Nancy McKinstry was appointed CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board of Wolters Kluwer in 2003 and is regularly included in annual rankings of the world’s top leaders. As one of the most powerful women in business, Nancy McKinstry has been honored by Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women, Fortune’s Global 50 Powerful Women in Business, and the Financial Times Top 50 Women in World Business.

Mrs. McKinstry engineered a successful transformation of Wolters Kluwer into a forward-looking, customer-focused information services organisation for professionals in the areas of legal, business, tax, accounting, finance, audit, risk, compliance, and healthcare. She is leading the organization as it carries out its 2010-2012 strategy for Maximizing Value for Customers.

During her speech, which marks a highlight event in the 2010 program of EuropeanPWN-Amsterdam, Nancy McKinstry will share how the global, market-leading information services company is implementing innovation in its portfolio of products and services for professionals, based on the foundation of the company; deep customer insight and understanding. The company’s long-term strategy is focused on maximizing value for customers and is based on technology and innovation to drive success for the company as well as for its stakeholders. Moreover, innovation is embedded in the talent management strategy of the company to foster leadership.

The program will take place on 16 June 2010 at the Amsterdam Renaissance Hotel (Kattengat 1, 1012 SZ Amsterdam) and is scheduled to begin at 20h30 (8:30 p.m.).

Members: free and are required to pre-register. Guest fee: EUR 25.
Please sign up now through: http://bit.ly/doWNQQ

ABOUT EUROPEANPWN-AMSTERDAM

EuropeanPWN-Amsterdam is a not-for-profit, volunteer run, networking association for internationally operating professional women based in The Netherlands. The association offers an open online and offline platform for members across industries to communicate, develop and share expertise through organised meetings and informal networking sessions. EuropeanPWN-Amsterdam is a member network of European Professional Women’s Network, which connects more than 3,000 members across Europe. The Amsterdam City Network combines the knowledge and expertise of approximately 300 women – senior professionals, corporate directors, entrepreneurs, government leaders, and top executives alike.

It’s fun and it’s feasible to be more active in the network. Also if you hold a full-time job and need to juggle family commitments. It’s all about sharing the workload. We all hold fulltime jobs, and still we make it happen. Because we think it’s important, because we have fun together and because we take inspiration from our peers’ “can do” mentality.

We’re looking for new board members, committee leaders and committee members. We need your help.

Our goal is to keep up our high level quality and frequency of Programming that our members have become accustomed to.

The Federation’s ambition to grow to 5,001 members by the end of 2011 (60% growth). The Amsterdam City Network is serious about following suit.

To meet these ambitions and growth targets, we would like to ensure we have enough volunteers in our Programming Team, we need workshop leaders, new people to assist the work on the Amsterdam and the Federation Web Platform, volunteers to contribute to our membership retention and recruiment strategy. Perhaps you attend many of the social events and wouldn’t mind contributing to the organization of our Borrels. We are also in the look-out for a new Treasurer. Tip, our current treasurer, has done an amazing job and would like to make sure a successor is in place at the end of her tenure.

In short, we need you too. Contribute to the challenge – join our team of enthusiastic volunteers.

Did I mention that it’s fun and feasible?

Contact any of your Amsterdam board members today to chip in! Together, we CAN staff it, I’m sure.

Magali writes :  “Thank you so much for all your congratulations. I am awed to be part of such a wonderful organization and would like to thank you all at EuropeanPWN!  Special thanks go to Jennifer Varino who has been giving me her unconditional support since July 2009 and to Marijo Bos who has brilliantly negotiated this great scholarship!”

On behalf of the Amsterdam City Network, we once again congratulate Magali and we wish her all the best in completing the International Executive MBA June 2010 program, English track.

The IE-EuropeanPWN Scholarship Program

According to Margarita Alonso and Celia de Anca, professors and leaders at IE:  “We want to obtain from this partnership, open dialogue with top-level women professionals who want to make a career breakthrough by using top-level business education as a key component of their career progression strategy. This program is a way for us to do this and help them financially. A key factor for choosing to partner with EuropeanPWN in the EU to attract Masters degree candidates is that we believe EuropeanPWN’s leadership has what it takes to maintain and continue to grow a professional and credible organization. We look forward to developing a long term partnership, which benefits both organizations.”

It is because of the notable growth of the network over the past few years to a community of 17 strong networks made up of outstanding professional women that we are the recipients of this generous scholarship program. We want to thank you for making this possible and encourage you to apply and participate in this process.

Please contact any of the Amsterdam Board Members for further details.

The Rising Star of the Year Award will be awarded to a non-board level individual whose initiative and determination has made an exceptional contribution to the success of their business over the last 12 months. They will also have demonstrated exceptional ability to make a difference when working with clients, suppliers, colleagues and stakeholders.”

If anyone deserves to win, it’s Marijo.

We can make that happen. Our Federation connects 3,500 professional women across Europe, many of whom are linked through Linkedin. We should be able to mobilize enough support to surpass the top of the leader board, the felllow who currently holds 931 votes… right?

Voting is easy, follow this link and click the red box: http://bit.ly/3QUnb7

We all stand to gain. How?
Each winner will receive a free year’s subscription to Cisco’s WebEx. It’s Marijo’s great wish to use WebEx to connect all of our growing networks at EuropeanPWN.

Need we say more? What an opportunity for all involved!
May we count on your support too to get the word out?

Vote for Marijo today, and please spread the word.

Now-a-days membership in an organization is fairly fluid, in that we have a “rolling admissions” process. There is no fixed “apply by” date – so the membership database is constantly being updated. For the purposes of this data analysis – a capture of the membership data was taken in November 2009. Some of the data has previously been described in the December Newsletter article.

Amsterdam’s membership in 2009 totaled approximately 303 members and is distributed amongst the five categories.

We come from 36 different countries (43 if you include our second affiliation – dual citizenships). A representative distribution in percentages of those reporting data is show below. 214 of our 303 members are included in the following diagram:

Slightly more folks report their nationality as compared to their year of birth. Age is under reported in our database, however the distribution of reported ages is as follows:

Corporate Sponsors of the European Professional Womens Network in 2009 included the pan-european and global companies: Orange, IE, Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Sodexo, Mercer, AON, Alcatel-Lucent, Mexx, BNP Paribas. Their financial and in kind donations to the network in the form of memberships, venues, speakers, and technologies are extremely important to sustain the organization and to augment the programming. In Amsterdam the 51 individuals making up the Corporate Member category are distributed as follows:

The distribution of participating partners is known to vary by city. This data applies only to Amsterdam in the 4th quarter of 2009.

Below we would also like to look a bit more in detail into the composition of each of the membership categories.

Here we see that the “sponsoring” Corporate members (51) are one third of all participating members from large corporations (144) so actually this figure could also be drawn as follows:

The majority of our Members find the EuropeanPWN network “on their own” – this is to say, they are not officially corporate members, they are not students, they are international and Dutch born business women looking to network “cross” B2B borders. Of these Members, nearly half of them work at companies that are considered to be large corporations (90) but participate as individual members and not as part of a corporate sponsorship program. There are also compositional differences in the corporate members from sponsoring organizations and from corporate members that find us by their own affiliations.

As you can see all of our Executive VP's and C-level members come from our "regular" membership

One third of our total members (93) direct, own, or work in smaller companies and enterpreneurships. In this “Independent” category 20 % are business owners/directors, 15 % experts (doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers), and 51 % are consultants and/or coaches.

Honorary Members number three in Amsterdam. Our Honorary members are chosen by a unanimous vote of the Board of Directors. Amsterdam honors founding member Agnes Benjamin, Advisory Board member Annette Nijs and Pauline van der Meer Mohr. Josephine Green one of our past (and founding) members of WIN in Amsterdam, is Senior Director of
Trends and Strategy at Philips Design she is an Honorary Member to the Federation from it’s beginnings in 2005.

MBA Student Members. Amsterdam has a strategic alliance with Erasmus University and offers memberships to students in the Rotterdam School of Management and MBAOne programs. This alliance in addition to membership also includes supporting joint programming initiatives. In addition to drawing upon our membership for speakers, panel participants, and guest lecturers, MBA students also take advantage of our mentoring program and publications series.

The last category – is the “staff” designation. This designation at the moment is reserved for the Board of Directors but other times in recent history has also included non-board positions such as Mentoring Coordinator, Webmaster etc. Amsterdam is organized 100% by volunteer efforts. We had no paid staff positions in 2009. Our Board of Directors in 2009 included: Rieke Smakman, Lucia Lloyo,Tip Atkins, Camilla Bjorkqvist, Judith Dieleman (first half of the year), Caroline van Leuven (second half of the year), Clara Ko, Katharina Pohl, and Anna Farrenkopf

The assembly elected Marijo Bos and Rieke Smakman as Presidents along with Susanne Forsman-Hey, as Treasurer of the Federation and Sandrine Joseph as, Secretary General. Marijo, Rieke and Susanne served as Presidents of Madrid, Amsterdam and Nice respectively. Furthermore, Monica Pesce will continue in a Federation leadership role as a VP now focusing on Women on Boards, Karine Heckmann as VP New Networks and Ana Baranda and Malika Mir sharing the VP Technology role. Strategic Partnerships will be led by Marijo Bos and Marketing, Public Relations and other appointed leaders will be announced shortly.

The leaders of the networks reinforced EuropeanPWN’s values of win-win, generosity, and a focus on excellence and co creation of initiatives across networks. “One of our continuing priorities is to broaden and strengthen our strategic partnerships offering visibility on key initiatives at the European level while ensuring there is a strong local presence and connection with members across the local networks,” said Marijo Bos.

Rieke Smakman added, “It’s also a key priority for us to create even more opportunities through connecting, knowledge exchange and support across our networks since this is one of the great benefits of being part of a network across borders.” They both added, “it is a privilege to continue supporting the progress of women in business given the strong foundation that the outgoing board and the champions of this network have created.”

The new EuropeanPWN Board is pleased to serve as a facilitator of the exchange ideas and experts across networks, ensuring inclusion of ideas and support from local networks on the federation’s overall strategy and key priorities linked to this strategy. There will be a continued focus on achieving a high level of excellence for all of our stakeholders.

The outgoing board was responsible for achieving impressive expansion of the network and programs, now consisting of 3500 members across 17 city networks. Please follow this link to learn more about the numerous accomplishments under the former leadership and their outgoing message of support as we make this transition. Thank you to Mirella Visser, President since 2007, Marie-Claude Peyrache, Secretary-General (VP Corporate Affairs from 2007 – 2009), Brigitte Pichat-Sese, Treasurer (since January 2007), Therese Torris, VP Website Strategy (also VP Mentoring from 2007-2009), Annalisa Gigante, VP Women on Boards (since June 2007), Marijo Bos, VP Corporate Affairs (since June 2009), Monica Pesce, VP New Networks (since June 2009).

Twenty-one of our members gathered at the Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam on 27 January 2010 for New Year’s drinks, followed by an Open Board Meeting of the EuropeanPWN-Amsterdam Board.

Anna Farrenkopf opened the meeting and talked about the history of the network since it was incorporated in 1986, how we got involved in the Federation 5 years ago and the accomplishments of our network builders. This set the stage for an invigorating discussion on our City Network’s ambitions for the future, and our desire to continue to play a lead role in the Federation’s future successes.

The Amsterdam Board members shared their stories on what motivates them and their passion for the network. Their enthusiasm triggered interest with the attendees to collaborate and develop leadership skills by getting involved in exciting projects and opportunities that are unfolding within the Amsterdam City Network organization and on cross-network level.

Ursula Brinkmann, Managing Director of Intercultural Business Improvement commented: “It’s fantastic to know that the European wide network creates an environment for women to prove they can make a difference. Members should seek this opportunity to show they’re the right stuff .”

The Amsterdam Board members would like to take this opportunity to thank all attendees for their continued support. We will be following-up to continue this collaborative effort. We plan to schedule a follow-up Open Board Meeting in March 2010, and a number of intermediate get-togethers where needed to advance specific items. Please contact any of the Amsterdam Board members if you too want to get involved in the entrepreneur’s initiative, corporates’ think tank, marketing, membership recruitment, programming, IT or financial team.

Join us to continue to make this network a successful and sustainable one!

OBA (the Bieb)
Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam
Oosterdokskade 143
1011 DL Amsterdam

Happy New Year
This is your chance to come borrel with the Amsterdam board.
Ideas, brainstorm, feedback, questions are welcome.

We’ll all be on hand to talk with you about the organization, logistics, planning, future board positions, what’s happening with the federation, and how you can help to grow and to sustain the organization with your participation. “Club business” and updates.

We will meet in the New Library – next to Amsterdam Centraal Station
(same as last year). Join us on the top floor at the bar for tapas and beverages in the La Place Restaurant.

We have also reserved a meeting room – on the 6th floor.

We really enjoyed the productive discussions last year in this format.
Please join us again!

New Year, New Chances.

Proost!

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