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Ritika Wadhwa
Business Partner. Diversity & Inclusion Champion
Ritika Wadhwa is the Director of UK Operations at the Cultural Intelligence Centre, a position she has held since June 2021. In this role, she is responsible for leading the organization's initiatives in the UK and beyond, focusing on enhancing cultural intelligence (CQ) across various sectors. Ritika has over two decades of experience in client retention, marketing, business development, and project management, having worked with senior stakeholders across multiple continents in both corporate and public sectors.12
Born and raised in India, Ritika has a rich multicultural background, having lived and worked in Canada and the UK. She holds a degree in Economics and an MBA, and she is fluent in Hindi, Punjabi, English, and spoken Greek. Her passion for cultural intelligence is complemented by her commitment to diversity and inclusion.124
Before her current role, Ritika served as the Chief Operating Officer at the Cultural Intelligence Centre and has held various leadership positions throughout her career. She is also the Founder and CEO of Prabhaav Global, an organization dedicated to applying cultural intelligence for impactful leadership.46 Additionally, she is involved in several advisory roles and serves as a Trustee and Board Director at The 5% Club.34
Ritika Wadhwa's work emphasizes the importance of cultural intelligence in fostering effective collaboration in diverse environments, making her a prominent figure in the field of diversity and inclusion.56
Highlights
I was not allowed to work.
Here's the story.
My papa was my biggest cheerleader. He told me, all the time, that there is nothing I couldn't achieve if I put my mind to it. He believed in me.
He passed away suddenly when I was 17.
This meant, the males in the extended family and community took over the decision making for me and my siblings.
Life went on then. Until I was the only one from my post graduate cohort to receive a job offer from a top advertising agency. My professor brought a cake for me to cut in class to celebrate this huge milestone.
When I shared this at home, this was the response from the men; "NO. You cannot bring shame upon our family by going to work. Join the family business if you really want to stay busy until we find a nice boy for you".
You see, no male in my entire family had ever worked in a salaried position. So, how dare I, a woman, go to work. For someone else no less?
Do you think I took that job? Of course I did.
Made my papa proud. His biggest gift to me in our short time together was a deep seated sense of confidence in my own capability. Which helped me immensely as I chose the difficult path, but a path that was right for me. And the rest as they say is history.
When resilience becomes the most desired leadership skill, remember that those like me had to be born with it.
Our training ground was the patriarchy, that made our gender the biggest hurdle we had to jump through, every step of the way.
Everything really is possible for us, if we put our mind to it.
#resilience #genderequality #diversityandinclusion
I am in India with my Greek husband, British children, Canadian sister and Trinidadian brother in law.
This is when what I do for a living comes full circle.
Every interaction requires cultural intelligence to have an acceptable outcome for everyone.
Of the 10 cultural values, the one that is really helping me navigate this trip is uncertainty avoidance.
In #India, 'sab chalta hai'. Just like 'mañana' in Spain or 'no stress' in Cape Verde. Not everything is planned to perfection and even if it is, there are always surprises. Having grown up here, I just know that eventually everything has a way of working out.
I operate on a low threshold of uncertainty avoidance. However, I see how that can rattle others who come from high uncertainty avoidance cultures. So, I work through it. Providing as little or as much detail as required to assail their 'fears'.
Our #culturalvalues play such a big part in how we react and respond. Just understanding them can make navigating real life situations so much easier.
#culturalintelligence #cultures #differences
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Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
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Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
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Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
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Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
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