Naheed Chowdhry
CEO
Naheed is a seasoned marketing and commercial leader who has led teams across the world with global blue-chip organisations and delivered results in unexpectedly challenging situations. Her extensive experience across markets has helped her develop an ability to “join the dots” and tell a powerful business story through a mix of insight-based and analytics-driven tools. This engages stakeholders and helps them identify “Aha!” moments to deliver results where many have already given up. In turn, the approach further builds an agile, forward-facing, ROI-driven organizational culture.
Naheed is passionate about bringing this knowledge to tackling workplace gender-disparity with a multi-pronged approach that provides individual and business advantages. In her early career years, concerned by the rate of attrition of women at a mid-senior level, she proposed setting up a daycare centre onsite-and was met with questions of whether she was pregnant. Never one to take no for an answer, Naheed convinced the Board by defining the commercial value of the initiative, thus going on to co-establish the first daycare centre at one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world. Over the years, she faced and overcame many challenges that she now realises were driven by an unconscious gender bias than by lack of competency; however, she knows how lonely a journey it can be and how much this impacts lives of loved ones outside of the workplace.
Naheed’s foresight on this issue is further rooted in her global background, her history of supporting organisations and mentoring leaders and her personal experiences as well as those of her team. Naheed is a member of the UN Women Leaders Taskforce, a Queen’s Young Leaders’ Programme Mentor and a best-selling published author