Irina Filippova

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226 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard Apr 2025

Irina Filippova’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Chief Change Officer™: Ensemble · #281 Irina Filippova: Courage Is the Career Plan · 8 Apr 2025 podcast

Thanks for having me, Vince. It's a pleasure. I grew up in Moscow, as you know. My father was a nuclear scientist, so he was in energy. But I was not. I was interested in languages. And when the time came to choose a career, I truly wanted a career that would expose me to different cultures and the way the world works. worked as it were.

So I chose a career in diplomacy, which was a very tall task for, first of all, a female. Typically, career in diplomacy would be reserved to men. But I did succeed in entering the very exclusive Moscow State Institute for International Relations, and I was studying international law.

when I had the opportunity to travel to the United States and see how, if you will, human rights practices worked in reality. And this is where my big journey began, as it were. So the career evolved. I went actually on to work for a UN think tank and peace and conflict resolution. I did that for about five years. And while it was a very, very interesting time,

in world politics, being a young person living in New York City, surrounded by kind of all the mystery of international relations, I was looking for something more challenging and potentially even more substantive as I was thinking about my future. So I decided to apply to a business school and of course a business school like Yale, a school of management,

stands out, certainly stood out for me because of their mission and the focus on leadership for business and society. And that helped me articulate where I saw myself heading as an adult, as a mature professional. I truly wanted to make a difference for society, for global society, as it were. But I also was interested in the mechanic of the business in terms of solving problems

some of the challenges that we're facing, not only the mechanism of politics that I was exposed to before. So that's how the journey started as it were. That's when we met at Yale. And when I was enrolled as an MBA student, I did not necessarily have a very clear idea of a path. If you recall, there were tracks, a finance track, a consulting track, a marketing track, a nonprofit track.

I did not see myself fully on any of the tracks because somehow that definition seemed a bit limiting. So I went down a limp. I got an airplane ticket to London during my spring break in the first year, and I went and introduced myself to BP. That was then becoming a leader in not only energy, but energy writ large.

With its new branding campaign, Beyond Petroleum, looking at alternative sources of energy, that vision really appealed to me and the company culture very much appealed to me. So that's where my journey into energy, if you will, began with that summer internship. I then got a full-time job offer upon graduation.

Spent some time in Chicago, moved to London, worked in upstream and downstream in a conventional energy space, but always with an eye out to that broader mandate to bring energy line and mobility to people in different ways, including using alternative and renewable sources.

And my last project at VP, before I decided to move on, actually had to do with relaunching brand and doing so in a renewable fashion. So we had this phenomenal project called Helios House in Los Angeles, where we've rebranded and revamped an old, dirty gas station on the corner of Olympic and Robertson into an architectural marvel. But also, it was an education.

station that helped us showcase renewable energy technologies, solar, the use of recycled repurposed materials, and kind of a new way of looking at what was a very typical if you will, feature of everyone's life, right? A gas station. And obviously looking at alternative fuels at that time as well. So that's where my journey into sustainability began. This was 2007.

And I have been on that path ever since. When you look back, do you see any common themes or threats?

I think the common path that I'm observing here is that I was always a self-starter. So even when I was working for a major energy company, I tended to work on projects that I was originating. At no point in time did I actually take over someone else's role. So every role on every project that I worked on was essentially starting from scratch.

So if you will, it was being an entrepreneur within a very established company and within a very established culture and way of doing things. So that is definitely a common theme. The second common theme was simply curiosity. My career path is completely non-linear, and that was okay by me, I think.

For me, when I reached kind of the age of 35 or so, the idea of following an established career path was not at all appealing. I wanted to learn about different aspects of energy. I wanted to try myself in different roles.

I actually joined a early stage startup out of the UK upon leaving BP, and that involved building the US presence really from scratch, from the ground up, and really creating relevance in a new market for that particular business.

So in that sense, the transition from a big established organization to being more or less independent or being an entrepreneurial advisor was not hard for me because I already thought like an entrepreneur, even within, again, an established company. The other component, again, is curiosity.

In order to be successful in being independent or running a small business, you do have to be very curious about industry trends. You have to be open to building partnerships, relationships, collaborations with others. You have to continuously find ways to in which you can create value, not just for yourself, but for others in the ecosystem.

So those components really lead, I believe, successful entrepreneurs to more success. I've also observed, I've observed a lot being in these different environments and these different spaces. And unfortunately, we don't see a lot of great examples of leadership on either side. I believe in the US culture, there is a bit of a glorification of the entrepreneur.

We hear all these great stories about unicorns becoming successful overnight. And therefore there is this mystery and mystique of what it takes to build a successful enterprise. And I believe that unfortunately gives rise to tendencies that are not necessarily healthy and don't lead to long-term sustained success for entrepreneurs.

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