ANITA BORG INSTITUTE PRESENTS THREE TECHLEADERS COAST-TO-COAST WORKSHOPS

USA (SANEPR.com) May 7, 2008 -- The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) today announced three upcoming two-day TechLeaders workshops to be held in May and June 2008. TechLeaders brings together elite networks of women from industry, academia, and government. Workshops explore the future of technology and develop technical women’s leadership skills and networks, while providing resources to help them navigate all stages of their career.

The first workshop, entitled “Power and Influence,” is hosted by Amazon.com and will be held May 21–22, 2008, in Seattle, Washington. Featuring Jo Miller, CEO of Women’s Leadership Coaching, this workshop focuses on extending power and influence as a technical woman through increased organizational awareness, negotiation techniques, strategies to increase visibility, and influence techniques to increase buy-in for ideas. The workshop will feature a panel of senior-level technical women including Nadia Shouraboura, vice president, FC Systems/Ops Tech Coordination at Amazon.com and Rebecca Norlander, technical assistant to the chief software architect of Microsoft, Ray Ozzie. After the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to participate in additional group coaching calls with Jo Miller.

“The group coaching calls are a unique new feature that we have added to TechLeaders program” said Kim McLeod, program associate at ABI. “The coaching sessions not only allow the participants to receive additional training following the workshop, it also allows them to share in each others’ immediate wins and successes that are direct results from the techniques and teachings they acquired at the workshop.

The second workshop, entitled “Strategic Persuasion and Change Leadership,” is hosted by IBM and will be held in Yorktown Heights, New York, at the T.J. Watson Research Center June 3–4, 2008. Facilitated by Nancy Houfek, head of voice and speech for the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University, and Dr. Lee Warren, associate director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, this workshop is designed to provide technical women with skills to succeed in accomplishing their goals in negotiations and meetings as well as with the capacity to use these skills to effect organizational change.

In the first half, participants will be introduced to techniques that people in the theater and in leadership training utilize to effectively communicate. The second half will increase the capabilities of technical women to effect organizational change. The workshop will feature a keynote given by Cathy Lasser, vice president of Industry Solutions and Emerging Business at IBM Research. This workshop is aimed at entry- to mid-level technical women who are individual contributors and/or managers in industry who seek to expand their scope of influence.

The third workshop, entitled “Senior TechLeaders: Leadership, the Final Frontier,” is ABI’s annual by invitation-only gathering of senior-level technical women across industry, academia, and government. It will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, June 30–July 1, 2008 at the Georgia Institute of Technology. ABI’s 2007 Women of Vision award winner Dr. Leah Jamison, John A. Edwardson dean of engineering & Ransburg distinguished professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, will be one of the featured keynote speakers. This two-day workshop helps senior-level women expand their network of senior colleagues and increase their collective impact as a group. Additionally, this workshop increases awareness and capacity of leadership challenges and strengths and helps women create a vision for their career. The workshop will be facilitated by Denise Brosseau, cofounder and president of Invent Your Future Enterprises, and Dr. Frank Greene, general partner at NewVista Capital and president of GO-Positive Education Foundation.

“TechLeaders workshops are grounded in research on the barriers technical women face and are led by world-class facilitators,” said Telle Whitney, president and CEO of ABI. “Working with organizational stakeholders, we find an increase in technologists’ potential to create a positive impact on the world’s women as we help the industry retain vital talent.”

For more information on TechLeaders, visit http://anitaborg.org/initiatives/techleaders.

About the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI)
The Anita Borg Institute provides resources and programs for industry, academia, and government to help them recruit, retain, and develop women leaders in high-tech fields resulting in higher levels of technology innovation. ABI programs serve high-tech women by creating a community and providing tools to develop their careers. ABI is a not-for-profit 501(c) 3 charitable organization. ABI partners include Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Google, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Juniper Networks, National Science Foundation, Symantec, NetApp, and Capgemini. For more information, visit www.anitaborg.org.

Media Contact
Anita Borg Institute
Jerri Barrett
650-857-6095
jerrib@anitaborg.org