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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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