Barbara Martin Coppola
speaker
72 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Barbara Martin Coppola’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Thank you so much for the introduction. I'm delighted to be here with you.
It's a great question, Marla. The more I advance in my career, the more I'm searching for places with purpose. And, you know, I grew up doing sport, and Decathlon is very much about democratizing sport. I really do know how sport can be beneficial for one's health, one's well-being, but also creating communities and well-being in societies.
So I joined and I have seen how beautiful it is to be working on something that you really deeply believe in. And then the other thing is I had, you know, switched industries quite a bit. And I'm a big fan actually of having impact and hopefully bringing all the best that can be brought to people, society's planet. And the role at Decathlon was very much the case.
So it's been actually a privilege to be serving for three years.
Yes. There is one moment that I remember deeply and that taught me so much. And it was when I was based in South Korea working for Samsung. And I remember I was a minority for the first time in my life. We were only two white people in a large department of Korean teammates. And I remember actually to... not understand everything that was said verbally.
During that time, I started spending a little bit more time observing and feeling the emotions that I could sense around me. It actually taught me very important lessons on leadership through influence, and also the fact of being able to do so much without completely understanding all the verbal aspects of the communication. And I also learned somehow that being different could be a positive.
You know, woman, young, I was a married back then, and somehow turning that into a positive. I was entrusted with risky projects. I had nothing to lose. And I could play by the rules in a little bit different just because of not being like everybody else. So another interesting moment of reflection on how the difference can actually be a positive.
I think it was more of a mental shift for me. Back then, I had been reporting, interestingly, to women in tech, which was very, very rare. Samsung, I was reporting to the first woman VP in the history of Samsung Electronics. And by observation, first I had examples that I could follow.
But also the mentorship that they gave me, I could understand that I couldn't actually very much compete if I was playing by the same rules. Not play by the rules and still bring what I could bring uniquely mine to the table. And giving myself permission mentally to do that was a really important shift. And so somehow it's a liberation of one's mind that allows to go and take risks.
And at the end, see that it's actually very positive. And it's positive not only for me, but it opens the door to many other people as well.
What I see is many women somehow don't give permission to themselves and are holding back to be ready one day to tackle this job. It's actually thinking if others can do it, why not you? And somehow having the step into the unknown, taking the risk. And it's interesting because it's never how we thought it would be.
Once you are walking, then you start experimenting, learning, and you verify that you are more than able to do the jobs and to face the different situations. By definition, nobody is ready before a new job because it's a new job. And so it's actually giving a little bit of a, OK, let's go.
to then have a full life, lean in, and somehow having through experiences and no regrets, you know, while looking back that, oh, I didn't try because the fear prevented me from doing that.
Listening deeply. For instance, at the job at Decathlon, I spent a couple of months visiting different countries, different stores, warehouses, different functions, and just listening. Listening to the verbal aspect, but also to the cues that were given through things that you can feel.
And so little by little, you start defining not only the culture and feeling it, but also some assumptions that you have in your mind and somehow saying, OK, is this assumption right or is it not right? And somehow through that, you start drawing a strategy and starting to have a bit of an iterative process into the clarity of the strategy to then define it together with other people.
Yes, through this period of listening to people within the company, I realized that there was a lot of capabilities, a lot of skills, and a lot of dreams that were not being embedded into the mission as it had been defined until now. So what we did is, imagining a playing field, what we did is amplify it.
So it contained the mission as it was defined, but we went wider with move people through the wonders of sport. From that, we wrote the North Star. The North Star is like a manifesto. It's an inspiring piece of video and narrative that will project people into the future of what Decathlon can do for societies and for the planet alike. And that moment was really inspiring.
I remember standing as a woman CEO coming from the outside in front of all the leaders of the company and presenting the North Star. And I knew it had resonated because the eyes were actually tingling. I don't know how you say that, but there was something special. And so it was this very heartfelt moment that I very much loved. And then from that, we started defining the strategy.
So we knew where we were going long-term as a North Star, and somehow that inspired and widened, actually, the playing field for Decathlon to start writing the strategic pillars.
Yeah, North Star was widening the field, so that meant that we needed leaders that will build and create new things, that will go into the unknown while at the same time having the ability to improve the existing.
Showing 1–20 of 72 · page 1 of 4
Next →