Series 3 Episode 1: Ellen Petry Leanse
On this episode of Strategy Sheroes I’m joined by Ellen Petry Leanse.
Ellen is a Silicon Valley pioneer, joining Apple in the 1980s and was a member of the Macintosh launch team and created the company’s first user focused online presence. Ellen has worked at or with company’s including Google, Facebook and Microsoft to make innovation more meaningful. Ellen is now Chief People officer at Lucidworks as well as being a Stanford Instructor, entrepreneur and author of The Happiness Hack, a best-selling guide to the neuroscience of happiness and life satisfaction.
Ellen and I chat about:
Women’s thinking super-power
Creativity as a strategic tool
Overcoming the use of permission language and showing up as equals
Mindfulness and reflective time
Check out below some of my favourite quotes from our discussion and listen to our full conversation on apple podcasts or spotify.
On women’s thinking super-powers
I would encourage, invite and emphasise to any woman listening out there that her creative potential and her way of integrating bigger thoughts and context into that more linear world is actually her super power and something very strategic that the world and the world of business needs.
The importance of reflective time
Computers are productivity tools, brains are not. We were not born as a species to be productive and busy...the brain requires reflective time to integrate new thoughts with established knowledge... If we look at some of the great minds and great contributors there’s a strong trend of them building reflective time into their day.
When was the last time that your work day allowed time for you to space out and encouraged you to space out? Probably not all that recently. So especially in agency life were you gain merit for booking your hours, and selling those as units of productivity for clients, how can that reflective time be something that your company and clients are willing to pay for as it’s actually the time that makes you smarter. It is in that reflective time that we actually learn and grow and sleep...We’re meant to be thoughtful, strategic thinkers and you are right the world of business needs to change to allow that.
On showing up as equals
Language is one symbol of what we all need to remember - We have nothing to explain, prove or justify we are equals. When we show up as equals and expect others to show up as equals we are able to do better work, be more strategic, be more creative and solve more problems. That isn’t always that easy as most of society doesn’t think like i think yet if we practice it by being aware of our language and aware of our patterns we can with time shape that collective in ways that serve us all better.
The importance of creativity as a strategic tool
What technology companies need most of all is the creativity and the expressive and the connecting power of people who integrate right brain thinking with the more linear and directed thinking associated with writing code, with analysing data. There is such a movement in this world that is about what is linear and what is finite. People talk about STEM and STEM is very important however for strategy we need to have STEAM which brings in art. Creativity is the most strategic tool that we have. Creativity allows us to think beyond the linear direction most technologies focus on and really into the world of possibility and what matters to people.
Links from our chat:
The Happiness Hack by Ellen Petry Leanse
“Just” Say No by Ellen Petry Leanse