Cristina Imre On Pressing Global Challenges Requiring Strategic Technological Adaptations
With over 20 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur, executive coach, and author, Dr. Cristina Imre leverages her polymath expertise to drive impactful global change.
At Tech Leadership Lab (TLL), she fosters a community of driven individuals focused on solving the 17 SDGs through human-centric and innovative approaches, making TLL a pivotal entity in global sustainability efforts.
Renowned for her transformative leadership, Dr. Cristina Imre is celebrated for her commitment to fostering purpose-driven, empathic leadership. As the founder of TLL, she combines her extensive background in remote work strategy, AI integration, and human-centric methods to empower impact leaders worldwide, ensuring a sustainable and equitable future for all.
Before founding TLL, Dr. Imre successfully led Quantum Wins, where she provided consulting, coaching, and fractional executive roles to help audacious, purpose-driven startups and companies grow and make a lasting impact—an experience that continues to inform her approach at TLL.
Outside of work, Cristina’s interests span a wide range, from avid reading to sports enthusiasm, biohacking, and a passion for coffee and forensic science.
Cristina discusses practising ethical leadership in a time where technology and its capabilities are rapidly evolving, and how innovative products and services can be developed with people and the planet's interests at heart.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in technology and leadership?
[Cristina Imre] - I originally straddled the line between my fascination with the human mind and how we function. I discovered early on people are a bit superficial and unstable, and I said we could do better because of my upbringing and life experiences.
I needed to be very sharp to read people and understand clues early, and this for me was super fascinating. When I started my professional journey, it was always with entrepreneurial stuff. I am a true born entrepreneurial type, and from seven years old I was trying to do stuff with money and always thinking about what could I create and how could I trade stuff?
These two sides were always in me, but then I said if I want to uncover what is behind everything we do as humans and as a species how we can improve, I cannot just stick to one domain and go down that route while becoming famous and successful. I needed to blend myself across multiple domains and understand people with different functions, people with different levels of knowledge, education, and backgrounds. It's the same with entrepreneurship.
As a serial entrepreneur, I co-founded multiple businesses, but besides this I was also a fractional executive. That was very handy because I understood business from different operational perspectives like marketing, HR, recruiting, and even secret agent type jobs inside of companies.
I worked with start-ups, SMBs and corporate, and then as a coach and trainer multiple times during this period I learned a lot. As a remote pioneer, I was very interested in what is happening outside of companies, and I didn't want to just fix myself here in Romania or around Europe.
I wanted to understand what's going on at the global scale because I did have this fascination with the idea that we can unite as one species, because we are one species. When it comes to SDGs or problems, there are existential threats we are now facing and giving to the next generations, and that just hurts my guts.
I decided that I need to jump in and do something about these problems, and this openness helped open my eyes to the global reality. I didn't consider myself a global citizen at seven fourteen years old, but education and knowledge open you up to everything. By learning about other cultures, whether it was Australia, the U.S., Canada, or in Asia, I realised I knew nothing.
This continued throughout the journey, and I did a lot of things during those decades while working on different start-ups and products. I was also immersing myself in understanding humans, because my focus was on leadership.
I knew that if we have the right type of leaders to guide us, we can guide ourselves as future generations and make the right decisions that will impact millions, billions and trillions of people, not just money.
As Founder and CEO of the Tech Leadership Lab (TLL), can you share a bit more about this organisation's purpose and how it’s inspiring change globally?
It is both a hard and easy question to answer, because TLL is something you cannot just put in a box. If I tried to put it in a box, I would tell that you can view it as a global movement, an action-oriented think tank, a strong ecosystem builder or a catalyst helping to solve the SDG's sooner.
From an agile entrepreneurial perspective, it works much faster and connects with others much quicker than a large institution. Then there’s my second definition. When we are doing social good or social enterprise, our world today does not have legal entities that serve the means of uniting people around the world.
There is nothing combining infrastructure, legal, and ethical frameworks together; you would need to open multiple companies or hoard groups together.
TLL sees everything as firstly principle-based thinking. Don't create a problem before you receive an ask. TLL evolves all the time around what is needed, but I see it like a united group of amazing, driven individuals around the globe who want to act as a catalyst to solve the SDG’s sooner.
For this reason, we are like a living organism that continually adopts, adjusts and innovates ways to impact and reach people and communities. These are groups who can help us become a bigger movement and progress to the next stage, to find the most effective steps that can bring us closer to creating a better future, to serve the SDGs as good ancestors.
How can businesses adapt how they use technology to not only increase profits but help other people while minimising their negative impacts?
Firstly, I'm not a tech person, I became a tech person who integrated technology inside of my businesses. Of course, with what we are doing at Tech Leadership Lab, many people get intimidated when they are talking about technology or opening a tech company.
I'm not a tech founder, I did work in a deep tech company, but now I'm running Tech Leadership Lab, where we are surrounded by tech founders worldwide. I started to understand that we can work very closely if we translate our mind inside tech.
People can open and understand the human aspects from us, and then you can create amazing products. Technology was always a tool, but today it's something that no matter what your business is, you need to integrate it. Even if you're a social enterprise, technology will just multiplicate your impact no matter what.
Not using technology right now will make you irrelevant, and as a fast adopter and curious personality, I was always open to testing things. Now we have so many possibilities, like with conversational AI or whatever else we have around us. My mindset is let's test these technologies and see how they can enable my business.
It doesn't mean we will include everything we find that’s exciting, but we do need to adjust. Testing and finding ways to improve our business today is a must have, otherwise we will become rapidly irrelevant.
I believe people who have good hearts, are long term thinkers, and are driven by their legacy and being good ancestors might not always embrace technology. This is because they are human centred, but I would say you need to embrace technology because it can become your best ally and friend to impact more people.
What is required to accelerate progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and to create a future which balances progress and innovation with protecting people and planet?
Since I launched TLL, this was one of the main questions we wanted answers for. At the beginning we were also trying to uncover what we were missing. Did we have enough resources? Did we have the technology and tools to solve the SDGs in time?
I learnt so much with our endeavours, especially with our first summit on the intersection of climate, AI and humanity. Together with AI I created a plan on how I could become a climate expert in four weeks. It was important for me to have relevant conversations with experts in the field while setting up speakers for our events, because we had a three-day global summit with 32 experts from around the globe.
Many were experts on climate because we identified that climate is one of the most urgent SDGs to, we need to solve. Last year, I can say I was ignorant around the data and facts on where we are with climate crisis, even as a curious polymath as myself. But learning through the process of building TLL and organising the Summit, I now have an entire board of advisors.
If I don't know something I just ask the most suitable person. I wanted to know where we are at with water desalinisation, I had questions like is this as costly as people are saying? Is this ruining our energy efficiency if we are using desalinisation more? Was it that it doesn't add up financially, we don't have the technology, or was this a farce and misinformation?
What I discovered is that this is misinformation, and I started to find the same thing was happening when I investigated the climate. I did a course about planetary boundaries created by the Stockholm Resilience Institute [Centre], and it’s amazing the level of knowledge they brought to us with where we are on this journey.
Learning about this field, I realised we have the tools and everything we need today to solve our climate crisis. Not even just the climate, but also the other SDGs. What stops us? It's policy and legal issues, and this comes to the leadership problem that infuriates me the most. We have created a society where for some crazy reason we decided to have leaders atop of countries and companies that can manage billions of dollars; people but who didn't pass the character trait test.
I would love to have a test for the traits of people, because how is it possible we can allow someone who is egocentric, narcissistic, psychopathic and/or sociopathic to run over others. Leaders at the top of organisations should all pass this test.
We've then identified that they truly care about others, and they are empathetic, long-term thinkers who are legacy driven. What they want to achieve is not just for their individual gain and ego centric purposes, because once a huge amount of power and money is in the hands of people who care less about you, everything we are trying to do on an individual or smaller scale becomes more difficult.
It will be like the David and Goliath story, but this time you have too many Goliaths! Eventually this becomes super frustrating, and now it’s like we are living in an absurd play where we are the actors who allow things to just perpetrate and continue even though they make no sense. We have leaders who oversee these major problems who care less about solving them. Then there are others who were maybe converted by oil and gas companies lobby in this direction against the climate.
Let’s think about the UN for example, it is one of the best organisations humankinds could have hoped for. The UN has done so much since World War II for humanity, we could have been extinct, but we don't even know. The UN played a huge role, but it then became big with bad actors entering it.
Even if you want to do something good, sometimes the brakes will be pulled on it and you just cannot move fast enough. Or there are people inside who want to corrupt the project, and so you need to consider if you have the alliances and partnerships to accomplish something.
We still have some people who are pulling the triggers and playing a different role on the inside, and they are bringing in other parties again with big differences. Top decision makers and leadership are just not aligned enough to creating global policies, policies that for example connect people around the world to a clean energy grid, accessible water, resources, and food.
No one should be hungry enough today that you can see their bones. This is just something our world shouldn't allow, because we have abundance. We are throwing out resources daily, and our recycling or the circular economy model is still in its infancy. We could accelerate this, but we must solve the leadership struggle place to people who want good and able to unite at the top.
If tomorrow we woke up with the right leadership, they would set up an emergency meeting to create global alliances and movements to connect what we have today technology and resource wise. We can solve our most of the SDGs in just a couple of years.
If we talk about water, more specifically (we just finished a show on water), we could solve this problem around the world before 2030. We have the tools and the means; we just need the will and speed from the right leaders on top of things. However, society and the structures are not just top to bottom, it's bottom to top as well.
This world can work easily if we all have the right education, because if people know the truth they behave differently. For example, if someone is educated on nutrition, they won't eat fast food, become diabetic, obese or sick. They eat these foods they either want to or because they think it's cheaper.
We are a very inventive and creative species; people just don't have the right information. I truly believe if you educate your surroundings and the tribe around yourself where you're living, they will make much better decisions. They will realise we need to make some sacrifices to change our ways to become a sustainable world, but we will do it for our kids because it's the right thing to do, and most people are inherently good.
How have you seen the technology for good space evolve and what opportunities are you seeing emerging for founders to make a difference?
This brings us to the issue of funding, because in this space, many founders are struggling when there are no interesting monetary incentives. That's not true however, because you can find money no matter what, but we also need to change the narrative. We already have inside our ecosystem at Tech Leadership Lab enterprises, people and experts who are working to create net zero profitable initiatives around the circular economy.
There are so many ways now we are becoming sustainable and also making a lot of money, so yes it is possible. Tech founders shouldn't stop because, "there is not much money in the system." There is, and especially today when you cannot escape from the realities of weather change, water scarcity, or rising temperatures, you just see that things are rapidly changing and funds are starting to be injected into these sectors.
You shouldn't be demoralised if you cannot find money, but yes we could accelerate progress with a little bit more mitigation activism. It’s not yet so real yet, but I can sense from the venture capital and impact investment side of the world, there will be a shift in mindset. There are more investors and people with capital who are truly scared or concerned, and they are realising they need to invest in what matters for humans.
Today as we speak, the shift is happening, and we will get to a tipping point I hope soon. I think we are close and then everything will rapidly shift. What we are seeing currently in our sector where there are no super helpful products helping people to survive and transition into a new way of life will change soon. Those who are preparing in this space will have a lot to gain.
What qualities have you seen that visionary tech leaders commonly possess, and do you have any recommendations on how impact driven individuals can develop these skills?
You need to be a resilient individual no matter what. If I could just pick a top five or ten skills, the first one would still be resilience. If you are doing good for the world, you are facing so much BS, and many times people won't believe in you. If you have a good idea, you think might work, or even if your idea starts to work and you already have a proof of concept, you will still face obstacles.
You are prone to mental health issues because you feel lonely. Atop the mountain the air is purer, but there are also less people. Many times, those around you including your family or even your co-founders will not understand what you are building or see.
You will face a lot of egotistic behaviour that will sometimes make you feel like it's not a good idea to help other people, because they just think about themselves. It's one of the illusions we create, because when we face so many problems we will internalise and want to solve our own problems before we can help others.
When you face so many struggles, eventually you will become more pessimistic. These are phasing every tech entrepreneur goes through, and why tech? Tech is very fast, it's the fastest growing industry out of all the sectors, so it's not like you must have the entrepreneurial skill sets established. But you also need to be fast, and everything just accelerates.
All the cycles an entrepreneur goes through when in tech are more rapid; it's like entrepreneurship, depression and anxiety on steroids! You need to remember that these phases are happening for everyone, but if you are truly resilient you can just acknowledge that it is a normal part of the process, so don't keep yourself alone.
Join tribes like TLL, join tribes that are fuelling your soul and what you want to build. Don't keep yourself outside because you don't have the time. You cannot afford to keep yourself solitary from the beginning because the journey will be harder, and you will have so many things on your plate.
Start now, because I believe that through networking, connecting and having the right alliances, you will succeed. If you study success stories from around the world and in Silicon Valley, alliance play a big role in whether the big companies succeed.
It's not just they were special; no, they had the right type of assets and resources around them. Now you can do that work remotely, so don't give up. Connect and keep close with people who are doing the same things as you are.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?
I usually don't recommend businesses and I’ve been doing this for the last two years because I read so much and I'm in contact with so many startups daily. It wouldn't be good as the founder of TLL to favour one or the other, but what I can tell you is that I discover start-ups doing great work across all the SDG’s.
I get this sensation of, "oh my God, I cannot believe what they are doing!" I have this feeling daily, so then I need to connect and see where they are with their technology.
The future looks so bright from an innovation perspective; there are innovations happening in every field. If we allow and support these founders, we will have an amazing future.
I could talk for hours about the little technical innovations popping up that could potentially change the world, things working in spaces such as inequality, AI, water and the circular economy.
Many projects are focusing on how we can connect our resources and infrastructure, improving the global energy grid and connecting different energy sources. Now we have more effective ways to rely on green energy sources, and that is such a great idea and vision to have in front of us.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend for our listeners?
If you could see my Kindle and Everrun you would know how much I love books. The best book for you is the one that answers your most urgent problem. I find mentors in books; they are my mentors, and they have been for a long time. The same happens with YouTube videos or podcasts.
If you listen to this podcast right now when you're about to give up or think that the world is bad, it will be the best resource you can have. It’s the same with books, and I am very intuitive when it comes to choosing my next book.
Many times, it’s not a recommendation, I just ask myself, “what are my struggles right now?" I might have personal problems, so I look for the best resources. I go on YouTube or my Kindle and just choose a title, because I do have a long list of books I haven’t read or listened too yet. Intuition is important as well; every time when I need to choose a book I just started looking.
Clarify your problem and just start looking, very quickly a book will speak to you. Then when I start to listen to or read the book, I realise it’s exactly what I wanted.
