundary Blueprint in action - This workshop will put into practice the themes we learned in the prior session. You will have the opportunity to identify your goals, identify your boundaries, and practice communication with your peers.

Roundtable Discussions

Roundtable A: What are the most important ways we can connect with consumers?

We all became marketers because we love communication. We’re paid to communicate with customers, but how do we even do that anymore? Even if we can find them on the planet, how do we communicate authentically and imaginatively? TV has fragmented into a billion channels, and the most influential medium for young people might get shut down this year. BTW, these young are pretty jaded about ads. So now what? What compelling strategies can we deploy that reach and engage our target audiences? And how do we convince the rest of our orgs?

Roundtable B: Let's get better at running our businesses

Anyone with P&L responsibilities runs a business. Whether you are managing a department or running the whole show, your lingua franca includes growth strategies, prognosticating the future of your business, 3-5 year planning, accounting, organizational design, and leadership. This roundtable will explore how we can become better managers, entrepreneurs, and CEOs. Specifically, we will examine what women do differently, enabling companies to thrive. Most importantly, we want to discuss our next five years as leaders. What do we want for ourselves, our teams, and our companies? What should people say about us as women who run companies, divisions, or departments in the year 2030?

Networking Activity

Join us for an afternoon of creativity and connection at the Ojai Valley Inn's Artist Cottage. We will have interactive stations and tastings. Embrace the magic of Ojai while making new friends.

Dinner

Guided Fitness Walk (optional)

Breakfast

Shipping Desk

Workshops

Workshop 1: The Art of Self-Promotion

All executives must find ways of constructively communicating their value to the organization. Join us to scrutinize the moments when we’ve self-advocated and when we haven’t. What were the results and what can we learn from them?

Workshop 2: Navigating Politics

All large organizations have inescapable political dynamics. Yet nobody’s college or business school education prepared them to excel at reading the tea leaves. Instead, we need to collaboratively self-educate ourselves. In this roundtable, we will share our politics with the group and get actionable advice. When we return to the office, we will have a new proactive approach to our organizational dynamics.

Workshop 3: Managing Generational Differences

Lost in the knee-jerk narratives about GenX/Z/Millennials is that the digital revolution has produced different approaches to life and communication during the past 30 years. It’s not good enough to complain about differing attitudes. We need actionable solutions. Join this conversation because you have case studies on what works and want to emerge energized to lead.

Workshop 4: C-Suite Primer

You come prepared to share what has worked and not worked in your interactions with the C-Suite. How did you crush that meeting? Where have you failed? What could have gone better? Ultimately, we want a toolkit to better position ourselves and our ideas for a more successful set of interactions. We get there by revealing our proudest and toughest moments inside the C-Suite.

Workshop 5: Don’t Sweat it

Is there anything worse than sitting at a conference table with a half-dozen senior colleagues and finding yourself dripping in sweat and needing to shed layers even though the AC usually freezes the room? Menopause causes significant changes for women who are at the peak of their power, yet we don’t discuss it, and many of us feel shame. This is a discussion about getting Menopause into the corporate light, but it’s also about having an instant support network.

Workshop 6: Taking Care of Parents, Kids, and Partners

Whether or not you have a terrific partner, society hasn’t evolved that much. In American society, women do much of the caretaking. This is not a gripe session. Instead, you show up to say, “Here’s how I’ve hacked the system.” The result is that attendees go home with actionable advice and a renewed belief that balance is possible.

Workshop 7: Managing the AI Moment

Too much of the AI discussion focuses on the whizz bang of the technology. The real conversation needs to focus on change management. WSJ and HBR say it’s arrived, but where’s the evidence? We’re still in the discovery phase and CFOs want us to cut our teams in half while dramatically increasing our output. That said, this is real. What can we do this year to set realistic budgets and expectations, while harvesting this fertile terrain

Networking Break

Workshops

Workshop 1: Workplace Diversity for Real.

We may need to catch up on how diversity breeds competitive advantage. More viewpoints can lead to creative solutions. How do we evolve our recruiting outreach, job descriptions, and organizational design to create space for more intellectual and cultural diversity? Join us to discuss your organization and how you are succeeding or challenged in building an organization you lead with people from diverse backgrounds.

Workshop 2: From Company to Community

You are accomplished if invited to this summit. But for some of us, our careers cannot be the sole focus of our life energy. How do we marshal our talent and energy into community, education, and charitable endeavors?

Workshop 3: Intentional Career Pathing

Sometimes, you’re 20 years into a career that just happened. But with sound career management techniques that include – mentorship, networking, workplace skill development, and self-promotion – we can position our journey for greater and more diverse opportunities. Why did you leave one job? Why did you get that promotion? Do you want to be the CMO or is there another end goal? Ultimately, what does trajectory look like? Join us to reflect, plan, and prepare to be more intentional.

Workshop 4: The Older I get, The More I Learn

Our attendees have a 25-year age range. How do we unlock the wisdom of experiential difference, and in particular, how do we upend the conventional framing that older is wiser? This is a roundtable about how more seasoned professionals learn from their younger colleagues and update their worldviews and, more importantly, their management techniques.

Workshop 5: Making Hard Decisions

We have cliches for it: face the music, bite the bullet, grin and bear it. Join us to share how you have succeeded and failed when the going gets tough. What can we take away from your experience, and what can you take away from the stories you hear about the promise and peril of managing change?

Workshop 6: Reverse Ageism

Does it feel that younger men are taken more seriously by their colleagues than younger women? If so, we need a case study to combat this alarming trend, which could keep women from maximizing their opportunities. This is a workshop to emerge armed with the tools to self-advocate when you return home.

Workshop 7: Leadership Unmuted

You know what’s hard. Staying true to your values when you see things that are not good for your company, colleagues, or customers. This requires a level of courage, confidence, and conviction that is hard. It’s easier not to speak up when you worry you are rocking the boat, offending your colleagues, or risking your employment. Yet, you’re here because you are senior, and those leadership positions come with the responsibility to set an example. So, how do we find and sustain our voice when we must speak up?

Town Hall & Lunch

Our final session aspires to be action oriented: let’s synthesize the Summit’s discussions into a set of principles that are actionable. What will we do differently? What are key tenants we want to push forward? Dinner by dinner, month by month, and summit by summit we have an agenda to advance. Let’s codify at our Town Hall.

Departure Shuttles to LAX & SBA from Ojai Valley Inn