Melissa Smith Opens Up About Everything from #MeToo to Project Management

WEX CEO and President Melissa Smith recently landed in two pieces of must-read thought leadership content that we’re excited to share. In addition to a forward-looking Fast Company trends piece that tapped her for insights on the year ahead, she also offered her perspective in a white paper coproduced by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and Forbes Insights that digs into the way technology is reinventing project management.

Melissa Smith talks to Fast Company

When Fast Company asked 10 of the top CEOs across sectors for their predictions about how business will change in 2019, they forecast everything from more transparency to a possible recession to the return of brick-and-mortar shopping. Melissa weighed in about how things will change for women in the workplace.

She told the publication, “With the tailwind of the #MeToo movement followed by the largest number of women elected into politics in any U.S. cycle, we are on the verge of significant change in the way women experience their professional lives. To think that the next generation of women, our daughters, could really show up to work and be treated from day one as equal is moving from a dream to a place of reality.”

Read the piece in full here.

Melissa Smith interviewed for Forbes Insights C-Suite report

A new report out from Forbes Insights surveyed executives across the globe to understand how they’re managing disruptive technologies and how these technologies impact people, projects, work, culture and strategy. To give a perspective on some of the survey findings, Melissa was interviewed for the paper, in which she speaks about the ways that WEX is welcoming innovation with open arms.  

“The C-Suite Outlook: How Disruptive Technologies are Redefining the Role of Project Management” asserts that technology can’t drive big change in an organization without the enthusiastic support of the C-suite.

It cites WEX’s culture of learning as an example of best practices: “One way [Melissa nurtures WEX’s culture] is by meeting regularly with employees to discuss the upsides of digital transformation and how disruptive technologies can improve workflows and boost productivity. In addition to personally evangelizing the value of digital transformation, Ms. Smith brings in industry experts to provide unbiased perspectives on disruption, stages tech talks where employees are encouraged to ask questions about disruptive technologies, and hosts hackathons where workers share new ideas and technologies. The introduction of agile approaches is also allowing WEX to continue to evolve and move faster as competition mounts.”

Melissa also spoke about how WEX rethought our company’s approach to project management: “If you look at our lines of business, we’re increasingly deploying people and creating teams that work in a more agile way,” she said. “Project management has become less formal across [WEX’s] business. [WEX now] spins up a small team, has them work on something, and then redeploys them to do something else.”

At WEX, project leaders “are doing more than what they would have historically done,” said Melissa. “Their work is more strategic and about making sure we’re continuing on the path of change.”

Download the paper in full here.

Want to see what else is being said about WEX? Read about all the times we made the news here.