Funny how…

… European borders have ‘melted’ in so many ways – and yet how many things remain slightly different. In France, we wish each other Bonne Année throughout January. In Denmark, where I grew up, “Godt Nytaar” greetings are exchanged from mid-December until Epiphany. And we often thank people dear to us for the previous year.

I would like to do just that: thank you, long-standing EuropeanPWN members for your fidelity and your contributions; thank you to our more recent members for injecting new ideas and helping us evolve; and particular thanks to the outgoing Board. Ingrid, Evelyne and Karin are stepping down due to increasing professional demands and Isabelle will have a baby demanding her at all hours, very soon. In different yet significant ways, you have all four made our shared ‘baby’ grow a good notch. Fortunately, a new Board is in place, read more below (I am sure I will have plenty of reasons to thank you this time, next year!).

We do not know exactly what 2009 will bring just like we did not know what 2008 would bring last January. But the mood is different. Yet, I wish for each of you to be in a position to tone down the impact of “the crisis” and be able to strive for an excellent 2009 for you, because you might just make it excellent that way!

Susanne Forsman-Hey, President, EuropeanPWN, Nice – Côte d’Azur

Annual General Meeting

The AGM took place 22nd of January in Sophia Antipolis. Having no exceptional agenda items, the AGM unfolded in good order and a positive atmosphere. Prior to the meeting a number of candidates had been nominated for positions on the board. The main agenda point was the election of the 2009 Board which resulted in the following:

• Susanne Forsman-Hey – President
• Julia Haston – Vice President and Mentoring Liaison
• Kelly Haynes – Treasurer
• Sabine Strauss – Secretary

Three further Board members were elected. Their portfolios will be confirmed during the annual Board Retreat, which takes place on 7th of February:

• Elizabeth Lielacher
• Sophie Le Brozec
• Vicky Kirby

Congratulations to the new board!!

You can consult the AGM meeting minutes (thank you to Melanie Gulliver for taking them), the President’ and the Treasurer’s reports online: under the Jan. 22nd Calendar or in the Group Files section.

Upcoming events

Registration and details for all our events can be found on the Calendar.

February 3rd – Pitching Lunch (Elevator Pitch)

Want to practice or discuss your elevator pitch and get feedback from peers?
Join Dorothy Foster and Julia Haston for a pitching lunch. This will be a supporting, informal event. There will be no standing up, no projectors and no flip charts, so if you want to share some slides then you will need to print them off. An elevator pitch isn’t just for entrepreneurs. It’s also for sales people, project champions, screen writers, job seekers etc. – in short: any savvy networker!

February 7th – Board Retreat

The newly elected Board meets for an entire Saturday, in order to establish goals and plans for 2009. Watch this space for the outcomes of the Retreat!

February 19th – How Green is your business?

Concern for the environment is evolving and influences our choices in personal
life and in business yet do we really understand what all the buzz words mean?
Wendy Buckley will examine our “green values” and how they drive our own and our customers’ purchase decisions. Time permitting, we will also play the Green Transport Game devised by Janet West to inspire us to make those planet-friendly transport choices.

March 8th – International Women’s day

“When Gender Diversity Protects Stock Prices from the Crash”.

Nearly all of the French national press: Le Monde, Le Figaro;Libération, Les Echos, La Tribune, L’Express have run stories on Professor Ferrary’s research paper: “When Gender Diversity Protects Stock Prices from the Crash”.

To mark International Women’s Day, EuropeanPWN and Femmes3000 on Cote d’Azur have invited Michel Ferrary, Professor of Human Resources at CERAM and the author of this study. He will present the results of his study based on data from CAC40 companies which shows that the fewer women a company has in its management, the greater the drop in its share price; firms with a higher ratio of women in management have better resisted the financial crisis.

Time: 18:00-20:30 – Apéritif will be served from 18:00 to 19:00. Presentation will start promptly at 19:00.
Venue: CERAM Business School, 60, rue Dostoïevski, 06902 Sophia Antipolis

Registration through the calendar on our home page

March 26th – Giving Feedback and Dealing with Emotions

Workshop to be held in the evening, led by Ines O’Donovan.

Recap of Recent Events

October 23rd: Communication Excellence with NLP

Florent Fusier and Giorgia Sanfiori (both certified NLP trainers and coaches) introduced twenty members to Neuro Linguistic Programming. Through a series of discussions and exercises we learnt some of the basics of NLP and how to use some of the techniques to improve the way we communicate with people. We left with guidance on how to improve the communication in a difficult relationship and how to define a well-formed outcome.

October 31st: Networking lunch

During the networking lunch held at the Agora Einstein Karin Triviere and Ingrid Loren gave us hints and tips for getting more out of the EuropeanPWN online platform. See article below for extra information about the platform.

November 18th: Personal Development with NLP/NeuroSemantics

This second event of the NLP series covered NeuroSemantics, the latest development of NLP and experiencing how it can be used in the area of personal development.

December 5th: Christmas party

Clara Pascal graciously offered us her elegant home for our final event of 2008. There was a great atmosphere amongst the 50 or so women who made the most of catching up, making new connections and just having a fun time. There was an impressive display of support for Universal Aid for Children (www.UacUkraineRelief.org) in the form of un-wrapped gifts. And there was no shortage of food, provided by the talented catering firm Crazy Gourmet (see their special offer below). Question is, what do we do next year to compete with that??!!!

January 22nd: Goal Setting Workshop

On the same evening as the AGM we brought in the New Year on a positive note with a Goal-Setting Workshop run by Julia Haston.

We started with a thought provoking and inspirational presentation by Patti-Ann McNeill who shared with us her story of changing career. After a presentation on the pitfalls and lessons to be learned from not setting or sticking to our goals, we received some tips from Karen Marsh on how to re-motivate ourselves on a regular basis. Then the members took part in several exercises designed at identifying and clarifying our ideas, during which we had a great many laughs at ourselves and each other! Julia finished off with a presentation and discussion on the seven main steps to achieving our goals, thereby generating a lot of positive energy for the year ahead.

The slides with notes can be downloaded from the platform.

Online Platform Hints and Tips

Improvements continue to be made to our online platform that you access through the Members Login tab.

Your preferred e-mail

It is now possible to define a preferred e-mail address for receiving e-mails, invitations etc. Make sure yours is up-to-date: go to your Profile and look under E-mail notification.

Joining online groups

You can join various groups. This gives you access to files and discussion boards. To join the Nice Mentoring Group for example, click on the Groups tab, click on All Groups, select a group you’re interested in and click on it. If the group is open to all members you will be able to Join Now under Membership on the right hand side of the screen.

Handouts from events

Handouts from many of our events can be downloaded from the platform. There are two ways of doing this:

• Click on Groups; choose Nice Côte d’Azur PWN, then Files. You’ll find the most recent additions first. Click on more to find older files.
• Click on Calendar, navigate to the event and open it. You’ll find them there as attachments.

Member’s testimonial: Elizabeth Lielacher

I am Austrian and settled down with my family in Monaco in 1999 after having lived 6 years in London. About two years ago I decided to set up my own business as Commercial Agent for IT products and services, which involves at the moment the sales of supporting online marketing tools, such as videomails and video portals. I am really happy to have joined the EuropeanPWN about 1 ½ years ago. It is very important for me, as I work alone, to be able to exchange experiences, opinions, and thoughts in different fields with other business women on an international level. The EuropeanPWN provides the perfect opportunity to do so. I meet all the time great people and in various interesting workshops I got new ideas for my work as well as for my personal development. I enjoy the very professional atmosphere of the meetings but also that we can always have a good laugh!

From the European Arena

Led by Paris President Marie-Claude Peyrache, a talented team has managed to secure the necessary sponsorships for the coming year. Notably, Orange has become a Platinum partner because they have decided that this partnership is a key action to developing their women inclusion policy. BNP Paribas had become a new Silver Partner. This is great news, and impressive given the economic context.

Our European President Mirella Visser is busy accepting invitations to speak in all corners of Europe. In January she has been speaking at the American Chamber of Commerce in Athens, which attracted interest from the international business women there. Who knows, perhaps Athens will become our next City Network?

Early February, Mirella will be at the Dutch Embassy in Berlin speaking at a conference for women entrepreneurs (and drumming up support for the City network there).

The preparations for the European AGM in Nice on June 26-27th are getting under way. Thank you to Sophie Le Bronzec, Ingrid Loren, Elisabeth Leilacher, Florence Plessier, Kelly Haynes, and Mary Lumley for joining our planning committee, led by Susanne Forsman-Hey.

EuropeanPWN Nice Côte d’Azur – In the News

Susanne and Isabelle were interviewed by The Riviera Times in December last year and the article was published in their January 2009 issue. You can see a copy of the article on our Press Page.

Mentoring

Results of Skills Survey

Last autumn, we asked mentoring programme members what skills they’d like to improve. The survey results were the basis for planning our workshop offering. Many of the skills are important not only in a mentoring relationship, but also in everyday professional (and personal) life. We would therefore like to invite all EuropeanPWN Nice-Cote d’Azur members to join us for the events this year. We’ve taken the results into account when planning our programme for 2009.

Summary of Mentoring Workshops

04 Oct 2008 – Contracting for Mentoring Relationships
22 Jan 2009 – Goal Setting and Planning
26 Mar 2009 – Dealing with Emotions & Giving Feedback
In Oct 2009 – Mentoring Workshop & Matching
Autumn 2009 – Focusing on Solutions, not Problems

More Information and Handouts of the Workshops

The handouts are available for download after each workshop (on the Platform under the appropriate Event Calendar entry and in the Nice Mentoring Group). If you are interested in learning more about the Mentoring Programme, please contact Ines O’Donovan, Julia Haston or Photini Papatheodoru.

Special offers for members

Florent Fusier

Florent offers 20% off the Neuro-Semantic practitioner training with certification by the International Society of Neuro-Semantics (USA) he teaches in Nice. It may even be free if you go through your company and qualify for ”DIF”. See
http://www.droit-individuel-formation.fr/ for further information. Contact Florent at: EMERGENCE COACHING
www.emergence-coaching.com coach@emergence-coaching.com, 04 93 72 30 05 – 06 62 79 69 85.

Crazy Gourmet

Crazy Gourmet (our Christmas caterer) extends a discount to EuropeanPWN members on specialty products. Check out
www.collectiongourmet.com

Books

EuropeanPWN books are available for purchase. Please send an e-mail to info@europeanpwn-nice.net

The latest publication is:

Women at Work Volume 10: The New Adriane Thread
By: Marie-Claude Peyrache and Cécile Demailly – 128 pages, English December 2008. Price: €15.

Can one succeed in business (professionally) without networking? To make diversity and parity a reality, women need to practice and master this art. “Networking – the New Ariadne’s Thread”, explores the long and rich history of women’s networks, presents women’s unique way to network and compiles a must-have set of advice on how to network and set-up a networking organisation.

There are two versions of the book. Volume 10 is in English and Volume 11 (Le nouveau fil d’Ariane) is in French.

Members can buy a copy here
Non members – Please send an e-mail to info@europeanpwn-nice.net

Feedback?

As always, if you have suggestions for newsletter content or any comments in general, we appreciate you sending it to
newsletter@europeanpwn-nice.net