Raised in the high Himalayas, educated across 22 homes in multiple countries, and fluent in five languages , Simmi Singh was never going to follow a conventional path.
She started out wanting to be a UN translator. A mentor stopped her and said: you have a voice of your own.
That single conversation redirected her toward management consulting at Booz Allen and Ernst and Young, then entrepreneurship, then scaling the health vertical at Cognizant from a $10M fledgling unit into one of the company's most significant growth stories,
then 15 years as a partner and global practice leader at Egon Zehnder placing boards and entire management teams for some of the most transformational companies in the world,
then a secondment as Senior Advisor on Health Innovation to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, and most recently joining Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts as Chief People Officer and Executive Vice President.
In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Simmi Singh to trace the through line of a brilliantly discontinuous career and pull out the lessons that only come from decades of doing it at the highest levels.
They discuss:
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Growing up in the Himalayas surrounded by brilliant women with broken dreams, and how that shaped her hunger for agency at a time when no recipe existed for women like her
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Being one of 12 women in a college of 3,000 men and becoming the first female valedictorian in the institution's 100 year history
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What she learned scaling Cognizant's health vertical by giving away power before she had any, and why that was the most strategic move she made
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How she decoded great leadership by surrounding herself with human textbooks, including mentors under 30, even at 62
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Why she believes women need sponsors far more than mentors, and what it actually means to be worthy of one
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The mistake she sees leaders making in healthcare AI right now, and the more audacious problems she believes women should be solving
Simmi Singh is proof that intellectual homelessness, the restless feeling of living on the bridges between worlds, is not a liability. It is the rarest kind of preparation.