About
FrancesWest&Co is a global business advisory organization focused on technology inclusion. Our human-first strategies for process innovation and culture transformation come with a commitment to building a diverse, inclusive, and future-ready world.
Led by Frances West, former IBM Chief Accessibility Officer, our team of collaborators includes subject matter experts with diverse cultural backgrounds, varied enterprise and entrepreneur experiences, and C-level hands-on executive management and organizational transformation expertise.
Meet Frances
Frances learned the importance of diverse, international experiences early, first as a child raised in Taiwan, then as a high school student in Hong Kong, and then as an immigrant to the United States, where she obtained a degree in marketing from The University of Kentucky before taking on a systems engineer job at IBM. To this day, Frances credits the IBM recruiting manager who looked beyond the language barrier and her lack of IT experience with planting the seeds of what would become a lifelong passion: helping leaders and organizations with authentic inclusion practices that can drive disruptive innovation.
Frances has over 30 years of global business management, technology sales, emerging market development, and organizational leadership experience. She has held numerous executive management positions, including IBM’s first Chief Accessibility Officer. In June 2016, after retiring from IBM, she founded a global advisory firm to focus on helping organizations to operationalize inclusion as a strategic business imperative.
Her focus on human-first technology innovation and authenticity in the workplace led her to write her first book, Authentic Inclusion™ Drives Disruptive Innovation, which was recognized in 2019 at both the CES and SXSW conferences.
The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 brought on a fundamental shift in the importance of technology to how we work, learn, and live and how globally connected we are. Frances decided to expand her organization’s services to meet the challenging demands of leaders and organizations by launching FrancesWest&Co in 2023. With a team of culturally diverse experts with deep subject matter expertise in design and management, and industry knowledge spanning business and academia, Frances and her collaborators can help her clients with hands-on strategy, execution, and co-creation of transformative initiatives globally.
As a person who believes in harmony in life, Frances is always mindful of work-life balance. She not only looks for but creates opportunities to spend time with her two adult sons and their families in Boston and New York. Her latest interest includes learning how to garden and hike.
Our Collaborators
Stela Lupushor
Stela Lupushor is a thought leader, speaker, educator, and futurist on a mission to humanize the workplace through the use of design thinking, technology, analytics, and future thinking to create inclusive workplaces. She is the co-author of “Humanizing Human Capital: Invest in Your People for Optimal Business Returns” and “Humans At Work: The Art and Practice of Creating the Hybrid Workplace” Along with being part of the FrancesWest&Co. team, Stela is Chief Reframer at Reframe. Work, Inc
Kathleen Delgado
Kathleen is an innovative and strategic leader who draws on her research, marketing, and client management background to deliver new thinking and impactful results. She began her career at software startup Lotus, whose progressive workplace culture inspired and framed her career working with first-of-kind workplace initiatives. Kathleen has a global business point of view with an entrepreneurial spirit, from managing strategic partnerships and brand presence for the Olympics, Burton Snowboards, and National Geographic to building global industry marketing programs for healthcare and government and innovative technology solutions for people with disabilities and the aging population within IBM Research. Today, Kathleen is VP of Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships at FrancesWest&Co, where she collaborates with leaders and teams across industries building cross-disciplinary and stakeholder relationships while shaping ideas into impact in complex and rapidly changing environments
Fanny Krivoy
Fanny is a seasoned facilitator, bringing inclusive design practices to life for organizations. She is passionate about designing for complex, often overlooked segments of the population that contribute to business and culture and seeks to bring understanding to differences and increasing access, use, and prosperity through expanded design knowledge. Fanny is a visiting professor at NYU and Pratt Institute; the host of Project Inclusion, an interview series exploring leadership and the multiple dimensions of inclusion; and the Founder and Creative Director of Analogous, a brand and design consultancy that focuses on inclusive design strategy.
Mindy Eng
Mindy is an advocate for radical inclusion in design thinking. She helps businesses build inclusive products with strategic, human-first approaches and design research. Mindy has worked across a myriad of sectors, engaging people from all walks of life, including vulnerable and at-risk communities. She has over a decade of experience working with companies like Google, CareFirst, Credit Suisse, L’Oreal, Petco, and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to grow their digital products and services. She is the creator of the Global Inclusion Toolkit announced at RightsCon 2021 (the global summit on human rights). In addition to being a FrancesWest&Co Collaborator, Mindy is a Professor of Design Thinking at NYU and Director of Research and Strategy for Analogous.
Sandy Hanebrink
Sandy Hanebrink is a global leader in disability rights, technology, accessibility, and inclusion. An indefatigable advocate, Ms. Hanebrink has a passion for change and continually looks for ways to make accessibility and inclusion of individuals with disabilities a priority. She is an inspiring speaker who shares her journey of how life-altering circumstances were not life-ending or limiting. Ms. Hanebrink brings unique perspectives, commitment, and passion to her work. She is disabled, an advocate, a Paralympic Medalist, an occupational therapist, and has worked in or with local, state, and federal government, traditional healthcare, nonprofit organizations, private practice, disability-led organizations, universities, school systems, technology corporations, government and organizational policy, disability justice, and as a consultant, trainer, and researcher. Sandy is currently the Executive Director of Touch the Future Inc.
Our Perspective
Diversity is at the heart of disruptive innovation.
At FrancesWest&Co, we see the world through the lens of Authentic Inclusion™. At its core, Authentic Inclusion™ is the insight that an organization can maximize human potential and organizational success by recognizing an individual human’s ability to make a difference not in spite of, but because of their difference.
Our Approach
Today’s leaders and teams need dynamic, responsive experts who can meet them where they are. FrancesWest&Co brings together trusted advisors who lead with principle and purpose, excel at collaboration, and support their clients with a holistic and custom-tailored approach.
Strategic planning and alignment are the most critical investments an organization can make. Frances and her team were invaluable in the lead-up and onsite facilitation of our program. We left with plans and new perspectives that reshaped our values, operating principles, and go-to-market plans.”
Working with FrancesWest&Co challenged us to think differently about our approaches and to think more strategically about our impact. Their feedback was incredibly valuable as we tackled the various scenarios and approaches that our teams take with regard to Accessibility and authentic inclusion.”
Frances inspired our colleagues to take the extra mile towards inclusion and accessibility in banking.”
Our time spent with Frances was motivating, thought-provoking, inspirational, and insightful. Her real-life examples of innovation made it easy for our team to comprehend the connections between different abilities and being innovative.”
Frances delivered a holistic perspective on the benefits of inclusion—specifically digital inclusion—and how leveraging inclusive technology can drive progress in every organization. Her talk was inspiring and thought-provoking.”
The industry expertise and global perspective provided by FrancesWest&Co helped inform the strategic planning of our nationwide network of community-based service providers. Frances and her team challenged us to think more deeply about the potential for technology to enrich the lives of persons with disabilities.”