27 July, 2015

Why CBA’s Next Boss Really Needs To Be Female: Cindy Gallop

By B&T Magazine

Can a bank really do lots of social good and continue to makes lots and lots of money? Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of If We Ran the World and Make Love Not Porn, thinks it’s coming, but only when the banks have at the least a 50/50 female/male split in their senior executive ranks, and most likely, only when a women is running the show.

When the next generation of socially aware school kids hit the market, things in business are going to change in ways we haven’t even imagined and when one of the female gender makes it to the top of the Commonwealth Bank, that’s when you’ll see a bank that truly love its customers, makes a ton of money, and does social good as an integrated part of its day to day business, according to Gallop.

“When businesses get to 50/50 [male/female] in their senior executive ranks, not only will they start solving most of the issues they face with disruption, but most people problems in a business, including sexual harassment, will disappear”, Gallop told a crowd of journo’s gathered last Friday to see a preview of Commbank’s Wired for Wonder innovation event to be held in August in Sydney and Melbourne.

Gallop is a firm believer in doing social good and making money simultaneously. In fact she thinks that ‘not for profit’ start-ups are largely doomed because they are almost always marginalised. She says that the secret to success is financial success wholly integrated with a positive social agenda for a company and a diminution of male dominated executives and boards.

“When that girl is running the Commonwealth Bank, it will be making a lot money and doing a lot of social good at the same time”.

Gallop was referring to the recent winner of a Year 4 Bondi Public School internal digital innovation competition, judged by Jordan Ngyuen, who developed a free mobile app concept that would use visual recognition technology to identify rips on a beach and real-time lets people know where are the safest spots to swim on any beach.

Gallop will be one of a stellar line up of speakers at Commbank’s Wired for Wonder Event this year.

Wired for Wonder moves beyond the typical formularised business events and brings together storytellers, investors, artists, musicians, technologists, writers and scientists to learn and connect. Other speakers listed for this year’s event include: Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and the only person to have actually hired Steve Jobs, Jason Silva, from National Geographic Channel, Dr Hannah Fry, the UCLA mathematician and author of ‘The Mathematics of Love”, and many more.

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