FountainBlue

Monali Jain, Head, Monali Jain Foundation and sponsor of the Women Leaders in Conversation Series

Head of Salesforce.com Engineering at PayPal, eBay

Monali is responsible for Salesforce.com technology team supporting sales and marketing processes across all of eBay properties such as eBay, PayPal, BillMeLater, etc. Her weekly communication includes teams in almost every continent North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Her current role is exciting because she is building sales technology organization that can support all eBay properties.

Prior to PayPal, Monali was Director of field marketing at Interwoven, responsible for global integrated marketing campaigns and sales enablement. She closely worked with President and CMO to track effectiveness of both sales teams and marketing campaigns.

She has worked as core team member in functional groups including Product Development, Sales Operations, Marketing and Finance. When she chose to return to writing code after 7 years, she became one of handful force.com experts with all of salesforce.com certifications. Her goal in life is to be wife of one, mother of two and boss of many. She has completed Bachelor in Engineering from India, MBA from US(Santa Clara University) and Executive Education at Harvard Business School. She has also completed TLP(Technical Leadership Program) from GE.

Bios for Our Upcoming Programs

Bios and Notes from Past Programs

Vijaya Kaza, Director of Engineering, Cisco

Vijaya Kaza is a Director of Engineering at Cisco. She leads teams responsible for developing Firewall and Advanced Security Functionality on Cisco’s high-end Security appliances. She has been with Cisco for more than 12 years with progressively increasing roles and responsibilities spanning software and hardware, development and QA, both as an Individual contributor as well as manager of people and teams. She has been instrumental in bringing several change initiatives in her business unit and is very passionate about creating efficient work environments. She is a true believer in the fact that happy employees create great organizations. She is the lead for several leadership initiatives within Cisco that are designed to mentor and develop upcoming talent.  Prior to joining Cisco, Vijaya was head of the wireless communications division at a Defense Research facility in India, which gave her a very diverse experience managing work force under very challenging conditions. She holds double Masters degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Outside work, Vijaya enjoys dancing, reading and teaching. She lives in Sunnyvale with her husband and 12 year old son.

The interview with Vijaya Kaza on the topic of Negotiating When You're the Only Woman Around the Table showcased her grounded experience, humility and wisdom, and her focus on generating collaborative, win-win results.

To her, negotiating is about being clear on your intentions and expectations, doing the necessary homework beforehand, and understand your passions and goals and that of the people you’re working with, and communicating in the kind of convincing, fact-based, persistent, manner which builds consensus. It’s about building relationships, earning credibility, finding a win-win, and building on successes. It’s about speaking and acting with confidence, being fully informed and fully transparent with others.

And negotiation is always about the give-and-take. Know what you’re not willing to compromise on, and the areas where you are willing to give in. Be flexible in your negotiations.

Taking the initiative is another secret to negotiating successfully. Don’t just wait for an opportunity to present itself. Make your case for what’s best for you, your team, your company, and position yourself to succeed in negotiating that outcome. Then deliver results when you get there, increasing the likelihood of another opportunity for success!

Whether you are negotiating for yourself, for your team members, at home or at work, here are some top ten tips for negotiating, whether or not you’re the only woman around the table:

1. Know your signature strengths, passions and abilities.
2. Build your credibility with your educational background, your proven, measurable results.
3. Do your homework and understand the opportunities, the stakeholders, their motivations, etc. Then come up with a plan to negotiate a win-win.
4. Negotiation is always about the give-and-take, so collaborate, compromise and create alignments with other people, teams and organizations to achieve common goals.
5. Negotiate before and following meetings, offline, face-to-face, one-on-one, speaking person to person, focused on shared objectives.
6. Be clear in all your communications, both verbal and non-verbal, written and spoken, and persistent and passionate and convincing when you’re negotiating your position.
7. Always point to your results, rather than trying to play political games.
8. Invite influential and strategic others to your cause through convincing, data-based, passionate communications.
9. As an acid test, always make sure that you can stand on your own outside your current company, that your work will have value elsewhere, and that it’s not necessarily the relationships or politics alone facilitating your successes.
10. Never make a rash decision. Make sure that you consult those that you trust and give yourself time to ensure that you’re agreeing to do the right thing for you and your team and company.

The bottom line is that negotiating effectively is about knowing yourself, your objectives and working collaboratively with other parties to serve a common, mutually-beneficial purpose.

Savitha Srinivasan is a Partner in IBM's Venture Capital Group in Corporate Strategy where she develops strategic relationships with venture capitalists and their portfolio companies to leverage external innovation for mutual strategic advantage. She has nearly 20 years of experience at IBM in leadership roles addressing the strategic priorities of IBM’s Services businesses and leads the development of IBM’s Services venture ecosystem, with each of the Global Technology Services business units – Strategic Outsourcing, Integrated Technology Services, Managed Business Process Services and Industry Analytics with early identification of companies, fostering pilots, partnerships and M&A insights.
Prior to this, she led multiple research teams as Senior Manager at IBM Research's first Services group to create and deliver value for IBM clients with data mining and business intelligence solutions. Attained ten times return on investment with increased revenue and cost savings exceeding ~$30M. Co-led Services Information Strategy for IBM Research, and served as Research Advocate for key IBM customers bringing thought leadership and innovation to client engagements. She began her career at IBM Watson Research and has over 15 patents in unstructured information management. She received an MS in computer science from Pace University and an executive MBA from Columbia University. She is a member of IEEE and ACM and an area editor for IEEE Computer.

Savitha Srinivasan is one of those authentic, effective leaders anyone would want as a colleague, mentor and friend. She consistently advocates for working passionately and strategically to further a cause, a technology, an idea, and does this as part of her work as a partner at the IBM venture group. Through her 20-year career at IBM, she focused on opportunities in many different areas, from research to venture financing, and currently leads the development of IBM’s services venture ecosystem, fostering partnerships, pilots and M&A insights with a wide range of stakeholders.

As someone who began her career at IBM’s prestigious Watson Research center and having earned 15 patents in unstructured information management, Savitha’s technical knowledge is extensive and her decades of experience in this area in many capacities gives her key insights on the trends in data analytics and its practical applications to the complex problems of today in the areas of health care, financial services, CRM, telecommunications and other areas.

Savitha generously shared her advice for negotiating across silos:

1. Be fact-based and speak to objective, quantifiable things like numbers and evidence.
2. Be entirely honest with yourself, and with those with whom you’re communicating. Do it, even if you don’t look good in the short term!
3. Know your strengths and your limits and surround yourself with people and resources who can fill your gaps.
   
4. Consistent honest, direct and transparent communication will earn you a reputation as someone reliable with integrity and people will want to work with you.
5. Stretch your comfort zone and communicate with people who represent other divisions/silos/viewpoints.
6. Find and work for the win-win.
7. Communicate and negotiate with passion for something you believe in.
8. Continue to grow and expand the scope of what works for you.
9. Be customer-centric and negotiate on behalf of the customer.
10. Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes and speak a vernacular and language they understand.

The bottom line is that advancement and effectiveness will always be dependent on thinking strategically about the value you provide for the people that you work with, and understanding the needs of the ‘other side’ will help you create that value, and find a mutually-beneficial path forward.

Our speaker for our February 2 program is Amita Paul, Founder, ObjectiveMarketer, Social Media Director, Emailvision

Amita Paul is a bright entrepreneur of the social media generation. She founded and led to the fast growth of her company, ObjectiveMarketer. This pioneering social media startup was acquired by Emailvision in early 2011, where she continues to head the development and strategies for the Social Media products. Amita, who has been named one of the successful women entrepreneurs by Women 2.0 organization, is actively involved with, and evangelizes the adoption of social media as a business channel. Her special areas of interests include helping businesses converge traditional and emerging media as a coherent marketing and communications channel.  Amita has authored the book “Social CRM for Dummies” and regularly speaks on topics related to entrepreneurship, social media – technology and strategies, and on issues that relate to women in business.

Amita Paul shared the ins-and-outs of social media and its revolution while sharing the story of how it drove the business choices she made. She advised us to focus on something that you’re passionate about, then strategically build relationships with those who can help you nurture a shared customer-centric vision, leveraging technology and relationships, insisting on excellent execution, and collectively building momentum and brand around the cause.

Amita affirms that negotiation plays a key role throughout the process, whether you’re just articulating that vision that will-not-be-denied, or whether you’re working with partners to build prototypes, collecting initial customers or investment dollars, or strategizing on the best exit path forward. And throughout the negotiation process, she emphasized the importance of clear communications, of building relationships and constantly focusing on making something bigger than it is, creating something from nothing. Specifically, she mentioned that when negotiating with corporates as an entrepreneur, always charge your value, while enlisting their support in making your solution better!

Amita said that it is the consumer shift which has brought social media to the forefront for her, recognizing early that consumers will progressively become more dependent on connecting with each other through social media solutions to make purchasing decisions for themselves, and to inform others in making their decisions as well. And this shift in the way consumers do business is a global trend that’s growing quickly. Indeed, the whole social media phenomena started globally, not in the Silicon Valley or the US as many technology solutions have, and will explode not just with online social media solutions but will extend beyond the web well into other real-world purchasing patterns and decisions.

For those who have not ventured down the social media path, Amita’s advice is to get connected! For those stuck with the privacy and security questions, her advice is to be strategic and thoughtful, but do have a presence, a brand, a voice. We will conclude with a top-10 list of things entrepreneurs should do:

1. Do everything with passion.
2. Insist on excellence.
3. Tell your story.
4. Make up your own rules to overcome obstacles, especially around budgets.
5. Sometimes it’s about taking a chance, and doing something that you’re passionate about that takes you out of your comfort zone.
6. Empower your loved ones and make a good choice for a spouse.
7. Believe that your thoughts and actions can change the world.
8. Look for early adopters.
9. Be customer-centric.
10. Always focus on building momentum.

For more information, follow Amita’s blog http://blog.emailvision.com/users/amita-paul.

Our speaker for our January 26 show is Usha Sekar, Founder/CEO of Meemli

Usha Sekar is the Founder/CEO of Meemli, Inc.  She is an experienced entrepreneur and software executive who is passionate about social entrepreneurship.  Her corporate experience included the positions of Director of IT at Compaq and CIO of Fujitsu PC and her first startup was a pioneering application for outsourcing management.
Her strong drive for entrepreneurship and social impact is the impetus for Usha’s current venture.  Meemli is committed to ‘doing good and doing well’ and helps students get online academic support and guidance from trusted mentors.  In her spare time, Usha is also the president of a non-profit organization, Shadhika, which supports grass-roots initiatives for children in India.

Usha Sekar inspired us all with her career-long dedication toward creating, connecting and caring in a way that adds business value while producing lasting social impact for the good of the community. Usha leverages her phenomenal training and education in a practical way that grows teams and companies and produces results that serve the needs of the customer, and the community overall. Whether she worked in IT at companies like Tandem, Compac and HP or whether she was the CIO at Fujitsu, or working for her own or someone else’s start-up, her focus has always been on finding opportunities and solving problems leveraging technology.

Her current company, Meemli creates a versatile platform for connecting students to mentors on specific subjects ranging from science and math to writing and the arts, serving her passion for the education cause. Currently available in the market by invitation only, Meemli is partnering with nonprofits and foundations such as the Silicon Valley Education Foundation and its Step Up to Algebra program, as well as various California schools and academic institutions like UCSB to provide the type of targeted, one-on-one instruction proven necessary to build skills, build relationships, and ultimately to build confidence.

Doing this in a trusted, private, protected system leveraging technologies helps ensures the mentor-mentee relationship, and facilitates growth, inquiry and learning, while also making it scalable to benefit all stakeholders, from mentors to students to teachers to schools and nonprofits. And doing it online will enable more people to participate and contribute as mentors, which is of particular interest to corporations with social responsibility mandates to build employee connections with the community, and serving in a tangible, concrete way, without the cost of commute time.

If you are a potential mentor, student, nonprofit, academic institution or someone else interested in Meemli’s way of leveraging technology to connect students with mentors, giving them the power to help themselves, e-mail them at info@meemli.com or find out more at http://www.meemli.com.

Our speaker for our January 19 topic: Technology to Connect and Empower Caretakers: Geetha Rao, PhD, Springborne Life Sciences; Vice President of Strategy and Risk Management, Triple Ring Technologies

Dr. Geetha Rao’s over 20 years of experience in high-risk technologies includes being an entrepreneur, executive and strategic advisor to numerous early-stage life sciences ventures. She is the founding CEO of Springborne Life Sciences, providing advisory services and interim management to medical device, biotechnology and other life-sciences enterprises with a focus on emerging business challenges and operational excellence that meets best-in-class, international standards. She serves as Vice President of Strategy and Risk Management at Triple Ring Technologies, a medical device incubator and contract development firm. She is an internationally recognized expert in risk management and liability and has served on several international policy making bodies, and as an invited expert to regulatory agencies, including the FDA.

Geetha chairs the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab’s Emerging Business Track for Life Sciences, serves on the Life Sciences Committee for Astia, the leading organization supporting women-founded and women-led start-ups, and has been a guest faculty on Stanford University’s Biodesign Innovation Program. She is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, holds a doctorate from MIT and a masters degree from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where she was a Sloan Fellow.

Serial entrepreneur, community activist, and ground-breaking, business-minded technologist Dr. Geetha Rao candidly shared her career path, from civil engineering to medical device entrepreneurship, from safety and risk management to business management and outreach. A thread of her career is centered around better serving people, patients and caregivers, through the use of technology. Over the past 15 years in the medical device industry, she has seen how technologies have better served doctors, surgeons and hospital administrators than they have providers like nurses and lay-caregivers. But innovations in medical device technologies, advancements in IT, networking and software, the rising costs of healthcare and other factors have shifted the focus from the high-investment, high-stake, treatment intensive care of the very ill to a wider, broader treatment of the less ill, with a broader impact on the overall health of a community.

But much has to be done to facilitate this happening, including the following:

• A broader and deeper collaboration between entrepreneurial innovators and the larger companies such as the Baxters, Medtronics and J&Js out there with the markets and channels and resources to package, manufacturing and distribute these innovations into market which would welcome them.
• More collaboration between software IT giants such as the Intels and Qualcomms out there and healthcare companies so we can leverage the software, database, and networking advances in the high tech space and apply it for healthcare needs.
• A balance between privacy and information access and policy to support that balance so that it’s predictable for all parties.
• A collaboration between patients, caregivers, providers, hospitals, government and all other stakeholders, to help facilitate an electronic health care standard which is adopted, accepted and implemented as an integral part of the health care system.

Geetha mentioned the following resources which are supporting patients and caregivers in encouraging this shift toward lower-cost, more effective treatment of the masses:

• Entrepreneurial events that facilitate conversation and bring people in community:
• VLAB http://www.vlab.org,
• Bio2Device Group http://www.bio2device.org, and
• Astia http://www.astia.org
  

• Contract research and innovation lab Triple Ring Technologies http://www.tripleringtech.com. Attend their monthly MedTech Frontier series to find out more about this Newark-based organization.
• Patient community resources which connect patients and encourages the sharing of information and resources and facilitates collaborative and proactive action.
• Patients Like Me http://www.patientslikeme.com

PatientsLikeMe is committed to putting patients first. We do this by providing a better, more effective way for you to share your real-world health experiences in order to help yourself, other patients like you and organizations that focus on your conditions.

• CureTogether http://www.curetogether.com 

The smarter way to find the best treatments. Get access to millions of ratings comparing the real-world performance of treatments across 590 health conditions.

• Everyday Heath http://www.everydayhealth.com

EverydayHealth.com is a leading provider of online health information. We're here to help you manage your own and your family's conditions and overall well-being through personalized advice, tools, and communities. We're committed to bringing you the most credible and relevant health information available online, and to giving you the best possible user experience. Our information is easy to understand and incorporate into your life every day.

• WebMD http://www.webmd.com

WebMD provides valuable health information, tools for managing your health, and support to those who seek information. You can trust that our content is timely and credible.

The bottom line is that there has been a lot of movement over the last decade in enabling technology to empower patients and caregivers alike. And patients and caregivers will play a critical role in ensuring that they get continued access to technology advancements that could help in their diagnostic, treatment, and management of care for themselves and those they care for.

Our panelist for our January 12 topic, Social Media - Your connection to your next job, customer and new you: Deepika Bajaj, VP of Marketing, Fierce Wombat

Deepika is a results driven, dynamic, people-oriented business professional with expertise in brand management, marketing iOS and Android gaming apps and social media for profitable customer acquisition, conversion and retention. Published author & award-winning entrepreneur.  She is heading the marketing for Fierce Wombat Games. Advisor to social mobile gaming incubator, Yetizen and a few startups. She is an early adopter of technology & always loves the challenge of working on things that have never been done before. You’d think she has been doing marketing in the gaming industry for quite a while, but WRONG! Deepika actually started out as an Engineer but ended up in gaming by accident while completing her MBA in marketing. And to think, she had one time thought people wasted time playing games. Nowadays, Deepika loves wasting her time playing games. She loves to travel. Deepika has backpacked through different countries such as Europe and Asia. Her goal next? Machu Picchu.

Social media strategist, dynamic marketer and woman gamer Deepika Bajaj boldly shared her professional story about all the choices she made in the intersects of her career, how she always embraced opportunities, especially when they were uncomfortable, how she embraced new technologies, new challenges and learned along the way.

As a passionate entrepreneur, her view is that too many people spend time thinking and contemplating rather than doing and correcting. She was one of the first people to have a cell phone, allowing her to travel internationally and remain connected to important others in her life. As an engineer, she embraced the opportunity to get an MBA specializing in marketing. She launched her own business on a shoestring, and embraced social media as a low-investment, how-impact way to spread the word and build the business. Then she moved into gaming as a rare (and accidental) female gamer, and found that her strengths in technology, marketing, and social media are well leveraged in her current company. As an active blogger and expert in social media, Deepika makes the following recommendations for professional women (and men):

• Embrace the possibilities of what social media can provide, rather than resisting it and pointing to counter-examples of its effectiveness. If you don’t join the crowd, you will be left in the dust, as the social media revolution will continue to gather momentum.
• Social media is a great way to make your voice heard and impacts your career, your brand, and even the political structure of countries. Never underestimate the power of the written word in real-time communication, shared in community, through social media.
• Casual gaming will really take off – and more women play casual games.
• The new way of communicating will be more focused on the whole person, a 360 degree view of someone in authentic wholeness. Different generations will have different levels of comfort on how social media will fit into their lives, but the younger generations will have much less fuzzy a line between what’s public and what’s private. Social media will make it easier for everyone to share both.
• Get on LinkedIn to share your professional profile, whether you’re in transition or not. Get on Twitter to hear what’s on people’s minds and follow influencers. Join FaceBook to share with others in community. And start blogging if you have content you’d like to share, and would like to start conversations on things that matter to you.

In the end, Deepika says that life is something that you design, with change the biggest constant. She encourages us to 1) be open to possibilities that will stretch us and 2) think how communicating who we are and what we do through social media can open up more possibilities for us.

Contact Deepika at deepikabajaj.com