Barbara Ex is the Founder and CEO of WhiteSpace, a new model in CRE that operates professional meeting space on demand for regular business events. Before launching WhiteSpace, Barbara served as Executive Director of Business Transformation at Lenovo in Beijing.  In the 1990s, she was a Principal Consultant at IBM, where she pioneered B2B e-business models in the manufacturing industries.  Barbara holds an MBA from London Business School and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Chemical Engineering from MIT.  

Why did you wait before, and why are you not waiting anymore?

I wanted to use corporate resources to create the changes I wanted to see in the world. But big companies are like ocean liners, incredibly slow and hard to turn. In the end, I realized the best way to make an impact was to create my own company and lead it the way I knew it should go.