Priya Durvasula, PhD

I attribute my success to hard work and a strong, relentless work ethic, grounded in honesty and integrity. I also place great importance on following through on commitments and leading with empathy in a people-focused way.

The best advice I received was when somebody told me not to keep thinking about just moving upward all the time. When you've just got a promotion, think about moving laterally more, picking up keys. Have a 5 or 6 year goal of where you want to be, like if you're an analyst just starting out and in 5 years you want to be a director of a certain field and area. Figure out what are the keys, what are the different skills and knowledge and experiences you need to get there in 5 years, and chart your career that way rather than just blindly saying I'm here and now I need to get to the next position. Sometimes it may be better for you to just stay where you are in the level and move laterally to another experience, because you may be deep in one specific area at this level, but you may need to get another business area experience and knowledge. Pick up the different keys, and then naturally you will flow to the next level after you pick this next key laterally. Another piece of advice is having a board of advisors, having your personal people who are not just your boss but outside of your immediate chain. Having mentors and people who like you, who see things in you. I've been very active in social clubs, ERGs, employee resource groups, and other activities in a company. It gives you another group, a network, broadens your network, and then you develop relationships. Especially for women, you need your own personal group of advisors who are not in your chain of command, who know a full, broader view of you to help you navigate conflicts.

Think about moving lattrally isntead of up and then naturally you will flow to the next level , have a 5 or 6 year goal - figure out what it will take for you to get there,
having mentors and people who like you and see things in you - get into groups - network and you develop relationships - women need their own personal group pf advisors

The biggest challenge is consistency of data and technology across the enterprise. Getting good data, having harmonized, clean, dependable data is critical. The opportunity is, of course, AI. Those are the two words that are on every leader, no matter what, it's not just technology, it's any leader in any business. I mean, perhaps maybe not the township committee, I don't know, even they're using AI, I'm sure. The opportunity is AI, but the challenge is how do you have consistent process that gives you consistent data that AI can use? Because AI is only as good as the data that you feed it for the mathematical models. In my PhD, I did systems engineering, so I did some high level stochastic math that predicts and is underlying in these AI models now.

The values most important to me are work ethic, honesty, and integrity. Do what you say and say what you do. Absolute honesty and integrity. If you know something, say it. If you don't know, say it. There's no shame, it's the truth. The second thing is work ethic, commitment, and follow-through. Nothing beats work ethic. I think you can be as smart as you can, and a lot of people come to me and say, my God, you're so smart, and part of it is the degrees, but I'm like, no, that doesn't matter. You can be super smart, but if you're arrogant and you're not empathetic and you don't have the skills to first of all work hard and come through, it doesn't matter. So I think those are the values: honesty, integrity, hard work, work ethic, and empathy, being people-centric. Because at the end of the day, it's the people. Now we have AI, but there's people behind the AI too. So inspiring others, motivating, how do you get the work done. The other one I will say is personal power, not position power. Influencing through personal power.