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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Leaders Loop