Dr. Chitra Anand

Over the past several decades, we have become a more untrustworthy society. 2020 accelerated this into 2022-23 with a set of implications that has exposed a set of flaws – This includes flaws in institutions, businesses, governments, and media. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, we are in a “cycle of distrust.” This is a result of an epidemic of misinformation which has led to a wider spread of mistrust amongst societal institutions and leaders around the world. This has left many of us in existential crisis – distrust is now a default emotion.

Businesses have an opportunity to step up and intervene – in a new kind of leadership, where trust is at the core. Business partners who trust each other spend less time and energy focused on self preservation. When trust is present both sides achieve better economic outcomes. 

2022 recipient of The Globe and Mail’s Changemakers Award, Dr. Chitra Anand has hypothesized and tested a ‘Trust Trifecta’: Humanity, Reciprocity, and Practice.

During this session, Dr. Anand will share insights into the impact of the intersection of these notions and when met in this specific order – we can all benefit from the outcomes.

Dr Anand has designed this as an immersive, multi-sensory keynote, featuring music with M’ Michele, an electronic harpist with a masters in linguistics.

With marketplaces being disrupted at a rate like never before, companies need to re-think how they operate. To succeed, modern businesses need to foster the creativity of their team by providing an environment that promotes constant innovation. In this talk, Dr. Anand explores how Intrapreneurship can be used as a gateway for organizations to achieve sustainable innovation. She will show audiences how to harnesses the entrepreneurial drive within an existing organization to foster new ideas, creative thinking which will provide companies the problem-solving mindset to succeed in an ever-changing world.

With over 20 years spent in the technology sector working for some industry-leading organizations including Open Text, TELUS, and Microsoft, Chitra has led disruptive projects and initiatives which have created new ways for organizations to operate and think about the way in which they do business. Her book The Greenhouse Approach (a mandatory read for the Forbes School of Business MBA Program) shows organizations how to reimagine current norms and structures and develop a culture of innovation.

Learning objectives:

1. How leaders can practice intrapreneurship within their organizations, identify the true agents of change, and mobilize these agents to act.
2. Practical ways to apply Greenhouse principles that will drive intentional innovation within your organization.
3. Develop methods to best support the intrapreneurs that live inside your organization.

Mental toughness is a term that is gaining more and more momentum both in the workplace and in our daily life.  Mental toughness is an umbrella term that entails positive psychological resources, which are crucial across a wide range of achievement contexts and in the domain of mental health and business.  

Mental toughness has been studied as an important individual difference factor that allows individuals to deal effectively with challenges and to persist under pressure.  High pressure and stress is a constant and has been for hundreds of years and mental toughness is the gateway to overcome and sustain a new paradigm of performance.  

Dr. Anand through her decades of research has uncovered some fundamentals of mental toughness – the core ingredients and ways we can start to turn this into a practice.  It is the process through which we do things on a more regular basis through the acknowledgment and dedication of this. 

Through this critical talk Dr. Anand will help us understand how high stress situations are in fact a stimulus for growth.  She will:

• unpack how the journey and the process to an end goal no matter how challenging will enable us to uncover the fundamentals of mental fitness. 
• help us train our brains and mindset in a way that will start us to reframe how we endure situations in the business world and life through ideas such as neuroplasticity;  As a broad concept, has emerged in the context of sports training.

These are a set of attributes that allow a person to become a better thinker and performer through the ability to cope with difficult training and difficult competitive situations and emerge without losing confidence.

Dr. Chitra Anand outlines the biggest factors over the next three years in the industry, marketplace & culture, likely and unlikely, but possible scenarios, intersections and implications for all of us now.  In her previous roles, Chitra focused on advisory mandates in the Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) and Social Impact arenas, with particular emphasis on the Technology and Healthcare verticals.Over the past 5-7 years ESG has become a hot topic which is top of mind of many leaders. These areas of focus include how human activities will be shaped; from food consumption to buying behaviours, these patterns will be changed by new business creating business models -Big bold moves are required by businesses and ESG will create a new kind of asset class where old and new worlds will collide.   Dr. Anand will dive deep into this and look at the macro forces that are impacting this.

Outcomes for this talk include understanding the tipping points that are driving these changes.

Tipping Point 1. Information Age: Information is more accessible than ever before. This has therefore created a generally more educated and informed population around these types of issues. This has driven the need for organizations to be more transparent and ESG focused – Understand the implications of this and how organizations can readjust their business practices.

Tipping Point 2. Global Pandemic: The Global Pandemic has been an accelerator of what was inevitable on my different fronts. It has helped rise in the surge of social issues in our society. Issues such as healthcare, gender equality, climate change and accessibility are front and centre.

Tipping Point 3. ESG: Investors need to think and understand this discourse and the priorities around these things in a post pandemic world. How does this change companies and organizations from an overall impact perceptive? With he world moving quickly, we need to spot its signals and get ahead of it to be effective as leaders, stakeholders, practitioners, customers and citizens.

What is an intrapreneur? An intrapreneur is an entrepreneur within a large, complex organization: a startup within a company. These people spur innovation, creative thinking, and new ideas, driven by passion and genuine love for their work. But how to you identify these people within your company, and encourage their good work? Chitra Anand is a lifelong intrapreneur and top researcher in the field.

In this talk, she breaks down the traits of an intrapreneur—fearless; agile; “greenhouse” thinkers who sprout and germinate ideas, plans, and execution strategies; and can easily navigate an organization—and how to find and mine talent within your company.

She explains how to bridge the gap in organizations that are set up against intrapreneurship. And, she provides practical takeaways for your company, focusing on deliberate innovation that rapidly responds to market trends.

In today’s global market, consumers are more empowered than ever. Intrapreneurs know how to meet consumer demand quickly, and ensure your company doesn’t get left behind.

In the new world of work, creativity is one of the most coveted skills. It’s no longer seen as something exclusive to artists, musicians or designers, but rather, an essential skill for the modern workforce at large. Those who thrive are able to use creative thinking to look at things differently and bringing new ideas to the forefront.

Intrapreneurship is built on creative thinking. Having spent over 10 years researching Intrapreneurship through doctoral research, Dr. Anand has gained new insights on the application and impact of creative thinking within the most successful organizations.

She’s also lived a life of creative thinking in the corporate world, having guided projects in her senior roles at Microsoft and TELUS to award-winning success, having won such awards as the IABC Gold Quill Award, Canadian Public Relations Society Awards of Excellence, CMA Awards of Excellence, the Corporate IT Hero award by the Information Technology Association of Canada and the Business for the Arts Awards.

In this presentation, Dr. Anand combines the research with hands-on experience to equip audiences with the insights needed to reach new levels of success.

Learning Outcomes:
• The framework to create a culture instilled with imaginative thinking.
• Developing a lens where risk and failure are seen as a platform for learning and new ways of doing things.
• How to flex your creative muscle by framing and reframing concepts and ideas.

Chitra Anand has worked in the tech space for over 20 years with some of the worlds most notable organizations. Women who want to study, work in, and lead businesses in science and technology have much to add and should be proactively empowered to do so.

Only 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees and 26 percent of computing jobs are held by women. It’s worse at the top of the corporate world — just 5 percent of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women.

A better question might be, how can we collectively work to improve women’s participation in the tech industry at each key stage of their careers? The problem is far deeper than stats. They are embedded in our culture, language and unconscious biases that we all hold; both as men and women. How do we uncover what these are and how do we take those insights to drive real sustained change? How do we continue to trailblaze knowing these challenges in a hyper competitive market?