Saying YES opens the doors to a world of opportunities to Lead, Engage, Accelerate & Disrupt — Stanford LEAD

YES!

This blog is dedicated to one of the best ‘yes’ I ever said and this includes the yes to my husband! (well, not really). After a year and a score of 8 amazing courses, long working hours online & offline study and more than 100 team meetings and multiple opportunities to connect with people around the world, I completed my Stanford LEAD Corporate Innovation Certificate last month.

End of 2018, I said Yes to a community that shares a common objective to Lead, Engage, Accelerate and Disrupt. Before spelling out the reasons for this being my best ‘YES’, let me walk you through the memory lane. In 2007, I was on a business trip to Palo Alto, meeting people who would later come up with DropBox and Box. One fine evening after the meeting, I took a stroll to the Stanford University campus for my favorite vanilla latte. I fell in love with the campus and wrote down in my journal, “Next time I come here I will be a GSB Stanford student and part of this community”. As a long-life learner, I love exchanging views with new people and a legendary community as Stanford would be a perfect place to thrive and challenge myself.

I went back to France, worked on many projects, got married and even had a kid. The dream became blurry but never went away. At some point in my experience on corporate innovation, I started to see the same patterns around in failing innovation projects: unclear objectives, lack of focus, lack of vision, lack of resources, lack of sponsorship and huge management pressure. At the same time pace of disruption was accelerating and driving change became a necessity. As Innovation is part of my DNA, I knew that it was time to honing skills and challenge myself to new ideas and methods.

In 2018, I found what I was looking for, a flexible and multinational program, a global platform where I would be able to interact with executives from other industries, best in class and legendary business school to round out my innovation and leadership skills. YES, IT WAS it was a Stanford, the Stanford LEAD certificate as Learn, Engage, Accelerate and Disrupt. All these words resonated with me.

Stanford LEAD is an immersive, interactive and personalized online program

The first question I asked myself was that an online program great but it will be as good as going to an in-person campus experience. So, I decided to test by taking one of the complimentary courses they offer each quarter. One of them on “Persuasion” starts next week providing you a sneak peek of the long-distance learning experience. Thanks to the Stanford LEAD Preview I had the opportunity to not only test the virtual learning platform but the quality of the content and getting a great taste of the top-notch expertise of GSB faculty and LEAD participants.

This program creates a virtual environment where you learn innovation with people from all across the globe. Each quarter, we used multiple tools like Virbela, Novoed, Workplace, and others to help us work and understand innovation, motivation, disruption and planning specific strategies.

The LEAD program allowed me to learn specific skills and apply them to my work and projects by providing real-time feedback. It includes real-time engagement with the GSB faculty, course facilitators and community peers with the help of virtual learning platforms. Each course came with a personalized course facilitator that assists and supports through the whole coursework and the program as a whole.

Stanford LEAD helped me to create and capture more value

LEAD allowed me to experiment with different innovation techniques and tools, making me more impactful on the people I work with. This program empowers you to take risks, and bring a positive impact on yourself, your team and your company. As you get the tools and materialize each learning by doing. Some of the personal examples where the LEAD program allowed me to create more value include:

• Design Thinking: From Insights to Viability, I worked on a company project to improve the innovation process, have the opportunity to discuss with other innovators around the world and proposed 2 prototypes to help company innovators to develop and validate their ideas. I learned that is not only about the process, it is also about the way we think when addressing a challenge. The course tools and learnings gave me a new systematic approach to empathize with our customers while at the same time reflect, test, learn and iterate in a specific time frame.
• Business Model Analysis and Design, I reworked the full business model of a new platform we were developing at that time to cover a potentially untapped market with a new business model that described based upon my learning from the LEAD program alone.
• Design for Disruption, I come up with different disruption hypotheses for the plastic waste industry, including the value chain and the whole cycle. In only 8 weeks I have gained an understanding of the industry and proposed several disruptive innovation hypotheses.

There are many other stories about Building power to lead, Strategy, Storytelling learnings and results. For sure I am now ready for the next step as I learned from the best.

Stanford LEAD opens the door to a vibrant community of change agents and friends

I am still amazed by the strength of the LEAD community that goes beyond borders and time frames. I found a group of peers and friends, offering a diverse set of perspectives for efficient knowledge transfer, networking, and support. Since day one, I joined different groups as mentors’ networks, design thinking club, and regional chapters and I am still very active in all of them.

During the second quarter, we worked on a capstone project to create a Design Thinking Platform with a group of LEADers from the US, Japan, and Hong Kong. We came up with a prototype that was presented during the LEAD annual meeting “Me2We” at GSB Stanford campus in March 2019. We also kept in touch off the screen and met in Paris and along with the on-campus annual LEAD meeting last year and of course, I am returning to Stanford campus this year as well!

Stanford LEAD confirms that passion and dedication always paid off

This program not only challenges you to get out unknown resources to manage home, full-time work, wellness, and training but also a lot of opportunities to thrive. During each quarter, you get the opportunity to get recognition for your passion and progress by the teaching team and peers’ feedback and by working on different projects in and outside your course work.

During the first quarter, I was nominated twice for the Intellectual Contribution Award (ICA) in the LEAD courses of Critical Analytical Thinking and Financing Innovation. This award is a quarterly recognition of your contributions to the program and for positively impacting your classmates. Then in the second quarter, I was awarded the ICA for the Design Thinking course and in the third quarter, I was again recognized with the ICA for the Business Model Analysis. It is very gratifying to see this result and receive these recognitions from colleagues and Stanford GSB Team.

Stanford LEAD unlocks higher purpose and accelerates a new path on my career

This program offered me the opportunity to learn new business frameworks and techniques to accelerate change and transformation not only in my organization, team, and people but also to accelerate personal growth and purpose. The opportunity to engage with other professionals who are experiencing similar business challenges was one of the best moments for me in the course. I also learned the need to search for the real purpose of our lives in which lies a sustainable living for the present and future human beings.

We all can start this journey, towards a better present and future, and this journey is surrounded by innovation and disruption. I just started a couple of new projects as an entrepreneur and more will come soon. Stanford LEAD prepares you to thrive in a state of constant change as you get all the tools and empowerment to learn, engage, accelerate, and disrupt.

According to new research from Linkedin future of work will require more and more Critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability and flexibility, communication, leadership, innovation, and creativity capabilities. The traditional education system becomes more difficult with every passing year in the life of a professional. Stanford LEAD breaks through the traditional classroom or online training environments, if you are looking to hone these skills you can’t accomplish this much with another program around the globe.

Saying YES opens so many doors, don’t miss them.

Thank you, Stanford LEAD and all my peers, for the ride. Looking forward to our annual meeting at GSB Stanford campus in March 2020.

What about you? Are you ready to say YES — Visit the Stanford LEAD website right away!