Um I would like to say hi to everybody out there and thank you for supporting this wonderful cause of completing the 100 K challenge. My name is Carolina Guard. Everybody calls me Carola.And um I've been devoting my 13 years of my previous life to corporate uh being the head of the brain stimulation in Metronic for 10 years. And now I jumped and start a new company based on graphene neural interfaces for the development of a technology that will treat brain disorders. This company is called in brand new electronics and uh I am the only woman. So that's why I'm doing this today because I would like to invite other women to take the chance and to jump as well and be part of this wonderful ecosystem. So I hope that you enjoy the talk. I'm going to share my experience and my learnings with you so we can all progress at the speed we deserve. Of course, with our male colleagues. Let's go ahead and let me see if you see the presentation. Yeah, unfortunately, I don't see now your comments. So I will try to pause. Let me see if I can do this. Um No, it doesn't work for some reason. Um But it's ok. OK. I go, we are going to talk about how to engineer. I have to take some of your questions. OK.

Um I'm going to pause and just let me know where you see when I do. Yes, perfect. Thank you. You're so kind. All right. So after all this time in Mac Tech and when I was made director and I had the responsibility to lead teams. One of the first questions and I asked myself was, can this be engineered, can actually create a team of great performers where you know, we can run together to, to transform in my case, Mette. And I came across two different publications that made me think. So, one of the publications is actually coming from Forbes Clover Pop that says the decision making drives 95% of business performance, right? And certainly when you are in a team as an individual, I mean day to day, we have to make decisions. But when you are in a team is very important to make the right decisions and most important to keep the team together into these decisions, so we can go to a great execution together. So I love data. So I I need to always have data on, on my life. And my and my thinking, another piece of data is that teams make great decisions better than individuals. But teams that are diverse actually. Make better decision than individuals, 73% of the time. And I don't know if you have ever come across with this window of uh wisdom of crowds. But basically, we have individual judgment that creates noise when making decisions.

You know, if we will collect every individual judgment, there's always confusion that when comes together actually in the wisdom of crowds, you know, this confusion and this noise actually gets net out towards the better answer, right? And, and I found that amazing in a sense that it's actually factual and can be replicated, right? So it's it's it's a fact. So if this is all true, right? If decision making is great and obviously women, you know, we can take decisions every day uh in many, many dimensions and teams plus diversity make much better decisions. Why there's only 6% of women CEO S or you know, let alone women in the C suite or other um top management responsibilities, right? So when we look at conferring and we look at the number of women in each of the C suite profiles. So C Os CFO S cio S CTO S CMO S and hr and we look across all the different sectors. We see that in financials and in retail, there is the most amount of women. However, in technology, it's only 5% of the co level, it goes up to 56% on hr but we know that in hr is a world of ladies, which is good.

But you know, when we look at health care, which is my dimension, there's only 1% of C Os and and this was intriguing to me, right? I mean, we are 5050 as a population, 50% women, 50% men. So this is completely disproportionate, um a complete disproportion. Sorry. So the question is why is this happening? You know, and one of the reasons I've been observ serving in my career is that we and I said, we women and men feel safer around equals and therefore we tend to hire people that we like. And usually the people that we like are very similar to us. I remember early in my career, no, the, the people that we interview actually was really like me, you know, extroverted and ambitious. And then I discovered that other people that were opposite to me were bringing incredible value to the team, but I had to make a stronger effort to understand them because for sure, um they were doing things that sometimes I was not able to understand. And, uh, although it took time to understand and then I got a new perspective that was certainly enriching the decision making of the team, right? I don't know if that happened to you. But if you look at some managers and you look at their team, sometimes you feel they are more or less the same.

And then this is one of the quotes from one of the human resources consultants and former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, you end up with this big homogeneous culture where everybody looks alike, acts alike, think alike. And if you happen to do the opposite, you are certainly a disturbing factor, right? And in tech and in Met Tech, this happens a lot. Why? Because originally the culture of metech O tech was very engineered driven, so very male driven and male will hire other males because they will see reflected themselves on those other um characters, right? This is fortunately changing at a very big speed. So we don't have to worry about that anymore. But it's one of the reasons why these ecosystems have been created with very little diversity. OK? And to put some more data into all these concepts, I had the pleasure to participate in an experiment at in e so one of these um nice European business schools where actually we had to do this kind of exercise, right? The the test was that you are sailing solo across the Atlantic Ocean when your judge hits some merge objects and then you are taking on water and drinking rapidly.

And these that you see here on, on the left, on the order of importance in a way that you think that will save your life, right? And we were a group of executives, all of us with a lot of experience and we were put in teams and teams that I didn't know they were pre engineered at that time. I didn't know I was just given a team with some nice fellows. Actually, they were all men and they had to do first individually, the ranking exercise. And then we had to redo the exercise as a team. Right. And then we had to report our scores. I'm going to show you what happened and, and some of these score. So this is real life and this was one of the wow moments of my life, right? So we were nine groups and each of these groups were four people, 4 to 5 people. And the professor without us knowing, as I said before, had preg engineered these groups in a way that group one and group eight will be control of each other and group two. And then you see the colors here, the reds were the meaning the this list of items to be safe in the, then you had in orange, the best individual score based on, on real maritime rules.

So I mean, this is all approved uh by the sector and then we have the group score, right? So if you look at group one and group eight, indeed, they are very similar. The mean individuals are 64 and 63 the group scores are 54 and 52 and the best individual 44 and 30. So quite, quite similar, right? Group two, this is where I was in is also very similar to group nine. And I remember at that time, I didn't know there was a control and I didn't know this was pre engineer. So in my group, there was a sailor. So for sure, we listened to him a lot and I thought he was the expert. So we took some of the recommendations we had to do the group exercise. Then the, the teacher, the professor asked, OK, who was the expert in your team? And we all say, oh, this guy was a sailor. So, so he was the expert. Well, it results without knowing I was the expert. For some reason, I hate I had came with the best answer. So right there, the orange is my best individual answer, right? But of course, you know, the sailor thought he was the expert. Well, this is not the point. The point is that the group when we actually share all our perspectives and we have the sailor in the team improve my best individual score and greatly improve the mean individual of everybody, right?

And if you look at the rest of the teams that were very diverse, but there were three very key important lessons. So first in most cases, teams overperform or equal individuals, again, to the wisdom of crowds, right? You are always thinking and making decisions better within a group.

So most all of the groups actually did better in teams that just individually, most diverse team. So remember I was a woman with uh I think three men, you know, so most diverse team. I was in number two, perform better, right? So if you look at the red, there's a big distance to the blue, right? So we really did better because also we were very diverse and the worst teams. So three and four, no, were the worst and were also very similar as individuals. They were all the same gender, they were all you know, from the same geographical location and and because of this, they could not think better. And I was just astonished that this actually could be engineered, right? And this professor would be able to get right, the controls and also the whole theory. So it is really a no brainer, right? And then we have to be at the great percentage to improve decision making. And indeed a global survey of almost 22 K firms from 91 countries. I mean, I'm choosing data that is representative stated and concluded that 30% of leaders with women, right? Add up to the 15% extra profitability that if you will have a firm with no female leaders, right? So this is no longer a discussion, this is not a fact and we as leaders should gain confidence to actually engineer these teams since we are the the leaders of the future, right? And the present. So how do we get there? How do we change all this history?

And uh in this ecosystem, I have only 33 points to achieve this. The first one is be aware of our cognitive viruses, right? I mean, this exercise about the boat, you know, you will rank these elements depending on how you think you were going to be safe. You were going to be saved by being saved by a boat. You were going to be saved by swimming by rowing. So you will choose different objects depending on your strategy. And your strategy will depend on how you look at the world. So it, you know, if you have a square, you will see the square, you have a circle and you, you know, think on circles, you will end up with a circle is when you combine uh your perspectives that you start seeing things in a different way. And of course, you have to be away your confirmation bias and your anchor bias. And there's a lot of cognitive biases. There is an amazing book by Kahneman, thinking fast and slow that I would really recommend. So you can use your system one and your system two to make different types of decisions. The second one is just do it, just jump, do every single day. Something that scares you and it doesn't have to be crazy. You don't have to jump through a cliff or do you know paragliding? It's about, you know, if, if, if we are let alone, we tend to go home through the same road.

We tend to do more or less the same things on the day, you know, just go to the supermarket and grab the beans jogger, right? Like try new things. Just do it right. Don't be scared. You're never gonna check all the books and the third one just go right. When the lights go out, we learn to see and you just have to be the superhuman and the superhero that you are inside, right? So I want to leave you with these lessons. This is my team. Um There's only one woman and now there's another one coming. Um we are hiring uh we are looking for talented women that want to jump and do something scary every day and of course, transform healthcare. So I hope that you like this and I think we might have time for a couple of questions and I will love so of this. Let me just stop the sharing. I see. I'm reading. Thank you. The number one. The number one was huh was the number one, the number one. yes was the cognitive biases, right? Like always be aware that you have to explore the world in different lenses and sometimes you have to delen we are very much shaped by society, our parents, our professors, our family, we have to get rid of that and start thinking on our own terms, taking everybody's perspectives and having different time frames of reference.

Good. Any other question? I think we still have two minutes. So Lan. Huh. Yes. I mean, remote opportunities are going to be everywhere in every industry I believe. I don't think people will be required anymore to stay and work in a physical place all the time. Um So all our positions are remote. Actually, most of them except for the ones that require manufacturing facility where we manufacture our products. But I am working in Switzerland and the company is in Barcelona. So definitely we have a lady from Bolivia doing some uh protocols in our lab. So definitely remote, don't be scared. Remote is the new future and the current future um imposter syndrome. Um Can you explain Chin a little bit more? What do you mean for that by that? The main projects in in brain are a set of neural interfaces made of graphene which is the smallest material known to men is uh they call it the mercu material. And we are hoping to apply these uh graphene brain sensors in the brain and really understand much better brain signals, individual brain signals and decode these biomarkers of the brain into therapeutic solutions. Yeah, in I want definitely more talented women to join elite real lead.

I want collaboration to happen. We we we actually re invent the wheel a lot and I think it's a waste of talent, resources and time. And of course, you know, a cost of opportunity for incremental and leapfrog uh revolutions to happen. So collaboration, you know, sometimes there are not frameworks that exist where you have to, you know, uh deal with IP and other things. So don't be afraid just make them right? I mean, one of the my inspiring uh quote is the best way to predict the future is to create it. So whatever, there's something that doesn't exist, just make it happen, right? Uh Imposter syndrome. Well, you will always feel you are not good enough and I think that's good, right? If we will be so good, then um we'll have so much confidence that we'll have these egos like uh many of the politicians and many of the men that um I know I also know a very wonderful men with not so much ego that are super effective, but I think you have to have always a little bit of doubt just to keep improving, right?

But not as to stop you, right? You always try and make it happen and learn from it. So, II I always say I never lose either make it or learn, right? So don't feel good enough to the point that you are stopped, just do it and learn and make it better, right? Thank you. Just, you know, go for it. Don't let anybody to stop you. You are your best driver and an engine and just learn from everything you do to just keep being better. And um you are always, I mean, I'm always here at the reach of a click in linkedin. So I'll be very happy to connect with you. And you know, if sometime you want any, any tip from my experience, I'll be very happy to talk to you. Have a wonderful day. Keep contributing to this call to this cause and uh I hope you learn a lot from many talented, wonderful women. Yeah. Talk to you very soon and again, connect me linkedin if you wish. Yeah. Keep it up.