Stevens Leadership Portal: Leading Organizations

As a source of resilience and basis for unity, corporate values will be gaining more significance in the post-COVID workplace. Going forward, they will be even more essential in attracting and retaining talent, increasing employee engagement and driving performance. And what a better place to look for values that drive a successful culture than Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”? What are the values of these companies, how are their values described and how do they put them into practice?

Leaders often operate on the basis of “accepted wisdom,” ideas that persist despite a lack of real scrutiny. Two interesting examples of challenges to accepted wisdom can be found in 19th century Vienna and the 21st century NFL.

Dr. Donald Lombardi has worked alongside hospitals in the wake of disasters like Hurricane Sandy, 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing. His talk looked at how he’s worked to help leaders on the ground manage through a crisis.

Social distancing has made it even harder to make individuals feel like part of a team. Dr. Wei Zheng surveyed Stevens alumni to learn how their managers were making them feel like accepted, valued contributors — even from six feet (or many miles) apart.

In this interview, Terry Weipert discusses current trends in the field of technology that she has noticed over the last ten years and key strategies that she has utilized to adapt and evolve to a shifting technological landscape. She also shares some important pieces of advice regarding how to best develop and advance in one’s career.

Boris Levin is the Chairman and CEO of Mott Corporation. He previously served as Group President at Nypro Healthcare, President at NP Medical, and General Manager at ACMI. In this interview, he talks about using first principles of engineering to think about business problems, his company’s proactive COVID-19 strategies, their unique mechanisms to embed core values into everyday work life, and how he empowers others to make decisions.

Chris Ferreri, the Chief Operating Officer at Hartfield, Titus, and Donnelly, shares insights pertaining to his academic and professional career.

Annie DeStefano is the Vice President at Silicon Valley Bank where she works with CEOs and founders of venture backed Fintech companies. She is also a member on the Advisory Board at Stevens Institute of Technology. Having worked at Goldman Sachs and Foursquare on the technology front, she has become a leader in Fintech.

Stevens Joachim, the Chairperson at Global Legal Entity Identifiers Foundation and Chief Financial Officer at Smart World Productions, shares insights pertaining to his academic and professional career. Having had experience working in a variety of industries and environment, Joachim offers an intriguing perspective on leadership, particularly what it takes to be an effective leader.

Lisa Mascolo, a Stevens alumnus and current trustee of Stevens, talks about how technology is not for its own ends but an enabler of problem-solving. She also talks about the leader’s job as listening, learning, and teaching, in addition to leading; how a leader needs to be both effective and admired, both confident and empathetic, and know what to do when they don’t know what to do during disruptive times.

In this interviews, Dr. Suba talks about the applications of AI in mental health and fraud detection, limitations of AI, and how technical and nontechnical professionals can prepare for an AI-fueled world.

In this interview, Stephanie Rowe talks about her work with the TSA, pulling together large-scale technology change projects, her entrepreneurial endeavors and lessons learned, and her consulting work on product innovation. She also shares what she sees as the “branding” problem of STEM, and how STEM can be rebranded to be more welcoming of women and girls.

In this interview, Joelle Rusin talks about how her data analytics projects help solve old business problems, how she gains credibility as a young woman in technology, and how she keeps a sharp focus on her goals when navigating biased interactions.

In this interview, Archana Vemulapalli talks about how to use technologies to add value to organizations, how to build effective teams, how respect and humility have guided her to learn and thrive, and how we can make technological fields a more inclusive environment.