PETER FISK - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Founder and CEO of Babylon
Ali Parsa is founder and CEO of Babylon, the revolutionary artificial intelligence and digital health company. Babylon's mission is "to put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on Earth."
Ali Parsa is on a mission to reinvent the world's access to healthcare. Maybe his time has come.
Job Titles:
- Coach
- Knight 's Co - Founder
Bob Iger - The Disney CEO's ride of a lifetime, from weather presenter to transformational leader.
Cristina Junqueira was working at Itaú Unibanco, one of Brazil's more traditional banks in 2013, managing their credit card portfolio when she gained the largest bonus of her career. She quit immediately, realising that she wanted to change people's lives, not just make money.
Within months, she got together with two friends, David Velez and Edward Wible, to launch Nubank, a Brazilian fintech company that seeks to make banking more accessible to everyone in a company with a huge underclass. Nubank is looking to tools like low-interest, no-fee credit cards, high-interest savings accounts, and an app-based credit system to seeking to serve 45 million unbanked Brazilians, neglected by competitors.
In the early days of start-up, Junqueira found herself doing everything from leasing a small office in Sao Paulo to designing the company's new website. "If somebody called our customer service line, it would ring on my cellphone," she says. For Junqueira, it was an even more challenging time, because she was pregnant with her first child.
She is most proud of how Nubank has developed for women. She says that HR policies were very much informed by her early struggles. "Many of the structural choices we've made in terms of gender equality and inclusion are reflective of the fact that I have been here from the beginning," she told Quartz magazine.
"Looking back at my corporate career, I remember how tough it was to work in those predominantly male environments and do things like wear suits just to fit in," she recalls. "At Nubank I was determined to create a working environment without all the stupid barriers that are very detrimental to women's career development."
Nubank's policies that address gender equality include bringing more women into its technology teams with events like "Yes, She Codes!" a recruitment process specifically targeted at female software developers. The company also uses blind recruitment to minimise gender biases, and has a mentoring scheme specifically for female leaders, which involves discussion groups aimed at tackling unconscious bias, and a program that allows new mothers to stay connected while they take maternity leave.
Daniel Ek - Spotify's founder says he's an introvert, but you don't need to be a superhero to be an effective leader
Job Titles:
- Surgeon
- Founder of Narayana Health, Has Performed over 15, 000 Heart Operations, and Also Operates a Chain of 21 Medical Private Medical Centres across India, and Much
Devi Shetty, founder of Narayana Health, has performed over 15,000 heart operations, and also operates a chain of 21 medical private medical centres across India, and much more.
Shetty describes how he looked after Mother Teresa for the last five years of her life. "These years changed my perception of life. Mother Teresa's humility and simplicity is what struck me most. She was one of the most popular women in the world, and yet so humble and simple. Everybody knew her well, in fact, as they would see her approach them, they would be ready to bow to her feet. But she would greet everyone and politely introduce herself."
In 2001 he opened Narayana Hrudayalaya, a multi-disciplinary hospital just outside Bangalore. The NH cardiac unit is the largest in the world, with 1,000 beds performing over 30 major heart surgeries every day. It also hosts around 15,000 outpatients daily.
He believes that most hospitals can reduce their costs by 50% if they adapt a business model that leverages economies of scale, plus measures such as smart sourcing, and preserving air conditioning for extreme conditions. More hospitals were developed around the country using the Bangalore model, in total with over 30,000 beds, and extending further afield into Africa too.
His innovations in patient care included training family members to administer after-surgical care and pioneering low-cost diagnostics. He also typically has each of his surgeons performing around 35 operations every day, compared to one or two in other heart hospitals worldwide.
In the two decades he has reduced the cost of his heart bypass operations from $3,000 to around $800 (compared to over $200,000 for the same procedure at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, USA). He has developed Yeshasvini, a low-cost health insurance scheme, affordable to most people in his markets, whilst offering free care for poor families, especially for children, partly funded by revenues he gains from a more recent health tourism service, largely focused on cosmetic operations.
Shetty says "India is in a phenomenal position to show the world a new way of delivering affordable healthcare." The Wall Street Journal called him "the Henry Ford of heart surgery."
Devid Shetty was inspired by his early career caring for Mother Teresa. He has been call the Henry Ford of heart surgery. He created Narayana Health which has become one of the largest hospital groups with 22 hospitals, 6 heart centres, over 30 medical specialities with 2.6 million patients treated every year from 78 countries.
Emily Weiss is intent on disrupting the $250 billion cosmetics industry, which is still dominated by traditional brand owners like L'Oréal and Estee Lauder. "Women today have different needs than we had in the past, but beauty companies haven't responded to that," she years.
Her journey started when she was a 25-year-old fashion assistant at Vogue magazine and started her own blog in the evenings "Into the Gloss". She wanted to connect with real people like her, and rapidly built up a following by taking her followers into the bathroom cabinets of women she met.
An early adopter of Instagram, she focused on photos that were rapidly shared by her community. She soon became far more significant than Vogue. It became the must-read for beauty fans, with over 10 million page views a month, and she realised she needed to focus on it full time.
She launched Glossier as a socially driven online cosmetics business in 2014, that grew rapidly with the help of $2 million venture funding. She focused on creating content and cosmetics products for women like herself, "useful and affordable, for girls who work hard but want to have fun".
Emmanuel Faber, former CEO of Danone, believes that people want to have a vote in the world they live in. "Each time people choose a brand they exercise their right to vote. They want that brand to be transparent, meaningful and responsible. Still, they also want the brands they choose to be playful, innovative, relatable, emotional and engaging. As a result, there is a new paradigm at play today: brands only exist through the power of people" he says.
Job Titles:
- Turkish Education and Healthcare Entrepreneur Who Founded Udemy and Carbon Health
Bali is the founder of Udemy, an online education platform with 150,000 courses ranging from how to win at online poker to principles of quantum mechanics. However that's not enough for Bali, who is also founder of Carbon Health which is a modern, tech-enabled omni-channel healthcare provider. Both organisations have thrived during the pandemic.
Bali is the founder of Udemy, an online education platform with 150,000 courses ranging from how to win at online poker to principles of quantum mechanics. However that's not enough for Bali, who is also founder of Carbon Health which is a modern, tech-enabled omni-channel healthcare provider. Both organisations have thrived during the pandemic.
He grew up in a small village in south-east Turkey, where one teacher covered at least five year groups of children, which forced him to become very self-driven in learning and everything else he did. "One day my parents bought my two sisters and me a computer including internet access". He found a new way to learn, and a new world of opportunities.
Bali found online mathematics forums that prepared him for the Turkish Maths Olympiads. "Even though these forums were clunky and disorganised, they had a huge impact on my life." He won a gold medal, and went on to secure a silver medal in the international version.
After leaving school, he dreamed of the internet's power to create "a world where anyone could learn anything - from any expert in the world." He tried to launch an e-learning business but failed. In 2010 he moved to San Francisco, working for several Silicon Valley start-ups. He linked up with two other young Turks in California to develop an e-learning platform. They pitched to over 30 investors, and got rejected every time. But it did build his resilience, which came in useful when they eventually got a break.
Bali has recently been ranked in the Forbes "30 Under 30" and Business Insider's Top 100 Innovators, he brings his entrepreneurial drive and ambition to Carbon to reimagine healthcare and build the world's largest hospital.
Job Titles:
- the Zoom Founder Who Says His Business Is All about Delivering Happiness
Eric Yuan - The Zoom founder who says his business is all about delivering happiness.
"The greatest, most sustainable happiness comes from making others happy. It is our privilege to deliver you happiness every single day" says the former Webex engineer who thought he could do better, so created Zoom.
In the suburbs of Santa Clara, California, 50 year old Eric Yuan joins his latest call. The palm trees swaying behind him make for a surreal setting. He could have chosen a day on a Hawaiian beach, or even the spectacular Mount Tai in Shangdong Province, near to where he grew up in China. That's one of the many benefits of his web conferencing service, Zoom, now the world's fastest growing, where you can easily choose any background you want. No more embarrassing peaks into your home to distract your colleagues or clients.
It has been a crazy time for the Chinese American since Zoom's $15.9bn IPO last year. As the world's stock markets have tumbled by 25-35%, Zoom has doubled in value since January, making Zoom now worth $35bn. He stills own 20%, but the new billionaire is one of the most frugal people you will meet, remembering as a teenager in China how he hunted through rubbish dumps for scraps of metal to sell in order to fund his education.
Yuan was captivated by the success of Bill Gates, which inspired him to study computer science in Shangdong. Drawn to the US by the dotcom boom of 1997, and despite not speaking English, and after nine attempts to gain a visa, he landed a job writing code for online conferencing service Webex. After the business was sold to Cisco, he went on to become VP of engineering. However he could see that mobile and cloud technologies were rapidly emerging, and could transform the user experience, yet his Cisco bosses did not share his passion.
He left in 2011 to start his own company from the ground up - a simpler, more intuitive, app-based experience to meet the rapidly evolving world of remote and collaborative working. Initially calling is Saasbe, he turned to former colleagues to help him fund a team of 30 engineers back in China work on his new idea. He worked tirelessly for two years on the new app, a lightweight web client that would work on any device, even with slow or patchy internet connection. He also added more human features, like the choice of virtual backgrounds.
Zoom launched in 2013, initially targeting the corporate market, and creating networking solutions like Zoom Rooms with partners such as Logitech. Within a year he had 40 million subscribers, including 65,000 organisations. In 2017, after subsequent rounds of funding, Zoom became a $1 billion valued "unicorn", now with around 2000 employees (a third still based in China), and started exploring new areas such as virtual reality. Zoom evolved into a "freemium" business modelbased on subscriptions, with the first 40 minutes of any call free and able to accomodate up to 100 participants, although the platform caters for anything to 1000 people.
Since January this year, Yuan has seen huge growth in Zoom, becoming indispensable to the world's schools, businesses and governments, as COVID-19 shut down the physical world. Yuan offered free access to all schools, and now sees around 1 million app downloads every day. He's been surprised too by the innovative social applications that have emerged - from virtual fitness programs to virtual cocktails parties.
Remote working, though, is nothing unusual for Yuan. He typically only makes two business trips a year, aware of the time inefficiencies and environmental impacts of travel, when you can simply click onto Zoom. Yet he is a big fan of human engagement, defining Zoom's mission as "delivering happiness" and measuring business performance based on happiness, trust and gratitude, as equals to more usual financial results.
Evan Spiegel sits in his loft-sized office, taking up the top floor of Snap's head office in Santa Monica. On the beach outside, young people chat and surf, sunbath and play. Inside, his Snapchat platform enables those same teens and young twenty-somethings to stay connected day and night. Spiegel is one of the them, still in his twenties, but also a multi-billionaire tech entrepreneur founder of Fast Company's "world's most innovative company" of 2020.
A little like his hero Steve Jobs, Spiegel studied design at art college, followed by an internship at Red Bull, which taught him much about consumer culture. At Stanford he launched a start-up with classmate Bobby Murphy, initially called Picaboo, which evolved into Snapchat in 2011. He dropped out of college when the app reached 1 million daily users a year later. In 2014 Mark Zuckerberg offered him $2 billion for the business, which he turned down, instead choosing an IPO in 2017, which valued the business at $30 billion.
Then everything went wrong. Spiegel rapidly grew his team to thousands, putting himself at the heart of all technology development, yet Snapchat was haemorrhaging users, losing 5 million in 2018, and losing most of his senior team. The stock price dived by 90% and most people thought it was all over. However, Spiegel wasn't finished, knowing that he needed to fix his business, and his internal workstyle. With Murphy he reimagined the app around what consumers liked. He invested heavily in Augmented Reality (AR) tools, and also added crazy rabbit ears to photos, which might sound like a gimmick, but were loved by his young audience.
Job Titles:
- CEO, Founder of Chobani, Who Wants to Give It All Away
The Kurdish refugee who created the world's leading yogurt brand Chobani, calls himself an anti-CEO, and has pledged to donate most of his wealth, at the time of the pledge at least $700 million, to help Kurdish refugees, and refugees from all around the world.
Hooi Ling Tan was at Harvard when she co-created Grab, the $20 billion South East Asian "everything everyday" super-app, where she is better known as "the plumber" for her pragmatic approach.
Tan grew up in Kuala Lumper before travelling to Europe to study engineering at the University of Bath. She took a year out from her studies, to work for Eli Lilly in Basingstoke, where she realised that even in a world of fast-changing technologies, "the real decisions and future strategies in business are made by management not engineers" as she puts it.
She returned to Malaysia to join McKinsey. Often working late, she would rely upon the city's notorious unlicensed taxis to get home after dark. Her worried mother sat at home, waiting for her daughter's safe arrival home. Little did she realise that her late-night journey would have greater impact on her future career, than her consulting work by day.
At Harvard she most profoundly affected by a class on how to build a sustainable business, and realised the opportunity to serve the many more under-served consumers at the "bottom of the pyramid", back in her home country. Coincidently, at Harvard, she met another Malaysian, Anthony Tan, no relation, who would become her business partner.
The two Tans worked together on a business idea to make taxis safer back home, their plan winning $35,000 in HBS's New Venture Competition 2011. Using their winnings, they set about launching a mobile app, initially called MyTeksi, and then renamed Grab. It helped that Anthony Tan's family are the largest distributor of Nissan cars in the country, and they soon had a fleet of taxis and motor bikes on the streets of Kuala Lumper. However, Hooi-Ling had to return to McKinsey in return for funding her education, but spent every vacation day flying back to support the fledgling start-up.
In 2015 she returned full-time to Grab, and took on the role of COO, focused on product development, customer experience, and HR. In reality though, she became known as "the plumber" because of her pragmatic operational focus on problem solving, unlocking bottle necks and reshaping the business model. Progress depended on building many partnerships, where there were rarely any rules to follow. Partners trusted them, she says, because of their passion to help make life better.
Jack Ma is the Hangzhou teacher on $12 a month who went to America and couldn't even get a job with KFC, so returned to China and built Alibaba into a $400 billion global technology leader over 20 years, before retiring to become a teacher again.
Job Titles:
- CEO of One of the America
Fraser, the first female CEO of one of the America's largest banks, has certainly had an interesting journey. Born in St Andrew's, educated at Cambridge, she started out as an investment analyst with Goldman Sachs in London and Madrid, then found her way to Harvard for an MBA.
Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage nearly 30 years ago. He recently stepped up from CEO to become executive chairman, saying it will give him "time and energy" to focus on his other ventures. Bezos, again the world's richest man with a $200bn fortune (depending on share prices), will be replaced later this year by Andy Jassy, who currently leads Amazon Web Services (the cloud computing business which he has led for 15 years, and contributes 63% of Amazon's total operating profits).
Bezos's legacy is phenomenal. Since leaving his Wall Street job in 1994 and heading west towards Seattle in a VW campervan to launch an online bookstore, his journey has been unique. Nobody else has
Job Titles:
- Co - CEO of Ping an Group, the Shenzhen
Jessica Tan is co-CEO of Ping An Group, the Shenzhen-based second largest insurance company in the world, but with a responsibility far beyond insurance. She grew up in Singapore, and then studied Engineering and Economics at MIT. She spent a decade at McKinsey before joining Ping An in 2013
John Donahoe, previously boss of Bain & Co, and then of ServiceNow, the cloud computing business, stepped into the top job with a swoosh - while Mark Parker continues as executive chairman.
Katrina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix, is reinventing how we shop. Launching the business in 2011 at the age of 29, an IPO followed 6 years later. In 2021 she "retired" as CEO, to focus on investments and family.
She has always loved fashion. "Classic with a twist" is how she describes her style, a twist that was stimulated by the regular one-off clothing samples she would receive from her sister who worked as a fashion buyer. She loved the eclectic pieces and couldn't understand why so many fashion retailers still focused on average seasonal ranges, particularly in a world of big data and AI, where more personalisation was surely possible.
Having initially worked for Polyvore, a now-defunct social media start-up that was more like a virtual mood board of ideas and fashion, in 2011 she set about creating an online retail platform that "pairs an army of stylists with an arsenal of data to deliver clothing".
Stitch Fix actually started in a small Boston apartment, whilst Lake was still studying for a Harvard MBA at the time, along with her co-founder Erin Flynn who was a former buyer for J Crew. "We cobbled together things you could do online for free," says Katrina. She started by doing lots of free online surveys to find out what potential consumers might want.
"I felt so strongly that the way people were shopping was not going to be the future. I was like, there's no way that the future of buying jeans is going to be spending a day at the mall or even searching online. Searching online for jeans is a ridiculously bad experience." She recently told New York magazine.
Stitch Fix quickly took off. "It was 30 people, then 50 and then 120, and kept growing. As a female entrepreneur, a big challenge was raising funds from the male-dominated investment community. "I didn't have the trust of a lot of investors, and for me the biggest reason was around the lack of diversity in the venture capital world," she says. "Male investors would say things like ‘I can't see myself wanting something like this', and I'd be, ‘Ok, well you're a Caucasian male who is very wealthy, and maybe this isn't the service that you would use.'"
Job Titles:
- CEO
- Rock 's CEO Has Been Described As "the Steve Jobs of the Money Game"
Larry Fink - BlackRock's CEO has been described as "the Steve Jobs of the money game"
Larry Fink leads the world's leading investment company. BlackRock's mission is to help investors build better financial futures and the firm is trusted to manage more money than any other investment company in the world. Each year he write a letter to the CEOs of the world, to the people who he invests in, about how we sees the challenge of business in the world - the need for more purpose, the urgency of climate change, the shift from shareholders to stakeholders as the source of value creation.
Larry Fink shocked the financial world in 2018, when he declared that his BlackRock investment firm would only invest in companies that could demonstrate that they had a meaningful purpose beyond profits.
Over the previous 30 years Fink had built BlackRock into the largest investment firm in the world, with almost $9 trillion in assets under management. However, he was always a leader who looked beyond the numbers. His letter to the CEOs of nearly every large company in America deplored the corporate culture of short-term thinking and threatened to vote out board members who did not hold management more holistically accountable. Other large investment firms have followed BlackRock's lead.
"If the system is really going to change, pressure needs to come from the investment community," says the Drucker Institute. "And no voice has been more important or more forceful in this regard than Larry Fink's."
2018 Letter to CEOs: in his most disruptive letter, that marked his shift to purposeful thinking, he wrote that a long-term perspective matters more than short-term returns:
Expectation that companies deliver more than short term financial returns: In the current social and political context, society is increasingly looking to the private sector to provide more than short term financial returns.
Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential. It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders.
‘Social licence to operate' and long term prosperity depends on making a ‘positive contribution to society', and the absence of a long-term focus or ‘sense of purpose' exposes companies to greater risks.
A new model of shareholder engagement is required with clearer and fuller disclosure of strategies to deliver long-term growth reviewed at board level.
2019 Letter to CEOs: he became more specific about the relative importance of purpose and profit, saying that profit was an outcome, but purpose was the goal:
Purpose is not a mere tagline or marketing campaign; it is a company's fundamental reason for being - what it does every day to create value for its stakeholders.
Purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits but the animating force for achieving them. Profits are in no way inconsistent with purpose - in fact, profits and purpose are inextricably linked.
Purpose unifies management, employees, and communities. It drives ethical behavior and creates an essential check on actions that go against the best interests of stakeholders.
Companies that fulfill their purpose and responsibilities to stakeholders reap rewards over the long-term. Companies that ignore them stumble and fail.
2020 Letter to CEOs: he called for a fundamental reshaping of finance, driven by the urgent need for governments and businesses to respond to the challenges of climate change:
A company cannot achieve long-term profits without embracing purpose and considering the needs of a broad range of stakeholders. Ultimately, purpose is the engine of long-term profitability.
BlackRock believes that the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) provides a clear set of standards for reporting sustainability information across a wide range of issues.
Over time, companies and countries that do not respond to stakeholders and address sustainability risks will encounter growing skepticism from the markets, and in turn, a higher cost of capital.
We will be increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the business practices and plans underlying them.
2021 Letter to CEOs: he wrote that achieving "net zero" carbon emissions is the best way to drive investment growth, and economic recovery.
The pandemic demonstrated the importance of ESG: reflecting on 2020, he argues that these issues - with climate change as the existential threat that affects us all - matter more than ever, revealing a 96% increase in sustainable investing in 2019
Now, because of Covid-19, we know how fragile we are, we must act to remain under 2 degrees. He challenges all companies to achieve "net zero" by 2050. Companies who ignore this, he says, will rapidly lose investor confidence, and economic value.
We need a single global reporting standard. He says most companies, even the best, do a poor job in accounting for carbon emissions, and demands the same standards of accounting as applied to financials. What gets measured, gets done he says.
Social issues are rising fast, he argues. Racial and gender equality came into focus during 2020, although economic inequality is still less visible. Business, he says, holds the key to inclusive capitalism - DEI - diversity, equity, inclusion.
2022 Letter to CEOs: he addressed the power of capitalism, but also the changing nature of capitalism - from profit to purpose, shareholders to stakeholders, and more:
Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers, and communities your company relies on to prosper. This is the power of capitalism.
In today's globally interconnected world, a company must create value for and be valued by its full range of stakeholders in order to deliver long-term value for its shareholders. It is through effective stakeholder capitalism that capital is efficiently allocated, companies achieve durable profitability, and value is created and sustained over the long-term.
At the foundation of capitalism is the process of constant reinvention - how companies must continually evolve as the world around them changes or risk being replaced by new competitors.
It's never been more essential for CEOs to have a consistent voice, a clear purpose, a coherent strategy, and a long-term view. Your company's purpose is its north star in this tumultuous environment.
Institutional Investor has called Fink "the Steve Jobs of the money game" for his ability to foresee a changing world, where most peers are limited in their mindsets by conventional assumptions and incremental solutions. Fink says he is ready to shake-up BlackRock and the entire industry "We need to be willing to reimagine every aspect of our company and how we manage it," he wrote "and so should every other business".
Job Titles:
- the Spanish CEO Is Building Depop With a Vision to Be
Maria Raga - The Spanish CEO is building Depop with a vision to be more human in a digital world
Job Titles:
- Reinventing GM for an Electric Future
Mary Barra grew up just outside Detroit, at a time when the city and car making was booming. Her father Ray Makela worked as a dye maker for 39 years at the Pontiac car factory, whilst Mary started working in the industry at the age of 18, checking fender panels and inspecting hoods to pay for her college education.
"My parents were both born and raised in the Depression. They instilled great values about integrity and the importance of hard work, and I've taken that with me to every job" she says.
Mary Barra, GM's CEO is said to have advised Fraser to "embrace" the focus on her gender because it aided progress, and then spend the rest of her time focused on her job. "At the end of the day, the most important thing is, can I do a good job in the day job?" she's reflects.
Mercado Libre is the Buenos Aires-based online marketplace that has become the most valuable company in Latin America. It operates in 18 countries, although Brazil alone accounts for 65% of its revenue, growing to 96% when including Argentina and Mexico. It was founded in 1999 by Marcos Galperin and two colleagues while at Stanford.
Job Titles:
- Managing Director of Reliance Industries
Mukesh Ambani is India's richest man, managing director of Reliance Industries, one of India's most successful companies of the last decade.
Born in the Yemeni capital Aden, he grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Bhuleshwar near Mumbai. At school, he and his best friends - Adi Godrej, Anand Mahindra and Anand Jain - were obsessed with sports, in particular hockey (each of the friends would go on to become billionaire business leaders). A turning point in Ambani's life came whilst he was studying for an MBA at Stanford but decided to drop out before he could finish his studies.
He began working for his father to build Reliance into an $100 million international group, with subsidiary businesses in energy, petrochemicals, textiles, natural resources, retail, and communications.
Phil Knight co-founded Nike in 1968 with his running coach Bill Bowerman. At college he trained hard in pursuit of a 4 minute mile, but not quite making it, he started selling imported Tiger running shoes out the back of his truck. He trained as an accountant at Coopers & Lybrand, but soon had an entrepreneurial urge. He headed back to Japan, to form a partnership that produced his first Nike shoes, the swoosh created for $35 by a girlfriend. The business grew rapidly into the world's most successful sports brand.
Job Titles:
- the Noma Chef Who Goes Out Each Morning to Forage in His Local Forest for His Michelin Star Menus
René Redzepi - The Noma chef who goes out each morning to forage in his local forest for his Michelin star menus
Redzepi is the world's most celebrated chef. He could not have had a better education. His apprenticeship was served in two of the world's greatest restaurants - Catalonia's el Bulli and California's The French Laundry.
Under the guidance of the great Ferran Adria he developed a passion for experimentation, and a love of seasonal ingredients. In Napa Valley he was instilled with a commitment to working with local suppliers.
In 2003, aged 25, he opened Noma in his native Copenhagen (an abbreviation of the words "Nordic" and "mad", which means food in Danish). He wanted to create a cuisine that represented the environment in which he found himself, giving rise to the term "new Nordic cuisine."
Redzepi sought to develop a cuisine that reflected the soil, topography and climate of the place. He says "All of the people who work in the kitchen with me go out into the forests and on to the beach. It's a part of their job. If you work with me, you will often be starting your day in the forest or on the shore because I believe foraging will shape you as a chef."
Job Titles:
- Leader
- Leader Who Wants to Make Other 's Cool
The Indian-born CEO says he doesn't want to be cool, but to make other people cool, inspiring Microsoft to become the world's most valuable business, again.
But this is not a cult of leadership, or a hierarchy of command. Nadella is a very modern leader, recognising that his role is not to be the expert, or the hero, or the decision-maker - but to be the facilitator, the connector, the enabler. Behind that behaviour is his belief in the idea of a "growth mindset. Nowhere will you find this approach to leadership more clear, applied and powerful than in today's Microsoft.
Job Titles:
- Founder of Google X
- the German AI Scientist Who Is Creating Driverless Cars, Online Education and Flying Taxis
Sebastian Thrun - The German AI scientist who is creating driverless cars, online education and flying taxis
Sebastian Thrun is the German-born founder of Google X, more often known as the Moonshot Factory, or the new ideas business of Alphabet. He defined the goal as to use the capabilities of technology and data to solve the world's biggest problems, and famously search for "10x not 10%".
He started his career in academia, in 1995 as a research computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, becoming co-director of the Robot Learning Lab. He founded the Masters program in Automated Learning and Discovery, and a PhD program in machine learning. In 2002 he became the Finmeccanica Professor of Computer Science and Robotics. He then moved to Stanford, as a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. In 2005 he was named one of the "Brilliant 5" people who could change the world by Popular Science magazine. A life in academia seemed on the cards.
On an entrepreneurial impulse, he joined Google, specifically working on their lead project at the time, a driverless car system. It became Waymo. At the same time, harnessing his expertise in AI, he created Google Streetview. Google X became a more structured environment for developing new ideas, and the number of projects rapidly grew, big bets on the future, harnessing the latent power of new tech.
Shou Chew is a Singaporean who started out at Goldman Sachs where he led investment in Alibaba, Xiaomi, and then Bytedance. He joined Xiaomi, often described as "the Apple of Asia" in 2015 as their CFO which he helped take public in 2018. In 2021 he joined Bytedance, the Chinese AI-based media business that owns TikTok. Three months after joining Bytedance, amid huge political challenges and future uncertainty, he became CEO of TikTok.
Stitch Fix essentially combines data science, personalised marketing and a platform-based business model to drive growth. Chris Moody became Stitch Fix's lead data scientist. He also has a PhD in astrophysics focused on using supercomputers to simulate how galaxies crash into each other. He uses the same analytical rigour to fine tune the perfect selections for each Stitch Fix subscriber. He describes the business more like an online personal styling service combining Netflix-style algorithms with human intuition and curation supported by a team of around 100 data scientists and 3,000 in-house stylists who fine-tune each fix.
In 2017, at the age of 34, Lake became the youngest woman to take a company public. The IPO raised $120 million and valued Stitch Fix at $1.46 billion. As she appeared at the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York for the company's first day of trading, she held her 14-month-old son in her arms. The images went viral. She was quickly seen as a role model for women, and mothers, in business. "It felt like a really meaningful moment for me, and hopefully for others as well," she told CNN.
Lake become not only a pioneer for better shopping, but for a better workplace too. With a mother who was a Japanese immigrant, she is focused on promoting diversity within her company, both women and people from ethnic minorities. But ultimately, Stitch Fix is a fusion of passion and science "When you think of entrepreneurs, you think of somebody who is super risky and stays up for all hours tinkering with something in their garage." Instead she prefers a smart business plan, clever technology, good people, and sleep.
Tan Le is a Vietnamese boat refugee who found a new beginning in Australia, qualifying as a lawyer, then creating Emotiv, a world-leading neurotechnology company.
Job Titles:
- Patagonia 's Founder Is on a Mission to Save Our Home Planet
Patagonia was founded by Yvon Chouinard in 1973, based in Ventura, California. A certified B-Corporation, Its mission is to save our home planet. The company is recognised internationally for its commitment to authentic product quality and environmental activism, donating 1% of sales annually, contributing over $100 million in grants and in-kind donations since 1985.
Job Titles:
- Founder of Bytedance, the World 's Largest Unicorn Business, and the Man Behind the Rapid Growth of TikTok
Zhang Yiming - Founder of Bytedance, the world's largest unicorn business, and the man behind the rapid growth of TikTok