Priya Durvasula, PhD

I attribute my success to unwavering hard work, 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, for example, if you are starting out as an analyst and in 5 years and you have an aspiration to be a manager or director of a functional area of your expertise. Find out what the different skills, knowledge and experiences you need to get to your 5 year goal, and chart the next steps of your career. Sometimes it may be better for you to stay at the same level and move laterally to learn another experience and knowledge. Pick up the different “keys” and then you will naturally flow to your career goal. Another piece of advice is having a personal board of advisors, comprised of leaders you have worked with, who know you and see your potential who can help navigate conflicts. I've been very active in social clubs, ERGs, employee resource groups, and other activities in a company. It gives you a wider and diverse network, broadens your outlook, and helps you develop relationship outside of your immediate work.

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.