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Coco Brown: Founder & CEO of Athena Alliance on Board Opportunities and Governance.
Description
(0:00) Intro.
(1:14) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel.
(2:02) Start of interview.
(2:37) Coco's "origin story."
(4:32) Her professional background with HR, comp and IT.
(6:32) Her time at Taos, a professional services business in IT consulting (17yrs). Ultimately acquired by IBM in 2021.
(8:35) The origin story of her founding Athena Alliance (2016) as a non-profit.
(11:00) Three core issues with board placements: 1) access to opportunities, 2) positioning for the role, and 3) how to compete to win. *They have placed ~500 women to boards.
(13:52) On the business model of Athena Alliance.
(16:50) On transitioning from a non-profit to a for-profit model.
(20:56) Distinguishing board service between companies with different capital structures (ie. public, PE, VC, ESOPs, etc).
(22:18) The landscape for independent director board opportunities (~30,000 companies). On ESOP companies and closed corporations and/or family businesses.
(28:18) On Athena's Board Readiness Course.
(32:20) On in-person vs remote work, both on an executive and board level. "How do you scale intimacy?"
(36:14) On the impact of AI in the boardroom.
(39:48) Books that have greatly influenced her life:
- The Popcorn Report, by Faith Popcorn (1991)
- The Science of Evil, by Simon Baron-Cohen (2011)
(43:05) Her mentors. "Different people for different things" e.g. Ivonne Wassenar and Scott Maxwell.
(44:20) Quotes that she thinks of often or lives her life by.
(44:41) An unusual habit or absurd thing that she loves.
(45:12) The living person she most admires. Toni Townes-Whitley (CEO of SAIC)
Coco Brown is the Founder and CEO of Athena Alliance, a company helping to position top 10% of executive women for advancement and board opportunities.
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Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License