More than 650 past and current women students at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management staked claim to a bigger vision of their influence and leadership at the Kellogg Global Women’s Summit, October 22-23, 2024.
The theme of this year’s Summit — hosted in the Kellogg Global Hub on Northwestern’s Evanston campus — was “Own What Comes Next.” With this event, the Summit seeks to advance women’s leadership through education, inspiration, networking, and mentorship.
“We are on a mission,” said Ann M. Drake in her introductory remarks. “Owning what comes next means not waiting for someone to give us a direction, but instead charting our own path. It means steering by the stars we choose and taking full responsibility for the outcome.”
As she opened the Summit, Kellogg Dean Francesca Cornelli noted that women now comprise fully 50 percent of Kellogg’s full-time MBA program students and 46 percent of students in the Executive MBA (EMBA) program. Yet once they leave school, women continue to lag behind men at the C-suite level, on corporate boards, and as government leaders.
Kellogg’s Summit aims to close that gap by giving more women the tools and confidence they need to realize their potential and advance toward the top.
To explore how, speakers from business, academe, technology, the entertainment industry and more talked about ways women leaders can overcome different obstacles. Some challenges come from a lack of experience or knowledge; when faced with the unknown, advised SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynn Shotwell, accept that “failure is incredibly important. So, fail fast and often in the development stages,” she said, knowing that’s part of growth.
Other obstacles for women are self-created, said Ellen Taaffe, Clinical Associate Professor of Management and Organizations plus Director of the Women’s Leadership Program at Kellogg. Her research on women in the workplace has shown that many female executives hit a point in their career when they hesitate to seize the next opportunity because of self-doubt. Her session on confidence underscored that “you’re more ready than you think.”
Another theme of the summit was the value of women’s networks for empowering women at work. Recent research shows that both women and men benefit from networks, but women especially need a combination of smaller support groups as well as larger networks.
“I’m passionate about networks, particularly for women,” said Ann Drake in her remarks. Recalling her own days in the EMBA program, she added, “The people I met and the relationships I built at Kellogg changed my life. They influenced my career. They gave me courage when I needed it. They steadied me when I doubted myself. They celebrated with me when I won. They were my personal force multiplier.” Ann urged every participant in the summit to “grab the richness here” by adding to their networks.
In a closing virtual keynote conversation with Dean Cornelli, Oprah Winfrey reframed the Summit dialogue on accomplishment and influence. “Your legacy is not one thing,” she said. “It’s every life you touch. It’s the way you are and the way you are being every day.”
Former Kellogg Dean Sally Blount launched the annual Global Women’s Summit in 2018 when she was the first woman to lead a top-level business school in the U.S. She got the idea for the summit, she has said, when she met with other business school deans in 2014 at a White House conference. They were exploring ways to better educate students for success in the new global workplace. Women, they acknowledged, were going to play an increasingly significant role in that emerging workplace.
Underlining her commitment to advancing women’s leadership now and in the future, Ms. Drake helped underwrite the 2024 summit at Kellogg with a generous donation.
“Summits are about reaching the highest level of something,” she said, “because at the summit you see things you can’t see in the daily scrum. Use this time to lift your perspective,” she added. “We are here to own what’s next. But first we have to dream it.”