Executive Search and Leadership Consulting Professionals Convened for the Annual Global Conference

The annual global conference of the Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants gathered more than 135 executive search and leadership consulting professionals from more than 20 countries in New York City for a two-day event on April 15th and 16th 2015.

As the voice of excellence for executive search and leadership consultants worldwide, it is the AESC's promise to provide tools, resources and insights for the profession, to help executive search and leadership consulting professionals operate successfully and to create forums for interactive learning and thought leadership. With this in mind, the association put together an exciting program for the event which focused on critical trends and challenges that are facing the profession, as well as how to overcome these in future.

Lauren Leader-Chivee, Founder and CEO, All in Together, commenced the first day's session with "Inclusive Innovation", where she discussed how diverse leadership yields innovation within organizations. Chivee argued that most companies are failing to be truly innovative due to old practices and out-of-date thinking and so she offered some suggestions on using new leadership behaviors to challenge traditional thinking and enable creativity and innovation.

Richard Dobbs, Director, McKinsey & Co., led a session about "Management Intuition for the Next 50 Years", where he spoke about the disruption caused by technology and connectivity, rapid emerging-market growth and widespread aging the effect that this will have strategy setting and decision making.

Joseph J. Nocera, Partner, PwC, moderated a panel on "New Top Roles: Cyber Security". Panelists included Marene N. Allison, Vice President & Chief Information Security Officer, Johnson & Johnson and Stephen Ward, Chief Secutity Officer, TIAA-CREF. The panel discussed the critical situation regarding cyber security threats and what new executive roles are emerging as a result of this.

Following Nocera's session, a panel moderated by Helena Morrisey, CEO, Newton; Chair, The Investment Association and Founder; 30% Club, focused on "Diversity as a Business Imperative". Panelists included Benito Cachinero-Sanchez, Senior Vice President, DuPont Human Resources, Sheila Penrose, Chair of JLL and Director of McDonald's and Celia Brown, Executive Vice President and Human Resources Director Willis Group. 30% Club members are Chairs, CEOs or the equivalent at companies who are committed to achieving better gender balance at all levels of organizations because they believe this will make businesses and boards more effective. The session discussed the importance of business-led change as the right way forward for all organizations.

Jennifer Golbeck, Director, Human-Computer Interaction Lab, spoke about how scientists and companies are leveraging big social data to develop new insights into customers and what they want as well as how new computational techniques are revealing hidden traits and how this impacts the future of business.

The two-day conference concluded with an interactive workshop led by Andrew Sobel, President, Andrew Sobel Advisors Inc. During this session, Sobel discussed a series of proven client development strategies to help organizations create more leads out of their network and grow existing client relationships and firm capability. The session covered:

• How to "agenda set" so that work is tied to client goals and how to maximize sole-source engagements
• Techniques to reframe opportunities and define the total problem and total solution to create larger and more impactful projects
• Strategies for managing and staying in touch with your most critical relationships in a way that adds value
• Conversational techniques to transition from a general business conversation to a specific issue in which you can help your prospective client