I spent last week in Osaka with the Cartier Women's Initiative Awards community - it was so wonderful and jam packed that there is very possibly too much to put into one post. I first applied for and won an award in 2011, so this journey has been 14+ years in the making. If you want to learn more, read about the Impact Award announcement here, and head back to the 2011 award here. If you want to head straight to a full video of the Awards, just scroll down!
The first two days we spent as a small group, just the nine impact awardees, learning how to practise integrated leadership. And just what does this mean? "The ability to stretch across your full range of capacities is what the founders call the Unlocking Eve Integrated Leadership Practice. Their research shows that integrating decisiveness with reflectiveness, agency with community, rational with intuitive, and power with empowerment, is intimately correlated with positive business outcomes. The most powerful elements of this time, for me, was understanding that you can and should tap into all your resources; a great leader doesn't choose a small basket of skills to operate with, or just show their more masculine or data driven self, emotion, intuition, reflection and contextual awareness are just as crucial. We have to train all our muscles - the hard ones and the soft ones! And this isn't about gender either - this is about us being whole humans. The program also offered us the chance to spend a lot of time with each other, as a small group or one-on-one, learning everything about each other and our businesses. Movement, eye contact, system mapping.... it was a strong start!
On the third day the full CWI community arrived and we had another packed schedule. There was a session on health and wellness which was curated and delivered by CWI fellows who work in women's health, health diagnostics, and traditional healing methods. We also had an incredible lecture from Sandi Toksvig - which was funny, exasperating and terrifying in equal measure. It was a global roller-coaster ride through the absence of women from history and how this is now entrenched by Wikipedia and the algorithms that are underpinning AI. She is working on a project with Cambridge University to balance the scales, you can find more information here! We finished the evening off with a community cocktail party overlooking Osaka - so the celebrations were really starting to ramp up.
We kicked this day off with a breakfast meeting with Amal Clooney - all of us discussing our goals, challenges, and considering how we could best support each other. Then we headed straight to the Expo, to tour the Women's Pavilion - which I loved because the architect, Yuko Nagayama, had recycled the building from Expo Dubai - and then attend its launch. We heard from JJ Bola, Anna Sawai, Jacinda Ardern, Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamado, Her Excellency Reem Al Hashimy, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, and the finale was an incredible performance by Anna Sato, who performed an original composition "The Flower of the Human Heart", accompanied by the Wadaiko Drummers, youth soloists and international and Japanese choirs. Imagine trying to absorb this experience while on the way for a full dress rehearsal for the awards! Following a nervous run through we went for a casual dinner and found a basement marketplace of bars, three stories underground....
We spent the entire morning with press from all over the world, running through our business models and impact. We had such insightful questions about the fallout of US tariffs, how partnership and collaboration can unlock scale and greater impact, our cultural influences and goals for the decade ahead. It was great to catch up with Karla Martinez De Salas, from Vogue Mexico, that I met years ago in Canada at the Women's Forum.
We headed straight from the press morning to the awards venue, Fenice Sacay, where a team of hair and make-up professionals settled our nerves.
After the months of preparation we all had with Anna Ong and the Cartier team and in Sandi Toksvig's safe hands the ceremony went off without a hitch - you can see the whole thing too!
Don't worry - we made no recording of our own little after party... Karaoke until very late (or very early)... with the unifying song for our diverse group being the classic "Hello" by Lionel Richie.
This day was a real treat - we had an incredible discussion about identity with Karlie Kloss, Candice Pascoal, Kodo Nishimura, followed by a leadership session with Cyrille Vigneron (former global CEO of Cartier and now head of Culture and Philanthropy and the CEO of Cartier Japan, June Miyachi) and then a one-on-one session with our Jury, the lovely group who chose us to receive the Impact Awards.
And as if this was not enough, this was just the morning and early afternoon! We then went to the Osaka Symphony Hall for a special performance, titled Mother Earth. I have to say, I was completely unprepared for how much I would love this! I was in the second row, on the right hand side, and it was clear to see how the conductor, Simone Menezes, was influencing the mood, tone and rhythm. The world premiere of Mother Earth, performed and composed by pianist Fazil Say was so full of impossible sounds, I had no idea that a piano could sound like a skipping rock, or an orchestra could transform into tropical birds, rivers, and rain.
Our final cocktail dinner was at an indoor/outdoor garden - the best place to say our goodbyes AND launch a fundraising collaboration between us and fellow awardee Mariam Torosyan, of Safe You.
I spent every non-scheduled minute exploring, running, swimming, sharing a meal or catching up with a community member, plotting collaborations and ways to achieve more impact, much faster. It was thrilling and tiring and just the best way to usher in a hard summer of work back at the farm.
