Meet Avivah Wittenberg-Cox
Avivah is CEO, writer, speaker, coach, consultant, change agent – depending on the call and the context. She is a global expert on 21st century leadership, gender and generational balance, longevity and the future of work and careers. Avivah is currently spending a year at Harvard as a 2022 Advanced Leadership Fellow researching longevity, gender differences in ageing – and how to manage individuals and teams through the 3rd and 4th Quarters of 100-year lives. Themes summarised in her latest graphic book Thriving to 100 – Through Life’s 4 Quarters.
The Corporate Context
As the CEO of 20-first, Avivah works with organisations focused on capturing the competitive advantages of the future of work and the impacts of changing demographic trends on talent and markets. Author of WHY Women Mean Business (Wiley), and 7 Steps to Leading a Gender-Balanced Business (HBR), she is also a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes, as well as a sought-after speaker with three TEDx talks. Avivah was given a Lifetime Achievement Award for Gender Balanced Leadership by PWN Global, was named one of the world’s 40 Most Inspiring Women Over 40 and was recently featured in a Financial Times article on how women are changing the future of management.
A Personal Note
In her own 1st and 2nd Quarters of life, Avivah grew up in Canada, attended the University of Toronto as a joint Computer Science/ Comparative Literature major, went to Paris for a year and stayed for 30, completing an MBA at INSEAD along the way. Avivah holds 3 passports (CDN, F, CH), lives in London with her sculptor/ magistrate husband and visits her two grown, gender-balanced children, a son and daughter based in Dakar and New York. She is tracking her 60th year, as a Fellow at Harvard, in a weekly newsletter called elderberries.
the team
Martha Christie
Client Relationship Manager
OUR GLOBAL GENDER BALANCE ECOSYSTEM
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our values
Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something – Thomas Edison
- Don’t look to the past for answers, don’t benchmark ‘best practices’ that don’t work. Innovate forward. Invent, rethink, design the future.
If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention – Tom Peters
- Gender is a topic that we are all in the midst of learning about. Embrace, understand and empathise with everyone’s confusion, especially if they are men.
There is little success where there is little laughter – Andrew Carnegie
- Let’s laugh at ourselves, at the world and at the extraordinary, wonderful, absurd things we hear said, almost every day.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake – Henry David Thoreau
- The world has not yet awoken to the importance of gender at every level – country, company and couple. We will have the patience to tell it (and repeat it and repeat it) from the mountain.
Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them – Buckminster Fuller
- We hire genius – and then trust you to shine.
If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves – Thomas Edison
- We believe in introspection, self-awareness and proactive communication aimed at getting us to go deeper, higher and better – together. Radical honesty. With ourselves, and others.
Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you’re right – Henry Ford
- We dream big and deliver stylishly, with a distinct leaning towards optimism.
It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project – Napoleon Hill
- Gender balance doesn’t happen naturally. It takes leadership will and skill. Anyone can learn, but few today know how. Our goal is to get male feminists ‘out of the closet’ and influence other men, and ally with women to build powerful coalitions for change.
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