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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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