The 10 Most Inspiring CEOs Making a Difference in 2023

Remodelling Qualities of Leadership with Excellence

Lionel Lodge

Dan Ghitza Dan Ghitza

Embarking Upon the Horizons, Creang a Success tory

Dan Ghitza's journey of becoming a CEO was a

little different than the usual trail of most business leaders. First off, it took him a long time to understand 'who he really wanted to be' and what was important to him.

As a son of an ex-judge and lawyer in Israel, it was clear to everyone, including himself, that he would follow in his father's footsteps, but guess what! Reality had completely different plans for Dan. After a few years of studying law & business & working at the family office, Dan quickly realized that he was very drawn to entrepreneurship and building his own companies. When he was 25, he established his first marketing company.

Building and selling companies and moving where work took Dan to locations like (India, Greece, and Thailand) and definitely took its toll on him. After almost 10 years of doing that, he decided to take a needed break and went on a life-changing bicycle trip around southeast Asia while working as a freelancer.

When he returned to Israel from his journey without a plan, Dan realized that he needed to try something completely different. He decided, against his initial instinct, to take on a low-level sales job with an Israeli company that was part of a bigger group of companies. He thought that he needed to re-learn everything from scratch and improve his people and sales skills.

Little did Dan know that after less than a year, he would be promoted to be a junior manager at the company and since would continue to get promoted every 6 months until finally, he received an offer to relocate to Malta as the CEO of the group's mobile games brand, Zarzilla Games .

Moving from an entry-level position to being a CEO in such a short time (under 3 years) was definitely not an easy thing. It took a lot of determination and dedication. Still, it taught Dan that everything is possible and that once you find the right people and mentors around you, not only 'the sky is the limit' but that you actually get to define for yourself what 'the sky' and success really means for you.

In this interview with CIOLook, Dan shares his professional tenure while highlighting his journey to the horizons of success.

Below are the excerpts from the interview:

Tell us something more about your company and its mission and vision.

Our company, Zarzilla Games, wants to create the world's most fun and innovative casual card games with a lot of focus on community, social interactions, and live activities.

We truly believe in the value of our fan community and that the more value we give our players, the more we get back and profit. It's a win-win situaon!

We want to create games that give players much more than just a way to pass the time, challenging them by playing with other real players, participating in events and competitions, and sharpening their minds.

We truly believe in the value of our fan community and that the more value we give our players, the more we get back and profit. It's a win-win situation!

Enlighten us on how you have impacted the Mobile Gaming niche through your expertise in the market.

One thing that makes our company disruptive and innovative in the mobile gaming social card games niche is that we bring gamification elements from casual games to card games, thus combining the two worlds and creating a completely new experience.

Instead of the old card games that were technical and repetitive and depended more on luck than skill, we create in our games a content world that enriches the gaming experience with social, innovative & competitive features.

Describe in detail the values and the work culture that drives your organization.

One of the principles that constantly guide me in leading our company is to create a safe, honest, and more than anything, supportive environment for all the employees that form the Zarzilla Games family.

As I went through the same path from an entry-level employee to a CEO, not only should everyone have an impact and a say, but sometimes, the best advice comes

from the most unexpected places. Our company's motto is 'if you truly believe in something, show us, and we will build it together.'

Undeniably, technology is playing a significant role in almost every sector. How are you leveraging technological advancements to make your solutions resourceful?

The mobile games industry is incredibly dynamic, so we constantly have to resharpen our skills, update with new technologies and always be flexible and always learning.

What, according to you, could be the next significant change in the Mobile Gaming Sector? How is your company preparing to be a part of that change?

Most definitely, the developments in AI and procedurally generated content are changing the very fabric of how we define creativity in gaming and many other fields.

Where do you envision yourself to be in the long run, and what are your future goals for Zarzilla Games?

I see Zarzilla Games positioning itself as one of the world's top Gaming studios and publishers, becoming a public company and building the future of mobile games.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the Mobile Gaming Sector?

I get this question a lot, and I think the person that answered it best was Mahatma Gandhi: "First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Almost all of the innovations and mega success stories we see in the Mobile Games sectors started as a niche idea, disregarded, and brushed off by high-paying executives interested more in doing the same thing over again.

It takes courage and determination to push what you believe in even if no one else sees it, but once they do, you have already won.

Daniel Fincham

Reflecting Sheer Expertise with Significant Leadership Traits

Improving the effectiveness of substance use

disorder (SUD) treatment requires leadership approaches that impact drug treatment’s efficacy. To promote this positive system change, we define leadership beyond leaders’ characteristics. Leadership is considered a developmental competency among individuals, as well as the relational role of followers and the enabling context of organizational climate which create a system of influence.

Transformational leadership has the most empirical support in the extant literature. It is generally characterized by the leader’s ability to inspire others to follow a particular course of action. These leaders draw from the unique talents of each staff member, provide them feedback based on staff needs, stimulate their problem-solving abilities, and create a sense of shared purpose.

Although transactional leadership, which is based on reinforcing performance using rewards is also commonly used by managers, transformational leadership has demonstrated a higher impact in motivating staff to improve performance, which in behavioral health generally translates into delivering treatment with fidelity.

Daniel Fincham , a proficient leader with sheer expertise with his transformational leadership approach, has been in various leadership positions including Vice President of Customer Success and has established Recoverlution , an addiction recovery platform, aiming to connect and support the 100 million people recovering from addiction around the world.

“We welcome everyone in recovery to be part of our

community, which is a safe space to stay well for life,” expresses Mr Fincham, Founder of Recoverlution.

Brief our audience about your journey as a business leader until your current position at Recoverlution. What challenges have you had to overcome to reach where you are today?

I was VP of Customer Success at ZMags, a SaaS digital experience platform. I was there for over nine years, progressing into various customer experience roles, and was based for six years in Denmark before moving to London.

It’s fair to say I’ve experienced a host of personal challenges – divorce, mental ill health, addiction – and overcoming them has also helped me professionally. I’ve learned resilience, patience, and most importantly, that your past failures don’t need to define your future success.

Tell us something more about your company and its mission and vision.

Our ultimate vision is a world where it’s easy for everyone in recovery to connect with others and get the information and support they need in one place.

We want people in recovery to have a positive experience that gives them life-long support, with a big focus on being inclusive; Recoverlution uses technology that is accessible anywhere, anytime to anyone.

Enlighten us on how you have impacted the healthcare niche through your expertise in the market.

One thing that sets Recoverlution apart is the robust

Daniel Fincham Founder Recoverluon

One thing that sets Recoverluon apart is the robust technical framework behind it. Our platorm is underpinned by best-in-class technology, which I’ve been able to drive forward thanks to my own background and experse in ech.”

technical framework behind it. Our platform is underpinned by best-in-class technology, which I’ve been able to drive forward thanks to my own background and expertise in tech.

Our CTO, Jacob, also brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the company, allowing us to create a platform that’s agile and responsive.

Perhaps most importantly, though, we pride ourselves on the security Recoverlution offers. You don’t need to make public any personal details to use our Community feature – only your profile name. This sense of anonymity provides a sense of protection for our members, and that’s something I think is unique in the health-tech market.

Describe in detail the values and the work culture that drives your organization.

Our core values are community, honesty, trust and empowerment. Many of the Recoverlution team are in recovery themselves or have loved ones who have experienced addiction, which means we all share the same common understanding of just what it means to be in recovery. That’s what makes Recoverlution special, I think. It was founded by people in recovery, for people in recovery, and this sense of community underpins everything we do.

Undeniably, technology is playing a significant role in almost every sector. How are you leveraging technological advancements to make your solutions resourceful?

Something we’re starting to look into at Recoverlution is how we can harness AI. In particular, developing a machine learning framework or model that can start understanding the life-long journey of somebody in recovery from addiction for the first time would be an incredible venture for us. It would help us continue to ensure our members get the most out of Recoverlution throughout their recovery journey.

What, according to you, could be the next significant change in the Health Care sector? How is your company preparing to be a part of that change?

I think the biggest change in healthcare will be greater signposting to virtual and online communities. Virtual healthcare has grown hugely of late due to Covid –

think online doctor appointments, wearable health monitoring devices, and even robotic surgery. But where I see this having the biggest impact will be the use of online forums and patient communities.

Being part of a patient-led community has many benefits, regardless of your health condition. Personally, I can see how it could increase treatment adherence, as well as ensure patients are kept informed about their conditions.

Perhaps most importantly, though, connecting with others on the same journey as you does wonders for your well-being. Living with a health condition, whether that’s mental or physical, can be isolating at times, so knowing you’re not alone and that there are people you can turn to for support who understand what you’re going through, makes such a difference.

As for Recoverlution, we’re focusing on developing and growing our Community Hub in the platform, to ensure people in recovery have the best experience possible when connecting with others on the same path.

Where do you envision yourself to be in the long run, and what are your future goals for Recoverlution?

Looking forward, we hope to see Recoverlution grow to the point where it’s the first port of call for anyone experiencing addiction or who is in recovery. We have some exciting things on our radar for the next few years, from a sober dating hub to the offering of therapy via an in-platform psychotherapist. This is all planned with the vision of being the home of recovery and helping people in recovery learn, connect and stay well for life.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the Health Care sector?

My advice would be to be bold and not lose sight of what has made you into the person you are today. Recoverlution wouldn’t be what it is if I hadn’t overcome the challenges I did and used those learnings to launch a business from the ground up.

Denise Hayman-Loa

Empowering Clients to Enhance their Work and Communities

Addressing today’s challenges of saturated digital connections, Denise Hayman-Loa, Co-founder & CEO of Carii , has developed an awardwinning digital platform that allows communities to connect and communicate around the world while retaining private ownership of their content, bringing people together across boundaries.

Denise Hayman-Loa CEO & Co-founder Carii, Inc

Denise has more than three decades of expertise in management in the financial services and technology industries, as well as in business planning, entrepreneurship, and customer interaction. In the ten years after the company’s founding, she transformed it from a modest beta platform to a fully-fledged solution, winning numerous accolades, clients, and team members in the process.

Denise has been interviewed numerous times, notably by the BBC, and is currently regarded as a thought leader in the social business software industry. Along with managing the firm, she offers advice to Carii clients from various industries as they implement the Carii solution on communication and business strategies.

Denise spent 29 years in senior positions in the financial services industry before she founded Carii. During this time, she focused on sales, client relationships, risk management, technology, strategy, and business building at companies like Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and as a management consulting partner at Ernst & Young.

A creative thinker with broad experience, Denise shares with CIOLook her journey in the finance and tech domain and the challenges and incredible success she has experienced along the way.

Below are the highlights of the interview:

Brief our audience about your journey as a business leader until your current position at Carii, Inc. What challenges have you had to overcome to reach where you are today?

I started my career in NYC at Salomon Brothers on Wall Street back in 1980 when the technology division was one of few places where men and women were treated fairly equally. I was lucky because they put me in a training rotation program to learn the various jobs in the division – starting with literally loading tapes on mainframe computers in the huge data center. Mike Bloomberg was running the division at the time, so I knew all the people he founded his company with. It was inspiring to see how brave they all were in launching Bloomberg in that era.

That said, it was never easy to be a woman in Financial Services with the predominance of men in the industry. I had to work hard and deliver every step of the way to progress – the conventional wisdom was that to succeed, a woman had to be better than any of the men. I did that and continued to move ahead with my career, though I often needed to move to new firms to learn new skills and get promotions and raises.

I will say that I was also lucky to work with a long list of very smart people who provided me with both challenges and role models. A big step was when I transitioned to consulting at E&Y instead of running technology teams inside companies. That taught me how to build a business because each partner had to sell, deliver and collect on their own work and build a team to deliver the projects for their clients. And then, I went to work at a client, Goldman Sachs, where I was hired as an intrepreneur to deliver the firm’s risk management technology to institutional clients. It was a great experience to create a full business offering and build out the marketing and model.

I moved to front office sales after that and further developed the sales skills which I had already been working on in other roles. I worked in that capacity for another ten years, both within firms and independently.

After 28 years in the industry, I decided to transition to a different kind of start-up – a horse farm! I did that successfully for ten years, learning many new skills along the way until my husband came up with the initial idea for our current community platform, and I transitioned to that. And have been doing that ever since.

Connective solves for the current fragmentation in social and engagement technologies – and puts the control in the client’s hands instead of with a public social platform.

Tell us something more about your company and its mission and vision.

Carii, Inc. (Product name is Connective) is a community ecosystem platform that meets the communication and collaboration needs of businesses and organizations such as investment firms, social impact organizations, and professional networks. The mission is to enable our clients to amplify their work and engage their community in a secure branded environment where they own their data. The platform solves for the current fragmentation in social and engagement technologies –and puts the control in the client’s hands instead of with a public social platform.

We have been building the award-winning platform over the course of eight years, with the benefit of great feedback from the market and our clients.

Enlighten us on how you have impacted the Technology niche through your expertise in the market.

We are constantly working on advancing the platform to use the most modern techniques and approaches. We are always exploring and pushing the envelope to stay ahead of trends and service the market with the most flexibility possible.

Describe in detail the values and the work culture that drives your organization.

First and foremost, we are client driven – we build longstanding relationships with our clients and make every effort to be as responsive as we can, given practical realities. Communication is key for both clients and team members. We value our team, and they have all been with us for many years, which translates into a healthy environment where they feel that they are growing and being recognized for good work.

Undeniably, technology is playing a significant role in almost every sector. How are you leveraging technological advancements to make your solutions resourceful?

We are constantly assessing new technologies that can provide value to our solutions. In some cases, we decide to build it ourselves, and in other cases, we integrate it with specialist technology. Everything we build is created as a flexible engine that can be re-purposed for all clients, so our clients also benefit from new advancements.

What, according to you, could be the next significant change in the Tech sector? How is your company preparing to be a part of that change?

Blockchain technology is a significant change that we have been actively engaged with since 2017 and are now beginning to implement/integrate. AI will also have a major impact on certain aspects of our solution. The other unique opportunity is to incorporate virtual reality/metaverse technology where applicable to enhance experiences.

Where do you envision yourself to be in the long run, and what are your future goals for Carii, Inc?

We are looking to expand our reach and implementations to amplify more communities – with the requisite team growth to support those communities and clients. We are especially interested in supporting sustainability and regenerative solutions to expand reach and recognition.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the Tech sector?

Make sure you have a product idea the market is interested in – that fills a gap no one else has filled. Make sure you also have a well-rounded and diverse founding team that will challenge you and each other to be the best you can be. And get good advice from other entrepreneurs who have “been there, done that.” But also know your own mind and be prepared to stick to your beliefs.

Lionel Lodge

Effective leaders think analytically about their businesses and those they oversee. They invest the time and effort to clearly understand any outstanding weaknesses, threats, strengths, and opportunities.

This helps them identify how they can support the team and help them overcome problems. Great leaders know when to pivot, constantly evaluating their own input to see how it aligns with organizational policy and objectives.

An astute leader makes a point of getting to know their staff and developing an understanding of what makes them tick. They not only spot talent in their employees, but they also cultivate that talent for the benefit of the company. These attributes shine the spotlight on Lionel Lodge , CEO of SyncLodge .

Under his adept leadership, SyncLodge is the most powerful B2B ecosystem for music supervisors, visual production companies and copyright holders/administrators to conclude all the sync licensing tasks needed to professionally license music.

It runs on the principle that those who create music should have Equal Opportunity in sync placement, Regardless of Where They Are In The World, regardless of their connections, finances, or level of fame.

In an interview with CIOLook, Lionel shares valuable facts that highlight his professional tenure and the significance of SyncLodge in the dynamic business arena.

Below are the excerpts from the interview:

Brief our audience about your journey as a business leader until your current position at SyncLodge. What challenges have you had to overcome to reach where you are today?

Working in the entertainment industry, especially music entails a constant flow of change. Nothing remains the same for very long. Any business in the industry has to adapt to the changes or risk becoming obsolete.

Over the more than 40 years I have been in the industry, I have seen frequent changes to what was accepted as established modes of business. Staying current with the change and even foreseeing change, has been essential.

Tell us something more about your company and its mission and vision.

We all love to watch TV shows and films with great music, but most of us have no idea of the long hours, stress, and complications involved with legally placing the music in the visual content.

Our mission is to streamline the process of IP licensing in the entertainment industry. We are helping those licensing IPs to enjoy their work by letting them focus on the creative side while our software takes care of the time-intensive and tedious tasks.

Diversity and Inclusivity for all is at the heart of the SyncLodge mission.

Lionel Lodge CEO SyncLodge

Enlighten us on how you have impacted Media and Entertainment niche through your expertise in the market.

SyncLodge is state-of-the-art IP licensing management tech with intuitive tools and ease of access designed to build communication bridges throughout the music and visual production industries. SyncLodge facilitates direct relationship growth throughout the entertainment industry, driving digital transformation.

SyncLodge has no membership or signup fees. The SyncLodge portal assures exhaustive inclusivity so all independents can work on the same professional level as the large, multi-national companies.

Describe in detail the values and the work culture that drives your organization.

Diversity and inclusion are at the heart of the SyncLodge mission. We focus on ability and enthusiasm. We are wholly transparent. Everyone at the company has access to all communications and initiatives. We value outside input.

Our social impact outside of our company team is to allow true inspiration to flourish. We offer education and mentoring to all who need it. Our system is designed to be inclusive; it does not allow for any barriers based on age, gender, race, sexual orientation, or financial limitations.

Undeniably, technology is playing a significant role in almost every sector. How are you leveraging technological advancements to make your solutions resourceful?

We are a technology company. We have looked at the needs of the industry and developed never-seen-before tech solutions to fulfil those needs. During the building of SyncLodge, we sat down with hundreds of industry professionals and built the tools they told us were needed.

This is a continuous process for us. We need to listen and not assume. We are also working with many other

entertainment industry tech companies and combining their advancements with ours. So many really clever teams are doing great things for the industry. It is a very exciting time.

What, according to you, could be the next significant change in the Media and Entertainment Sector? How is your company preparing to be a part of that change?

Web3 and the Metaverse are the big changes that are here but are still in the early stages. We see them becoming central to entertainment consumption. We are working with groups like the Web3 Music Rights Group to ensure that the transitions allow the copyright owners to maintain control of their rights and to navigate and leverage the opportunities these new technologies offer.

Where do you envision yourself to be in the long run, and what are your future goals for SyncLodge?

The future is steeped with multiple chapters of growth for SyncLodge. The IP licensing industry is massive and constantly evolving globally. SyncLodge needs to bring guidance, understanding, and opportunities to copyright licensees and licensors.

We are always looking at the industry landscape and how it is evolving. By partnering with other innovators in the entertainment industry, we want to ensure the creative future of entertainment is very much alive and kicking up a storm.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the Media and Entertainment Sector?

It is a very big industry with many complicated, intertwined sectors. Investigate deeply, and make sure you understand how the different sectors work together. Find a missing piece that is needed and introduce it. Change is constant; getting those entrenched in the industry to adapt is not easy. You need to be patient and think long-term. Be willing and able to pivot.