HR Magazine - Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder and CEO, Center for Talent Innovation

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is the founder and CEO of the Center for Talent Innovation, and the founder of Hewlett Consulting Partners LLC. The co-director of the Women's Leadership Program at the Columbia Business School is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Century Association.

An economist with 20 years of experience in global talent management, Syvia Ann Hewlett has particularly focused on the "power of difference" and the challenges and opportunities faced by women, minorities and other previously excluded groups. She has forged a signature style of enquiry that blends hard data and rigorous analysis with concrete solutions and on-the-ground action.

Hewlett is the author of 11 Harvard Business Review articles and 12 critically acclaimed books, including When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children (winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award); Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success; and Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success (an Amazon Best Book of the Month). In 2014 she was recognised as the Most Influential International Thinker by HR magazine and won the Google Global Diversity award.

Her writings have appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, she is a featured blogger on the HBR Blog Network and The Huffington Post, and has appeared on US shows and BBC World News. In 2011, she received the Isabel Benham Award from the Women's Bond Club and Woman of the Year Award from the Financial Women's Association, and in 2013 won a Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute.

Her advisory services firm Hewlett Consulting Partners focuses on helping organisations leverage talent across the divides of culture, gender, geography and generation. Hewlett has taught at Cambridge, Columbia, and Princeton universities and has held fellowships at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard. In the 1980s she became the first woman to head the Economic Policy Council, a non-profit organisation composed of 125 business and labour leaders.

A Kennedy Scholar and graduate of Cambridge University, Hewlett earned her PhD in economics at the University of London.

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Sylvia Ann Hewlett discusses executive presence