Brainpower
Leveraging Your Best People Across Gender, Race, and Other Divides
A compendium of four critical selections, including: Off-Ramps and On-Ramps Revisited, Vaulting the Color Bar, The X-Factor, and The Power of "Out," as well as a new introduction and new forewords by Joanna Coles, Cornel West, Mellody Hobson, and Kenji Yoshino.
The Center for Talent Innovation, a non-profit think tank, has a long history of focusing on challenges and issues pertaining to the workplace.
The mission is two-fold: to drive groundbreaking research that leverages talent across the divides of gender, generation, geography, and culture; and to create a community of senior executives united by an understanding that full utilization of the global talent pool is at the heart of competitive success.
The flagship project of CTI is the Task Force for Talent Innovation and was founded in 2004. To date, the Task Force has spearheaded 200-plus new best practices, many of which are "second-generational" and go beyond access and opportunity to retention and acceleration. This action on the ground has garnered significant attention (ten Harvard Business Review studies and numerous articles in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Strategy & Business, The Huffington Post, and others) which brands Task Force members as "thought leaders" in global talent management.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett is an economist and the founder and CEO of the Center for Talent Innovation, a nonprofit think tank. She founded and chairs the Task Force for Talent Innovation, 80 global companies focused on fully realizing the new streams of talent in the global marketplace. For nine years she directed the Gender and Policy Program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and is ranked #16 on the "Thinkers 50" listing of the world's top business gurus. She is the author of 11 Harvard Business Review articles and ten critically acclaimed nonfiction books including Off-Ramps and On-Ramps; Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets; and in 2013, Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor (Harvard Business Review Press). Her writings have appeared in The New York Times and Financial Times, and she is a featured blogger on HBR.org. She is a frequent guest on television, appearing on Oprah, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, the Today show and CNN Headline News. Hewlett has taught at Cambridge, Columbia, and Princeton universities. A Kennedy Scholar and graduate of Cambridge University, she earned her PhD in economics at London University.
Co-authored by:
Ellis Cose, senior fellow, is involved with CTI's multicultural research. He has worked in various editorial capacities for Newsweek magazine, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, Time magazine, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. He is the author of ten books and the president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education.
Courtney Emerson is a senior research associate at the CTI and a Senior Associate for CTI's advisory practice, Hewlett Chivée Partners LLC (now Hewlett Consulting Partners LLC). Emerson has expertise in organization diversity strategy development and specializes in the design and delivery of women's leadership programs as well as sponsorship initiatives.
Diana Forster was assistant vice president at the CTI where she was involved in Task Force research projects on "The Female Talent Pipeline in Emerging Markets," "Top Asian Talent," and "Off-Ramps and On-Ramps Revisited."
Catherine Fredman was vice president and senior fellow at the CTI. She has collaborated on Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets: Why Women Are the Solution (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011) and Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business is Down.
Maggie Jackson, vice president and senior fellow at the CTI, helps lead the publication division. An award-winning journalist known for her coverage of U.S. social issues, she has written for The Boston Globe, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, and National Public Radio.
Lauren Leader-Chivée was senior vice president at the CTI and partner at Hewlett Chivée Partners LLC (now Hewlett Consulting Partners LLC), the advisory arm of the center. She has many years of experience in human resources leadership and management consulting and is a sought-after speaker on talent, diversity, and leadership issues.
Laura Sherbin, executive vice president and Director of Research, heads up CTI's survey research and plays a key role in CTI's advisory arm, Hewlett Consulting Partners LLC. She is an economist specializing in workforce issues and international development.
Peggy Shiller is the chief operating officer at the CTI and has been at the CTI since its founding. She has twenty years of experience planning conferences and overseeing research ventures taht run the gamut from blogs to reports to blockbuster books.
Karen Sumberg was executive vice president at the CTI and a principal with the CTI's advisory services practice Hewlett Consulting Partners LLC. She is an expert in gender, sponsorship, career-pathing, and communications and leads research projects for the CTI.
