Leadership Profiles

Leaders worth studying closely

In-depth editorial profiles of the people who shape great organisations: the context, the defining decisions, and the durable lessons. 29 leaders and counting, from founders and operators to chairs and CEOs.

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, speaking at a conference podium.

Finance & institutional leadership

The letter the world reads: the long reign of Jamie Dimon

Every spring, the chief executive of America's largest bank publishes a letter to his shareholders. It runs to tens of thousands of words, and almost nobody reads it for the dividend. For two decades, Jamie Dimon's annual letter has been the closest thing Wall Street has to a state-of-the-union address, and a window into how the longest-tenured big-bank CEO thinks about leading through storms.

Operating & company building

The operator's manual: Claire Hughes Johnson and the case for writing it down

Most leadership books stay safely abstract. The one Claire Hughes Johnson wrote, drawn from scaling Stripe from fewer than 200 people to more than 7,000, is full of templates, cadences and a user guide to herself. The tactics, it turns out, are the point.

Ben Horowitz speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018.

Venture capital & the craft of management

No recipe for hard things: the case of Ben Horowitz

Most leadership books promise a formula. Ben Horowitz wrote the one that admits there isn't one, a candid account of layoffs, demotions and near-death pivots that grew out of a blog and reshaped how a generation of founders talk about the job.

Robyn Denholm, photographed at CeBIT Australia in 2018.

Governance & technology leadership

The chair from Milperra: Robyn Denholm's case for a tech economy

She runs the boardroom of one of the most scrutinised companies on earth from a desk in Sydney, a rare Australian resident chairing a major US tech board. Robyn Denholm's argument is that the seat she occupies should not be so rare, and that technology ought to be treated less as a sector than as the country's next growth engine.

Rob Alford, seated outdoors in a beige quarter-zip sweater, smiling at the camera.

Product & commercial leadership

Better, not just faster: the making of Rob Alford

From a chip shop on the edge of the Wentworth estate to general management at SEEK and a software venture of his own, Rob Alford has spent twenty years chasing a single, stubborn idea, that the best leaders don't move fastest, they decide best.

Julie Zhuo, smiling, photographed during her time at Facebook.

Design & management

When everyone looks to you: Julie Zhuo and the making of a manager

She was twenty-five when Facebook made her a manager, and not at all sure she was ready. A decade later she wrote the book she had needed that day, and it became the one first-time managers everywhere now reach for.

Demis Hassabis photographed at the Royal Society in 2018, in a dark jacket, looking towards the camera.

Artificial intelligence & science

Solve intelligence, then everything else: Demis Hassabis

A chess prodigy who designed hit video games as a teenager, then took a neuroscience PhD before founding Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis built a company around an outrageous two-step pitch. In 2024 a Nobel Prize turned the second step from aspiration into proof.

Product & design leadership

Making research pay: Alex Burke and the case for proving UX value

Most leaders nod along when you say a company should be user-centred. Alex Burke, the CEO of the Wellington-built research platform Optimal Workshop, is interested in the harder question that comes next: can you actually prove what that research is worth?

Carolyn McCall speaking at a conference, photographed in 2009.

Media & leadership

No such thing as having it all: Carolyn McCall's honest case for structural change

From a childhood between Bangalore and Singapore to the chief executive's office at two FTSE-100 companies, Dame Carolyn McCall has spent her career refusing the comfortable story. The "have it all" myth, she argues, is exactly that, a myth, and the only honest answer to it is diversity that is built into the structure and counted, not sloganised.

Indra Nooyi, then CEO of PepsiCo, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2010.

Leadership & culture

The letters home: how Indra Nooyi led the whole person

Most chief executives talk about treating employees as whole people. Indra Nooyi, who ran PepsiCo for a dozen years, did something stranger and more concrete: she wrote to their parents. It is the smallest gesture in a very large career, and the one that explains the rest.

Design leadership

The hard work of looking effortless: Ernest Hui

Cathay Pacific's head of design has spent a career building digital journeys for millions of travellers around a conviction most boardrooms still mistake for a soft skill, that design is empathy, made disciplined. The catch, he says, is that the simplest outcomes are the hardest-won.

Brian Chesky speaking onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, gesturing as he talks.

Leadership & product

Founder mode: how Brian Chesky learned to run Airbnb

An industrial designer who built a hundred-billion-dollar company out of three air mattresses, Brian Chesky spent a decade being told to hire good people and get out of their way. When that advice nearly broke Airbnb, he did the opposite, and inadvertently gave Silicon Valley a new name for an old idea.

Behavioural science & organisations

The man who calls bullshit on work: James Healy

After a career spent inside the consulting machine, James Healy reached an awkward conclusion: most of what organisations do to "fix" their people is ritual nobody ever validated. His remedy is to stop blaming character and start redesigning context.

Creative leadership & studio culture

The all-nighter is not a badge: Gareth O'Brien on craft without the crunch

A New Zealand designer who made his name at Buck's New York studio and then came home to open its Sydney outpost, Gareth O'Brien has spent years arguing that the best creative work and a life outside it are not a trade-off, and that the industry's old romance with the overnight grind is finally fading.

Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, photographed in conversation in 2024.

Stakeholder capitalism

Philanthropy on the cap table: Marc Benioff and the 1-1-1 idea

Most companies bolt giving on once they are rich. When Marc Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999 he did the opposite, he wrote charity into the founding documents, pledging one percent of the company's equity, product and people's time before there was much of any to give. The idea outgrew the company.

Behavioural science & service design

What people say, what people do: Angela Bliss and the science of behaviour

The research most organisations trust tells them what customers say. Angela Bliss, Head of Behavioural Science at NAB, has built a career on a more uncomfortable question, what those same customers will actually do, and on the science of closing the gap between the two.

Product leadership & community

Dreaming the dream: the making of Liz Blink

A PhD immunologist who walked out of the lab and into product, Liz Blink has spent fifteen years building a quietly radical case, that the thing most worth investing in isn't the roadmap or the framework, but the product people themselves.

Platform & product leadership

Ship it half-baked: Teresa Huang's case against the perfect product

Bupa's Teresa Huang has built a career on two unfashionable convictions, that customers would rather hold a rough thing today than a perfect thing later, and that platform leaders have to hop two steps before anyone believes their work creates value.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and CEO of Atlassian, photographed against a plain background.

Distributed work & the future of the office

How, not where: Mike Cannon-Brookes and the case for distributed work

As the corporate world marches employees back to their desks, Atlassian's now-sole CEO has done the unfashionable thing: he counted. A thousand days of company-wide remote work, measured and published, became his argument that the real question was never the building, it was the way the work gets done.

Andrew Forrest, founder and executive chairman of Fortescue, photographed at a Chatham House event.

Energy & industrial leadership

Confessions of a carbon emitter: Andrew Forrest's improbable bet

A fossil-fuel billionaire took the ABC's most prestigious lectern, titled his opening lecture Oil vs Water: Confessions of a Carbon Emitter, and admitted he was part of the problem, then bet his iron-ore empire on green hydrogen and a deadline most of his peers think is impossible.

Enterprise leadership & hypergrowth

Amp it up: Frank Slootman and the war on mediocrity

Across three companies and two decades, the Dutch-born operator built the same reputation each time, that you don't fix a sluggish organisation by reorganising it. You raise the standards, narrow the focus and increase the tempo until the place is unrecognisable. Then you do it again.

Culture & talent

The woman who published the rules: Patty McCord and the Netflix culture deck

Most companies guard their culture in a brand book nobody reads. In 2009 Patty McCord did the opposite, she put Netflix's rules on the open web as a 125-slide deck, and turned the private craft of building a company into a document the whole industry could copy.

Systems change & collaboration

The cartel that gives it away: Sarah Patterson and the politics of connection

Most consultants sell strategy. Sarah Patterson founded a "cartel" to argue the opposite, that the thing that actually moves people around big change isn't a plan at all, but the relationships in the spaces between them.

Marketing & behavioural science

The man who would slow the trains down: Rory Sutherland

The Ogilvy vice chairman has built a career on a single, mischievous heresy, that the rational, engineered answer is usually the wrong one, because value lives in perception, not in the thing itself. It is a stranger idea than it sounds, and a more useful one.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder and CEO, in his trademark black leather jacket, speaking at an awards ceremony.

Founder leadership

The gift of pain: how Jensen Huang built Nvidia on suffering

He told a graduating class at Stanford that he wished pain and suffering upon them, and meant it as a blessing. From a Denny's dishwasher to the head of the most valuable company on earth, Jensen Huang has spent three decades turning adversity into an operating system.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft chairman and CEO, in glasses and a dark jacket, photographed against a plain background.

Culture & corporate transformation

The learn-it-all: how Satya Nadella rewrote Microsoft's mind

When Satya Nadella inherited Microsoft in 2014, it was a company that knew everything and was learning nothing. His wager, that a culture of curiosity and empathy would beat a culture of cleverness, became one of the best-documented corporate turnarounds of the era.

Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, in a head-and-shoulders portrait.

Technology & the study of progress

The man who wants a science of progress: Patrick Collison

In the summer of 2019 the co-founder of Stripe published a magazine essay arguing that humanity's most important subject, progress itself, was barely being studied. The piece launched a movement. It also revealed the idea that has run quietly through everything Patrick Collison has built.

Martha Lane Fox, smiling, in a portrait photograph.

Digital leadership & public institutions

Dot Everyone: Martha Lane Fox and the case for a braver internet

A decade before "tech ethics" became a boardroom phrase, Martha Lane Fox stood under the lights of the Science Museum and asked Britain a simple, awkward question: if the internet is going to run our lives, who is going to make sure it runs them well?

Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, photographed in 2019.

Founder leadership

The two-step plan: the making of Melanie Perkins

She was turned down by more than a hundred investors before a word of yes. A decade on, the Canva co-founder runs her company on a plan she can recite in a single breath: build one of the world's most valuable companies, and do the most good she can with it.