Julie Gilbert

SVP Retail Training and Leadership Development, Best Buy, and a catalyst for women's leadership in business

BIG IDEAS

• The Fuel to Power Performance: Leadership, Diversity, and Innovation
  Julie Gilbert's capacity to tap employees’ passions to drive innovation and value has earned her a reputation as one of the fastest-rising leaders in corporate America. At Best Buy, Inc., she leads retail training, leadership development, and the company’s innovation engine for the more than 140,000 Best Buy employees internationally. She also created and leads the Winning With Women strategy for the company, which is powered by WOLF (Women’s Leadership Forum). Under her leadership, Best Buy has achieved significant business outcomes in employee recruiting, retention, and customer market share. In this presentation, Julie shares the strategies she and her team utilize to mine new growth markets, identify unmet customer needs, and create value by leveraging diversity of thought inside and outside of Best Buy.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Julie Gilbert motivates individuals to find their voices, link to their passions, re-think their leadership possibilities, and reinvent themselves, their organizations, and their communities.  She inspires others to create empowering networks and build new businesses to fuel innovation, change, and winning business results. Her initiatives have earned her a reputation as one of the fastest-rising leaders in corporate America.  
 
In her current role at Best Buy Co., Inc., Julie leads the “Winning With Women” business strategy powered by WOLF (Women's Leadership Forum). WOLF creates opportunities for thousands of employees and customers to re-engineer Best Buy to make the company a premiere place for women to work and shop. WOLF also drives Best Buy’s retail training and leadership development programs and guides the company’s innovation engine.

A seven-year company veteran, Julie is committed to building the business by finding, growing, and retaining great talent and linking this to unmet customer needs. She has demonstrated this commitment in her career with the creation and launch of new businesses for the companies with which she’s worked. Today, she works to unlock the leader in every single Best Buy employee by overseeing teams that develop and implement the training curriculum for Best Buy’s 140,000 U.S. store employees and leverage the lives and experiences of tens of thousands of female employees to transform Best Buy’s business. Her highly acclaimed retail leadership forum gives high-potential employees the opportunity to partner with corporate support teams and take on new business initiatives for the company.
 
Somehow, between business deals and financial analysis, Gilbert unearthed her passion for empowering others and helping them learn to be leaders. For a long time, it was a side-project. Whenever she visited stores, she took time to learn about individual employees (especially women) who desired to do more and play a larger role in the organization. Once she began inspiring and mentoring those employees, she saw them change personally and professionally. Not long after that realization, she founded Best Buy’s award-winning WOLF movement.
 
Before she was promoted to SVP at the young age of 36, Julie was vice president of retail training, leadership development, and WOLF. Through her leadership in WOLF, Best Buy increased female market share by more than $3.6 billion, increased the number of female job applicants by 37 percent, and reduced female employee turnover by 5.7 percent.
 
Previously, Gilbert served as vice president of customer centricity for Best Buy, where she led high-end male customer business group. In this role, she spearheaded the creation and partnership for Best Buy’s Magnolia Home Theatre store-within-a-store concept, now rolling out across the country. In her time as director of alliance development, she created and implemented several strategic relationships with key partners, including Virgin Mobile, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Sony. Prior to her time at Best Buy, she worked for Deloitte and Touche in New York and Minneapolis, where she created several new businesses including one that she scaled nationally to become a top performance driver for the organization.

Julie is a 2008 honoree of the The White House Project's Circle of 10, a group of exceptional women across sectors who have made women’s leadership possible by virtue of their philanthropic, personal and professional endeavors. She was named one of Minnesota’s Women to Watch by Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal and one of the 100 most successful women in business by Profiles in Diversity Journal Magazine.  She has been featured in BusinessWeek, USA Today, and PINK magazine, and profiled on ForbesTV and ABC, among other media outlets.

A firm believer in giving back, Julie incorporates community outreach into the development initiatives at Best Buy.  Furthermore, she currently partners with the Girls Scouts (to help inspire girls at all ages to pursue their passions and help each other), the International Museum of Women (which links women globally), and the Grameen Foundation (which helps women in the most poverty stricken areas of the world build new businesses).  

A South Dakota native, Julie earned her master’s degree in strategy and marketing and her bachelor’s degree in accounting—both with highest distinction—from the University of Minnesota.   She is also a licensed CPA in the state of Minnesota.

A Closer Look at Julie

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Julie's current research agenda?

Julie helps create significant organic innovation and business growth by: 

• re-inventing business culture and business rhythms to enable the voices that are not heard to innovate by linking their passions to business objectives and customer growth (this involves including employees at the lowest levels, as well as customers)
• leveraging diversity as a core strategic tenet, not merely as a “nice to do” initiative
• tapping employees’ unique talents and experiences to drive cultural change and organizational transformation
• serving the booming female markets in an authentic, sustainable way 
• aligning leadership development initiatives with efforts to innovate new businesses

Julie considers giving back to communities to be an important, strategic part of business.  She aims to inspire and link women across the globe, providing them with the business-building and leadership skills they need to transform themselves and their environments for the better

ENGAGEMENTS
How have other organizations utilized Julie's expertise, and what's ahead on her schedule?

Julie is a passionate change agent with proven business credibility.  She helps transform organizations and cultures through creative organic business growth, leadership development, and networks of voices that fuel innovation and real change.

Organizations are interested in the unique ways that she has embedded the gender component into business goals and outcomes.  An inspirational presenter, Julie shares how she helps others develop life skills, tie their passions to their work, and create new business opportunities through networks.  

Julie has presented at The Masters Forum, the Forbes Conference, the American Marketing Association,  the Ross Leadership Initiative-Foundation Session, the Minnesota High-Tech Association Annual Conference, the Heartland Institute Conference, the Girls Scouts Annual Event, the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show, the 15th Annual Society of Consulting Psychology, Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, and many others. 

Upcoming engagements include the 2008 National Human Capital Summit, the Institute of Management Accountants 88th Annual Conference & Exposition and the National Girls Scouts Conference.

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Who shapes Julie's thinking and inspires her work?

Julie is influenced the most by people that do not have official power, whose voices are not heard.  These groups include primarily those with backgrounds and experiences not typically heard in the board room (aka the company's customer growth).  She is most drawn to people who are somehow not in the social traditional norms of culture.  These people influence Julie because of their ability to accomplish amazing things against all odds, right down to basic human survival and because they comprise the majority of employees and customers any company could look to for organic growth.  These individuals also tend to have the most passion and courage, and they are the often the most creative and self-sufficient. They will reinvent future companies and the sustainability of the world.

Julie is also significantly influenced by historical change agents such as Catherine the Great, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, Gandhi, Jesus, and Susan B. Anthony.

RECOMMENDED READING
What's on Julie's must-read list?

The Great Bridge, by David McCullough, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge; Mavericks at Work, by William C. Taylor and Polly G. Labarre; Tripping the Prom Queen, Susan Shapiro Barash; Vanity Fair

MIND FUEL
Which blogs, web sites, and industry events does Julie tap into to feed her mind and fuel her creativity?

Julie gleans insight and information by observing human behavior on a daily basis in myriad situations and settings.  She looks specifically for common human behavior in difficult situations, as those ignite the largest business growth possibilities and promise for broad change.   She says, “I also try to throw myself into unfamiliar cultural situations and many times travel alone to ensure I am ‘in it’ with the local people.” The solo trips put her in unfamiliar situations and force her to understand what’s happening around her.  "People and their behavior fascinate me in all social classes, groups, and unique settings. It is through real life that I see opportunities for business and sustainable positive change for all."

OUTREACH
What are Julie's pressing questions, and on which topics does she seek your feedback?

• What is the unachieved growth potential for organizations if they had all voices at the table representing their customer bases?  
• If leaders in positions of power truly were rewarded financially and otherwise for empowering all voices (employees and customers), WHO would be in the seats of the board room and WHAT would the discussions be vs. what they are today?
• What is the financial metric on the books when a company truly has employees and customers emotionally and passionately engaged in ways that align with their talents and skills?  
• How different would the world conflict situation be if there was an equal representation of women in positions of power given their unique perspectives and bridge-building skills?
• How dramatically could women change the world if they connected with other women—and men—from the world over to build confidence and leadership skills, and set them up with new businesses?