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Contributor of the Month June 2008

Molly Tschang

Career Background:

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Molly i­s the International Programs lead in the global public sector team of Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group. Much of Molly’s career has been focused on building bridges and successfully collaborating across different communities. Her role is relatively new, focusing on strategic thought leadership engagements with international financial and development institutions such as the World Bank; IMF; United Nations, and USAID. Our intention is to bring to bear Cisco's broad range of assets to add value to the agencies and help embed communications and ICT in development in sustainable and scalable ways. The belief is that Cisco can help ‘emerging markets emerging faster’.

Motivation:

­Molly is motivated and passionate about all aspects of her extremely hectic life, and committed to living a ‘life that ma­tters’. She values the importance of being ‘grounded - physically, socially and mentally’; Molly enjoys yoga, tennis, cooking, adventure travel and music and comments that ‘food and music can unite the world’. Molly is also very much focused on keeping in touch with her family, including her three nephews and niece.

­Molly’s motivation stems from her belief that an individual can change the world. One of her favourite poems success by Ralph Waldo Emerson epitomizes this conviction. Molly sees Cisco as a platform to make that change, speaking about IBSG Public Sector and her fellow colleagues, she comments, “We have a privilege and to me a responsibility, to (at least endeavor to) make an impact on the planet’s intractable problems, and show the world a better way…every person on our team believes that… We are thought leadership in action with the ability to reach both internally and externally”.

Molly has had some exceptional experiences that have shaped her career. One of these was leading the NGO, NetHope, which helped her realize her calling to work at the intersection of public, private and NGO sectors, www.nethope.org/

Another was the International Women's Forum - Leadership Foundation, where Molly was a fellow 2002-03.http://www.iwforum.org/LF_Brochure.pdf  Molly describes this as a ‘transforming program’ http://www.iwforum.org/leadership_foundation.aspx

Frustrations:

Molly gets frustrated when “senior leaders don’t grasp the fundamental value of diversity, which is the ability to solve problems in better ways with better solutions, not just about selling more”

Favourite sites:

Socrates Society Seminars: ‘…mind expanding’

Favorite Magazines:  National Geographic ... I have six stacked up but will always subscribe’ The Economist ‘... need an i-pod so I can listen while walking to work’ Tennis Magazine  ‘... playing 3 sets of tennis is a proxy for working through life's up's and down's’

Great things to do in New York: MOMA …sculpture, Picasso, outdoor courtyard and snack at "The Modern" (restaurant) the Guggenheim l ...great building The American Museum of Natural History …ocean exhibition and dinosaurs are awesome

Newest favorite video: Where the Hell is Matt?  “must see”

Pet Passions:

ICT has been hailed as an enabler of development for decades, but no one has yet solved for how the poor tap into the benefits of automation and connectivity at mass scale. To ‘crack the code’ to unleashing the potential of ICT, Molly believes the missing link is a ‘bottom-up’ approach. Communities must be empowered to exploit technology the way they see fit, rather than have technology solutions pushed down from above.

Currently, Molly, colleagues from across Cisco and NGO partners are testing joint development models with the World Bank in S. Asia with the potential to impact tens of millions of people in their rural development programs. This effort is aimed at how the rural poor can gain awareness of and use ICT to drive bottom-up momentum for connectivity, complementing our top-down country strategies for broadband. The desire is to prove out a working model for Cisco and the World Bank, and then potentially work with other such institutions. The key focus is on livelihoods/economic development, e.g. timely access to information, connecting to global markets, as well as ICT as a business opportunity itself and the development of a “rural ICT sector”.

Pet Hates:

Her pet dislikes are people with bad manners, who are full of themselves, and who lack empathy... The inability to, ‘put oneself into another’s shoes and value those shoes…We need to think more about the collective good.’

Magic Wand:

If Molly had a magic wand, she would wish for world peace. She finds it tragic that people can hold such great animosity, to create such violent acts in the world. Molly would also lessen our dependency on cars, energy and gas, which causes so much pollution. “We only have one planet and now would be a grand time to start taking better care of it....”

Personal Motto:

One of Molly’s personal mottos is a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, which highlights her belief in the impact we can all have, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’.