Inkandescent Podcast Transcript: Dale Marie Pfeifer
I’m Hope Gibbs, founder of Inkandescent Public Relations, publisher of The Inkandescent Business magazine, and your host for the Inkandescent Entrepreneur show, the voice of Entrepreneurs.

HG: Hi, this is Hope Gibbs. We are here in San Francisco, the day before the Professional Business Women of California Conference, with Program Director Dale Marie Pfeifer. Are you excited about what’s coming?

DMP: Absolutely, very, very excited.

HG: Excellent. So the conference is sold out. Four thousand women are attending. What are you most looking forward to?

DMP: Well, it’s really, really hard to choose, we’ve got such a great program coming up. The morning is starting with a look at where we are now and where we’re going. We’ve got a [Lorena ?] from Mackenzie, who’s going to give us the stats on where we are. Then we’ve got Cheryl Sandberg coming and telling everybody to Lean In and how they should really improve the work situation around you, the workplace, including in the future. And then we’ve got an incredible array of workshops and breakout groups from sessions on entrepreneurship, to conflict negotiation, to how you can become a better global leader. Then in the afternoon we’ve got two portraits of incredible leaders who are not from business. So we’ve got Rita Moreno, who’s going to be talking about the arts and her fascinating career, and we’ve got Governor Jennifer Granholm, who’s the first female Governor of Michigan and is just an incredible voice for women’s leadership, in the afternoon. And then we’ve got a power panel, so members from a lot of our incredible sponsor organizations from the very top levels of those organizations are going to come and talk about really innovative initiatives that they’re undertaking in their organizations and what it really took for them to lead from the C-suite.[]

HG: So interesting — an interesting mix of corporate leaders and business leaders and women in the arts. Rita Moreno, she’s eighty one years old my goodness that woman is a role model for all of us. I can’t wait to listen to her talk. So the conference is called the Next Genderation: Unlocking the Full Potential of Women in the Workplace. Tell us a little bit about why you came up with that concept and exactly what that means.

DMP: So the Next Genderation is all about moving to the mixed era, a new era of gender workplace equity. So it’s all about the transition from now into a new exciting reality where women are equal in the workplace. They have equal opportunities, equal pay, equal access to a lot of things that, we don’t quite have right now. So it’s about — the conference’s is really focused on how we create that new reality.

HG: Let’s talk a little about Lean In by Sheryl Sanberg, who of course is the C.O.O of Facebook. So, she’s got galvanizing women across the, around the world really to this concept of leaning in, and you and I were talking offline about what that meant, and how her book and also her Ted Talk, which was so powerful, just made us so mad because we don’t understand why we’re not equal and why we’re looked down upon or shut off or cut down. Tell us a little bit about, from your business perspective and your career, how that’s affected you and what you think about this concept of leaning in.

DMP: Well I think, you know, what Sheryl has done has been so important because it has really reignited a movement around women standing up, particularly in business. But you know in all sorts of areas in the government and the arts, you know, across the spectrum. And I think, you know, it’s really time for us all to start, you know, to be aware of where we’re at for a start. The awareness is the first, awareness is the first, key to change. And then really to take it upon ourselves to create the change that we need, we’re really good at going ‘well, their organization, that organization needs to change, society needs to change, that man needs to change….’ But you know really, it’s the time I think what I feel from Sheryl’s message, she’s really creating a container for women to be able to stand up and take responsibility for that change happening and stop blaming other people. And you know I think it’s really exciting I think from a personal perspective I’ve been thinking through what I can do myself to lean in or stand up, and what I can do to help other people that I work with, what I can do to help my team, what I can do to help my organization and what I can do to help society. And for myself, I had an idea around an initiative that I wanted to start inside of my organization. And so instead of sitting on that and just sort of suggesting it to my boss in a fairly casual way, I’ve really got behind that idea and I’ve really put it forward in a powerful way — I’ve created the PowerPoints, and I’ve been having the meetings, formal meetings, with all of these people kind of selling the idea. So that for me is an example of, you know, leaning in. I’ve been signing petitions around initiatives, around workplace equity, and also, you know, broader initiatives in society, where, you know, women and I’m around business by supporting women’s causes and things like that. I think I’m a champion of women’s causes, and that sort of thing. So I think each and every one of us as women need to think about what it is that we can really do to create this new reality of the Next Genderation and really do that by leaning in.

HG: That’s excellent, reminds me of Ghandi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” that famous quote. Also reminds me of David Pendleton from Oxford, who we interviewed last month whose book is “Leadership: All You Need to Know,” and he said that women are the new wave of change in the world, that it was in the eighteenth century it was England and then it was the United States in the twentieth, and now it’s not China in this new age, it’s women. So, here’s to that, right? So talk a little bit about Lean-In Circles, I know that’s a big push during the conference. What is a Lean-In Circle? How do they work?

DMP: Well if you go to the Leanin.org website you can set up your own virtual Lean-In Circle. They’re really peer-to-peer mentoring circles, so you can sign up yourself, you can sign up with a team, and basically what it does is provides an online environment and also a structure for you to be able to make your way through educational units and then really talk about those educational units with your friends, the people in your Lean-In Circle; share your experiences around them and learn together. And these are some of the essential skills that, the Lean-In Team has identified that women could get better at to really stick up and lean in here. We decided at the conference that it’s such a powerful concept that we would like to bring it into the conference so with Leanin.org we’ve designed a series of Lean-In Circles that are going to be held live at the conference. So they’re going to be really really interactive, really really fun, and really getting people thinking deep about what they can do to change and then committing to change all in seventy five minutes. That session’s going to be very very powerful — very excited about them!

HG: That’s excellent. Well, we’ll definitely be there to cover it, we’ll put something up on trulyamazingwomen.com so that we can have an example of a Lean-In Circle and maybe get people to continue to join with us. So this is a new era for women. As a professional doing some amazing things, tell us a little more about yourself and your career. You’re from New Zealand.

DMP: I am from New Zealand, I call myself a recovering academic — because I used to run a research center at Victoria University on leadership, and I’m just joking it was an incredible experience and a wonderful, wonderful time to immerse myself, both in the leadership literature and write a lot about leadership, particularly the indigenous Maori was an area of my focus. But also to do a lot of leadership development trainings for women, for indigenous peoples, for business people, and it was a fantastic opportunity. And then I came to the U.S. in 2008 and worked for the East-West Institute, which is [a track 2?] diplomacy organization. So I was in charge of setting up their big global networks, we set up networks of their world’s leading think-tanks, we hosted a lot of different discussions, particularly between U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China. I am the Director of Partnerships at a firm called Future View in Washington DC, and what we do is we create empowered communities of people through communications. We make films, we design human interactions, so people can become very focused on a particular outcome around social change.

HG: Wow, that’s amazing, and you’re thirty-six years young. So that’s pretty amazing, we look up to you. Tell us a little more about the Professional Business Women of California. It’s an interesting organization. How long has it been around, who founded it, and what is their direct mission in addition to having these amazing conferences?

DMP: Well, it is really a remarkable organization. This is my first year being involved with them as the Program Director and I have just been blown away. They’re twenty four years old this year, next year’s their twenty fifth anniversary, and watch out for that because it’s going to be a very special occasion — a lot of really, really interesting things are going to be happening. It was founded by Jackie Spear, Congresswoman Jackie Spear, you know, because she really saw this need for businesswomen to come together and really work together to really create gender equity in the workplace. And interestingly enough, she thought that we’d be out of business now, so it’s really quite [poetic?] that coming up to the twenty fifth anniversary, this movement has been reborn. And it’s just a fantastic organization — there is monthly webinars, there are regional events. The webinars people call in from forty different countries around the world. We have an eLearning Program with very specific content for people who want to learn about PR, for people who want to learn about communications, for people who want to learn about entrepreneurship. So they have six weekly sessions, and yeah, it’s just a fantastic organization and I really recommend that people who are listening check us out on the website, www.pbwc.org, and get involved.

HG: That’s fabulous. Well,we are thrilled to be here covering this conference, four thousand women at the Moscone Center here in California on May twenty third, coming together to talk about Leaning In, The Next Genderation: Unlocking the Full Potential of Women in the Workplace. How thrilling. In fact, we have created an entire radio show on the Inkandescent radio network around this, so people can go to inkandescentradio.com and click on the Professional Business Women of California link, and there you’ll see interviews with all the speakers that are going to be here, of course this interview with Dale, and more exciting things that we don’t even know are coming.
So here’s to leaning in, and leaning in circles. Thanks so much for your time.

DMP: Thank you very much to Inkandescent Radio for coming and covering this event, and making sure that the word gets out and we just appreciate you all very, very much and the wonderful energy and everything that you bring in helping us reach more and more people.

HG: Well, thank you. I love Professional Business Women of California: the West Coast and Beyond. So this is the Inkandescent Radio Network, I’m Hope Gibbs your host and the producer of the organization. We look forward to talking to you very soon and bringing you more from the Professional Business Women of California Conference: The Next Genderation. We’ll talk to you soon.

HG: So that’s it for today’s Inkandescent Entrepreneur show, where we always ask, what’s your story? If you have a good one and would like to be interviewed on the Inkandescent Entrepreneur show, send me an email to hope@hopegibbs.com. Check back every Monday at noon for a new episode of the Inkandescent Entrepreneur show on the Inkandescent Radio Network, www.inkandescentradio.com. We look forward to talking to you next week. Here’s to your incredible, indelible success!