Turning points and lessons learned: Meet The Leader's top leadership moments so far

Hans Vestberg, Verizon: You need to adapt your leadership. You need to spend time on it.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Welcome to Meet The Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they’re tackling the world’s toughest challenges. On today's very special episode - our 101st -- we celebrate the best moments so far from top names like Al Gore and Jane Goodall - and the lessons that stand out to me personally from the past 100 episodes.

Subscribe to Meet The Leader on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your favorite podcasts and don’t forget to rate and review us. I’m Linda Lacina from the World Economic forum - and this is Meet the Leader.

John Amaechi: Your ability to navigate organisations, to use diplomacy, to pick your moments for the long game. This is what leadership is about and that's what I'm hoping that I can help people embrace.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: I always consider myself a lucky girl and that was further proven out to me at the tail end of 2020 when I was tapped to do this podcast.

Meet the Leader was designed as a chance to talk one-on-one with the people working on your behalf to solve problems like climate change and job scarcity. The people sitting in on the meetings pushing teams to be upskilled, or to inspire engineers to design a better train or truck that will slash emissions, or big minds keeping teams on track for big goals that they might not get credit for but are critical to move forward none the less.

I’m proud to say we’ve already completed 100 episodes. But I wanted to dedicate the 101st to my favorite moments - the ones that stuck with me, that made me laugh or helped give me a steer when I was unsure.

Today’s episodes includes politicians, activists, CEOs, a commercial fisher and more. But we’ll start with Jane Goodall. She’s the world's best-known living naturalist and primatologist and at 26, she lived amongst chimpanzees to provide the world first-hand insights on how they lived and behaved.

People balked at her age, her gender, her methods and that she ascribed emotions to her subjects. But she pushed forward. And later became an activist for animal welfare and the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, She’s also a prolific author and speaker on the need for hope to make change happen. Here’s a moment where she brought hope to a cranky London cabbie.

Jane Goodall, Jane Goodall Institute: Stories can change people. I was in a taxi cab in London, going to the airport for a two-week trip to the US. And the taxi driver knew who I was and he started on it, me. Oh, you're just like my sister. I can't stand the likes of you. This old is suffering people. All you care about is animals. She goes to the animal.

So I sat forward. And I told him stories about the chimps, how we were helping people to rise out of poverty, or we were helping people find alternative jobs. I told him how we had sanctuaries for orphan chimps. Some of the stories about the chimps showing compassion and altruism to each other. Oh, he was just grumpy, grumpy, grumpy.

And we get to the airport and neither of us had any change. So in the end, he owed me what I think today would be the equivalent of $50 maybe. And I said, "oh, donate it to your sister for her work." Thinking we are gone drinking off in the pub with his friend.

I got back after two weeks, there was a letter from the sister. She said, first of all, thank you for your donation. But secondly, what did you do to my brother? She said, "he's been three times to help me. He's interested. He asks questions."

We're living in pretty grim times and that's covering the political scenario, social, and of course, especially environmental.

When people lose hope, then they sink into apathy and do nothing, or they might become violent and aggressive. I've watched people who tackle problems a little aggressively, and they start arguing with the protagonist, let's say. Somebody who thinks differently from them. And you can actually see the entire thing goes wrong because the person they're talking to and pointing a finger at and saying, "you've got to change." And you can see the eyes sort of cloud over. And you can see that person thinking of a rebuttal to what he's been or she's being told.

And especially if it's a young person talking to a much older, especially dominant male. They don't want to be told what to do. So I've found find some point of contact between you and the person you're going to talk to. Find it on the internet or something. Maybe you both love dogs. spend one minute or two minutes talking about that to build a tiny little bridge between you and your different ideas. And then you've got to reach the heart.

It's no good arguing with the head. It's no good blinding. someone was statistics. Change must come from within, I believe, real change.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You might know Al Gore as the Nobel laureate and former US Vice President but you might not also know that he’s the founder of the Climate Reality Project, and through that organization has trained thousands of grassroots activists for climate change. It’s the product of 3 decades of lessons learned in public service and climate action, working to give others the headstart he never got on how to connect and be informed - and how to effectively communicate.

Here’s Al Gore talking to me about one of the lessons that shaped him -- a turning point that he never forgot.

Al Gore, Climate Reality Project: When I first went to the United States Congress, quite a long time ago, I organized my first congressional hearing, the first in the House of Representatives on the climate crisis.

And I invited the professor who had inspired me as an undergraduate way back in the 1960s to be the lead witness in this hearing. Dr. Roger Revelle was his name. And I naively thought that when my colleagues at the dais heard this great wise professor, they would have the same epiphany that I had experienced in a full college course.

It turned out that the 20-minute congressional statement was not comparable. And at the end of that hearing there were the equivalent of yawns. And the experience that I had had listening to him through that full course was simply not replicated in that congressional hearing.

And so that caused me to stop and think, ‘Wait a minute, what were the elements of this, communication between him and me when I was younger that engaged me and caused me to really change my thinking? And how different that is from a congressional hearing? And so I began then a long journey that I'm still on to try and understand the best way to communicate with people about the existential nature of the climate crisis.

It is so different from anything humanity has ever experienced before. The threat of nuclear war during the height of the standoff between the US and the former Soviet Union is the only thing that really comes close. Because this too, like the prospect of nuclear war, is potentially civilization-ending. And it's changing - it's getting worse so quickly as I said earlier. We have to be willing to make bold moves.

You know, back during the years when I was in the Senate, working on nuclear arms control, I became friends with a Russian poet. He's passed on now. His name was Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

He wrote a famous poem in the last days of the old Soviet Union called Half Measures and the poem was about a man standing on the edge of a cliff, looking across the chasm, at the cliff on the other side, and preparing to leap across to safety. And the point of the poem was: don't try it in two leaps.

And the transition we are now trying to make from dirty destructive fossil fuels to renewable energy, from combustion vehicles to electric vehicles, from inefficient and wasteful approaches to business and industry to the new, clean, sustainable approaches -- we can't do it in two leaps because it just doesn't work.

So finding better ways to communicate to people generally that this is insane, we have to change it and we have to change it not gradually, but quickly. That is a mission that I've been on since that learning experience way back in the 1970s and early '80s when I first began to try to communicate more effectively about the climate crisis.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And what tactics do you employ since that realization to capture people's imaginations?

Al Gore, Climate Reality Project: Some of this may sound, pretty elementary, you know, the old cliche, a picture's worth a thousand words. Well, I found that a slideshow is worth a thousand speeches if it's done well. And then I was approached by some folks in Hollywood who are very talented to make my slideshow into a movie.

And, another example of my own naivete, I thought that was a silly idea. I couldn't see how it would work, but they have more talent than I counted. And I've participated in launching two movies on climate thus far, but I've tried to use another tool as well, and that is to delegate, or to recruit others, to also deliver the message that needs to be heard round the world.

And when my first movie came out, I started training grassroots advocates. The first class was 50 people at my farm in Tennessee. And by now, I've personally trained almost 50,000 people who go through a lengthy almost week-long course, that goes into great detail on the causes and the solutions for the climate crisis, but also focuses on giving all of these people the skills and the tools and the network connections with one another and with the scientific community to be effective advocates.

And our focus is increasingly on convincing policymakers to make changes because some of the largest polluters tried to get across the idea that really this burden is on each individual to turn off the light switch when you leave the room to change the light bulbs to more efficient ones and, and so forth. And that's all fine and good, but as important as it is to change the light bulbs, it's a lot more important to change the policies.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Caroline Casey is the founder of The Valuable 500, an organization that represents 22 million workers across 64 sectors worldwide working to end disability exclusion. She’s an advocate and a powerhouse of a person and she shared with me a moment when she hit a wall. It's a wall that many founders and entrepreneurs hit but one that changed how she'd lead her organization. Here’s Caroline on the moment she learned her own perfection was getting in her way.

Caroline Casey, The Valuable 500: One thing that was very uncomfortable advice given to me was by Bill Mitchell. He was one of the former CEOs of Arrow, which is a Fortune 200 company. And he was mentoring me. And he said, "Casey." He liked to call me Casey. He said, "yes, you're a system thinker. Yes. You have great vision and ambition. But remember, 80% is good enough."

I said "What? But it has to be perfect."

And he just said, "If you want to scale change, if you want system change. 80% is good enough. Perfection is what gets in your way. Get out of your way. Get out of your own way.'

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Blake Scholl is a self-described ad tech guy from Amazon and groupon who went on to found Boom SuperSonic, a sustainable aviation company with flights twice as fast as what's offered today. He doesn’t have the usual background for an aviation CEO and sought out what he needed to found this company.

He has run his life by the idea that skills are adaptable and changeable, and there to support our passions.

It’s a fine reminder for any of us - and especially key as reskilling becomes all the more important in the years ahead. Here’s Blake.

Blake Scholl, Boom Supersonic: I think people underestimate what they can learn and what they can teach themselves if they are motivated and focused.

I was very fortunate as a kid. My parents sent me to some really awesome summer camps. Like I hated my normal run-of-the-mill Midwestern U.S. school experience. But I would go to these summer camps, started like learn to program or I'd learn how digital circuits worked.

And like that stood in my mind is like, this is what it really means to learn. This is exciting. And I'm around people who feel like my peers. And so Carnegie Mellon had this really visionary program where you could apply as a junior in high school, write an essay on why you're kind of done with high school, and then they would throw you in as a freshman if they bought your essay.

And I feel incredibly fortunate to have stumbled across that opportunity and been able to take advantage of it. And it's a lesson that I think plays forward in my life. Like I don't have the resume to build supersonic airplanes. I'm a software engineer by training. I'm like the ad tech guy from Amazon and Groupon. But I spent a year kind of just teaching myself the fundamentals of airplane design and airplane economics. And it turns out, like, I can learn that.

And I think a lot of people have a very self-limiting mindset that this is normal in our culture of you go to school and that's where you pick your field and then you become an expert in something and then your expertise just gets more and more and more narrow. And that's certainly a model that can work. But my experience is that skills and capability are very changeable. Knowledge is changeable. But passions are not. And it's much more powerful to follow your passions and let your knowledge and skills follow where your passion takes you.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Bas van Abel is the founder of Fairphone, the world's first smartphone built to make smartphones circular and supply chains ethical. His phones are ones you can fix yourself and even come with a small screwdriver. Fixing supply chains isn’t nearly as straightforward and he shared with me a make-or-break moment for the company that drove home both the importance - and challenge - of their mission. Here’s Bas.

Bas Van Abel, Fairphone: Everything is about efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. You know, cost reduction. It's killing a lot of the joy also in not only the work, but also in what you can accomplish. And also the extra time you can spend on really finding out these questions and things.

I think a great example - we were running a crowdfunding back in 2016, I believe. 2016-17. We sold $10 million worth of phones that we hadn't produced yet. It was a pre-sales campaign. We were 2-3 months late in delivering these phones that we promised to people that were already waiting for half a year for these phones.

And at that moment, the factory calls us, like, we have a problem. We're going to be delayed another two months. But we've discussed it here internally and we also have a solution. The solution is that we're going to get some agency workers in, make overtime, and we're going to catch up. The delay will only be two weeks. The problem with that was that is all this overtime and all this pressure that you put on people and all the problems that come with hiring people without an employment contract to do temporary work.

So at that point, it would solve our problem with, people that are already asking for the phone. You know, 'where the hell is it?' And you've promised it to your customer. And on the other hand, your supply chain and what you stand for. And it was really a tough decision.

We were really like, What do we stand for? And that moment was really, for me, it was really an eye-opener. It really felt good to make the decision to say, ‘Well, we are Fairphone and we want to have better working conditions, and this is exactly the problem. We messed up and as a company, we're not going to solve it by pushing down the supply chain to make it more efficient, to make it faster, to really get it done because in the end we are responsible. So I wrote an email, and sent it to all the customers waiting, and it was really fingers crossed because we knew this might actually really kill the company because people won't just say, "Well then I want my money back."

But you know, a magical thing happened. We got three people that cancelled their pre-sales because they really needed a phone, and we got so much good feedback on the decision that we made. And we were really happy about having had that discussion inside the company.

And even if we had chosen differently, I think being open about why you decide these things, what kind of problems you're facing, that is really important.

I think now, in a time where we see that we are able to show more transparency because of the media, because of social media, because of everything happening, we could also embrace a bit more vulnerability as a company and not go for efficiency all the time.

Meet The Leader, Linda Lacina: What was that like in that moment before you pressed send? What were you feeling?

Bas van Abel: Well, I felt proud, to be honest. I really felt proud of the team and us being able to take such a hard decision and just deal with the consequences.

There have also been moments where we took decisions which we had to take. You know, re-organizing the company, letting people go. It's really those kind of things that the company also needs to do. You can't make it like one big kumbaya. It's still a commercial enterprise.

I think balancing that is really what is nice. And, you know, there's a cost to it as well. The cost for any company would be, well, the decision-making is slower. If people are more aligned with the mission and their values are really into that, people are very strongly opinionated about all kinds of things. You can't just go and not communicate about things.

That's also something if you ask which future companies need to really embrace, it's the vulnerability. It's also letting go, again, of that kind of efficiency that you want. That ultimate efficiency in the decision-making of everything alienates people. It also alienates your suppliers from you because you're just pushing problems down the throat of other people.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Francis Kéré is one of those incredible changemakers we have the good fortune to feature. He made history last year as the first African to win Architecture’s top honour: the Pritzker Prize. But before he was a pioneer for sustainable building, leveraging local materials and traditional techniques, he was just a boy from Gando, a village in Burkina Faso, with just 2,000 people, no clean drinking water, no electricity and no schools. He chatted with my colleague Gayle Markovitz about the impact his designs have had on Burkino Faso - the impact his journey has had on him and he shared a special message for anyone looking to make a difference.

Diébédo Francis Kéré: It is never too late. Never, never, never too late. So for our audience and for you, I have to tell you, I started to study when I was 30.

I had another motivation. I believed in what I wanted to give to my people. And I was looking for a solution to do that. So, for a young student, I will say don't be shy. Don't think that it's too late for you. Don't think you have no talent. I had no talent. When I started to study, I would go to the shop and study the number of colourful pencils that exist.

I was looking through that and saying, wow, what an abundance. You can come from scarcity, I mean, someone that cannot afford everything and you bring it to greatness. It is possible. Never give up.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: My conversation with Deloitte’s Punit Renjen has always stuck with me. He was the CEO when we did this interview - he’s the Global CEO Emeritus now. But he talked about being counted out as a young man, someone who didn’t fit the mold others expected, and how we can't let others ideas for us - and even their lack of expectations for us - shape what you can accomplish. I’ll let him explain.

Punit Renjen, Deloitte. I grew up in a town called Rohtak, which is 40 miles west of New Delhi. And I was sent to a boarding school, and my parents felt there weren't appropriate schools in this little town. So I went to a boarding school, but my father went bankrupt. But when I was 14 years old, I came back from boarding school and went to the local school in my hometown.

You know, there isn't formal bankruptcy in India or certainly wasn't then. He just ran out of money. And so what my brother and I would do is we would go to school and then, of course, help, as most many kids have done, help in the local factory that my father was still trying to run.

Articles by Punit Renjen:

You know, it was a difficult transition for me being a teenager, coming back from a lifestyle where I was away to boarding school for nine months of the year and then being home and having to work. But – and I don't think I knew about this when I was going through it – But it taught me a few things. One taking the long view and this is something that my father always insisted. He was always an optimist and he was the glass-half-full type of individual.

And this was the second learning was that this too shall pass. And that's actually been a really good learning as we've navigated this pandemic, as I've talked to my partners and managing directors within Deloitte. I have reinforced the fact that this too shall pass. And it was learning. If I go back and reflect on my own life I will be going through what I was going through as a 14, 15 year old.

And then persistence and hard work, which I believe had been the key calling cards for me with something that I learnt there where, you know, it took all of us coming together, the family coming together, working hard, trying to make ends meet and trying to get through what was a difficult time.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: My husband worked in a factory for many years stamping parts in Detroit, and it was his father's company, and he was happy to contribute, but it also helped him learn that he wanted to do something else. Did you have a similar sense?

Punit Renjen, Deloitte: There was an element of that, but I have to tell you, at age 18, if you had lined up all of my friends, and you would ask people who would be successful in life, successful being defined as professional success, I don't think anybody would have pointed to me. And I mean, that's the truth. At age 18, I was the one that people pointed to and in soft voices say, well, what's going to happen to the poor Punit? And I wonder what his parents think about that. And so at some at some level, I knew that I needed to get out of that. And the Rotary Foundation scholarship that I got really changed my life. It gave me an opportunity to come to the United States. I came sight unseen to Oregon, never certainly been overseas, never been on an aeroplane. And it gave me a gave me a perspective. Now, looking back in retrospect life is a miracle. Yeah. And you know, today. If you look at professional success in that group of friends, all 18-year-olds, I'm doing pretty good.

The future is not pre-ordained. We've been dealt a hand.We accept that. We will do our best to play our hand and make sure our future is ordained the way we would like it to be ordained.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Regarding the future not being preordained. It seems to me that there's been this theme through your life where you maybe haven't taken a path or a label that someone else thought was expected for you. How do you apply that in your own decision-making? How do you make sure that you're carving out your own path?

Punit Renjen, Deloitte: First off, you have to accept that you don't control everything. And in the pandemic is a very good example. I mean, we don't control everything about the pandemic. In fact, we only can control very few elements.

Then if you take a view that you play that hand with a certain purpose, that drives everything that you do. In our case, as I said, as an organisation, our purpose is to make an impact that matters for our clients, for our people and the communities that we live and work in. That is our North Star. And then you apply the techniques that we talked about, you know, making sure that you have clarity in terms of where you're going. You have clear accountability. You're trying to do it in chunks with some speed, acknowledging that you will make mistakes, but you will correct those mistakes as quickly as possible. Those tools and techniques always work.

The other piece, and I'm not trying to be overly religious here, is in the Hindu way. There is this notion that you have to do your duty and that duty is taking pleasure in the act of doing rather than in the outcome. Outcomes are very important. Professional life outcomes are very important. You have to generate bottom-line results. You have to generate impact in world climate and world-class. But if you take joy in just the act of doing, I believe you end up performing at a much higher level.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Yuxiang Zhou is the CEO of Black Lake Technologies, a platform helping to digitize factories, a world that often still depends on pencil and paper and managers walking around to monitor operations. Black Lake was not his first attempt - that startup failed and the experience almost led him to give up entirely. Instead, he took to Mount Kilimanjaro, and reaching the summit helped him learn patience and a new way of driving change. I'll let him explain more.

Yuxiang Zhou, Black Lake Technologies: So at that time, we were really frustrated because we all got educated from overseas, and then we came back to China. So initially we were blaming ourselves. We thought it's because we don't understand the market. We are no longer like a true Chinese, in order to be successful as entrepreneurs in China. And somehow we fail. We spent a month in China. If we just go back to the US or Hong Kong, and that'll be such a waste of the month.

Instead of making any decision, some friend recommended maybe I should go somewhere else and to figure out the puzzles in my mind.

So I joined the hiking trip to Kilimanjaro and trained for a period of time, and I summited the mountain on Christmas Day 2015. And the journey to the summit was really, really tough. It was snowstorm nights with very strong winds and sand and mixed with snow. But you know the process, how you are to summit you just to follow your guide one step by another. Ignore everything else. Just watch your step one, two, one, two, and continue to do that for 6 hours. Then I reached the top. I was tearing in my eyes. I felt maybe this is how we should do a start-up. Instead of being to have a big idea, we want to be Palantir in China, and rush into the ivory tower and not understand the market. We should take time. Maybe is just we didn't spend enough time rather than that we are not Chinese enough, etc. So after the climbing, I went back and talked with my previous co-founders saying that we should make up the lesson that we missed by going into the factory and maybe we can figure something out from there. So I guess this more Zen mindset opened our eyes to more opportunities and be more patient.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: One of my favorite questions is to ask people about a habit they can’t work without and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg certainly delivered. He is a perfect interview for Meet the Leader since he has been a student of leadership since his days as a professional handball player, studying how coaches and teams operate. And importantly, he’s dedicated to big long-term goals - including digital inclusion, and had even lobbied hard once for connectivity to become the 18th Sustainable Development Goal. He told me a special practice he’s used since he became CEO to make sure his time matches up with his biggest priorities.

Hans Vestberg, Verizon: I think that when I became CEO for the first time, I realised I was looking for a manual on “What is a CEO doing?” And I didn't find it because there's no nothing to read. There is no this is how you should do it. So I decided actually to do a planning, how I would spend my hours in advance because I was so worried I would be consumed with a topic and miss something else.

So I started 2009, so I actually did dedicate my time in percentages in six different buckets, three external and and three internal, which all were aligned to the strategy of the company and what was important. And I started to follow up. How was my hours spent the quarter compared to my forecast? I've done that since 2009 e and I still do it.

So I actually measure every hour I work. I put them into six buckets in order to see that it reflects what is important for the company and where I should dedicate my time. I had a quarter, for example, when I became the CEO of Verizon, where I spent roughly 80% on the internal three buckets, meaning talents, the strategy and the board. And then only 20% expternally. And there are quarters when I spend 80% externally, when we're down to a big acquisition of things like that, I speak a lot customers, I speak to shareholders and media.

So I have all the time been measuring that and wondering always how to tell my team? When I meet the top leaders of my company, I always put out the graph of how I spent time in the last quarter, and I always ask them, okay, how did you spend your last quarter and did you really support where you should be, where you should spend your hours? And I think that's how I have been managing because it doesn't really matter if you're a CEO or whatever, as long as you're a leader, you lead other people, you need to see that you spend the time on the things that are the right for bringing that function or unit forward. And that was a learning for me. I'm a super nerd, I have everything in Excel. So I make sure that every day because it works for me in order to stay, stay very focussed on the things that are important for the company. So I don't spend on things that are great and cool and fun for me, but has nothing to do for the company.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: So you're tracking your hours in Excel and also a calendar program?

Hans Vestberg, Verizon: I have a calendar that has different colours, six different colours for two different types of things that I point that down to Excel and I would do a lot of graphs so I can show in a bar every quarter, every month actually how I spend the time. And you can see that over time how it changes. So I can basically – this is super nerdy, I'm sorry – but I can plot from 2009 every month up to 2021. I had this small gap when I was free for six months when I was in between two jobs, which was really tough for me. But other than that, I have it.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: So was there some kind of event that triggered this, some kind of a turning point when you realised that you had to change how you worked?

Hans Vestberg, Verizon: I think the turning point there was that I was appointed as CEO, but of course when the water goes up, basically you need the flows. But in order to manage more and more, if you go up in the hierarchy. I found myself basically every time standing on the same place and trying to manage the same way as I did in my previous position. But this is much more different, a different vertical or maybe much bigger. And I think I've learned every time to make that pivot quicker, to move to another level or dealing with my leadership. And I think that's what everybody struggles with. When you move to a new job, you know, Hey, I knew how to work before. Now we're going to have a new job. I bring that with me. That's usually – You at least need to do some adaptation in order to succeed in that job. But I think anybody is, I mean, super stressed. I work like crazy in order to succeed in my new job, actually applying the process for my previous one. Then I had a lot of that between my I would say between my age of 30 to 40 and the super anxiety just working day by night to deliver in order to see the what are the most important things that I should deliver and see that others are working as well. But you learn by time. And I think I'm not saying that I'm perfect neither. No, I'm far away from that, but at least I'm better right now.

I still improve because, for me, I spent time on my leadership because it's so important. That's really what I what I can contribute to this organisation. I have met the technical people. I have met the accountants and everybody's better at everything than me.

The only thing I can contribute is to lead and empower these people and give them the North Star where we're going and giving the energy that they like, that they like to be at this place and a clear direction. And that's why leadership becomes so important to me, because that is the confidence that I have. And I need the. I cannot manage water ice on today as I did Eriksson in 1994. That would be a disaster. So you need to adapt the leadership. You need to spend time on it. I think i do that. I spend a lot of time on my leadership.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader. Harmony Jade Wayner was the vice chair of the Arctic Youth Network when we met this past January. She’s also a commercial fisher, a fishery scientist and an indigenous woman from the Arctic native village in the Bristol Bay region. I caught up with her at Davos this year and in a moment when we were all clamoring to hear from her, she was looking to hear from the other voices at the conference. Here’s Harmony.

Harmony Jade Wayner: I'm really happy to be invited to such a forum like this and get the chance to really share authentically. But I can't speak on behalf of all of Alaska or all of the Arctic region, and there's so many more voices that need to be heard. So I just I want to be kind of the boundary span or between that, but know that my perspective is just one perspective of many.

I think I'm trying to listen more than I speak. Yeah. And that was a value that was taught to me early on. But I can kind of jump sometimes to want to express right away, But I need to take a moment to stop and hear from other perspectives. And I think I learned that a lot when I was living in other places too, because I was in international communities and in places like this that you just don't get exposure to if you're in Alaska all the time.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader. Some of my favorite interviews on Meet The Leader have helped highlight how anyone can lead - and the unsung qualities that are so important to truly making change possible.

My colleague Alex Court caught up with John Amaechi, the psychologist, former professional basketball player and the author of leadership book, The Promises of Giants on just that topic.

John Amaechi, APS Intelligence. We've all grown up with the idea of the strongman leader and it is a strong-man leader with all the stereotypes associated with that. The power and the willingness to use it despite collateral damage is the boldness with no restraint. And it is a certainty with no room for doubt. It is in vulnerability. It's omnipotence. It's omniscience. The idea that you know everything and shall not be harmed is like all of that wrapped into one. You can look around the world and see leaders who embody that even now.

And it means that there's a bunch of people who think that. That they have no place at the leadership table because they're not like that. The quiet man thinks that he cannot believe that his entire life is laced with bravado and volume. But he can any woman. You know, you kind of have to look to New Zealand before people think that there's another woman who's a leader. But there are remarkable women out there who can do leadership their own way.

There are men who are empathic and warm, who think they can't be leaders because that's only for women. There are black and brown people who think they can't because they see nothing like that around them. You can find your own way, your own authentic way to be a leader. You can find your inner giant no matter what. It is effortful, and to me it requires three things.

The first is introspection, because that's where everything starts to be. You can't be a leader if you don't know anything about yourself. And it is amazing. I coach some quite senior people in big businesses, and our first conversation is often so revealing because it's that conversation where they realise that whilst they are technically brilliant and they know so much about their sector, once you wander into questions about who they are or what they stand for, what are the qualities that they have? What are the deficits they have?

One of the things that they respect and love. Their knowledge disappears. Their insights are shallow. Knowing yourself is really the first key to being a great leader, whatever your context.

Then there's the interpersonal. How do you connect with how do you communicate effectively with eloquence, with people who are both similar and dissimilar from you, from people who are both familiar and unfamiliar to you? There are skills that that we require, and many people never bother developing them. They develop a skill to work with to be able to communicate in a kind of transactional way with the people they work with and rely upon that; otherwise, they never imagined developing the kind of eloquence and authenticity that's required to inspire and motivate and galvanise. And then there's the organisational piece and people think that's obvious.

Right? As a leader you, you lead an organisation, but not always. Leaders exist at all different levels. There's a law firm in London and when I walk in as a young man on the desk, on the front desk in security, and he knows everybody and everything that's going on. And I'm often amazed that nobody seems to recognise that this man is a leader in this organisation. He sets the tone for this organisation from the moment you walk into it. So your ability to navigate organisations, to use diplomacy, to pick your moments, to cause a conflict and to bite your tongue at others for the long game. This is what leadership is about and that's what I'm hoping that I can help people embrace.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I always ask my subjects for a book they recommend. They have all great - classics from organizational psychologist Adam Grant, resource books that school us up on central banks or digital currencies, history books and memoirs that can remind us how others navigated uncertainty before us. But Andrea Fuder’s recommendation stood out. The Chief Procurement Officer of the Volvo Group chose a children’s book, Pippi Longstocking, and it’s one that reminds us that there are leadership lessons everywhere.

Andrea Fuder, Volvo Group: Linda, now, now this is the moment where you want me to be super smart or you --

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: You've already been super smart.

Andrea Fuder, Volvo Group: I don't know. Now I should bring up the fantastic title --

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Proust!

Andrea Fuder, Volvo Group: Top notch books.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Right?

Andrea Fuder, Volvo Group: I would actually take a completely different approach. You know, one one book I would still recommend because I love it since years is Pippi Longstocking.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I love it.

Andrea Fuder, Volvo Group: You know what?

Andrea Fuder, Volvo Group: Because Pippi is still today a role model for many things because she is strong, she does not care about gender-specific roles. And she demands even from the grown-ups that she's treated on a level and also her leadership skills. You know, she was a great leader. She motivated people to follow her by convincing them. For me, she is still today a role model of a true leader.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I’m going to end this episode where we started with Jane Goodall. I asked her for her message to listeners and it's one that I think is just as valid today, one that I'll leave with as you go about your day and make your choices, big and small, to truly make an impact.

Jane Goodall, Jane Goodall Institute: Well, I have the airwaves. I would love to say that it's really important that everybody understands that they, as an individual matter, that they make a difference. They make an impact on the planet every single day and unless you're living in abject poverty, you can make conscious choices, ethical choices in how you live each day.

And even the very poor, they can make some choices too. Like, am I going to be kind or cruel to an injured animal that I find. Am I going to smile and reach out to a sick person in my community so we can all make some decisions to lead a more ethical life, a more environmentally sustainable life. I want everybody to know that they matter.

And they may think I'm just one person. What I do can't make a difference. Now, if it was just one person, it wouldn't, but the cumulative effect of millions, hopefully billions of people making conscious, ethical choices will move us towards a better world.

And the last thing I would say is that one thing which is amazing, every single major religion, all of them, have the same golden rule and that is do to others as you would have them do to you.

If everybody followed that golden rule and we applied it to how you think about an act towards animals and nature. And if we could even bring it to government levels, nation national levels, just think, look, the world would be.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And that was our 101st episode.

Thanks so much to the leaders in this episode and the leaders who have talked to me throughout Meet the Leader’s run so far. And fear not. We’ll have more great interviews to come in the weeks and months ahead.

A transcript of this episode - and those from my colleague's episodes of Radio Davos – is available at wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was presented and produced by me with Juan Toran as studio engineer for episodes recorded in Davos, Taz Kelleher as editor and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina with 101 episodes under her belt -- have a great day.