Believe Your Best Work is Yet to Come
Just named in India Today’s list of top 25 women achievers, Lynn de Souza, is a marketing and advertising dynamo with decades of experience and leadership under her belt. Currently, Lynn is Chairman and CEO of Lintas Media Group, one of India’s largest media agencies, which saw a 17 per cent growth in revenue in 2011.
The wisdom of professors who encouraged her to pursue advertising, and seasoned professionals along the way shaped her path, passions, and perspective. Ravi Gupta, her boss at an early job at Triyaka Grey, made the biggest impact on her life. Early on, he told her: “Don’t be afraid to create your own path and follow it,” and “Your chair is not you; the day you equate yourself with the chair you occupy, you’re finished.” She also learned under his trusting leadership that she worked best autonomously, having the freedom to make her own mistakes and learn from them.
As her career progressed, Lynn went to trainings, was always willing to learn, showed great confidence in business, and used setbacks in her career as a time for recreation and opportunity. One of her guiding philosophies is:
“I like to believe that every moment in my life is a defining one,” Lynn said. “It is not the big, but the little things that make you. They cumulatively create who you are, just like a beautiful string of pearls.”
Advertising has historically been a man’s world. Two years ago, Lynn launched the InterPublic Group (IPG) Women’s Leadership Network in India, “Equal and Opposite”, in an effort to let men to understand women better so they can bring out the best in each other in the agencies, and in the industry. She is one of the few women heading several industry bodies, and served as the vice president of the male-dominated AAAI (Advertising Agencies Association of India) in 2010-2011.
Lynn is continues to play a significant role in India’s media presence, power and culture. She is fiercely proud of India: “India’s potential story is not even the tip of the iceberg, and I haven’t even travelled the whole tip yet!”
True to the potential she so deeply believes in for India, she also believes the same for herself: “There are so many challenges ahead, so much to learn and so much to do…The only people who can be on top of all of this are those who want to keep learning and keep evolving and keep travelling. There is no place for those who think they have arrived…My best work is yet to come.”
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Sources: afaqs!, exchange4media, mxmindia
