Duena Blomstrom
Co-Founder & CEO at People Not Tech
Duena is the author of “Emotional Banking: Fixing Culture, Leveraging FinTech and Transforming Retail Banks into Brands”. She is an entrepreneur and Angel Investor, a mentor, a blogger with cutting edge opinion style, a writer for prestigious outlets, an international keynote speaker at industry events, named an influencer in most technology related lists and the inventor of the Emotional Banking concept. Today, Duena runs the PeopleNotTech -a revolutionary AI-driven people software solution company focused on the concept of monitoring and improving Psychological Safety in teams. With a background in Psychology as well as Business, Duena is on a crusade to see lasting change in the lives of employees across all industries. In addition to running PeopleNotTech, Duena delivers different, entertaining, engaging and thought-provoking keynotes internationally and occasionally participates in panels and debates on topics ranging from FinTech, Digital and Innovation to the bigger themes of the Future of Work, Technology and Agile as they reflect in organisations through the perspective of both individuals and teams and has a strong following of 200,000+ subscribers on Twitter and LinkedIn.
How did you get to become an expert in your key topics?
Over the past 25 years, I’ve worked with multiple large organisation in addition to founding a few start-ups from a position of leadership be it to assist them in their digital strategy or to help them transform.
What topic areas are you most passionate about?
While I know a lot about Financial Services, my focus shifted towards people and cultural topics when I wrote the book and now the only topics I focus on are Psychological Safety in teams and Agile and the anatomy of digital change.
Which influencers influence you within those key topics?
Aside from my friends in the FinTechMafia – from Jim to Brett and many more awesome ones- when it comes to people and Agile topics the thinkers I look up to the most are Gene Kim, Brene Brown, Amy Edmondson, Karen Ferris, John Cutler and others.
How would you describe your offline influence?
I run a technology company offering a new type of software that focuses on helping organisations adapt to the new ways of work and win in this digital era so we are at the forefront in between science and technology so we have close relationships with everyone from Silicon Valley to small local teams. In addition to that, my writing reaches 60000 subscribers on the “Chasing Psychological Safety” weekly newsletter and another 51000 on the “The Future is Agile” one in addition to the 26k on Twitter and 240k on LinkedIn and I speak on both those topics so the overall influence is hard to quantify.
What’s your best source of information for getting ahead of a story? What resource do you use to stay ahead of the trend?
A combination of online sources originating from social channels in particular LinkedIn.
If a brand wanted to work with you, which activities would you be most interested in collaborating on?
What are your passions outside of work?
What would be the best way for a brand to contact you?