Anita Owen: Chief Delivery Officer, Putting Your Hand Up, Valuing Curiosity
This week's guest is Anita Owen, Chief Delivery Officer at Novigi, a 550-person tech and data firm serving Australia's superannuation industry. Anita leads a team of 350, but her path to the C-suite started in data entry at a life insurance company after she dropped out of university and travelled the world. Her career has been built on curiosity, putting her hand up, and asking questions when other people rolled their eyes.
In this episode:
- Why Anita hires for soft skills before tech skills, and how she can tell within 10 minutes of an interview whether someone is right for her team.
- How asking questions at a superannuation legislation briefing led to her first proper job in product and marketing.
- Why doing an MBA after years of work experience is what made it valuable, because she could bring real context to every concept.
- Why working three days a week made Anita more productive, not less, and how constraint forced her to focus.
- Being a hard marker on yourself, and the cost and discipline of an internal critic that thinks about failures more than successes.
- Why "you can do it all" is a myth, and how Anita balances family-first priorities with leading a big team.
- Working through public speaking nerves with the discipline of MBA presentations, and the year she has decided to put herself out there.
Anita's career philosophy:
"I'm probably towards the end of my career, but I feel like I'm still at the start."
All opinions are the guest's own.
New episodes on a Wednesday, with interviews with leaders or experts every week and a monthly discussion on what we've heard in the last week of the month.
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Help other people find this podcast by subscribing in your podcast app and leaving a review. Career Stories is brought to you by The Career Library.
Creators and Guests
Host
Dr Luella Forbes
Dr Luella Forbes is a consultant specialising in Organisational Change and founder of The Career Library and it's podcast, Career Stories.
