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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Leaders Loop