Speakers

Liz Forkin Bohannon is the founder of Sseko Designs, an ethical fashion brand that works to educate and empower women. In four years, Sseko has grown from three women making sandals together under a mango tree to an international fashion brand that provides employment, educational opportunities, and entrepreneurial training to over 50 women in East Africa, enabling them to continue their education and become leaders in their country.

Organizations continue to face rapidly changing work environments, sales teams who are stuck in analysis paralysis, and the urgent need to rethink business models, products, and services to meet the changing needs of their customers. But what Plucky Leaders know is that inside these challenges you can find the greatest opportunity to pivot, progress, and innovate, and that’s exactly what Founder and CEO of Sseko Designs did and how she and her team created a massively successful turnaround story in the height of the pandemic.

Like many businesses experienced, March 2020 showed record low sales and revenue for Sseko Designs. But by May, not only was Sseko back up to baseline, but they had also surpassed their revenue goals by over 100%. How was this possible?!?! By taking her team through the principles in her bestselling book Beginner’s Pluck: Build Your Life of Purpose & Impact Now, Liz helped her team reclaim their Pluck by choosing to get curious and tap their inner beginner. 

Organizations around the world are using Plucky Principles like Dream Small and Own Your Average to smash sales goals, drive innovation, and build teams focused on passion, purpose, and impact.

She now splits her time between Uganda and Portland, Oregon, where she and her husband, Ben, run Sseko Designs.

Topic Information

Beginner’s Pluck: A Roadmap to Success in Highly Uncertain Times

When we are starting on any journey, there are things that we will do as beginners more naturally that will help us become more creative, innovative, and ultimately, more successful. Even uncertainty becomes something that we look at with curiosity instead of fear. This is a little something Liz Bohannon calls “Beginners Pluck.” By embracing your status as a beginner or diving deliberately out of mastery and back into the magical land of beginners, you will achieve goals you never imagined. 

Through exploring some of the 14 principles from her bestselling book, Beginner’s Pluck: Build Your Life of Purpose & Impact Now, Liz will challenge your team to dream small so they can start doing instead of dreaming, show them how curiosity over criticism fuels innovation and set them on the ultimate path of success by weaving passion and purpose into every goal.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Become a Problem Finder – If you understand your customers’ lives at a granular level, you can look for other problems you might be able to solve for them, rather than searching for ways to make them comfortable with business as usual. 
• Be a Doer, Not a Dreamer – Just like start-ups who go from dreaming to doing, iterating and testing, you need to apply a beginner’s mind. 
• Reconnect your Sales Team with their Purpose – This is why purpose is so important. When unexpected curveballs are thrown your way that all but decimate your organization, the strongest unifier and innovation-inducer is purpose. 

* A journalist-gone-shoemaker, Liz shares her passion for social enterprise, conscious consumerism, social justice, creative leadership, gender equity, risk-taking, (pause for deep breath) ….and empowering women.

To learn more about Liz and her extraordinary journey:

Deborah Rosado Shaw is a leading and powerful voice, who founded and led PepsiCo’s transformational global leadership program that provided leaders with strategies to guide their people beyond limitations. Deborah’s New Realm of Mastery program helped employees see beyond their constraints in order to pave a path toward their best levels of performance.

This is an entirely new area of prowess that Fortune 50 leaders are seeking in this era of company culture that requires a focus on commitments, goals and personal values. When leaders focus on their people in this deeper way, they transform them into self-starters, risk-takers and people who know how to find their voice and path even in the most challenging times. 

As Deborah shares with global leadership audiences, the best leaders help people learn how to motivate themselves in times of uncertainty and challenge. She helps leaders and organizations elevate to new heights by sharing the strategies of the New Realm of Mastery, which former Chairman of PepsiCo Indra Nooyi praised: “Deborah took our company-wide conversation about diversity from one focused on inclusion to a broader dialogue about the engagement of all employees with each other and with the diverse world around us.”

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The New Realm of Mastery: Shaping a Culture that Elevates Performance

In this keynote, Deborah takes the audience through an empowering and tangible definition of culture and gives them the mindset, behavior and tools needed to powerfully contribute and deliver results at unprecedented levels, no matter their role in an organization. This keynote creates a powerful mind shift in every individual contributor and provides the following takeaways:

• Strategies to create a vibrant and healthy culture where people think powerfully, act courageously and invent collaboratively.
• Mindset shifts to sustain a high-performance culture that becomes a competitive differentiator for talent attraction, retention, and engagement.
• Clarity about their role and impact in crafting and cultivating their signature culture.
• Perspectives and tools to build a culture where people feel valued, honored and heard.
• The realization that they are co-creators of their culture having discovered their own voice and power in the matter of shaping culture.

Video: Deb Shaw Speaker Demo Reel

* Workplace attrition rates are staggering. This is an opportunity to bring in a thought leader who is also a rare practitioner, having built her own successful company, as well as strong leadership at PepsiCo.

Denise’s award-winning film, Project Eñye, has one single and simple purpose… to transform how we think and speak about culture, identity and what it means to belong. And it’s amazing. 

In 2020 Denise was recognized as a “Featured Host” by Apple Podcast North America for her podcast “The Self-ish Latina” which has listeners in 32 countries. Denise has been invited to speak to some of the world’s most recognized brands: Progressive, Microsoft, AARP, Facebook, LinkedIn, JP Morgan Chase, Salesforce, Proctor & Gamble, Dow Jones, Eli Lilly, KPMG, Starbucks, VaynerMedia, and SONY to name a few.

Her work with Project Eñye has been featured on Forbes.com, CNN, NBC Latino, Chicago Tribune, Telemundo, Univision, Fox News Latino, HOLA and the Huffington Post.

Denise is currently in production with her second feature length documentary (Fall 2022) and also working on a new book about Belonging (Spring 2023).

Whether she’s keynoting an event, conducting a Q&A or participating on a panel, Denise communicates about emotionally difficult concepts in a way that makes people feel validated, understood and yet profoundly challenged to be a better version of themselves.

Topic Information

The Magic of Belonging

Through the power of film and an interactive conversation, Denise Soler Cox takes audiences on an emotional journey of understanding the most inherent human need—belonging. 

Simply put, Denise brings clarity to what is happening underneath the surface so that attendees from all cultural backgrounds, nationalities, and ethnicities, walk away feeling personally understood and professionally empowered to be more impactful leaders.

Denise distills learning compiled over the course of eight years into an interactive and authentically delivered keynote that inspires a new way to think about culture, identity, and what it means to belong.

• Participants will understand that the ultimate expression of diversity is the individual. Each of us must learn to embrace our own story. Only then are we free to share who we are with others. That authenticity is the first building block of belonging.
• Participants will experience psychological safety, which is the key ingredient groups need, to tackle meaningful professional challenges as a team.
• Participants will better understand how their cultural past shapes their perception of today, and their vision of the future. In a refreshing and fun process, each person will begin to build the “scaffolding of belonging.”

Denise’s presentation illuminates how each of us want to be seen, heard and understood.

*Want to see the entire film or hear how it’s being used powerfully in both live and virtual events?

Cassandra Worthy is the world’s leading expert on Change Enthusiasm®. She is lighting the world on fire with her refreshingly unique take on not just ‘managing’ but growing through change. Through her consulting firm Change Enthusiasm Global, she has shared this revolutionary approach for not only embracing change but using it to propel you to heights you never imagined with thousands all over the world. She is trusted by clients around the globe including MassMutual, Johnson & Johnson, Marriott International, CVS Pharmacy, Bristol Myers Squibb, Snapchat, and Cisco.

After spending nearly 15 years working as an executive within both Procter & Gamble and Berkshire Hathaway thriving through some of the biggest acquisitions ever recorded in the consumer-packaged goods industry, Cassandra decided to cultivate the mindset and tools she practiced to grow through these disruptions in a way that inspires, invigorates, and motivates others to grow through their change challenges.

“Early on in my career, when my company was in the aftermath of a $5B acquisition, I almost quit. Fueled by frustration and stress, I found myself on the precipice of walking out of the office and never coming back. Had I done so I would have become another statistic. Yet another African-American female departed from a STEM-driven industry. Top talent voluntarily resigning during a time of significant organizational shift. Another change victim. But I didn’t. Instead, I woke up one day and decided to view those feelings as a signal that I was sitting in a moment of opportunity to transform that chemistry, that feeling into something better. To choose every day to do something, say something, behave in some way that would move the needle of my work experience towards a better feeling. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was cultivating a teachable strategy to inspire anyone to become enthusiastic about change, to find their unique power of resilience during turbulent times. Today, I help organizations disrupt ‘change as usual’. Through a practical and repeatable framework, I show them how they can transform their culture from surviving change to growing through change.”

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Grow Through Change

15 years of real-world M&A experience distilled into instantly applicable mindset, behavior, and tools to grow through change.

Did you know that 70% of change programs fail? Why? Because organizations fail to acknowledge the biggest change-adoption factor. Your people.

When your change plan focuses only on business strategy, responsibilities, and timelines, it is missing your people’s emotions and beliefs that power the change.

It’s Time for a New Blueprint.

*Want to learn more about how Cassandra gives your people the framework to transform their fear of change into fuel for personal and organizational growth?