Irina Filippova

speaker

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

Because again, folks think that if they kind of somehow outsmart the market and become very popular, that somehow is going to get them from point A to point B. And of course, we've seen a lot of unfortunate consequences of that kind of thinking.

In my mind, Vance, the word leader equals the word courage. There is no leadership without courage. And even though I believe we don't necessarily have a lot of examples of courageous leadership, those who show courage are the true leaders. Did it take courage for me to make the transition from BP to an early stage startup?

Probably, probably some courage, but I would say more curiosity on my part. Like I said before, I was not wedded to a particular structure of my career. I was not wedded to going from one stage to the next in a very precise way. I always desired to have more freedom and more control over my own destiny, as it were. So that, to me, was very natural.

That transition was very natural, even though it happened in the midst of the global financial crisis in 2008. So anyone thinking rationally about this would say, well, why wouldn't you just stay with a safe, secure career where you were progressing just fine in a large company versus going kind of off on your own into the unknown. But to me, that wasn't really the dilemma.

I was attracted by the opportunity of meeting a challenge. My desire was to meet that challenge and to bring all my skills and experiences to bear on meeting that challenge. And if I could do that in the context of a small enterprise, like-minded individuals, great, fantastic. If I had to venture off on my own, then that's how it had to be. So I see courage really as a way of being rather than

kind of a quality that you have to have. It's just a way in which you get from one place to the next. And you do have to sometimes jump over large chasms. But in doing so, you have to have a vision of bridging areas that don't really bridge easily. The business that we are now, for example, we're in now, the business of

Electrifying transportation involves two very established industries, energy and transportation, going through a transformation. And as both of them are changing at the same time and fundamentally, we're here to really bridge everything that they're going through and create an opportunity for fleets to electrify successfully.

So again, this is an opportunity and this is seeing how you can actually connect the dots in the midst of the storm, for lack of a better term, in the midst of this big major transition and transformation. I would say that most courageous leaders in my mind are those who actually stick to the promises that they make to their people, to the organization that they run.

Those who continue to deliver on the promises they made to their investors and funders, people who back them, back their idea. And those who continue to deliver value to those who use their products and services, their company's products and services. That's called integrity. And sometimes integrity takes courage.

It means walking away from opportunities sometimes because they don't fit with the original vision for your enterprise. This also may mean walking away from certain partners or ecosystem players who are not showing up with integrity.

and standing your ground, but being flexible at the same time and seeing opportunities and bringing those opportunities to bear on shaping the mission of, of your existing enterprise. So I don't know if I answered fully your question around courage and leadership, but to me, again, leadership is courage and courage is leadership. One is impossible without the other.

And it really just means staying in integrity with yourself, with what you say and what you do.

Sure. Well, I've ventured into this change area primarily because I wanted to see the change in leadership of large companies, leadership on the political arena in terms of achieving our decarbonization goals. And I guess I wasn't seeing enough persistence, enough integrity in getting through the transitions that we had to get through as quickly as we needed to get through them.

So I told myself something has to change, something in the way these leaders think and act has to change. But notice, I was thinking about those leaders out there, leaders that I was observing at a very senior level in corporate worlds, in entrepreneurial worlds. But what actually needed to happen, the change needed to happen within myself.

I studied psychology at the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich, and that's where I first had the insight, not without help from a very accomplished depth psychologist to actually see the need that you're perceiving out there as being actually very internalized. with yourself.

And so really the journey for me was to use what I needed to bring into this world, all my skills, all my experiences, and leverage that and share that with others and really kind of use my own experience as it were as a roadmap for someone else to embrace change, for someone else to have the courage to step up,

to act according to their beliefs rather than according to what common thinking may suggest they do. and really follow through, as it were, on the ideas that they had. So that was a period in my life where, again, this reflection around what's happening around me in the world, on the world stage, actually had to all transpire within myself.

Otherwise, I could not be effective as an advisor, as a consultant to established, companies as well as to entrepreneurial companies and their leaders in terms of what they needed to do to make a difference, to make a difference to their strategy, to make a difference to their positioning, to create a better service or a better product for this world.

But it all again comes back to each person's individual values and the ability to live according to those values and bring those values to bear on what it was that they're building staying in integrity.

As I've already mentioned, the world of transportation and the world of energy are going through a tremendous transition. All the major automotive original equipment manufacturers actually voted in favor of electrification of ground transport.

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