Marianne Broadbent

Greetings from Marianne Broadbent. Writing helps me sort out my ideas and enables me to express things that fascinate, delight, educate, amuse and sometimes annoy me. Much of my writing was about professional things, related to the executive leadership, business strategy and how organisations succeed in gaining value from technology investments. There were probably over 200 articles published in everything from ‘A Grade’ global academic journals, through to conference proceedings, trade journals and regular columns in both global and local business magazines.

My career was a mixture of academic and commercial research roles, particularly Melbourne Business School (University of Melbourne) where I became Associate Dean and a Professor, and Gartner Inc where I held Global Vice-President and later Senior Vice-President roles. These roles gave rise to two books published by Harvard Business School Press – The New CIO Leader (co-author Ellen Kitzis), and Leveraging the New Infrastructure (with co-author Peter Weill).

My professional work over about five different careers has meant that I have travelled quite a lot. Working with Gartner, I effectively commuted for half a month every month between Melbourne (Australia) and Stamford CT (USA) or wherever Gartner had major events around the world.

Over the past 13 years I have been a leadership advisor and executive search consultant as a Managing Partner with what is now NGS Global. I with many executives and managers to help them build and sustain the people part of their businesses. I started to get requests to give talks or workshops that combine my professional and personal life. I have had what is now a 50 year professional career, and together with my partner through all that time, have raised four kids to adulthood and they now all have their own kids. People were asking me do you manage making difficult career decisions? How do you manage trade-offs and career risks? Early on I found these challenging, being much more comfortable on the professional side sharing experiences about ‘stuff’, rather than talking about my personal journey.

Then my daughter Katie shaped the challenge for this book. Katie gave me an empty folio for Mother’s Day. On the front cover was ‘In my Mother’s words’ and the rest was blank. She explained to me that it was about time I gathered some thoughts together about my ‘blended life’ and eclectic career and put them into some sort of order. Hence the writing and publication of my latest book, The Agile Executive: Embracing Career Risks and Rewards. The combines the personal and professional and in that I share quite a lot (perhaps too much . . .) about what has worked for me, and my learning and insights through the past 13 years as a leadership advisor. My ‘guilt-free’ journey as a female executive is not for everyone, but that is just the point – we each to have figure out what works for us, embrace and enjoy doing it.

You can find out a bit more at https://www.linkedin.com/in/marianne-broadbent/ and www.arbiterLT.com and www.ngs-global.com