Innov8rs Connect on Culture, Talent & Teams

In this panel discussion facilitated by Natalie Painchaud, Director at Innosight and co-author of Eat, Sleep, Innovate, we will hear from Jessica Schneck, Director of Surgical Research and Development at Hologic, Justin Kaster, Growth Strategist and Business Designer at General Mills and Helen Gordon, Senior Director, Global Culture Enablement & Enabling Capabilities at Johnson & Johnson on how they are each reimagining ways of working to unleash the potential of their people and cultures to achieve strategic and organizational goals. The discussion will center on why culture matters, their experiences identifying and scaling desired behaviors and the types of blockers they have encountered. They will share stories about what they have learned about how to overcome these blockers.

Natalie is an experienced strategy and innovation consultant and coach. Natalie has extensive experience developing leaders and has more than 15 years of experience in helping Fortune 500 companies develop the strategies, capabilities, and early proof points required to successfully innovate. Natalie is coauthor of the book “Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization“ (Harvard Business Review Press, October 2020) and is the coauthor of the HBR article “Breaking Down the Barriers to Innovation.” Natalie has been nominated, together with her Eat, Sleep, Innovate co-authors, for the Thinkers50 Fujitsu Innovation Award. Before working at Innosight, Natalie was a senior associate with an MIT-founded executive-education company. In this position, Natalie led a team that developed and presented technology-based prototypes and business cases to hundreds of global CEOs and CIOs who were invited by the sponsoring companies, HP and Oracle. Natalie holds a BA with distinction in Industrial Relations from McGill University in Montreal and an Advanced Certification in Executive Coaching from the Columbia University Coaching Program. Jessica Schenck is Director of New Product Development at Hologic. She has been in medical device R&D for 18 years and has worked on teams that have brought best in class medical devices in the women’s health space to the market. As part of her R&D journey, she was on a dedicated innovation team to expand the Hologic portfolio and worked with Innosight to develop a process that maximizes growth opportunities through both internal and external innovation. Justin is a growth strategist and business designer with diverse professional experience that ranges from corporate innovation consulting to investment banking to startups. He is currently an innovation coach and growth strategist at General Mills, residing within the Morning Foods operating unit.Justin's earlier career included launching and running an early-stage startup accelerator, and roles at organizations such as Citigroup, American International Group, Cherry Tree & Associates, Dover Partners, Paine Webber and AmeriCorps. His work experiences have been diverse, ranging from working on billion-dollar Wall Street transactions to consulting on major corporate innovation initiatives to startup leadership roles. He has successfully launched and completed major initiatives in each professional setting. Justin is fluent in and passionate about lean startup, design thinking, business model design, and a variety of innovation methods and techniques. Helen leads the global team responsible for defining & developing the culture and capabilities to empower mindset & behavior change & cultivate the human enabling skills to shape the cultural evolution in HOW employees think, act & work across the Johnson & Johnson Supply Chain & Enterprise Functions Organisation. Helen has worked for Johnson and Johnson for 19 years and has rich and diverse cross functional & cross geography experience from across the various positions she has held during her career; spanning Sales & Account Management, Professional Education, Organizational Change & Transformation, Program & Project Management, Integration and Acquisition & Divestiture, across both the Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices segments. She is passionate about people and fostering environments which enable every individual to thrive by empowering the professional of today and the worker of the future, through a purpose driven culture built on a foundation of inclusion and belonging which allows everyone to bring their best selves to work