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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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