The Game Changer Network

Jessica Bacal- Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out of Getting It Wrong This on demand audio series is a part of the Executive Girlfriends Group Vignette Series. Chicke Fitzgerald interviews Jessica Bacal. The original live interview was 11/13/15. Today’s women are being told to “lean in,” to assert themselves, to ask for more, and to analyze their work/life balance. But despite all of this dialogue, there’s something that is not being addressed: advice on how to recover when you’ve stumbled. Everyone makes mistakes, but for many women, acknowledging them can feel tantamount to career suicide. In Mistakes I Made at Work, I interview twenty-five high-achieving and influential women across a variety of fields—from writers to doctors to engineers. They share their worst on-the-job moments, and how they used them as learning experiences to build successful and fascinating careers. Jessica directs the Wurtele Center for Work & Life at Smith College, an independent women’s college in Massachusetts with students from every state and from 60 countries around the world.

Brian Solis- X: The Experience Where Business Meets Design This on demand audio series is a part of the Executive Girlfriends Group Vignette Series. Chicke Fitzgerald interviews Brian Solis. The original live interview was 12/18/15. The future of business lies in experience architecture and you are the architect. Do you know how your customers experience your brand today? Do you know how they really feel? Do you know what they say when you re not around? In his new book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design bestselling author Brian Solis shares why great products are no longer good enough to win with customers and why creative marketing and delightful customer service too are not enough to succeed. Brian Solis is a principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a Prophet company. He is also an award-winning author, prominent blogger/writer, and keynote speaker.

Rachel Hofstetter-Cooking Up a Business: Lessons from Food Lovers Who Turned Their Passion into a Career -- and How You Can, Too! This on demand audio series is a part of the Executive Girlfriends Group Vignette Series. Chicke Fitzgerald interviews Rachel Hofstetter. The original live interview was 11/20/15. Cooking Up a Business is an inside look at how food entrepreneurs (from Popchips and Hint Waters to Vosges Haut Chocolat and the guy who invented the Big Mac) turned their dreams into reality. A former food editor at O, the Oprah Magazine and Reader’s Digest, Rachel is now founder in chief at guesterly. She also runs an online education experience, PR School, where she teachs entrepreneurs how to effectively connect with editors and press in meaningful ways. She received a degree in economics from Miami University and lives in New York City with her husband, Lorne.

Body of Work - Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together

These days it’s increasingly rare to have a stable career in any field. More and more of us are blending big company jobs, startup gigs, freelance work, and volunteer side projects. We take chances to expand our knowledge, capabilities, and experience. But how do we make sense of that kind of career—and explain it?

Pamela Slim, the acclaimed author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, gives us the tools to have meaningful careers in this new world of work. She shows how to find the connections among diverse accomplishments, sell your story, and continually reinvent and relaunch your brand.

Pamela’s website is www.escapefromcubiclenation.com

The human brain is an amazing tool. Yet, many of its ways of working do not serve business leaders well. The brain can process large amounts of information. It has a real talent for forming patterns and connections. And it loves to answer questions and solve problems. But it also has a tendency to see what it expects to see, overlook data that contradicts its prevailing view of the world, and have greater confidence in its decision-making abilities than it should. In order to become more effective leaders, we need a much deeper understanding of how our brain works and how it often gets in the way of winning.

As CEO and Managing Director of THE HUMAN FACTOR, Inc., Holly helps business leaders and their companies achieve excellence by creating clarity on what winning looks like and determining how to get there.  Her unique approach to strategic agility, alignment and engagement - based on the approach Pause, Think, Focus, Run - provides the tools, techniques, and skills companies need to reach their destinations and achieve their goals.

Holly's website is http://thehumanfactor.biz/

Annette Hogan is one of the founding board members of the Executive Girlfriends Group and currently serves as Managing Director, ONBOARD.COM. The last time we interviewed Annette on EGG Live, she was the head of Marketing for Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex. Annette will share her career journey and talk about reinvention of yourself as you go.

Annette is a proven, innovative, global travel industry expert specializing in performance based sales and marketing, distribution and multi-channel

business transformation. She has industry wide recognized expertise in building strategies for core businesses, start-ups, M&As, expansions, and mature organizations with a goal of capturing/maintaining competitive advantage and profitability. She has held senior positions reporting directly to the top leadership with industry icons such as Sabre, Amadeus, Delaware North Companies, and Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd. She is lauded for leadership skills, and as a strategist with excellent communication and talent management practices, successful in driving aggressive growth, increased revenue and profit. Annette is trilingual and multicultural and has a passion for fitness.

Annette’s website is https://www.onboard.com/

Throughout her career as a top celebrity make-up artist, Michelle's job was to create the illusion of perfection for the camera. Like so many other women, she strived for that same perfection in her personal life.

However, after two decades in the business, Michelle realized that we live in a society whose obsession with perfection meant that women were never allowed to feel good enough. Youth was prized over wisdom. Looks mattered more than character. And having the perfect life was more important than enjoying it.

Michelle has created a unique and proven process that has radically and wonderfully transformed thousands of lives. Her clients, readers and workshop attendees world-wide have gone from couch potatoes to marathoners, broken relationship to more fulfilling ones, and are achieving greater success on their terms. By empowering women to live confidently and radiate that confidence to the world, this process creates a life and a look that is ageless and unique to every woman.

Michelle’s website is www.michellephillips.com

There is an invisible army of people deep inside the world’s biggest and best-known companies, pushing for safer and more responsible practices. They are trying to prevent the next Rana Plaza factory collapse, the next Deepwater Horizon explosion, the next Foxconn labor abuses. Obviously, they don’t always succeed.

Christine Bader was one of those people. She loved BP and then-CEO John Browne’s lofty rhetoric on climate change and human rights.

Bader’s story of working deep inside the belly of the beast is unique in its details, but not in its themes: of feeling like an outsider both inside the company (accused of being a closet activist) and out (assumed to be a corporate shill); of getting mixed messages from senior management; of being frustrated with corporate life but committed to pushing for change from within.

Christine Bader is also a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at Columbia University, where she co-teaches a course on Human Rights and Business, and a Human Rights Advisor to BSR.

Christine's website is http://christinebader.com/

Bury Me with My Pearls is a real-life, roller-coaster ride of laughter, tears, and stomach-churning truths by a professional speaker, humorist, and singer who, as Miss South Carolina, represented her state in the Miss America pageant and has been singing, speaking, and writing ever since. Incorporating the analogy of pearls, this book uses humor and spiritual principles to bravely address difficult issues many in her audiences encounter within changing roles, self-actualization, and families.

From the tomato fields of her native Johns Island, South Carolina all the way to runway of the Miss America Pageant, Jane's contagious optimism helps audiences learn how to handle difficult life situations with a sense of humor and grace.

Jane's story of overcoming being labeled Dyslexic and other challenges give audiences a recipe for balancing their own personal journey with humor and hope through folksy wisdom-Southern style.

For more information visit her web site: www.janeherlong.com and check out Jane's funny YouTube Channel! http://www.youtube.com/user/janeherl

Annette is a proven, innovative, global travel industry expert specializing in performance based sales and marketing, distribution and multi-channel

business transformation. She has industry wide recognized expertise in building strategies for core businesses, start-ups, M&As, expansions, and mature organizations with a goal of capturing/maintaining competitive advantage and profitability. She has held senior positions reporting directly to the top leadership with industry icons such as Sabre, Amadeus, Delaware North Companies, and Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd. She is lauded for leadership skills, and as a strategist with excellent communication and talent management practices, successful in driving aggressive growth, increased revenue and profit. Annette is trilingual and multicultural and has a passion for fitness.

Annette’s website is https://www.onboard.com/

Drawing on two decades of consulting with leading sales organizations, sales leadership expert Lisa Earle McLeod reveals how a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP) can drive a team to outstanding sales numbers. Using hard data and compelling field stories, Selling with Purpose explains why salespeople who understand earnestly how they make a difference to customers outperform their more quota-driven counterparts.  In an era where most organizations believe that money is the only way to motivate salespeople, Selling With Purpose offers a sustainable and exciting alternative.

Lisa began her career with Procter & Gamble, where she established herself as a sales leader and highly-skilled sales coach. She established her own firm in 1993. She’s spent over 10,000 hours coaching sales people and leaders and has conducted over 500 workshops and keynotes. McLeod is the Sales Leadership expert for Forbes.com and the author of 4 bestselling books in three different genres: business, personal development, and humor.

Lisa and her husband Bob live in Atlanta. They are the parents of two fabulous daughters.

Lisa's website is http://www.mcleodandmore.com/