Details by…
Frank Gehry
WORLD-SHAPING ARCHITECT
In my fourth year at the University of Southern California, the teacher from my professional practice class came up to me in the courtyard one day and said, “Frank, I’ve been watching you, and I think you’re a talented guy who’s going to go somewhere. I just want to give you one word of advice: No matter how small a project you work on, and no matter what it is, put your heart and soul and sense of responsibility into it, and don’t dismiss anything.” He said it very clearly and lovingly, and I never forgot it and I’ve lived by it.
Due diligence by…
Sara Blakely
RAGS TO (BILLION-DOLLAR) RICHES: FOUNDER, CEO, SPANX
In the early days of Spanx, I didn’t vet the manufacturer helping me make our first product, footless pantyhose. They went out of business and gave me one week’s notice. It almost put Spanx under. Had I done any kind of financial due diligence on them, I would have been able to prevent that. Early-stage entrepreneurs shouldn’t forget about that layer. It almost stopped everything for me.
Empathy by…
Sheryl Sandberg
TECH TRAILBLAZER: WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP CHAMPION; COO, FACEBOOK
Driving to work on my first day back after maternity leave, I cried the entire way there. I wanted to work, but leaving my son at home was hard. To be able to see him, I started finding ways to come in later and leave earlier.
Years later I mentioned in an interview that I left work at 5:30. The response was overwhelmingly positive. That’s when I realized that we are better employees when we stop trying to be two people and bring our whole selves to work. That doesn’t mean working around the clock. It means sharing what you are going through so that other people can empathize and help you.
When I lost my husband Dave two years ago, I learned this lesson even more deeply. Dave was a true partner at home and at work and taught me the value of peer mentorship. When I was talking to Mark about joining Facebook, Dave told me not to work out the substance in advance but rather to agree on the process. His point was that the substance would change but our working relationship was the single most important thing to get right. We agreed to sit together, giving each other feedback every week one-on-one. Nine years later, I often smile when I remember how Dave’s advice set us up for success.
So bringing my full self to work meant being openly sad. The way colleagues supported me drove home the need for better policies for bereavement and sick leave. Taking care of people when they need it most is not just the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do.
Experiment by…
Craig Venter
THE DECODER: FOUNDER, CELERA GENOMICS; HUMAN GENOME SEQUENCER; CHAIRMAN, HUMAN LONGEVITY INC. AND SYNTHETIC GENOMICS INC.
Timing is everything in science, like it is in most things in life. In 1944 Oswald Avery did the experiment proving DNA was how traits are inherited. But he didn’t get the Nobel Prize because everybody wanted to believe proteins were the genetic material. I’ve been lucky. I nearly flunked out of high school, and I decided not to go to college even though I had a swimming scholarship. I ended up in Vietnam. After, I had to start my education over from scratch. I had this English teacher, Bruce Cameron. We became lifelong friends. If it weren’t for him, I would not have survived the first semester of community college. He taught me to ignore the assignment and write what I wanted. I ended up getting my Ph.D. in just three years. I learned that most people fail in science because they talk themselves out of doing the experiment. Ideas are a dime a dozen. What makes the difference is the execution of the idea. That taught me to recognize when it was time to adopt new technologies to understand genetics and then even to sequence the human genome. Once, I was too early: I started trying to create synthetic life a decade before the world was ready for it. But it’s ready now.
Flexibility by…
Bernard Arnault
ULTIMATE TASTEMAKER: FOUNDER, LUXURY-GOODS CONGLOMERATE LVMH
The success of LVMH is built on creativity, quality, entrepreneurship and, most importantly, long-term vision. For instance, I remember the first time I visited China, in 1991. I arrived in Beijing – I saw no cars, only bicycles, no tall buildings. The GDP was 4% of what it is today. Nonetheless, we decided to open our first Louis Vuitton store in China. Today Louis Vuitton is the number one luxury brand in the country and across the world. We have been seeing for the past 25 years a growing desire for high-quality products and an acceleration of buying power. Nowadays, the internet makes the planet much smaller. Product launches now need to be global in order to be successful. When you start something today, you usually have to start it all over the world at the same time to be successful, and you can see what’s going on anywhere, instantly. That requires higher investment – which gives us an advantage. Creating increasingly desirable new products and selling them worldwide is what LVMH does best.
Julian Robertson
HEDGE FUND GODFATHER: FOUNDER, TIGER MANAGEMENT
Do you know what the most desirable job was at the beginning of my career, in the 1950s? Advertising. All the hotshots went into advertising. Investment banks? They were begging for people. I was interested in stocks from an early age, so I really wanted to go into investment banking. The fancy way in was to go to business school and then get into the investment banking department of one of the firms, but I started as a stockbroker. Today, people wonder why hedge funds aren’t doing better – I think it is from increasing competition from other hedge funds. If I were starting out now, I would look at what the competition is like in various fields – and then consider some that aren’t so popular.
Lakshmi Mittal
WORLD BUILDER: CHAIRMAN, CEO, ARCELORMITTAL, THE LARGEST STEELMAKER ON EARTH
Steel is one of the most used materials in the world today, but that doesn’t mean in the future there won’t be a different way of making steel or that other, new materials won’t be developed that challenge steel’s position. The pace of technological change is significantly faster than historically – every industry today has to fight complacency, prepare to see the disruption coming and then be flexible enough to adapt swiftly.
Foresight by…
Elon Musk
IRON MAN: ALPHA ENTREPRENEUR; COFOUNDER, PAYPAL, TESLA, SPACEX
Artificial intelligence will provide many societal benefits, including self-driving cars and improved medical diagnostics. However, with AI we may be summoning the demon and could create an existential risk to humanity. If a digital superintelligence were inadvertently optimized to do something detrimental to humanity, this could have catastrophic consequences. It could be something like directing the AI to get rid of spam, and it concludes the best way to get rid of spam is to get rid of humans. Or a financial program decides the best way to make money is to increase the value of defense stocks by starting a war. We’re the first species capable of self-annihilation, and it’s extremely likely, given enough time. The question: Can we get ahead of it? We need to learn as much as possible and should create a government agency to regulate AI. Ultimately the private sector will have to take the lead in building safe and useful technology that benefits humanity.
Michael Eisner
THE MOUSE THAT MIKE BUILT: FORMER CEO, DISNEY
Michael Eisner
In 1998, Disney bought Infoseek, then one of the largest search engines, behind Yahoo. Shortly thereafter, I was convinced in the men’s room by a consultant at McKinsey that Infoseek shouldn’t do advertised search because it wasn’t the Disney way. I wasn’t in my office, I wasn’t thinking, and I said, “Oh, yeah. My job is to protect the Disney brand. We won’t have advertised search, that’s not clean.” Google came around and did AdWords, and Infoseek didn’t. It was probably a $200 billion mistake. After that, we made a rule: No more meetings in the bathroom.
Golden rule by…
John Paul DeJoria
SELF-MADE BILLIONAIRE—TWICE: CO-FOUNDER, JOHN PAUL MITCHELL SYSTEMS; COFOUNDER, PATRÓN TEQUILA
There’s turnover of staff and then there’s efficiency of staff. Companies sometimes hire 10 people to do the job of three. What’s the answer to it all? It’s a basic thing that goes back to the law to do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Treat and pay your staff exactly the way you’d want to be treated if you were in their place.
Now, how does this work? John Paul Mitchell Systems is in almost 100 countries. We’ve been around for 37 years. My turnover is less than 100 people. Only two people have even retired from our company. They don’t want to. They’re having such a good time.
Someone once asked Francisco Alcaraz, the genius distiller creating all of our formulas for Patrón, “What is the secret? Why is Patrón so good? Why do people keep coming back?” He says, “The secret’s very easy. It’s called love. We are all treated so well, we love what we’re doing. We never want to leave. We want every bottle to be reflective of us.”
With Patrón, 53 people touch every single bottle; that’s a lot of hands-on work, and they’re all loved. If you work for me during the day shift, you get a free lunch by chefs. If you work for me at night during the night shift, you get a free lunch and dinner by chefs. You want to pray during the day? We built a chapel right in the middle of the 17th-century Spanish-French hacienda.
In all the businesses we’re involved in it’s the exact same way. If you love your people and let them know you’re giving back, not just hoarding all the money for yourself, they want to join in.