Her Story
About Lori
I've been at BI Worldwide for 11 and a half years as Director of Global Business Development. My entire career before this was in healthcare since college graduation - everything from pharmaceuticals to molecular diagnostics to genetics to clinical research and hospital administration. I was always in business development in those industries. I had this moment where I loved helping the companies I worked at build a culture where people got excited to get up and go to work in the morning. For the most part, we all have to work, so why not make it an awesome place to work? I found BI Worldwide and this industry that really spoke to me by helping companies become best places to work, by driving behaviors to drive business results for companies. I wish I would have found it many years ago, but I'm so happy I found it when I did. Every day is chaotic and completely different. I work with both my external customers on strategy - what are the behaviors and activities they're trying to drive to drive really critical business results - and I work with my internal amazing teams on creating strategy and solutions to support those customers. I work across all industries, which I love, and that's what makes the day different every single day. I learn something new every day, and I'm still growing. Not everyone can say that on this side of their career. It's pretty special. When I get the opportunity to work with a Fortune 50 company and do something for them that they had never done before that affects hundreds of thousands of employees to improve a culture, to develop programs that help people feel recognized and appreciated for the work they do, it's pretty special. I'm so grateful I got to work in the OR and do things that saved people's lives for most of my career, but being on this side of it, we all have to wake up and go to work, and we want it to be somewhere great. It is a huge accomplishment that I've been able to do that with not only one company, but many, many companies.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Lori
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
One of the things that I was taught the most by a mentor when it came to my career was don't just look step by step, but look at kind of the end point. Where do you ultimately want to be? And you almost look backwards of what are the steps you need to take to get to that ultimate goal, and that is something that's always stuck with me. I wanted to be a CEO one day. My priorities have changed, you know, and that happens as we age. But that was something I learned from one of those mentors, and I remember he even whiteboarded it for me to get me to visually understand it.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
This is such an amazing industry for women, because we get the chance to work with the C-suite of Fortune 500 companies and be strategists and be partners. I think advice I would give women, especially working moms, but even if not working moms, is ensure you have a work-life balance. This career has provided me with that. That was always my number one priority, is I could balance family and work. So always keep that at the forefront going into my industry, or any industry. And the opportunity that we get to use our intellect, and we get to use our experiences to help partner with companies to just build great cultures is pretty special.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The challenges that everybody experiences is companies that are merging or acquiring other companies. That's obviously a constant. Global changes, companies that are headquartered within the United States or outside the United States, so the changes globally within the corporate world. Those are probably the biggest challenges, but they're also the most exciting, because no matter what industry, no matter what company, human behavior is human behavior, and that's never going to go away. So the fact that we have the opportunity to really look at the principles of behavioral science, of how do people work the way they work, and how do people buy the way they buy, how do people learn the way they learn - it's a challenge, but at the same time, it's a really exciting time.
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