Company: Acxiom Corporation, Foster City, CA, U.S.A
Company Description: Acxiom is an enterprise data, analytics and software as a service company. For more than 40 years, Acxiom has been a leader in harnessing the powerful potential of data to strengthen connections between people, businesses and their partners.
Nomination Category: Individual Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Female Executive of the Year – Business Products –More Than 2,500 Employees

Nomination Title: Elizabeth Xu, Group VP of Engineering

Describe for the judges the activities and accomplishments of the nominated executive since the beginning of July last year (up to 525 words):

Dr. Elizabeth Xu is a seasoned global leader, mentor, lecturer, columnist, and motivational speaker. She is an amazing supporter in the workplace and beyond. Her team calls her “CMO”, the Chief Motivational Officer. As a PhD graduate and the current Global VP of Engineering at Acxiom, she is a well-respected and influential woman in the industry. She exhibits great passion and commitment in developing her career, her teams, and further developing herself.

In July 2012, she was leading global Engineering teams for Rearden Commerce, and successfully launched Easy Saver with Intuit and Mastercard Business Network with MasterCard. Both products enable SMB users to purchase office equipment online and reduce business operation costs.

In that same month, Dr. Xu published Myths of the Promotion: 10 Steps to a Successful Career with her mentor of 20+ years, Patricia Zimmerman, who is a Jefferson and Kennedy Award winner, and leadership mentor. Elizabeth’s book guides individuals on how to achieve career advancement and is being used as a classroom textbook at Stanford University. She has been teaching at Stanford since 2010.

In August 2012, Dr. Xu joined Acxiom, the global leader in Big Data. She accelerated the innovation within this mature company. She recruited and built Acxiom Silicon Valley Development Center, and more importantly, she connected the new team with the rest of the company on culture, process, technology and domain knowledge. A year later, Acxiom Product teams released the Audience Operating System. Gartner researchers believe that “Acxiom’s Audience Operating System Could Reinvent Data-Driven Marketing”. After hearing about this product, former Forrester analyst Dave Frankland wrote that “the world of marketing data just experienced a tectonic shift”.

Elizabeth and her team initiated and built the Acxiom University, promoting knowledge sharing among colleagues. It was adopted as the official Acxiom platform for internal learnings. Now, Acxiom University hosts classes for every aspect of learning within Acxiom.

This summer, Dr. Xu completed Stanford University’s Executive Education Program, serving as the class president of 2013. She speaks, coaches and teaches at career fairs, conferences, companies and universities. On October 5th, she will speak at the HYSTA Annual Conference, and the SASE Conference a few days after. She is also invited to CEO Summit by HYSTA.

Dr. Xu also commits much of her time to mentoring high-tech professionals, mid-career leaders, young adults, and K-12 students. She covers a wide array of topics, anything from self-development, career advancement and Big Data Science. Her philosophy on life revolves around 4 L’s to live by:

1. Live life to her fullest potential
2. Learn every day from everyone around her
3. Love the people around her and enable them to live their life to their full potential
4. Leave a legacy to the world and other people’s careers and lives.

She lives her life by these four principles and this has made her a great leader to trust, learn from, and work for. She has built countless successful products and more will come. She is an inspirational woman that will leave a lifetime of legacy.

Provide a brief biography of the nominated executive (up to 125 words):

Dr. Elizabeth Xu is the Global VP of Engineering at Acxiom. She has driven global engineering teams as a SVP at Rearden Commerce, RMS, and Vitria, and held a management position at IBM. She also serves on the board for several non-profit organizations and corporate officers at a public company.

Dr. Xu received a PhD and M.S. from the University of Nevada, Reno; B.S. and M.S from Peking University, and graduated from the Stanford Executive Program.

Dr. Xu has coached thousands of professionals from companies including Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Apple. Her book Myth of the Promotion: Ten Steps to a Successful Career has been highly appraised and is used as a textbook at Stanford, where she has been teaching since 2010.