W-Women Globally

(The next W.I.N. conference will take place 8-10 October in Prague. The tickets are still available at winconference.net.)

Kristin Engvig is Norwegian. After graduating from Oslo university Business School, she moved to Milan to take a Master’s Degree, “and that one-year stay in Milan extended to ten”. Recently separated, Kristin Engvig now lives in Lausanne with her five-year-old son, Leonardo. The founder of Women’s International Networking (WIN), she coordinates an annual conference attended by some 500 professional women from all over the world.

Below is the article written by Kristin Engvig back in October 2006 in Flair Italia, Mondadori, describing the beginnings of W.I.N. conference and network as well as her own ‘turning points’:

“Spring 1996. Evening. A five-star hotel in Moscow. Opulence abounding under the crystal chandeliers; people enjoying these splendid surroundings. This was my first posting as a freelance management consultant and I was brimming with enthusiasm.
And, yet, the lasting impression of that evening is not a happy one. For, the most striking feature was the sight of good-looking, elegantly-dressed, and obviously well-educated, young women selling their sexual services to the men in the place, the male members of my team not excluded. There was no subterfuge. It was all quite overt.
It was then that I realized that I had been born on the right side of the border. For, being Norwegian, it was merely a matter of kilometers. Not too many more to the south, and my situation might have been quite different. Instead, I grew up in a society where equal opportunities are on offer to all, with women being given priority status.

My dad had a camera shop. I graduated in Business Administration from Oslo university/school of business. I followed this up with a Master’s degree from the Bocconi Business School in Milan. And this is where I made my home.
Not least because, shortly after completing my course, I was hired by one of the leading international banks that have their headquarters in the city. The future looked clear. It all looked so easy.
And yet I gave it up. At age 30, I quit. To go freelance as a training consultant. The thought that I might have made a mistake did, of course, occur to me. To give up the security that goes with working for an top-name financial corporation for a start-up that was exploring new ground did sometimes seem like it might not the brightest idea in the world.
But, deep down, I felt that I would never be happy in the world of banking and finance. The atmosphere was too rigid, too masculine. What do I mean by that? At that time, I would not necessarily have been able to put it into words. I just knew that I did not feel at my ease. There was something missing. In retrospect, I think I know what that “something missing” was. A deliberate withholding of information. It was like, “I am not going to tell you what I know, so only I can gain advantage from it”. In this fashion, knowledge becomes a surrogate of power. Taken to the extreme, it brings everything to a standstill. The atmosphere in the office becomes leaden. Then the whole thing explodes. Leaving behind winners on one side, and losers on the other.
Another eminently male thing is the “old boy network”, a sort of lobby of people with a shared background, who are just not going to let anyone else in. This happens everywhere. Basically, not what you know but who you know.
That whole approach was quite alien to me. I am anything but shy. Indeed, I love meeting new people, making new contacts. But I tend to be spontaneous. When I left the bank, I had an inkling of an intuition: that the secret to having a successful and enjoyable career was not having the “perfect job”, but being a part of a dynamic environment that is creative, and even — at times — somewhat chaotic.

I came to this realization thanks to my membership of an association of professional women who meet in Milan twice a month. We all lived in Milan, but had come from many different countries. We had two things in common: that none of us had a cosy family background to fall back on, and that we all understood the importance of having a supranational outlook.
At that time, globalization was starting to make the headlines in Italy. For most people, though, it was an abstraction. For the members of the PWA, it was what had brought us to Milan in the first place, and what made us sought-after in the job market. These meetings also taught me something else: that I was good at organizing events. These might just be a book launch, or a dinner.
By this time, I had been teaching marketing courses for some time, and felt like doing something different, something a little more ambitious.

Thus was created WIN, Women’s International Networking, the first European-based global women’s business forum (and network). Our objective? To bring together professional women, or those who were aiming to achieve that status, whomever they might be, wherever they might be in the world. To exchange ideas, to brainstorm, each acting as a point of reference for the other. To get to grips with how each of us, as an individual, might make the best of her talents, and of the prevailing market trends.
Our public debut, if you like, was the first WIN conference, held at Palazzo Le Stelline in Milan in the fall of 1998. Success was not a foregone conclusion. We were all keenly aware that saying, “OK, gals, let’s give it a go,” was one thing. Persuading top-class speakers to attend an event that had no track record, as well as getting women to travel from all points in the globe to attend this conference, was quite another. Looking back, the topic we chose: “Winning strategies for women in the age of globalization” seems somewhat over-confident. Sounds like we really had everything mapped out. But you wouldn’t believe the last-minute nerves.
There we were, the evening before, not sure who — if anyone — would turn up. And yet, they came. And magically, we had two days of lively and constructive debate. And when they left, they were all keen to leave their contact details, so they would be sure not to miss the next event. What we all knew was that this was an event that had massive potential for growth.
The WIN conference has since become an annual event, the initial two days extended to three. It has become my full-time job that, I am pleased to say, provides me with an income.

The focus of WIN is almost always women as leaders (whether leading their lives and that of many others.
This year (2006), the conference took place at the Hilton hotel in Rome, and was attended by almost 550 women from 62 countries. This conference has become a complex operation and I have learned to keep my anxiety under control.
I turn 40 in December. I sometimes wonder whether some of the slogans I have used myself are just hot air. Such as, “Going from a profession to a vocation”. Have I managed it? I like to think that I have. I have experienced first-hand that making the most of your talents means, in the first instance, working in an environment that makes you feel good about yourself. That makes it possible to be successful with others. I have also understood that, before you make a change to your life, you have to understand what you like. Once you have discovered that, you have to get on with making it a reality. I appreciate that one needs to be prudent. But it seems to me that too many people (women??) stick with the job they have, despite the fact that they don’t enjoy it very much, because it offers them security. They cut off their own chances for happiness. Taking a risk is good for you. Had I been prudent, I would still be working in the bank.

During the workshops that form part of the WIN conference, I come into contact with many remarkable women with remarkable stories to tell.
Senior managers within multinational companies who invest part of their earnings in charitable organizations, in India or Malaysia, for example.
Human resources experts who have devised ways to help women make the most of their skills.
The conference does not just address business matters, though.
Our friend Meg, from Nigeria, has set up a centre to combat domestic violence.
Likewise our friend Margareth from Sierre Leone who set up a center for Empowering Young Women.
Thanks to WIN, she has been able to raise funds for her cause”.