This was the 14th annual WIN (Women’s International Networking) conference and the 9th time I had attended. Each year has a theme, and this time, fittingly for its Rome venue, the theme was “Creating History”. And there we were, in one of the most ancient cities of the world, appreciating and creating not just a new history, but the future.
A record 950 women attended this year, coming from all corners of the world, and all intent on making a difference in their own lives, in business and in the way women are viewed in the workplace.
Authentic, feminine power has always been the linchpin of the conference, which led us all to focus on such things as a new way of leadership, using the feminine, creative side of the brain, and on such wonders as art, music and dance. We had music, we had opera, we had dance and we had drumming – for WIN is determined to touch the parts that other conferences cannot reach.
WIN is the brainchild of Norwegian, Kristin Engvig, and it is under her brave direction that every delegate, every plenary speaker and every workshop presenter dares to push the envelope and articulate things that in another place or under other circumstances would remain unsaid.
“I want to create history in a gentler way,” she said. “With collaboration.” And sure enough, another intrinsically feminine trait was highlighted before going on to share the WIN rules of networking, because it is, after all, a networking conference:
Connecting with Purpose and Pleasure – The WIN Networking Way
1. Be open
2. Be ready to connect
3. Be quick to contribute
4. Take a risk
5. Commit
6. Don’t accept the unacceptable
7. Be light and have fun
8. Be prepared to experience magic
Maggie Barankitse
Maggie Barankitse describes herself as the mother of 30,000 children, yet she has never married.
“I am a Christian and I know that our human vocation is to love,” she began, before before showing a short film made about Maison Shalom, the center in Burundi that has been entirely funded by donations. In 1993, Maggie saw 72 Hutu people killed in front of her. She begged to save 25 remaining orphaned children and walked to Burundi, where she created not an orphanage, but a home. A home that now has schools, a hospital and a complete community, comprised of orphans, unmarried mothers, AIDs victims and the ostracized.
“We can change the world,” she said. “Because we have the capacity in our hearts. I bet you think I’m crazy – then be brave enough to be crazy!”
When people ask Maggie what her religion is, she replies with one word: “Love”. When agencies ask her what her action plan is, she replies, again: “Love”. When journalists ask her what her vision is again, she says: “Love”. “Love makes inventors of us all,” she says.
Finishing with the hope that some of us would leave the conference daring to be crazy too, Maggie had successfully set the scene and the global stage for the rest of the event.
Futurists, Risk Taking And A Ballerina
But WIN is not all about crazy tear-jerking speakers, oh no. We moved from Maggie to a bunch of futurists. Dominique Turcq, a futurist at the Boostzone Institute talked of the reality of the Jasmine Revolution, declaring, “We have to collectively manage a deconstruction and reconstruction of systems.”
Moving on to WIN-popular Graeme Codrington, founder of Tomorrow/Today, we learned that he believes that, “We need masters of fine art in our businesses because it’s all about design, arts, music and beauty.” A strong message made poignant the following day with news of Steve Jobs’ death, a man who knew exactly how valuable such strengths are to business today. “We need people in our businesses. They have skills computers don’t have – [computers] can’t be creative, they can’t have ideas and they can’t build relationships.”
Armed with new knowledge and new insights, we were primed to explore the goodies on offer in the concurrent workshops. I chose to learn about the importance of taking risks, at the hands of Eva Szita-Morris, and how we have to go to the edge and deal with the discomfort of change before we can move forward to maybe be the crazy people we need to be.
Later I chose a workshop by ex-ballerina, Nancy Glynn, who taught us how to put mind over matter, and how “The 21st century leader is mindful, optimistic, authentic, aligned with core values, has considerable self-awareness and self-regulation […] while we are hard-wired to be long-term optimists and short-term pessimists.” She explained how we live in the VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) and how this environment’s only antidote is such practices as mindfulness, meditation and spending time in nature.
And so it continued, with mind-changing keynotes, inspirational workshops and countless opportunities to meet people who shared the WIN vision and with whom we soon vowed to collaborate.
The Artistry of Leadership
For me, the highlight of the conference was Nancy J Adler, a professor in intercultural management at McGill University in Montreal. She shared with us about her own brand of craziness. A craziness that led her to prove Graeme Codrington’s point about the importance of art. Nancy is also an artist and she has dared to find a way to incorporate art and business, calling this the ‘artistry of leadership’.
“As Madeleine Albright said: ‘we have a responsibility in our time not to be prisoners of history but to shape history,’ so now is the time to invoke beauty,” Adler said, moving on to tell a story of how, when student doctors were forced to take classes in the history of art, it made them better doctors. This happened because looking at art taught them how to pay better attention – and that made them better diagnosticians.
Nancy shared how even Warren Buffet had declared that, “I am not a businessman, I am an artist.”
According to Adler, great artists and leaders have three things in common:
1. The courage to see reality exactly the way it is;
2. The courage to see beautiful possibility even when the world labels them as ‘out to lunch’; and
3. The courage to inspire people to move from reality back to possibility.
As Eleanor Roosevelt said: “the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
At WIN this year, I would wager that 950 women (and a few men, I admit) left Rome, recognizing the value and power of art and beauty while daring to dream a few crazy dreams. For it is in doing this that we can both create and shape history.
WIN Conference
