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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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