Leena Patel is the CEO of Global Impact Systems, founder of Sandbox2boardroom.com, and a leading expert on helping executive teams worldwide drive innovation and develop a culture of collaboration and inclusion. She draws from two decades of experience as a business owner to design and execute innovation initiatives that capitalize on new business opportunities and secure a strategic market position.

In this episode, Leena shares why leaders need to focus on helping their teams become better problem solvers, how her grandfather’s personal relationship with Gandhi had an impact on who she is today, the logic her Gamulation system that helps participants perform better in high-pressure situations, her personal mission to 4x the number of women CEO’s in Fortune 500 companies, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Leena Patel’s Website
• Leena Patel’s Free Download | 42 CEO Questions to Maximize Your Innovation Initiative
• Adam Grant’s Book | Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Today, I have with me, Leena Patel, who is the CEO of Global Impact Systems, founder of Sandbox2Boardroom.com, and a leading expert on helping executive teams worldwide drive innovation and develop a culture of collaboration and inclusion.  Very, very hot and important topics right now.

Leena draws from two decades of experience as a woman-owned business owner to design and execute on innovation initiatives that capitalize on new business opportunities and secure strategic market position.

Now, part of what Leena does that is really fascinating is Gamulation, which I’m excited to hear a little bit about that.  Hopefully that’ll come up in our conversation, Leena.  But Leena’s voice, this is so fun.  She is a powerful person and she’s got this amazing drive, I don’t know, like can really get to the point and can see through clutter.  I can tell she can just see through stuff and get right to what needs to be done or said.

Andrea:  And so I’m excited to have you on the podcast with us today, Leena.

Leena Patel:  I’m excited to be here, Andrea.  You know, you must be psychic, because I _____ you know, we haven’t had this conversation and I didn’t even know that you felt that way about me.  But one of my gifts that I’ve been told and I’ve known and felt it for decades now is this sort of ability to just get through the clutter, like be able to see exactly what somebody needs to take them to where they need to get to.  And it’s just this ability to connect dots.

I actually want share and talk about that today, but crazy psychic ability that you have there. It’s amazing.

Andrea:  Well, that’s awesome because, you know, I am kind of known for voice.  That’s sort of my thing, like I look for that in people and so I can tell that.  I just know that about you.  So I’m excited to have this conversation.  This will be fun.

So, Leena, what would you say is kind of the core message that really drives you in your business? I mean in your life?

Leena Patel: So, I’ve been on a journey that has evolved over the decades and the place I am right now is…let me kind of just sort of share what’s going on in the world right now.  The core message is to help organizations understand that leaders or the teams that they have…we really need to focus on up skilling everyone to become better problem solvers so that we can connect dots, do what I do, which is kind of help people get through the clutter and help them to do that, to be able to connect dots between different ideas, different roles, and different industries.

And the way that we do that is helping them unleash creativity in themselves and in others and teaching them to innovate but in a very, very strategic way.  I think that’s the way that businesses are going to win in the future.

And why, I mean why is that driving me?  In order to answer that part of the question; I grew up being mentored by my grandfather. I’m not sure if you knew this about me, but his mentor was Gandhi.  And the message that I got growing up from my grandfather was…

Andrea:  Excuse me, when you say his mentor was Gandhi, can you just briefly explain what you mean by that?  Because some of us would consider like authors or activists to be mentors without actually having relationships, so what do you mean by that?

Leena Patel:  So he met Gandhi at the age of 16.  He actually delivered a speech, a talk at his school, and his life changed.  Everything changed for him in that moment and he knew that this is somebody he wanted to follow and he wanted to learn from.  So they actually had a live, in person mentor-mentee relationship.  He was with him for 16 years.  He stayed in his house.

Andrea:  Wow!

Leena Patel:  He was part of India’s move towards creating independence. There’s a whole sort of back story between his relationships.  He was a spiritual activist.  He was a political activist and that was his mission and his purpose in life.  He was in his 30’s at some point.  Basically, the British government kind of forced him to leave India.  And so he moved to Kenya from there, which is where he met my grandmother and they got married and that’s kind of how I came into the world.

But those 16 years of his life were a huge part of who he was, what he stood for, how he showed up in the world, and consequently how he raised us; my mother, her brothers, and sisters.  And how we were raised because we grew up very close, you know, spending holidays, weekends, summers, and vacations together.

And sort of from the age of four, I had a very close relationship.  Two of my uncles committed suicide when I was 4 and 5 years old respectively.  The reason for that was they actually felt like they didn’t have a voice.  They wanted something in their life that they feel they couldn’t speak up for.  And because they didn’t know how to speak up, they didn’t know how to exercise their power and their voice, they took their own lives and that’s a really extreme thing to happen.

But it really kind of anchored into my mind at the age of four without being able to articulate it the way that I can now that I didn’t ever want to do that.  I don’t want to ever live my life that way, and I didn’t want other people to live their life in that way.

So that became the beginning of my relationship with my grandfather and him mentoring me because he helped me to understand these incidents and other incidents in my life in the context of, you know, sort of the bigger picture in what’s going on in the world.  And so leading change, driving change was a big…it’s just sort of felt like I grew up, it’s part of my DNA, you know.  So his lessons for me was to drive change where change is needed, to not be afraid to challenge the status quo, to do it respectfully, do it with kindness and understanding of where people are and meet people where they’re at.  But you and I, individually, and collectively _____ and so that’s been a driver for me in my life.

Whatever I’ve done, and just to sort of give you a little bit of a kind of back story of my professional background, I’ve got background in the arts and sports and entertainment. My first career was as a professional dancer.  That was over 20 years ago.

Andrea:  Which is fascinating though.  It’s fascinating.

Leena Patel:  But there’s a reason I’m sharing this with you because I moved then from the world of high performance into sports.  I started coaching athletes.  I worked with some Olympic level athletes.  I worked and trained with the artists of Cirque du Soleil for a number of years.  I worked with Celine Dion and personally worked with her for many years, over 15 years and her management team and her organization and then move from that world into the world of business.

I started training businesses on how they could bring this elite performance, high performance skill set into their business to drive performance within their team players. And so it’s been this evolution and I share all of this to kind of say that all of these experiences that we have in different areas of our life have led me to this moment of what I’m creating today.

And the realization for me at the time, you know, my whole life would be from sports, to arts, and to business.  I’d start learning about the digital marketing and I’ve learned about tax and accounting.  And I’d go in and learn about, you know, sustainability in the environment.

As I started evolving in business, I created Gamulation.  This is my innovation in instructional design because I realized that people in business weren’t learning the skills they needed to learn. So I came up with a new and more fun and playful way for them to integrate information so that they could up skill themselves quickly.

So the business was going through all this sort of evolution as new skills were being added as I was innovating to adapt to the marketplace.  And I was driving myself crazy, thinking, “Who does this?  Nobody does this.”  Our entire life was taught to zone in and niche and focus on one industry and one specialty, and these are the people that are rewarded.

Here I am learning all these different skills; one, because these opportunities are just coming to me; but two, because I’m genuinely interested in how people do things in different ways.  And I went to a mentor and he said “You know, don’t worry, you’ll figure it out. You’ll figure out how everything maps together.”

The turning point for me was realizing that all of this information wasn’t a limitation.  It wasn’t a shortfall.  It was my secret sauce.  And it’s the thing that leaders today need more than ever.  They’re solving their problems right now in isolation. Yeah, innovation is a hot topic right now in companies because they’re realizing that they have to adapt to new technology, artificial intelligence, things like that.

And so it’s top of mind for like 85 percent of CEO’s innovation right now but then they’re going ahead and bucketing things.  They’re now looking at gender and diversity and figuring out how to put more women in leadership positions and then they’re looking at their sales and marketing teams and figuring out how to help them perform better.  And they’re looking at big data and they’re bucketing all these different initiatives in their company and then sort of wondering why they’re not being successful.

So one of the things that I realized is that if I can actually teach them how to connect the dots between these different initiatives, I can actually draw from the 16 plus industries that I’ve now worked in over the last 20 years and help them to see _____ if they can implement what somebody’s doing over here in the tech space, you know, what somebody is doing in healthcare and in manufacturing, for example.

Now they’re innovating. That’s one level.  So we teach them actually how to connect the dots in a very systematic way to help them get exponential results.

Andrea:  Wow, I love that.  It’s interesting because I can understand the frustration with the idea of having to narrow down not being able to use all the curiosity that’s inside of you.  And yet, there is a way to use that curiosity and it kind of reminds me of Adam Grant’s book, Originals, and how people who are truly original, innovative and all that, that they really are able to draw from a lot of different sources and background and experience in order to bring all that to the problem that’s in hand.

And it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing and that’s what you’re teaching companies to do. I love that!  So what are some of the ways that you do that?  Could you maybe just share with us about Gamulation, this really cool training, or I’m not exactly sure what it is.  I kind of have an idea but I want you to tell us a little bit about it.

Leena Patel:  Sure!  I’ll give you two examples.  I’ll talk about Gamulation since you asked.  So we use that as a tool for actually helping leaders and teams understand or learn the skill they need to do.  So one of the ways that we want, we want people to actually learn faster.  We want them to retain information and we want them to go away and implement it.

Traditional ways of learning have not really served people in doing that.  It just sort of giving people a 10-step process, teaching somebody through a presentation whether sort of passively receiving that information. So Gamulation was really a combination of two different ideas, the gaming world which is so popular today and you know, women, men in their 20s, 30s, 40s utilize that as a pastime to activate and engage their brain.

So the gaming world that has really taken off and millennials, particularly, really connect with this.  I want to bring that environment of fun and learning through games and through play, but bringing it into a business environment so that it was highly relevant. It was highly structured and it helps people to actually retain information so that they could go in and implement it and actually get results.  They could actually get a return on their investment from investing in trainings.

 

So Gamulation is bringing together in the world of games, the fun and the playfulness that’s _____ and the world of simulation which has been around for a 100 years.  And simulations are known and utilized in healthcare and in the military for a long time because they understand that people learn best when you put them into an environment that resembles the environment they’re going to experience.  They’re going to be challenged in.

So the military are going to train in a sort of war zone environment so that when they’re on a battlefield they know immediately how they’re going to respond under pressure and they’re trained to do that.  And I wanted to train people in business in the same way to put them into environments where their skills were really tested and challenged so that they didn’t just sort of know on a surface level, “Here are the skills to be a great negotiator. Here are the skills to be a great innovator and here are the skills to be a great leader.”

But putting them into environments where their leadership skills would be challenged, where their negotiations skills would be challenged, and where they really have to negotiate.  But they have to do it and they’re dealing now with sort of international diplomacy and they’re dealing with contracts, and they’re dealing with time pressure. And putting all this pressure into them to help them see how they’re going to show up when the crap hits the fan, really.

Because it’s easy to be performing at a high level when things are going great, but we’re really going to be challenged and we’re going to make the worst decisions.  And I learned this, you know, this is how athletes trained.  This is how I trained, and this is how I trained other athletes is if you’re going to win a marathon, it’s great to just be like, “Hey, let’s have you running at a particular pace.”  Or you know, “These are the things that you need to be doing to train.”

But on training day, like on the day of the Olympics, on the day when you’re on stage, on a day when you’ve got that really big important meeting going on where the cameras are on you, people are going to be there, there are going to be interruptions, there are going to be audience, all of a sudden your adrenaline is lifted and loosening and you start making crazy mistakes.

So I would train people to operate under high pressure by throwing all these stimulus, distractions, and interruptions at them during the training process so that they learn how to focus even amidst all the craziness and so they wouldn’t be making those crazy mistakes.  And because they were training at that level, when they were put into those high pressure negotiation environments or they had to make difficult decisions or teams are falling apart, business deals are falling apart, they didn’t crumble under the pressure.  So they made sound business decisions that ended up saving their business, you know, sometimes millions of dollars of revenue depending on the organization.

Andrea:  Wow, that’s really interesting!  And then you said that you were going to talk about something else too.  What else is on your mind?

Leena Patel:  So yeah, that’s how I’ve used Gamulation as a tool to train leaders and teams.  And it’s simply a tool, a mechanism for helping them get to their goal faster. You’d asked what kind of example of how I’m sort of helping companies do this.  One of the things that’s really been huge for our business this year is helping leaders not only sort of innovate in terms of what they need to develop in terms of new product ideas or their processes internally, but as I particularly focused on the entertainment sector, the tech sector and those sort of big, big areas that I focus on.

And there’s a big conversation, I’m not sure if you’re aware of right now, but diversity is the big conversation that’s happening in these spaces where they’re really wanting to focus and bring more women into leadership.  There’s a recent initiative by the ex-governor of California where there has to be at least one woman on the board and three by 2021, I think it is. And so that companies and businesses are sort of scrambling to put women in leadership positions to “meet that quota.”

So the gap is that these women are not necessarily trained for leadership positions.  They haven’t been given a skill set and so what we kind of have them do is help them to really align.  We go into companies and say, “Instead of focusing on your innovation initiative in one bucket and then focus on growing women in leadership and growing your diversity team in another bucket, let’s bring them together.  Let’s actually help your women, your potential like women that you’re grooming to step into leadership positions.  Let’s really help them to understand your company’s long term goals and utilize and leverage their innate skills and abilities that they have as women, that they have coming from these diverse backgrounds to actually forward your company’s goals.”

So now they’re actually adding to the bottom line revenue of the company. Now, we’re also going and teaching these women not only like use your skills to help the company innovate and drive revenue, but we also are going to teach you actually how do you position it. Because women and men think quite differently as we teach them actually to how they make the business case for their ideas so that they’re speaking the language that men understand, right?

So now, they’re setting themselves up for success because they’re helping the businessmen.  They’re setting themselves up and positioning themselves for leadership skills and leadership positions.  They’re learning how to ask for the money that just they want and not that they’re owed.  I mean, they’re not just saying, “Hey, you know, what, let’s promote more women because it’s the right thing to do.”

So we’re moving beyond kind of tapping into people’s moral consciousness and saying, “Look, this is not only the right thing to do, this is helping us, this is helping you _____.

Andrea:  The strategic thing.

Leena Patel:  Strategic.  It’s really strategic.  So women are getting promoted.  They’re getting the money that they’re due, the respect that they’re due.  They were setting the business up for success.  It becomes a win for business, a win for the women and win for the cause, and so that’s an idea.

This is one example of how it really strongly bringing together two areas.  You know, bringing together the tech space, bringing together innovation which is needed in every industry right now in order to really be prepared for the future, and then bringing together this initiative to drive women in leadership and uniting it together so that it becomes a win, win, win.

Andrea:  Uh it’s fantastic.  Yeah, I was noticing that with some women.  I spoke at a conference recently with women and we were talking about portfolio building and building business case, just not exactly, but similar to what you’re talking about.

When I was doing some research around that before the talk, I kept hearing from other people that were in executive positions that women don’t come to the table to ask for more money as often as men do or they don’t ask for as much more money in their salaries as men do.  That’s just generally speaking of course.

But you know things like this that you’re talking about that I think across industries, women need this kind of training.  They need to know how to bring all those things together and think strategically and be able to communicate in that strategic way, yet bring all their empathy and ability to connect to the table.  It’s so huge right now.  I just think that’s a fantastic thing for you to be doing with companies.

Leena Patel:  Yeah.  Really, for me, it’s so exciting because I’m speaking literally like a couple of times a month.  I’ve been speaking at women’s conferences where I’ve been going into companies and sort of helping them to actually introduce this idea to them and actually how we can implement it within their company.

And I’m talking to these women and it’s amazing while these companies have women’s initiatives and women’s groups and employee resource groups within the company.  The very fact that they’re looking at their initiative separately and there’s not this sort of alignment and communication between the different business units and all the way sort of down from executive leadership, all the way down the company is massively hurting them.

I actually looked into this and I found that like the research and the data shows that literally just by making this one shift, they get their goals.  I think it was like 38 percent faster, like just because of this alignment and just by bringing two business units together, like sales and marketing.  Just by aligning people, their revenue jumps up 20 percent.  That’s one shift they need to make.

And so for me, it’s so exciting to go and talk to these women and really listen to what it is that they need.  You know, their self confidence has been really burned for a lot of women just being in that working environment.  So helping them build that up by teaching them that the natural skills that they have, like building great networks, building relationships, this ability to problem solve, or multitask; when they apply that strategically to the company’s goals and how to do that and put it together in a business case that really make sense for the company, makes sense for them, it shifts them in such a huge way.

So it’s super exciting for me to see that transformation.  My personal goal, my personal vision right now is to see more women in leadership right now in the Fortune 500 companies.  There are 25 CEO that are women and I want to get that to a 100, like that’s my personal goal and my mission by 2025 and that’s a pretty huge, pretty huge endeavor.

But to tap into those, those Fortune 500 companies and help them to actually not just make that number that women are in leadership, make it like, “Hey, I’m hitting my quota,” but no, this is the right thing to do because now we’re truly leveraging the value that they bring and we’re utilizing it to open up new market spaces and drive revenue to the company.

And by the way, people are feeling great because they’re being heard and acknowledged in the workplace and what a magical thing that you can make money.  And you know, you can serve your bottom line and your people are happier for it and you’re doing some good in the world at the same time.

Andrea:  Leena, can I just ask you a really blunt question?  I’m going to forewarn you.  I should’ve forewarned you but I am, what makes you think that you have the ability to get to 100 CEOs by 2025?  I want you to be honest because I’m excited to hear your answer.

Leena Patel:  So it’s 25 now.  There are 25 female CEOs in the Fortune 500 right now, and I want that number to be a 100. That means it’s got to like _____ in the next seven years.  So I’m speaking to a number of senior leaders in Fortune 100 companies right now. Actually, there are about four companies, if not five.  I’ve got two calls scheduled next week in the Fortune 20, in the top 20.

So I’m going out and we’ll be like making it my mission to talk to and make connections with the influencers because, you know, those companies like when they initiate these changes, it becomes a ripple effect.  And the other companies, the medium sized companies and the small businesses start to follow over time.  But they’re looking to these big companies, the influencers as kind of leaders and sort of paving the way.

So my decision was, I’m just going to go straight to the top.  I want to work with the people that are out there, driving change.  They’ve got incredible products and services, they’re offering to the world, and they want to be that _____ in the next 5 to 10 years.

The world is changing so quickly right now that they need to be on top of it.  They need to be on top of it in terms of how they’re innovating, how they’re connecting with their customers, the customer service that they’re offering, and the way they’re treating their people.  And they need to consider all of this and sort of put this on the table and then be strategic in putting a plan together so that they’re heading, they’re checking all these boxes.

Some of them are doing a great job, but a lot of them, the great companies right now that are doing so well are really struggling.  They make great products, but they’re really struggling, for example, right now to support their women.  They’re really struggling with understanding how do we work and drive this initiative forward without affecting their bottom line revenue.

And they haven’t cracked the code and part of it is because they’ve been in the tech space for so long. They’ve been in one mindset, which is what we’ve been talking about today and earlier.  So kind of going and saying, “Hey look, I’ve got this other perspective.  I’ve got this experience of being able to like draw knowledge from other industries and I can help you connect the dots so that now all your initiatives are aligned and you’re moving, your ship is moving in one direction and your people are behind you.”

So while I don’t see it as an easy task and, you know, for one minute I think I’m arrogant not to think I singlehandedly would be able to do this by myself.  I think it’s going to take a lot of people jumping on board with this idea and kind of recognizing it.

Our firm, personally, right now is really focused on reaching out to these companies and helping them to understand and we’re getting interest and movement and traction. So I’m really excited to see how this is going to sort of start to cascade over the next 12 months.  And, sorry, just what kind of vision is to bring other people onboard and help them to sort of say “This is what I’m doing, like if you want to help and you want to jump on board with this, let’s do this together because this is something the world needs.”

Andrea:  Well, it sounds like to me, it sounds like number one, you have confidence because you have lots of positive successful experiences.  They’ve built up overtime.  You’ve worked with tons of different kinds of people.  So number one, you have confidence.  And number two, you have purpose.  This thing that’s driving you and this is just me kind of my observation of what you’re talking about and why I think that you are going to make this happen, but also because you have this purpose.

You are so driven because you believe in the reason why it’s important and you care about it.  It’s something that you want to see happens and you care about voice, you care about, you know, all these things that have kind of happened to you in your life and this huge purpose is like backing you up to.

So it feels to me like you’re unstoppable.  It feels like you’re going to make it happen and not because you just think you’re all that, but because you care and you know it’s the right thing.  You know it’s going to be good for them and so you’re going after it.  And I just wanted to point that out because I love it and I think that it’s going to happen, yeah.

Leena Patel:  Thank you.  I appreciate that.  I know it’s a long journey and it’s taking action every day continuously reaching out, even when people don’t see the value in it or don’t see that it’s top of mind for them today, but continuously pointing out “Here’s where the world’s heading and you’re either going to jump onboard today and start strategically planning for the future or you’re going to be back peddling and catching up in five years time because your competitors have taken the leap.”

And you know, it’s so interesting for me that the people, the companies, specifically companies within the Fortune 50 that I’m talking to right now, the ones that are responding and wanting to initiate this conversation and learn more, are the ones that are actually already doing amazing things in this space and they want to push the needle. And it’s fascinating to me that the people that are already doing great or like the ones like “How can I be better, what can I do differently?”

And the ones that are kind of struggling in this space but they’ve got a multibillion dollar company, they’ve got something that’s really awesome and everyone is using and utilizing their product, they somehow think that because I’ve got this awesome product, they actually don’t need to innovate on their people.  They don’t need to change their culture.  They don’t need to, you know, kind of focus on taking care of things and they’re missing this whole thing.

And I’m like, “Wow, this is amazing that they’re operating in this way.”  And so my kind of goal is to just educate and maybe just to open the window and kind of what could be possible for them if they look at their business from a different perspective.  And if they see that a lot of these companies, some of them are goals driven and they understand that and a lot of them aren’t.

So, you know, part of being strategic is helping them to understand that this is actually going to have a positive bottom line effect.  But my end goal is to drive them towards understanding that it can be a win win. They can build a great company. They’re building a company and future proofing that company by thinking in this way.

But they’re also, eventually, using their influence and their power to create some good.  And creating that good in their workplace and the environment and the culture they’re building, creating some good in the community that they can now kind of impact, creating some good in a world by solving bigger problems in the world.  So that’s sort of my, you know, sneaky end goal is to sort of help them to use their power and influence for the better.  And I think that, you know, it kind of becomes a win win for everyone.

Andrea:  Yeah. What would you like the listener to take home with them today?  Of all the things that we were talking about so many important nuggets, but what’s something that you would want to leave with the listener today?

Leena Patel:  The number one takeaway, I want people to get as that now is the time to cultivate creativity amidst this chaos.  Now is the time to take action, to take risks, to up skill yourself, to up skill your people.  Gandhi said we need not wait to see what others do.  So taking those risks, even though it feels challenging, you know, to lead the way in your industry and lead the way for the future.  Take that action.

Andrea:  Hmm OK, so this has been great.  This has been fun to hear and inspiring for sure.  Leena, how can people connect with you, and is there anything in particular that that you would like to point them towards?

Leena Patel:  Sure, our company website is Sandbox2Boardrom.com and that’s Sandbox 2, the number two boardroom.com.  And you can definitely connect with me there.  I’d say that, you know, wherever you are in this innovation journey, whether you’re just starting to think about innovation or you already got an initiative in mind that you want to develop or that you’re developing, or even if you’re an expert and you want to be stretched and challenged so you can continue to push the boundaries and lead the way in your industry, you want to start by changing the way that you think.  You want to start by getting better at solving problems.

One of the ways that you can do that is by asking more powerful questions.  And I have a resource for you that will help you to identify the blind spots that your organization could be overlooking.  So no matter if you’re at that C-suite level or if you’re a senior leader or you’re an aspiring leader of rising star, just train your brain to be a better problem solver and think differently will kind of move you _____ along that journey.

So this resource, you can download from our website, it’s a free resource code 42 CEO Questions to Maximize Your Innovation Initiative, and it’s going to help you to just think about questions that you may have missed that will help you to move things forward, to think more strategically.  And you can access this free resource at Sandbox2Boardroom.com.  Again, Sandbox2Boardroom.com/gift and that’s for you as your resource to just start getting moving forward your initiative.

And then I invite those _____ sort of looking to be more, if you’ve got an initiative coming up in the next 60 to 90 days and you really sort of want to move things forward and strategize to connect with me directly, I’m happy to give you some ideas that can really kind of move that forward for you a little bit quicker.

Andrea:  Excellent! OK, I love that, the questions. This is going to be fun.  So, we’ll make sure to put all that in the show notes as well at voiceofinfluence.net.  Thank you so much, Leena, for being here today and for what you are and are going to do in the world.

Leena Patel:  Thank you for having me, Andrea!  It’s been such a pleasure speaking with you.