In a recent episode of On the Brink with Andi Simon, I welcomed Ilene Rosenthal, the visionary CEO and founder of Footsteps2Brilliance, an educational technology company redefining early literacy and financial education for students across the U.S. Together, we explored how technology is revolutionizing the education sector, enabling transformative learning opportunities that bridge gaps and engage students in innovative ways.
The Journey from Law to Education Technology
Ilene’s career path is a fascinating one. Starting as a lawyer, she pivoted to education, her first passion, after realizing her drive to support and inspire young learners. Ilene began as a music teacher, pioneering new piano teaching methods she learned from Dr. Robert Pace at Columbia University. Her entrepreneurial spirit emerged when she used media to promote her services, which quickly led to a thriving business in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After a detour through law school, she became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., where she witnessed firsthand how a lack of education affects individuals’ paths, often contributing to the cycle of poverty and crime. This realization strengthened her resolve to make education more accessible, leading her to found Footsteps2Brilliance.
Bringing Education into the Fifth Industrial Revolution
Ilene’s journey led her to create “Learn With Me,” the first transmedia educational program, eventually nominated for an Emmy. This innovation bridged educational media and interactive learning, setting the foundation for Footsteps2Brilliance. With her extensive background, Ilene has scaled her vision nationwide, serving over a million children to date. She has designed the Footsteps2Brilliance platform to be device-agnostic, ensuring accessibility on smartphones, tablets, and computers—essential for reaching diverse student populations in both urban and rural communities.
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Transforming Education through Transmedia and Gamified Learning
Footsteps2Brilliance does more than just teach; it immerses students in gamified learning experiences. The program aligns its content with the curriculum to reinforce what teachers are teaching in class, offering interactive, game-based lessons that amplify teachers’ impact. The approach promotes engagement and allows students to work at their own pace, significantly enhancing literacy growth. Ilene cited data showing that students who engage with the platform for 45 minutes weekly exhibit three times the literacy growth of their peers, a remarkable achievement that highlights the platform’s effectiveness.
Building a Community of Learners and Empowering Families
A crucial part of Footsteps2Brilliance’s success is its emphasis on family involvement. Ilene recounted a powerful example of a superintendent in California who used the platform to bridge educational gaps in his diverse district. Through community engagement, parents were trained to support their children’s literacy efforts, resulting in a leap from 42% to 86% of students meeting literacy benchmarks. This collaborative approach has strengthened family bonds around learning and provided children with a foundation for future success.
The Future of Education and Technology
Ilene believes that technology, including AI, will continue to play a transformative role in education. Her team is already implementing AI-driven tools to personalize learning, making concepts like financial literacy more relatable to children. The company’s latest venture in transmedia, in collaboration with PBS, exemplifies the future of integrated learning. This groundbreaking approach allows children to extend their learning experience from TV to interactive games and books, creating an all-encompassing learning environment.
Parting Wisdom: Big Plans for Big Change
Ilene’s advice for aspiring entrepreneurs? Follow your passion, identify real-world problems, and be bold in devising solutions. Inspired by her grandfather’s favorite quote, “Make no little plans,” Ilene has dedicated her career to creating impactful solutions that empower children nationwide. Her life’s work at Footsteps2Brilliance exemplifies how technology, when combined with purpose and passion, can revolutionize education and change lives.
To Learn more about Ilene Rosenthal:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilrosenthal/
More about great women entrepreneurs creating companies with purpose:
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406: The Greatest Journey of a Woman Entrepreneur in Mental Health: Dr. Barbara Brown’s Story
Reach out and contact us if you need work on becoming a woman entrepreneur with a business that has both great profits and significance. Let’s Talk!
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Andi Simon: Welcome to On the Brink with Andi Simon. Thank you for joining me today. Whether you’re watching or you’re listening, our podcast is here to help you see, feel and think of new ways. As an anthropologist, I want you to be able to step out and take a look at what you’re doing, what others are doing and begin to get a fresh perspective on what’s changing. And these are very fast changing times. If you haven’t noticed, technology is transforming everything. Welcome to the fifth Industrial Revolution. But the questions I get is how do I use this? What am I going to do with it? What’s important here and what’s going to do to me, to my job? All kinds of questions to my children. And so I try to find people who are going to help you see, feel and think in new ways. And our guest today is an absolutely wonderful, wonderful guest. Ilene Rosenthal is a beautiful woman who I met through my favorite woman who’s Edie Frasier and Edie is this great connector who brings together people with great ideas who are doing some remarkable things. So, Ilene, thank you for joining me today. And I’m going to give them your bio in one second. So I appreciate you joining me.
Ilene Rosenthal: Thank you, Andi. It’s a delight to be here today.
Andi Simon: And you will love her background. If you’re watching the Footsteps2Brilliance you’re going to hear all about. But let me tell you just a little bit more about Ilene and why you should be listening to her. She’s a lifelong entrepreneur, for a while she was in the law industry, and she wasn’t a great attorney. But she’s going to tell you about being an entrepreneur. She’s a dynamic CEO and founder of Footsteps2Brilliance, an educational testing technology company dedicated to revolutionizing and scaling early literacy and financial education. Now, this educational technology company is quite remarkable because under her vision and her leadership, the company has become a beacon of innovation, providing transformative solutions to school districts across the US. And what you’re going to hear is how she moved from being an attorney to a whole new world, and what’s coming next.
She helped create “Learn With Me,” the first ever transmedia educational program that resulted in an Emmy nomination. But you won an Emmy, if I’m not mistaken.
Ilene Rosenthal: Well, nominated. We didn’t win. But next year there’s always hope.
Andi Simon: So that Emmy nomination based on Footsteps2Brilliance book, songs, and educational games. And I do think this is a very interesting conversation. My husband, as you know, was in the educational testing business. He built his company and then sold it to ETS, and he is very close to what goes on in education. And I guess I, being his wife, have been as well. Ilene’s commitment to enhancing educational outcomes for all students has earned her numerous accolades. She was named one of the top 100 women leaders in Stem education, featured in the best-selling book Women Mean Business that I humbly tell you I co-authored with Edie Fraser and was honored with the Wesleyan University Distinguished Alumni Award. She’s a sought-after speaker known for her thought leadership in the field of education technology. She serves as an advisor to the Women’s Business Collaborative, and she has a deep commitment to empowering women in business. I’m not going to tell you more about her early career, but I’m going to let Ilene tell you about it because it’ll come alive far better than anything I can read. And it will also help you understand how she began to see things in a different way and has continued to bring innovation into something which is really emerging education and technology. Ilene thanks again for joining me. Why don’t you tell our audience about your own journey? It’s a beautiful one, please.
Ilene Rosenthal: Thank you so much. Well, Andi, let me start by saying that it’s true that I’m a lawyer, but my first love and passion was as a teacher. When I graduated from Wesleyan, I was teaching at Wesleyan, actually, and I wanted to continue teaching, only to find out that I couldn’t do that without one more year, a teacher certification. At least I couldn’t do it in the public schools. So I applied to 29 private schools, and I think I got 30 rejections.
Andi Simon: Oh. Oh, you’re so cute. That must have made you feel like an aspiring teacher that people wanted. My goodness.
Ilene Rosenthal: Well, it made me realize that I needed to become an entrepreneur. And I had studied with Doctor Robert Pace at Columbia University. I was actually a music teacher, piano teacher. And, under his tutelage, I had learned a whole new innovative technique for teaching piano, for teaching how to play. And one day, The New York Times had this large article that was like a full page called Painless Piano Lessons, which was his methodology. You saw people in small groups and in semi-private lessons knowing nothing at that time. This was in the 70s, knowing nothing about intellectual property. I wrote on the bottom of that article, for further information, contact and I put my number on, cut it out. made a thousand copies of it, and then distributed it to all of the schools nearby.
Andi Simon: Forgive me for laughing. You’re bold, courageous, and. Oh, my gosh, what are we doing here? Wonderful.
Ilene Rosenthal: Between June and the beginning of school, which was about September, I ended up having so many students that I actually couldn’t handle them all. And this was a very competitive market. I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time. So what I did is I started writing books on how to teach Doctor Robert Pace’s Paces methodology and training other teachers so that I could give them to my students as my first foray into entrepreneurship. But the thing that I really realized is how vital it is to have, to use game-based methodology to get kids working together collaboratively to actually understand and break down whatever you’re teaching so that the kids can manipulate it themselves. And that’s what I do in language. But in between, there was a brief hiatus, and the hiatus was when I decided that I could not survive. I had followed a boyfriend from Cambridge down to D.C. about four years after starting my music school, didn’t want to start another music school, and thought that I couldn’t survive Washington, DC without a law degree.
Andi Simon: You are very entrepreneurial, right?
Ilene Rosenthal: So I ended up going to Georgetown. And after that. and clerked for a judge, I came back to D.C. and became an Assistant United States attorney, a criminal prosecutor here in D.C., and I loved that because I felt I was really helping victims of crime. But at the same time, I was seeing that there were a lot of people caught in the criminal justice system that shouldn’t be there. And the reason that they were there was, frankly, they did not have the education that allowed them in this global world that we’re in to go any path other than, frankly, a path that was going to get them into trouble. So after several years of that, I decided that I was going to look for ways to scale education so more students could have it. At that time, I was part of the Software Publishers Association. I was their general counsel. And I was taken aside at one point. The chairman of the board, who said that he was very interested in doing a school to home connection and without us knowing it we created the first Netflix back then. I mean, we didn’t call it Netflix, and we certainly didn’t make the money that Netflix has made, but what we realized is that there’s only six hours in a school day. It’s not enough for children because of all the things that they mandate to really get the deep exposure they need in language and math. And so the idea was, what if we could make it so that kids wanted to do reading and math after school. We made a partnership with Sony. Back then the Sony PlayStation had just come out every ten-year-old boy wanted a Sony PlayStation. And so we created Hollywood writers, video game producers, educators. It took about a year for them to talk together, to learn how to talk about each other’s lives. Ultimately, we created a software program that children would get plot and character that would lead them into real world situations where they’d have to, frankly, solve it through reading and math and ultimately kind of scale up as you do in video games. It was so successful that over the summer we would go on to the public TV stations where we had partnerships, and the parents could sign up and we would send them a disc. And at the end of the week they’d send back the disc. This isn’t Netflix, and we do a little show about what the next thing was going to be. And for kids who had nothing to do over the summer, this was a highlight. I mean, they waited to get this thing. And so I realized the importance of engagement, the importance of family involvement. Because you can’t say to a parent, go teach your kid if the parent themselves hasn’t had that modeling so modeled through media. So that’s how I got into educational technology.
Andi Simon: Well, you know, I just did a workshop for a company that’s in the gaming industry. And so the timing of this is quite fascinating because the world of video games is enormous. It’s huge compared to any other form of entertainment. But the most interesting part is that the people who are doing it are of all ages, and they are also becoming so engaged that they’re buying things in the games. One story about buying a Balenciaga cape for their avatar. And so there’s a whole metaverse coming. And I don’t want to digress from our conversation, but you’re starting at the cusp of something that’s transformational. And then that led into footsteps to brilliance. Or is there a gap between your Netflix lookalike and the next step? Because there’s something bigger than a bear here. It’s very, very important.
Ilene Rosenthal: Well, yes, there was another company in between that I worked with, and they looked at the idea of differentiating education for every child. So we actually had an algorithm that could have children reading the same news articles again to get them right, background knowledge. But if you were an accelerated reader, it would automatically put the content at, you know, whatever grade level was appropriate. If you weren’t, it would bring it to the level that was in your zone of proximal development, so that you were always stretching a little bit. And in that way, we could really make a difference and help children. Because part of the issue today is that there are many children with many different backgrounds and many different languages, truthfully, who are in a classroom and a teacher needs to teach all of those children, and she can’t do it unless she can differentiate for every child. But you still want everybody to get the same background knowledge. So that was a big influence as well for Footsteps to Brilliance. The big differentiator was when I read some research, and the research actually floored me. I don’t know if today it would floor people as much, but about 12 years ago I read that in this country, a country as wealthy as we are, about 46%, maybe higher after the pandemic of children enter kindergarten at risk of failure, meaning they’re 1, 2 or 3 years behind where they should be. Now what? That really means 88% of those children never succeed. And if you go further, the next benchmark is third grade reading. If you don’t have that foundational knowledge, truthfully, everything else is an uphill battle. And I thought, how could that be in the United States? So I spoke to superintendents and other leading educators and said, what’s going on? Because how can we define the trajectory of a kid’s life at age five? And they said, well, Ilene, there’s a problem. We don’t have jurisdiction over a child before they come to our school, but it’s a critical phase of brain development. So with my partner, my business partner, we said, how can we change this and come up with something that we’re calling A Model Innovation City. And in A Model Innovation City, what we do is we create a geofence and an electronic fence around an entire community, and then we work with all of the different organizations, the faith-based organizations, the mom and pops, the early Head Starts, the Head Starts to reach the hardest to reach families and give them the resources and the services they need. Now we work with this school all through elementary school, but this way we can reach children even before they come to school. And the part that is reaching the children before they come to school is actually our pro bono contribution to the district when we work with the district.
Andi Simon: Now tell me a little bit more because the abstraction is a case study, something to illustrate what you’re doing because it sounds like not simply a little more education. It seems like a whole different way to educate.
Ilene Rosenthal: Well, first of all, let me start by saying we always believe that the teacher is crucial, but the teacher needs to amplify herself. It’s not enough. On average, a teacher spends one minute a day with any student.
Andi Simon: So say that again. One minute a day with any student. That’s a little, little, little piece of time to make a big difference. Oh, my.
Ilene Rosenthal: So what you really want to do is make sure that their voice is amplified. So the way that we do that is we sit down with the teachers, or usually the district has a curriculum that they use. We’re a literacy career. So we look and see what they’re going to be teaching week by week by week. And because Footsteps2Brilliance is built manually. We then can align curated interactive game-based lessons. Yes, correlates with what the teacher’s teaching. Now with the click of a button, the student can either in small group time, after school time, or at home. And at home is important because our platform allows you to be on a cell phone or on anything that the parent has. They can now be practicing what it is that the teacher is using, and the teacher then gets data. So now if you have a student who’s challenged or a student who frankly needs to be accelerated, you can do that because our algorithm, our system serves up another game that will take the child. And if we need to break down the concept a little bit more foundationally, we can do it. If we need to accelerate the child, we can do it. There’s always writing and writing, no matter how accelerated you are, can be challenging for students. And in this way, we can really accelerate all. All children and most importantly, give a break to the teachers. Because teachers are overwhelmed today with everything. They’re just. there’s a lot on their plate. And so I want to make that easy for them too. So here’s the good news. We now have a lot of data. And we went into the data, and we looked at what’s happening. And we see those students who use us with fidelity, and we mean about 45 minutes a week and it doesn’t matter how you break that up, it can be ten minutes a day that those children actually have three times the literacy growth to children who don’t use Footsteps2Brilliance. That is so, set in stone. Now that we actually make a guarantee to the districts we work with.
Andi Simon: My goodness, I flip it around from the other side. Is there a reluctance on the part of the districts, or are the teachers lining up to see how fast they could bring it in? Because what you’re basically giving them is a system for educating the kids that complements their own skills. That sets the stage and let the kids self-learn like a gaming. You know where they figure it out real fast if you give them something to figure it out. So are they all responsive to this? I mean, is our society opening up for it?
Ilene Rosenthal: So I think that it depends. And I’ll tell you what it depends on. It depends upon leadership. At the end of the day because teachers are being asked to do a lot of things, and where the leadership really encourages the usage, then they take the time to go through the professional development, the whole thing. We found that usually when the teachers have the ability to go through the professional development and allow us to be coaches to them, they love it because it works. I could tell you about some other ways in which we’re just so excited. We have one phenomenal superintendent in California. He actually was brought in because his district is a “tale of two cities” and he said you have Silicon Valley families and you’ve got, you know, families, many of whom are just coming into the United States. And so he used Footsteps2Brilliance to make sure that those parents who have never been in the United States but are here because they want to help their children, get the services they need. So he creates, he calls them his communication specialists, and they will work with these parents and text them, show them how to get on Footsteps2Brilliance, look at the data and then show parents how to set routines. And really now they have all these books, songs and games that they can play with. The results are amazing. This superintendent has taken that part of his population and gone from 42% meeting the benchmark for literacy to 86%.
Andi Simon: Oh my goodness. And it was transformational. My gosh. I mean those kids have been changed forever.
Ilene Rosenthal: Well, they’re being given the opportunity to do what they want to do with their life. And that’s what America is all about.
Andi Simon: Well, it is, but the fact that he has the wisdom and forethought, foresight to see it and to embrace it. Well, I’m curious about the other side, whose town they are also using it, or are they? You know, I often wonder.
Ilene Rosenthal: The answer is yes, because, you know, 66% of children in the United States, when they graduate from high school, do not read proficiently. There’s not 66% of impoverished people in the United States. So the truth is that we’re really talking about a challenge that’s much broader than a certain segment of our society. But given the fact that we’re becoming a wonderfully more diverse society, which of course we appreciate, that means that there’s multiple languages too. So schools have to deal with all of these different things. And that really goes across all socio economics. And I can tell you that I have yet to meet any friend of mine who doesn’t say, I want this for my grandchild or my niece or whatever. I mean, this is not a dumbed down curriculum.
Andi Simon: Well, actually, what you’re talking about is how to enable kids to learn, to learn. If I hear you correctly and I’m gaming the game, I mean, it’s a structure to it, but they can begin to impose upon it their own interest and curiosity and begin to find solutions to and enjoy the whole process. I bet they like it.
Ilene Rosenthal: Well, they do. Engagement is important. It’s really crucial. And also the ability for them to make mistakes and it be okay.
Andi Simon: Yes.
Ilene Rosenthal: Without making mistakes. And it can’t be that software. Which meant a lot of digital software kind of serves an assessment. And then if you get it wrong, they say it’s wrong and then they serve something else up. No no no no no. We kind of say “well good job. Try again.” Now let’s look at what happened and then you could do it. So the software really has the ability, as you said, to help them learn how to learn but not analyze them for making a mistake.
Andi Simon: And it’s also interesting if you get the home set up right, they’re not doing it in a social setting where they could be embarrassed or diminished so that there’s a lot of uplift as opposed to peer pressure to not accelerate, you know, the learning, am I right? I mean, I’m imagining the home can be a really different environment for learning.
Ilene Rosenthal: Well, no, I don’t think that. But we’ve had parents tell us how their older children now play school with their younger children. Oh, the younger children are learning, but because the older children are teaching them. I mean, it’s wonderful. It really, as I said, amplifies what’s happening in the classroom.
Andi Simon: This is so exciting. Talk a little bit about what you’ve learned about education and technology, because I’m visualizing this as something neither it’s really, one enables the other. I mean, when you talked about the disk going out, there were other ways of doing this way back when. But now the technology enables you to provide information to the child and when it’s not right, really coach them on how to correct it and teach them how to think about it. That is just amazing. Can you share with us a little bit about what kind of technology this is and what you see coming? Because it sounds a lot like AI.
Ilene Rosenthal: Well, it’s funny that you ask that. I don’t think anybody cannot be playing with AI right now. And in fact, we have a new financial literacy program that is putting some AI in so that children really can relate to financial literacy concepts by finding out about different work environments, how much to make them work. I mean, there’s a lot that, you know, they can learn. But yes, I think that when we started this, frankly, the cell phone was just becoming ubiquitous. And it was the first time when you could actually get videos on a cell phone. And we saw that technology and we said we need to create a platform that is device agnostic because we knew that parents, the first thing is how do you reach the parent? Well, as it turns out, today, about 99.9% of parents have a smartphone, but it could be an Apple or it could be an Android, right? They could have tablets. Different ones. Obviously, computers that we needed to have literally a device agnostic platform so that you could create a 1 to 1 technology world without having to pay for it. And I’m talking about the district. Infrastructure that normally they’d have to do. The other thing is that as the technology updates, it’s our responsibility to update, to stay with where the hardware is. And so, it really takes that burden off of the schools and they never lose their investment because of that. That’s right.
Andi Simon: You have become quite a partner to the education of America’s children. My goodness. Could I ask you, how many kids do you think are doing Footsteps2Brilliance now?
Ilene Rosenthal: Well, we know that there are over a million children who learn to read next to Brilliance.
Andi Simon: Wow. I just think this is so exciting. What comes next?
Ilene Rosenthal: So there’s a few things that are really fascinating to me. One is the concept of transmedia. Transmedia has never been used in early literacy. And let me define that term, because that could be kind of jargon to people. But transmedia is the idea that you can take plot and character, and you could see it on a television set, and then you can do something with it on your phone, and then the radio may do something. In other words, it’s a complete cycle of what you can do. And during the pandemic, we were talking to the county superintendent at San Bernardino County, which is the largest county in the United States, and we were talking about how you help families when schools are closed. And we recognize that every family has access to television. And most of them have access to phones. And how do we marry the two? And they brought in their PBS affiliate, which is called KVCR, and put together the PBS side with the Footsteps2Brilliance side to create the first ever transmedia program for children, you know, in the early years. So here’s what makes it different.
We all love Sesame Street. We all do. But Sesame Street was something that, like all TV, was fleeting. Right after you saw it, it was gone. Now, if you were lucky enough to be sitting with an adult who was going to extend what you saw on TV, that was great. But kids didn’t always have that ability. Now, what we’ve done with this is that we’ve brought in some of the best teachers in the San Bernardino County region, which is over 33 districts. And we’ve and they actually are our leaders in the shows. They’re the main characters we’ve brought in animation. And then what happens is that 15-minutes of the show is in English and 15 in Spanish. All of our books have a toggle switch, English and Spanish. But after you see the TV program, which is based on one of the Footsteps2Brilliance books, then the parents can download the book, and they can read it over and over again with the child. Everything is tactile, so voice encoded if they can’t read it, and then we start giving them games that extend whatever they learned.
And out of that comes contests as well. So we’ve had countywide contests where students have to write their own books. We have a book, and so we have kids who are actually publishing books. So it really makes for an entire community ability to get education in every way that you can.
Andi Simon: My mind is saying that this isn’t an add on to an education system, this is a transformation of it.
Ilene Rosenthal: We think it does revolutionize education. But of course, there’s a lot of fabulous stuff that we’re building upon.
Andi Simon: Of course, you’re adding something which might have been difficult for San Bernardino by itself. And, you know, the way human minds work, wouldn’t you have a box in the stories in the box? And this is what I do, and this is how I do it. It’s hard to see beyond that. And what you do with a kind of entrepreneurial mind you have is to see opportunities well beyond what is. And now you’ve given them, I won’t say hope, but really the opportunity to do what they intend to do, which is to educate every child to the best of what they can become. This is just amazing. So is that transmedia everywhere or just some places or not?
Ilene Rosenthal: Well, the way that PBS works is that the affiliates develop programming, and then other stations pick it up and become nationwide. It’s great.
Andi Simon: This is so, so wonderful. for yourself personally, where do you see the next steps for you? And I was going to ask you about purpose, but your entire life here is purposeful, isn’t it? You know, this is less about profits and more about, you know, purpose.
Ilene Rosenthal: Absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. There are challenges that they need entrepreneurs, frankly, to help solve. And, and as I said, education is near and dear to my heart.
Andi Simon: So that teacher that you wanted to be who couldn’t find a school to be in is now going to be in every school you can find a way to get inside of, and teaching in ways that your piano teacher might have embraced. If he could have figured out how to get the technology into his piano, learning, you could go back and teach piano again. This is wonderful. But I do think we have probably taken our half hour of time, and it probably is time for us to say goodbye, but 1 or 2 or 3 things you want the audience to remember. They tend to remember the end better than the beginning. And while your life has been a wonderful journey, a couple of things you’d like to leave them with.
Ilene Rosenthal: So I think the first thing is, if you want to be an entrepreneur, think about what your passion is. Look at where the problems are and then figure out how you can solve it. And the second thing is, something that was back in the day my grandfather had, he’d take quotations that he loved, and there was an architect. I think his last name was Burnham, and his very first quotation was “make no little plans.”
Andi Simon: This is, I think, big and makes it happen. Yeah. This is exciting. This has been such a privilege and a pleasure. Thank you for joining me. I’m going to say goodbye to my listeners and to my audience who come to view and send me great emails. Continue. Tell me who you want to hear info@SimonAssociates.net comes right to me. The three books are behind me on my shelf back there. Amazon loves you if you want to pick one up: On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights is about how a little anthropology can help your business grow. But if you listen carefully today, and part of this is taking what you see as observations and beginning to think about how you can create innovative solutions, which is just what Ilene has done with Footsteps2Brilliance. It isn’t a good teacher, it’s a whole different way of complimenting them and amplifying them and accelerating them. And then great things happen. The middle book back there, Smashing the Myths of Women in Business. Those are 11 women who all said, of course we can. Don’t hold us back. And they lead others to become CEOs and geologists and aerospace, where women aren’t particularly welcome. And my third book, which Ilene is in, and you should read her chapter there, is called Women Mean Business, written with Edie Fraser and Robyn Spizman. We talk about 102 women, all of whom were kind enough to share their wisdom so that as they rise, they can lift you as well. And I’m going to say goodbye. Remember, take your observations, turn them into innovations, and come again. I do love all of you because you give me joy and it’s fun to bring wonderful people to share with you. So I’ll say goodbye. Have a wonderful day. Bye.
