Shefaly Yogendra, Sustainable Growth | Inclusive Leadership

Shefaly delivers inspiring, informative, humorous talks for small (10-30) and large (100+) groups on topics such as better governance, thinking about risk, technology and its impact, startup related themes, inclusive leadership, business futures.

Corporate clients and event organisers can find out more and reach her here.

British state secondary schools wishing to ask Shefaly to speak may wish to contact Speakers For Schools.

Recent talks, panels, and other appearances:

Panelist, Designing for Your Future Self: Happy, healthy and wise, Design Museum, London, March 21, 2023.

Second Opposer, on the motion “This House believes good Chairman are born, not made“, NEDA Global Annual NED Debate, WTW, The Willis Building, London, February 22, 2023.

Panelist, “How to get the best out of your Board of Directors“, Amadeus CEO Event, Institute of Physics, London, January 17, 2023.

Panelist, Talent, Tech and High Performance, CriticalEye CFO Retreat, Monkey Island, Bray, November 10, 2022.

Podcast Guest, Launch Episode, Ten for Ten podcast, Women On Boards’s 10th Anniversary podcast, September 16, 2022.

Keynote Speaker, Bullying in the Boardroom, Governance 2022, Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland, July 5, 2022.

Opening Keynote Speaker, Evolving Governance Fit For Our Futures, Advance HE Governance Conference 2021, Online Event, November 28, 2021.

Chair, The Directors’ Circle: Chair and Board Succession, Women On Boards, Online Event, September 14, 2021.

Speaker, Unusual Pathways To The Boardroom, Virtual Advisory Board, Online Event, August 27, 2021.

Speaker, Authentic Leadership on Boards, Virtual Advisory Board, Online Event, July 9, 2021.

Speaker, Technology in the Boardroom – How tech, talent and data catalyse strategic growth, JP Morgan Chase Innovation Week, Private Online Event, June 23, 2021.

Speaker, The Great Reset, CISEI Seminar Series on Implications of the COVID crisis for Business and Society, Centre for Inclusive and Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of Southampton, Online Event, February 17, 2021.

Speaker, Investment Trust Boards in the Boardroom Insights series, Women on Boards, Online Event, November 24, 2020.

Panel Speaker, Innovating to 2030: The Big Debate, UK Finance Digital Innovation Summit, Online, November 16, 2020.

Speaker, Architecting AI-powered organisations from the bottom-up, The AI Summit London, Online Event, September 2, 2020.

Panel Speaker, Ada’s List ReStructure Series, On White Privilege (Getting uncomfortable with our privilege, bias, and 3 actions to take), Online Event, July 2, 2020 (a recap post is available here; and a 5-min video of takeaways is here)

Speaker, Prime Time@9, hosted by Tech Mahindra for their global leadership team, Private Online Event, June 8, 2020

Expert Panelist, Negotiation 101, hosted by the American Center in New Delhi, supported by Women in Labour podcast and The Wild City, Online Event, June 4, 2020

Panel Speaker, The City in a data-driven world, an Elevate City event, London, January 29, 2020

Speaker, Changes in Corporate Governance code, an NEDonBoard event, London, January 28, 2020

Panel speaker, Future Fit: upskilling for the tech powered future, London, October 8, 2019

Panel speaker, Advisory boards: how to build a good one and manage it well, Girls Just Wanna Have Funds, London, July 22, 2019

Panel speaker, Harnessing the power of data & analytics, BCG FI.Summit, CEMA-WESA, Vienna, March 27-28, 2019

Speaker, CivTech(R): Bringing AI to the Public Sector, Public Sector AI, February 13, 2019 (speaking in stead of Jack Morris)

Speaker, BBC Design + Engineering, January 17, 2019

Speaker, 30% Club & 2020 Women on Boards Event, November 15, 2018

Speaker, Artificial Intelligence: A Case of TCO outweighing the benefits, GRC Summit, November 13, 2018

Speaker on future growth, RBS Growing Inclusive Leadership in Technology – Edinburgh, October 29, 2018

Panellist on future growth, RBS Growing Inclusive Leadership in Technology, October 11, 2018

Panellist, Millennials in the Workplace, Women in Banking & Finance, April 30, 2018

Speaker, Adoreum Thought Leadership Breakfast Series, April 24, 2018

Panellist, Tackling The Skills Gap: AI & us, February 27, 2018

Pitch coach and judge, Hack for social benefit to create a more inclusive social environment for refugee women and children, with NatWest, Accenture, TechFugees, IBM and FriendlyFires, January 26-28, 2018

Startup&Bloom, November 21-22, 2017, discussing startups and boards on November 22, 2017

Growing Inclusive Leadership in Tech, October 2-6, 2017, speaking about future growth and inclusive leadership on October 2, 2017

Finding your way on board, an UPWARD Women London event, September 19, 2017

Surgery: How to overcome self-limiting beliefs and behaviours using what we know about decision-making, May 23, 2017

Boardroom Conversation: Financial Services Boards, February 23, 2017

The Policy Exchange’s launch of the report “Bitter Sweet Success?” – November 30, 2016

Women’s Entrepreneurship Day – November 19, 2016

The Mirror: Our Bodies, Our Selves – October 20, 2016

Female Founders Mentor Day – sold out and waitlisted session on business modelling – June 30, 2016

Learning from Diversity – a talk on National Women in Engineering Day, at Worldpay – June 29, 2016

How She Did It: Dealing with Cofounder Issues – March 10, 2016

Quoted here:

Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland, Governance is a contact sport, June 2022 (full interview available on the link)

“Governance is not a theoretical thing – though, of course, there is a lot of theory underpinning it – it’s is a contact sport. Going from one committee to another, one board to another, the knowledge that you’re gathering as you go along makes you a better board member for each company. You learn from every experience. More people should think about how being on different boards and doing different committee jobs, learning from different operating and regulating contexts, can make us better at the job of governance.“

8am Playbook, Research Professional News (paywalled), November 19, 2021

Is it finally time for members of university governing bodies to be paid? This was a question raised more than once at an Advance HE conference yesterday on “evolving governance fit for our futures”. It follows a year in which university governors have had to deal with the pandemic, post-Brexit changes in graduate recruitment, dramatic shifts in digital technology and new obligations for transparency and accountability placed on them by the Office for Students.

Shefaly Yogendra, vice-chair of the board of governors and chair of the audit committee at London Metropolitan University, told the conference that governing bodies of the future would need not only people with specialisms in corporate finance and human resources but also “deep generalists” able to see the bigger picture, with multidisciplinary skills and experience.

Boards will be competing with the corporate sector for these skills, she said. “We are in the business of exploring challenging ideas, right? Here it is: pay for talent.”

This, she argued, is vital to encourage diversity, a strong theme of the conference. It will help governing bodies to benefit from the perspective of those who have not necessarily had long or highly paid careers and are not living off good pensions, such as young people, women and people of colour. “It is really hard to make the moral case for wanting to benefit from their perspective but asking them to do it for no pay,” she said.

BBC, ‘Mediocre’ male managers are stopping women’s rise, June 16, 2021

Dr Shefaly Yogendra, a non-executive director at JP Morgan’s US Smaller Companies Investment Trust, told the BBC she struggled to find work in finance when she moved to the UK 20 years ago, despite having run five businesses and having two degrees.

“I would continually not get consideration by boards of those same blue chip companies who like to look at validation of other companies before they allow people like me into boardrooms,” she said.

“That systemic exclusion has not ended and it effects a lot of women, especially women of colour.“

BBC, ‘People didn’t believe my CV’, says board director, June 16, 2021

“Some of the other problems…were people asking if I was here legally, that they didn’t believe my CV, or that I was too educated.”

She said women and ethnic minorities face a “structural challenge” in getting a position on boards.

The vice chair of London Metropolitan University, who first came to the UK from India two decades ago, said board-level women often face disadvantages “even before they walk into the building”.

Economic Times, Redefining Capitalism @ Davos2020, January 24, 2020

Technology acceleration and Network effects will create new value sources and business models.

AI led automation is also growing rapidly as is the fear of huge job losses, which runs counter to the idea of broad stakeholder capitalism. Dr Shefaly Yogendra, currently serving on UK Research & Innovation’s AI Review external advisory group, sees this differently. “We have had periods of near-full employment in recent history and we are currently in one, although there is understandable fear of automation related job losses. What history tells us is that jobs change. Some jobs that exist today will not exist tomorrow, but new jobs will be created. This means the real challenge is re-skilling and constant learning and easy access to ways to update skills. Big data for insights and predictions is equally available to policy makers and to those shaping future trajectories in education and skills.”

Innovate UK, The power of the crowd: female-led innovative businesses on networking, June 19, 2019

“But how can you build a meaningful connection with a new contact? explainable AI firm Ditto AI’s COO, Shefaly Yogendra, had this advice:
I dislike the reducing of fabulous human beings we know into a network. So my advice simply is — take genuine interest in the totality of the people you meet, pay attention to them and what they say and what they do, listen to learn not to respond, give before you expect to take, and finally, think long term.
Learn to let go and do not operate a ledger of favours you may do to people. What we give is what comes back to us.”“

Service Now, Can your AI explain itself?, February 12, 2019

““Customers have a right to ask ‘how did you arrive at this outcome?’” says Shefaly Yogendra, chief operating officer of UK‑based Ditto, one of several new companies offering tools that make AI processes and decisions more transparent. “If you rejected my loan application, why did you do it?””

Financial Times, When loneliness at work drives employees to quit their jobs, June 8, 2017

“Shefaly Yogendra, a governance and risk consultant, also experienced virtual-office loneliness, this time working from home with teams in Asia and California. “Office banter is a social lubricant. It humanises people and makes them seem not like robots,” she says. “There is an existential quality to loneliness.” For her, the solution was not to find throngs of co-workers but to “calm the monkey mind” through yoga.“

Announcements:

WITAN: Investegate, January 10, 2023.

HARMONY: Investegate, October 11, 2021.

TEMPLE BAR: Investegate, August 8, 2019.

JP MORGAN US SMALLER: London Stock Exchange, September 7, 2016.

The Financial Times, September 7, 2016.

City Philanthropy, June 23, 2016.

Past interviews:

Masters of Many features Shefaly Yogendra, August 11, 2017.

FashNerd’s Women In Tech series, as part of International Women’s Day, 2017.

How to build risk culture, as part of speaking at Enterprise Security & Risk Management Summit, 2016.