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Meet Trailblazer Tamara Ghandour

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Tamara Ghandour.

Tamara, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
When I was fourteen, I started my first business by thinking differently about what was right in front of me. It was 1980-something and I decided to rent out my super hot off-the-shoulder sweaters and pegged pants to my girlfriends long before there was rent-anything or even the internet. Just me, trying to figure out how to leverage the fact that all my girlfriends kept borrowing my clothes. I even had an official rate card that I made copies of and kept in the top drawer of my dresser. From there on, I’ve always sought to shake things up and find the opportunity right in front of me.

However, how I initially started doing that and where I am today is through a circuitous route of full of successes and failures. Instead of boring you with a chronological account of climbing the corporate ladder and leaping off, I think I’ll share the top three lessons I had along the way as one of the only women in the male-dominated space of business innovation.

Lesson #1: Put yourself on the playing field. When I was the Vice President of Strategy at an urban marketing firm in NYC, I had the most amazing boss. I would fly to Chicago every week to meet with him as I was building the department for the company. I was the youngest exec they’d ever had and definitely needed his mentorship. One day, as I was showing frustration and feeling that I didn’t have some of the advantages some of my peers had he said, “Tamara you put me on the playing field with anyone and I’ll beat them. Not because I’m smarter but because I’m tougher and will work harder. It doesn’t matter what advantages the other person has on the playing field, I’ll win. Now, stop complaining and figure out what it takes to enter the field.” I’ve taken that approach to life and work ever since. I don’t always win but you better believe I wake up every day ready to play.

Lesson #2: There’s a difference between failing and being a failure: I’ve taken a lot of risk in my day. I’ve grown multi-million dollar businesses and launched a few of my own. Some have been wonderful successes while others have been epic failures. In fact, in the early 2000s, I tried to launch a website, stayingfit.com, to help people track their fitness progress. After lots of energy creating webpages and beta systems, I hit one major brick wall – the big gyms, or any gym for that matter, didn’t want some outsider building a relationship with their clients. No one would work with me and the idea was placed in the graveyard where it belonged. I was about twelve years too early for the marketplace. I have more battle scars of failure than I can share here. It may not take the sting out of it, but you are not a failure if you grow and learn from your mistakes. Failing simply means you tried, which is more than most people can say.

Lesson #3 Better to teach than to give: I was leading new product development and branding initiatives for recognizable brands like Procter and Gamble, General Mills, and IBM when I got the biggest slap across the face. I thought I had arrived at a pinnacle in my career given the top in business looked to me to tell them what products to launch and markets to go after. Then on one project, in particular, that reality came crashing down. There I was handing my clients a presentation full of ideas when I realized that everything my team and I had done was going to be shelved, just like every other initiative like it. Wasted time, money, and energy year after year. It’s when I realized that giving someone an idea isn’t half as powerful as helping them discover they have their own. If I came up with the idea it went nowhere, but if they unearthed the ideas they already had it was a different story. It was at that moment that LaunchStreet was born. I wanted to stop being the one seen as the innovator and start teaching people around me how they are Everyday Innovators too. It’s what led to the creation of the Innovation Quotient Edge assessment that has been taken by tens of thousands across the globe and the creation of the correlating toolkit that helps keep the innovation momentum going as well as the podcast I host, Inside LaunchStreet. All of what I do now works in concert to give people the tools they need to discover their innovation superpowers.

Has it been a smooth road?
Struggles, challenges, roadblocks, brick walls. When you are working towards something there are always obstacles in your way – lack of money, time and resources, competition that I didn’t see coming, technology, staffing, marketing, sales, etc. The list goes on. But, if I were to share with you my biggest struggles, they’d all be between my ears. Anyone that knows me will tell you that I have a fairly healthy dose of self – confidence but when you are going for big, bold goals, doubt and fear are your biggest struggles. That little voice in my head chatters away: Am I really up to the challenge? Will they take me seriously? Do I really have what it takes to succeed? Will they discover I’m just an imposter pretending to know what I’m talking about? What if it doesn’t work? For me, it’s become less about not having fear and doubt, they never go away, but having the confidence to embrace and push through them, maybe even use them as motivation to keep going. I’ve learned through multiple sources to play tricks on my mind to quiet the doubt and enhance my confidence.

As far as tangible struggles like lacking money and competitive advantages. I think those challenges can be a blessing. The constraints of reality force you to innovate. I had to think differently about how to stand out from my competitors with fewer bells and whistles. I had to figure out how to work smarter in the tight time I have between exercising in the morning and kids getting home from school. That forced me to think differently about priorities.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned out of my struggles is that trying to be better than someone else is a losing battle. It’s a challenge you’ll never win because, in turn, they can out better you the next day. To win today, you need to be different. I like to take my struggles, swirl them together and then ask, “how can I do this differently to stand out from the crowd.” It’s been the key to a lot of my success.

We’d love to hear more about LaunchStreet.
I’m so proud that the work we do helps people show up as their best, most unique selves, and not give in to conformity.

As humans, we have a fundamental yearning to be innovative yet most of us have trained or talked ourselves out of it. We believe it’s a special talent only held by the select few or its relegated to certain special titles or teams.

My team and I wake up every day and democratize and scale innovation, taking it out of the hands of the select few, and into the hands of everyday people like you and me. I’m really proud that I get to help people unlock their potential through the power of innovation. I firmly believe, and our research and science have shown, that being innovative is universal, we all do it. But, how we innovate is unique to each of us. I’m honored that our work uncovered the 9 triggers of innovation. That discovery led to the creation of the Innovation Quotient Edge (IQE) assessment, the only proprietary tool that helps people discover their unique Everyday Innovator Style and put it to work to gain a competitive advantage. The transformations and stories of people feeling like they’ve become catalysts of innovation in their world are very fulfilling. As you can tell, I love what I do. The individuals and teams we work with make all the hustle and all the heartache worth it.

I do everything I can to make innovation accessible. Whether it’s our proprietary innovation assessment and toolkit or the globally listened to podcast that I host, Inside LaunchStreet, our goal is to provide the world with the tools to be rock star innovators all day, every day.

In fact, I have a challenge for those of you reading this. I invite you to join us in unleashing one million innovators into the world. Imagine the problems we could solve and the opportunities we would create if we all made the decision to be the innovation rock stars we were born to be. All you have to do to join the club is go to our website and subscribe or better yet, discover your Everyday Innovator Style.

What do you feel are the biggest barriers today to female leadership, in your industry or generally?
When I was working on Madison Avenue in New York City, I thought I had to be one of the boys to play. I thought that if I wanted to be taken seriously, I had to wear the power suits, do the power lunches and play power games. What’s funny looking back is that I think I created that “play like the boys” rule in my head. Nobody else forced it on me. Needless to say, it didn’t get me very far. The minute I stopped playing that game and started creating my own game is the minute things started to click for me.

My experience has been that while there are some real barriers, our biggest leadership barrier is that we think there are more barriers than there really are. We create self-imposed limitations on our own capabilities. Men are likely to go for a job if they are 50% confident they can do it while women need to be almost 100% certain. As women, we tend to be more risk-averse, seeking more validation before we take action. It’s time to leap and recognize that we bring incredible perspective and experience to everything we do. Our difference is our advantage.

My advice to women in leadership: Don’t play by anyone else’s rules. Often rules are just somebody else’s way of doing things, but it doesn’t mean it has to be yours. Create your own and make them play your way. As my ten years old said to me the other day, “you should always be the dungeon master of your own life.” I’m not totally sure what Dungeons and Dragons has to do with life lessons but I’m pretty sure he’s right.

My challenge to all of us is this: If you are a woman who’s made, it throw a rope back. You have a responsibility to pay it forward, to be someone’s champion. And if you are an up and coming female leader, take the rope. You don’t need to figure it all out alone. Help is a powerful tool in your path to success.

Pricing:

  • IQE assessment – $47 for full report
  • Everyday Innovator Bundle – IQE + Toolkit $197
  • Inside LaunchStreet – Free to listen to

Contact Info:

Image Credit:
Laura Mahoney

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