Cynthia Watson is passionate about people living the lives they choose, which includes working from wherever suits them best. After decades of leading virtual teams, she sees the global shift to hybrid and remote work as a flexion point towards better productivity, happier employees – and a greener planet. An entrepreneur and project manager, Cynthia specializes in fixing bottlenecks, often hitting on common-sense solutions that drive greater efficiency and returns. In the mid-90s, she fulfilled her long-standing wish to be free of the office — highlighted in her master’s thesis on telecommuting — with a permanent shift to location independence. Cynthia has since worked at “her desk” from nearly 80 countries. After 20-plus years in enterprise tech sales at Control Data, Bell, Northern Telecom, and Telus, Cynthia added PMP and Scrum certifications to her MBA and pivoted to consulting, starting with CGI Group. Always seeking new challenges, she joined Cisco Systems in 2006 and set up an enterprise sales project office to streamline sales workflows by discovering and leveraging best practices across global regions.She then joined Virtira, a remote-focused productivity consultancy, eventually becoming its CEO for a decade, and more recently Executive Chair. Virtira’s best practices, developed to create highly effective, results-oriented virtual teams, were laid out in detail in the 2023 Amazon bestseller, The Power of Remote. She is convinced that most workers need not toil away in the office for decades before enjoying life and she is committed to empowering people, particularly minorities and the disadvantaged, to find fulfilling employment without leaving their communities. She believes in a world without bounds and has worked from her "desk" from almost 80 countries,as a digital nomad and adventurer.