Humility: An important quality to becoming a Limitless Leader™ – Part 1
My guest today says:
Humility is a very important quality to always carry with you. Just because you’re a CEO, or you have achieved a certain level of management status, does not mean that you are different or special. You just happen to have a job with more responsibility and a title, and apart from that, we are all in this together. We all deserve to be treated with the same level of respect.
– Maria Palazzolo, CEO, GS1 Australia
Joining me today is Maria Palazzolo, CEO of GS1 Australia.
She joined the organisation 35 years ago as a return-to-work mother after taking the previous 6 years off to have children and be a full-time mum in their preschool years.
With just a few people in the business and limited understanding of the business and the industry in which they operated, Maria and her team have been able to build GS1 into a now 170-strong team, with a membership of 20 thousand Australian companies. They are proud to serve their customers every single day with GS1’s bar-coding and scanning technologies.
This is Maria’s story, where she shares:
- Her thoughts on whether the journey is more important than the destination
- How she started out: her journey to becoming CEO of GS1 Australia
- The hurdles (both personally and professionally) she had to overcome
- The biggest challenges she believes companies as a whole are facing and how to address them
- The importance of internal and external collaborations
- The most valuable lessons she has learned through mistakes, and much more.
LISTEN NOW:
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About Maria Palazzolo:
Maria joined GS1 Australia 35 years ago as a return to work mother after taking the previous 6 years off to have children and be a full-time Mum in their preschool years. 
The organisation consisted of only a couple of people and was in a business that she did not understand or have any previous knowledge.
Known then as the Australian Product Number Association it had been set up by industry to introduce into Australia the very misunderstood technology of bar codes and scanning at the point of sale in supermarkets.
Today, of course, it would be hard to find any supermarket, or retail store, warehouse or hospital, or thousands of other different environments where bar codes are not present. Every consumer, patient, worker is in some way positively impacted by the information that is accessed by scanning the humble bar code.
Today GS1 Australia has 170 staff, and a membership of 20 thousand Australian companies that we are proud to serve every single day.
- Website: www.GS1au.org
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