SDA Bocconi School of Management offers a partial scholarship to female candidates applying to the Executive MBA, intake May 2010 This Executive MBA (http://md.sdabocconi.it/home/partime_ita.php) is structured around 10 week-long on-campus modules combined with distance-learning activities, making it possible to gain an MBA while working.

The program equips experienced managers with multi-dimensional skills and strategic thinking relevant on an immediate basis, and help them hone their analysis and problem solving skills.

 SDA Bocconi is dedicated to the recruitment of female participants as strategy towards ensuring diversity within MBA programs.  

For more information about this merit-based Scholarship: http://md.sdabocconi.it/home/Borse+di+studio+e+esoneri_112020030032008.html

Application deadline: November 30, 2009.

Is female leadership attainable?

Women leaders today face undeniable barriers that impede their career development. The oft-cited “glass ceiling” is a major obstacle preventing the majority from obtaining positions of powers. Those few that manage to break through often seem to have lost their feminine identities; while they are successful leaders, they are frequently perceived as being harsh or aggressive.

While these women with expertise and competencies invest their passion and energy into their professional roles, a common complaint is an absence of recognition. Even having followed the establishment rules, they find that the rewards are not equal for all players of the game.

In response to these phenomena, l’Osservatorio sul Diversity Management has conducted research to define and clarify the abilities and skills that can provide women with an advantage for career advancement. The Female Leadership programs offer training in personal development, techniques for accurately evaluating personal limits and instruments for developing leadership skills.

The first three workshops are:

• Autostima: un problema femminile. Come supportare e sviluppare la coscienza di sé in relazione agli altri (May 7-8)
• Le donne e la gestione dei collaboratori: alla ricerca della corretta distanza relazionale (May 29)
• La comunicazione assertiva al femminile: come esprimere le proprie esigenze senza rompere il legame con gli altri (June 25-26) 

PWA members enjoy a 10% discount on regular fees; if you wish to join the seminars, please write to president@pwa-milan.org

For full details, read here

SDA Bocconi is dedicated to the recruitment of female participants as strategy towards having class diversity. The School has led a number of initiatives to foster a steady quota of women in the Programs we deliver.For instance, SDA Bocconi has merit-based scholarships exclusively granted to female applicants with outstanding profiles.
In addition to several scholarships available for the full time MBA, the School offers a partial scholarship to female participants applying to the Executive Evening MBA starting October 2009.

More information

Tuesday, 18 October 2005 started out like any other day for me in my new hometown of Milan. I moved here in December 2004 from Minneapolis, USA, with my husband, whose career path brought us both here. I came knowing full well that it would not be easy to find a job. But we had made our decision and I was optimistic about finding opportunities that would take advantage of my experience in marketing. By now the excitement of moving to a new country and having my days free to explore my surroundings were giving way to a realization that this was indeed my new life and I didn’t know what to do with it! I had been out of work for longer than I had ever been since I was 15 years old; I knew I needed a fresh challenge, but didn’t know how to go about finding one.That Tuesday morning, I went to a Benvenuto Club coffee meeting, where my friend Andrea Wiarda – whom I had met through PWA – told me about a job opportunity that might be of interest. She called fellow PWA member Carolyn Wade, who had told her about it, and passed me the phone. Carolyn explained that SDA Bocconi University’s Alumni Association (AMSDA) was seeking someone to help grow the Alumni Network, including building the website and developing other tools. Since I love to network and was familiar with the reputation of Bocconi, I was happy to comply immediately with her request to forward her my CV. That same afternoon, I received a telephone call from a staff member of SDA Alumni Relations to schedule an interview for the following day.

When I met with the AMSDA board member and hiring manager the following afternoon, he had already received a reference from Carolyn. The interview went well, and he told me the next step would be to meet the President of AMSDA. Forty-eight hours later, the appointment was set up.

On Monday, 24 October at 4 p.m., I arrived for my second interview. An hour later, I was being welcomed to the team and asked to start the next morning at nine! Tuesday, 25 October seemed a world away from the Tuesday only one week prior, which had seemed like any other day, but in fact was the beginning of a bright new phase in my Italian life.

On Wednesday 26th, I attended a PWA Networking aperitivo where I looked forward to meeting and thanking Carolyn for her helpful role in my story. She in turn introduced me to fellow PWA member Pilar Chaparro and SDA Bocconi employee, who had told Carolyn about the opening. Without the networking that brought me to Andrea, Carolyn and Pilar, I wouldn’t have now my wonderful new job, which I truly love.

Monica Prom
PWA Member

First of all, we would like to thank SDA Bocconi for supporting this initiative and hosting this event.The first day was devoted to analysing the past year’s results: membership evolution, new networks, website features and updates, think tank groups’ news, corporate sponsors and financial results.

We would like to welcome our three new networks launched in Germany in 2008: Berlin, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf. This brings EuropeanPWN to 17 networks all over Europe and more are expected in 2008. The enlargement of our network gives us the opportunity to get directly in touch with more countries and hence more professionals, providing us all with the possibility to network on a European level. Despite different cultures, we all realized that the challenges we are facing are very much the same: from increasing membership so that members have a powerful network and can compare experiences; to the need to have more members actively involved in our activities. The only way to make concrete change is to act.

With Margaret Milan cited as one of the top 10 “women driving change” in Europe; Mirella Visser nominated for European Campaigner of the Year 2007 for her work on promoting women’s growth; our BoardMonitor on FT; our membership of over 3.500 across Europe; and the 500+ events we organise every year, EuropeanPWN is recognized as a visible, powerful and influential International network in Europe. Our internationalism is one of our shared values and differentiates us from all the others in Europe. Now that we are becoming a point of reference, the time has come to lead change in business and politics.
The EuropeanPWN online platform has been updated with new features, such as the Business Xchange tool, that enables every member to promote her activity and competencies and provide members with special offers. Online participation, through the forum in particular, is growing and usage of the internal directory that enables you to search within the 17 networks categorically (name, industry, company name, local network, etc), has incredibly increased. This gives me the opportunity to underline once again the importance of creating, feeding and updating your online profile, in order to exploit completely the benefits of this powerful tool.

Think Tank Groups, after their launch 18 months ago, have been effective at surveys, knowledge sharing and tools creation. A new TTG on networking was launched at the beginning of the year and the first outcome expected is a book on how women network, that should be published this autumn. The MATRIX, as this self-coaching tool on “Your first 100 days in your job”, is online now for you all to test it.

We have had an evolution within corporate sponsors, with Deloitte still our platinum sponsor, now together with Orange. We are proud to announce that Sodexò and Coca Cola are now EuropeanPWN corporate sponsors too, together with IBM, Mercer, Mexx, Aon, Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco.

We also had the official presentation of the BoardMonitor 2008 data during a press conference kindly hosted by Egon Zehnder in their wonderful location, who have partnered with EuropeanPWN on this research project since the very beginning in 2004.

As it is a tradition to offer a small gift to the visiting Presidents, we reflected a lot on what we would have liked to have given as a gift and in the end our decision was to offer them a present to people in need. We donated the sum devoted to our Presidents’ gift to Siticibo to support their useful initiative.

The Saturday morning meeting was devoted to sharing best practices. From how to attract corporate sponsors to how to motivate network volunteers, from creating events and activities that appeal to our corporate partners to how to plan and implement a mentoring program. These 4 hours offered all the Presidents a concrete opportunity to learn from other networks experiences, and to share ideas and create new projects and initiatives and, most important of all, create awareness that we are all sharing the same ambitious goals and facing the same challenges.

As PWA Milan the success story I presented was the Coaching Program, that has attracted 48 women up to now, with each single workshop sold out within a couple of days from the launch with long waiting lists, that have convinced us that we should keep offering such opportunities to our members and enlarge the scope of workshops offering some new ones on topics different from coaching.

In conclusion, the EuropeanPWN Annual General Meeting has been a great opportunity to share experiences and best practices with other networks, making us all aware that, despite differences in names, history, network origin and roots, membership size and of course country, we are willing to grow together and to reach great achievements.

Monica Pesce

I was recently asked how I benefit from my “remote membership” of EuropeanPWN, given that although I have been a member of PWA Milan for over a year, I have yet to physically attend a meeting. This question got me thinking about the payoff of being a member of an organization that I use only remotely. This set-up seems to contradict the nature of a networking organizing, which is to bring together its members in special events and seminars in order to exchange ideas, contacts, and experiences. Am I simply lazy? Or am I too influenced by the digital age of impersonal online networking? Perhaps a little of both. But the more I thought about my motivation for joining PWA Milan last September, the more I understood that my approach to membership is more a reflection of my current lifestyle (with all of its advantages and limitations) than an expression of what I traditionally seek from a networking organization. I also realized that this membership has opened doors for me that I could not have expected from as far away as Canada.As society moves steadily through this ever-expanding global and technologically sophisticated age, I find myself longing for the simple life. My own computer is stuffed to the brim with emails and contacts with whom I have worked closely and yet never met in person. And, while the romantic in me misses the days of pen, paper and letters delivered by post, I must admit that I also enjoy the relative freedom and flexibility of working from anywhere in the world, communicating instantly to family, friends, and colleagues, and being able to access a wealth of information on-demand. Advances in technology and the modern approach to networking have also provided me with a source of comfort through the turmoil of repeated moves, cross-country and internationally. When I consider the experience of my parents’ pre-Internet generation, I wonder how anyone found the courage to leave home.

In the same way that Skype or msn helps me keep in touch with friends around the world, EuropeanPWN has played a role in helping me settle into life in Europe. I first read about the organization in an article featuring the network’s founder. At the time, I was considering a move to Europe, a dream since childhood, though I still didn’t know exactly where I would land. Soon after, I was offered a place in the MBA program at SDA Bocconi in Milan and I knew instantly that the first European destination for this new beginning would be Italy. A planner by nature, I wanted to make the transition from Canada as smooth as possible. I knew that I would be at a disadvantage without a command of the local language, so the PWA seemed a perfect place to start. Here was a network through which I could find tips on life in Milan, talk to other women who had already made such a transition, and get the low-down on the professional life as a foreign woman in Italy.

When I first joined EuropeanPWN, I wasn’t sure exactly how I would use my membership. So I spent the first few days browsing the message board and reading about different events being held across Europe. Occasionally, I would connect online with a member who has similar professional interests or experience and I looked for opportunities to participate in EuropeanPWN activities remotely. One of the first opportunities that I found was with the editing team of the EuropeanPWN newsletter. From the outset, I expected that working with this team would enable me to stay active in the organization, while connecting with other members who have a similar interest in communications and journalism. The first project that I undertook was an article about ten EuropeanPWN entrepreneurs who are members of different city chapters across Europe. Writing the biographies of these ten inspiring women served as a guide for me to explore potential career paths. Every woman featured in the article has taken significant, and courageous, steps to shape her business. In many cases, the story of branching out into a self-made business is familiar to my personal long-term vision. In writing the article, I took away some fundamental points for a day when I will be ready to follow my entrepreneurial vision through to fruition.

Although my original idea was to attend events after moving to Europe, my best intentions were interrupted by the all-consuming MBA. Despite planning many times to attend a PWA aperitivo or dinner in Milan, school priorities inevitably interfered. Whether it was a group meeting or late class, scrambling to finish a team assignment, or ploughing through a 50-page article on Corporate Governance, time is the MBA student’s most precious commodity. Yet ironically, now is a time more than ever when the benefits of EuopeanPWN are evident, as I determine the first steps in the next stage of my career. Whether via the job board, or the recent Groups section, there is a wealth of resources online that help me better understand my post-graduation steps.

So, whether I remain in Milan to develop an entrepreneurial venture, or move to Geneva or London after graduating next December, EuropeanPWN will definitely be part of the transition. And while I intend to make the time for an aperitivo or dinner during the hectic workweek, I feel confident knowing that if all else fails, my virtual network can be accessed anytime, anywhere. And when lifestyle shifts of this magnitude can be unsettling, I am comforted knowing that I have an immediate support system, both professionally and personally, no matter where I land.

Aimee L. Dubrule

All professional women welcome whether members or guests

Mikkel Draebye, SDA Bocconi Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, presents

“The Entrepreneurial Mindset”

What makes a successful entrepreneur? What factors influence how a new business flourishes or founders, whether it be a new venture or a new business development within an existing firm?

 Join us for an evening with Dr. Mikkel Draebye, who shares his expertise on the entrepreneurial mindset and how this key competence factors in both start-ups and new directions for ongoing enterprises.

 While those individuals that do well are often hard-pressed to define their strengths, research in entrepreneurship has identified some very important behavioural patterns and conditions for meeting and exceeding goals and objectives.

 Come prepared to think outside the box, with insight from Dr. Draebye’s real-world case studies, drawing from his more than 15 years of experience, that illustrate the fuzzy matter of decision-making under uncertainty.

 About Mikkel Draebye

Dr. Draebye is a Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Milan’s Bocconi University School of Management www.sdabocconi.it  His responsibilities include facilitating and accelerating students entrepreneurial and start-up projects and coordinating the strategy and business planning activities within the schools executive MBA programs.

 Previously a consultant for an engineering firm, he is an advisor and consultant to several SME’s and start-up companies. He has been Chairman of the Foundation that organizes Europe’s oldest Business Plan Competition (EBPYC) and still serve on their board. He is in the scientific review board of the academic journal “ESIC Markets”.

Cocktails 7-8 p.m. / Presentation 8-9.30 p.m.
Jolly Hotel Macchiavelli Via Lazzaretto 5, Milano (MM Porta Venezia, Repubblica, various trams)

Free for members, €20 for guests, payable by cash at the event

2009 membership renewals can be paid by cash at this event.

Members, please indicate you attendance in the calendar section of EuropeanPWN

For guest reservations, or additional information, please contact speakers@pwa-milan.org