Meet the Leader at 200: Top tips, pivots and lessons learned so far

Fidelma Russo, HPE: I ran into the same challenges a few years later. And then the penny dropped. And then I said, “Okay, if I have to progress, I'd better do something about these couple of things.”

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 200th – come celebrate with me and enjoy our best moments, tips and lessons learned, all from the world’s top minds and changemakers.

Subscribe to Meet The Leader on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your favourite 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.

Daphne Koller, Insitro: Oftentimes our areas for development are our strengths taken into extremes.

Diane Von Furstenburg, DVF: All of you can do that, because all of you have a magic wand. the more you use the magic wand, the more powerful your magic wand is.

Adam Grant, Wharton organizational psychologist: How are people not just being nice or indiscriminately generous, but actually adding value in ways that advance the mission? Measure that behaviour and those are the people that you want to promote.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: In 2020, in the depths of the pandemic, when we were all locked down and when there was no Davos, I was the lucky girl tapped to launch the World Economic Forum’s flagship leadership podcast. This was one way, among many, that we were putting a face on problem solving, to show during that uncertain time, or any other, the human side of driving change, the work being done on everyone’s behalf. To remind us that even the biggest names hit big walls, but that it can all lead to building something bigger than any one person, or any one organization.

Since then, I’ve sat Zoom-to-Zoom with Al Gore and Jane Goodall. I have sat face-to-face with CEOs, startup founders, activists, ballerinas, astronauts, actors, scientists, AI pioneers and more – all of them working to solve the biggest challenges of our time.

Today’s episode, I’m proud to say, is our 200th. It will selfishly feature my favourite interviews – but they are moments I think you’ll enjoy, and lessons I hope will stick with you long after this episode is over.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: We will start with surprises – and how unexpected moments changed some of the top leaders of our day. And we kick off with Jane Goodall. She was the legendary activist, primatologist and founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, who passed away last October. I had a chance to chat with her in 2021 though, as she Zoomed in remote from her house in England. She talked to me about her trademark topic – hope. Here’s a moment that even surprised Jane Goodall, 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 ask and he started on at me. “Oh, you're just like my sister. I can't stand the likes of you. All this… all the suffering people. All you care about is animals. She goes to the animal shelter…”

So I sat forward. And I told him stories about the chimps, how we were helping people to rise out of poverty, how 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 he’d be 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. And 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 been, 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 with 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 he has trained thousands of grassroots activists for climate change and is product of three decades of lessons learned in public service and climate action, all working to give other people the headstart he never got – on how to connect and how to be informed.

Here’s Al Gore talking to me about a moment he realized he needed to change how he connected with people – a moment he never forgot.

Al Gore, Climate Reality Project: I’ll give you one moment early in my career that helped to change my approach to leadership. 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-off 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, I would say. 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 stand-off 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 – we have to be willing to make bold moves.

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 1,000 words. Well, I found that a slideshow is worth a 1,000 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 naivety, I thought that was a silly idea. I couldn't see how it would work, but they have more talent than I counted on. 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 policy-makers 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: AI is one of the biggest disruptions of our time and one of the big perks of Meet the Leader is learning how the biggest minds of our day suggest we navigate that. Minds like Swami Sivasubramanian.Today he drives agentic AI at AWS [Amazon Web Services], but his first experience using a computer was in high school in India, where there was just one computer for the entire school.

He talked to me about the transformative change possible when we expose people to new technologies and innovations, and the simple question that helped AWS get future ready. It’s a question that can help you, too.

Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS: If I were a manager, one of the key things I would think about is: how would my teams' work will be transformed with AI and generative AI, broadly? That is a mandatory question that they should answer when they are planning their annual cycle, or so forth.

This is very similar to how Amazon has been doing it for the past 10 years. In Amazon we have an annual planning cycle where we write a document and let's say, say: "Here is what my organization will be working on for the next 12 months to deliver remarkable customer experience."

And there is always one mandatory question: How do you plan to use machine learning in your business to improve the customer experience? And that question basically led to a lot of positive conversations.

Many early on, in the first year or so, they actually didn't know what it would do, but it triggered the conversation to engage with the right folks to say and get feedback, saying, ‘Okay, here are the potential areas you should explore.”

The next time then that led to better refined answers, and then it led to a culture of making machine learning an integral part of everything we do. So that is one of the mandatory things I typically recommend, so that people don't view it as machine learning, as something only a subset of their workforce needs to worry about, as well.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Navigating AI means leaders and teams will need to double down on skills workplaces have never been great at – things like collaboration and creativity. Bestselling author and Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant chatted with me last year about just this - and about about an insight from his book Hidden Potential, one that reminds us to be freaks of nurture, not nature, and to practice the soft skills we want to get good at, especially the soft skills that will be critical in an AI era. His tip for workplaces gives room for individuals to challenge themselves and organizations to build each other up. Here’s Adam:

Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and Wharton professor: I do a lot of work with BetterUp, and one of their findings is that a popular use case for generative AI tools is to role play difficult conversations and test out, “Okay, I'm going to give you some tough feedback.” or “I'm going to maybe raise a conflict that I've been avoiding with you. Let me, let me try out a few different ways of teeing up that issue and then see how…” – obviously it's not a direct human response, but I am getting predictive text back from a large store of human communication around how somebody might respond.

And then that helps me think through, “Do I want to open that conversation differently? And then what reactions do I need to be ready for?” And I think it's a travesty that in almost every field of excellence, people spend most of their time practicing and very little performing. Think about actors doing rehearsals, musicians doing rehearsals, athletes practicing far more than they compete.

In leadership and management, and frankly, in most jobs, we do the opposite. We perform and we don't practice. And I don't know that AI is the answer for everyone, but I think if you have a colleague that's willing to role play and test out some of these skills, the more you use them, the more opportunities you have to figure out what are you good at and where do you need to still work on development?

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: You said that one thing that the workplaces are going to need to do is sort of measure and understand where they are, so they know how they can develop these soft skills further. What does that look like? How else can they do this?

Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and Wharton professor: How do organizations measure soft skills? I like the Corning example a lot. They built the Gorilla Glass for the iPhone and the iPad, and they needed, in upstate New York, to attract brilliant engineers who could easily work in Silicon Valley.

And one of the things they did was they created a Corning Fellows programme, where if you're named a fellow, you get a job for life and a lab for life. That's cooler than university tenure. Who knew you can get that kind of job security in the corporate world? What does it take to become a Corning fellow? One of their criteria said you have to be a lead author on a patent that's worth at least $100 million. And most companies would stop there. If you can drive that kind of innovation, we want to lock you up for life and throw away the key.

Corning said, “No. We are worried that highly competent but selfish takers are going to pollute the culture if we give them permanent job security and they're going to stop contributing. And so we want to know, are you making other people better?”

And one of the ways they measured that was, “Are you a supporting author on other people's patents?” I think this was ingenious, because in their world it often takes eight or 10 years to get a patent. And so there are not a lot of people who are like, “Hey, Linda, I'm going to pretend to help you for the next nine years in hopes you will reward my fake generosity, by making me author 32 on your patent application.”

It's the people who, day in and day out, are sharing their knowledge, helping to solve problems, connecting dots across silos, who ultimately end up earning those later patent authorships. And Corning said, “Importantly, you've got to do both. You have to show you can drive your own success. You also have to show you can make other people successful.”

So, the question I would ask to leaders is: What is your equivalent of later patent authorship? How are people not just being nice or indiscriminately generous, but actually adding value in ways that advance the mission? Measure that behaviour and those are the people that you want to promote.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: In a modern era we are used to prompting AI and search engines but less familiar with prompting ourselves for answers. Suleika Jaouad had thoughts about this. She is the best-selling author of The Book of Alchemy, that’s a book with essays and journal prompts from some of our era’s top creative minds, all designed to help us reflect and make time for meaning over momentum. Here’s why that sort of reflection is key in an AI era.

Suleika Jaouad, Author: We live in a culture that is obsessed with, as the journalist David Brooks put it, our resume virtues, the things that make us attractive in the common marketplace. We're less focused on the eulogy virtues, on cultivating the traits that we’re often remembered for long after we're gone. Were you brave? Were you humble? Were you kind?

I think it's so easy in this modern day to tumble through your life, to be focused on doing, as opposed to being, without actually taking a moment to reflect on what it is that you're thinking, what it is that you are feeling and experiencing. And so to me, even one minute, even a sentence, is valuable. It's, to paraphrase the poet TS Eliot, a way of finding a still point in the spinning world.

And, what I've found that may seem counterintuitive, is that when I shift away from being productive, when I begin my day with a to-feel list rather than a to-do list, which is one of the prompts from The Book of Alchemy that I return to every day, it changes my mindset as I approach the rest of my day. It sets the tone for everything.

And we are giving prompts all the time, often in the context of AI. But to prompt the self is to take a moment to slow things just enough that you can ask yourself, “What actually matters to me today? Are my priorities really my priorities? What would make this day meaningful as opposed to productive? How much of my time is serving the things I actually want versus the things I should be doing?”

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: All the best leaders find ways to bring other people along. Designer Diane von Fürstenberg shared how she does this when she spoke at our 2024 Annual Meeting. It’s a great chat, you should check it out – and covers the creation of that famous wrap dress and how she built one of the world’s most recognizable brands. But it also digs into a simple way she opens doors for others. Something you can put into practice tomorrow. Here’s Diane...

Diane von Fürstenberg, fashion designer: And I advise you to do this. These are the steps: Every morning, you introduce one person to a person they would have never had the opportunity to meet. All of you can do that, because all of you have a magic wand.

And to use your magic wand, first of all, is incredibly fulfilling. But the more you use the magic wand, the more powerful your magic wand is, and even though you don't use a magic wand on yourself, by using it on others, it comes back to you as a boomerang.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Misty Copeland understands the value this can have. She was a very shy child and talked to me about an early ballet teacher that helped her believe she should take the stage. Here’s Misty reminding us to give someone a boost when we get off this podcast.

Misty Copeland, ballet dancer: When I was introduced to ballet, I was an extremely introverted and shy young girl. I think that it was also a part of who I am, my personality, but it was also my experiences as a young person. You know, having so much instability… constantly moving… I think I had four stepfathers… it was just a lot of instability and I shut down, and I didn’t want to talk and I didn’t want to be seen.

And, when I was given the opportunity to be in a ballet class, it was terrifying initially. I think also because I wasn’t in a traditional setting. I was on a basketball court where I took my first ballet class, I’m not in your traditional tights and a leotard… I was in gym clothes and socks and I just felt out of place. And it didn’t allow me to feel like it was something I wanted to throw myself into and be vulnerable. I think that’s why I was shying away from it.

But it was a teacher who invested in me, who saw potential in me, gave me opportunity, and gave me access, and kept saying, “You know, come back. I see potential in you.” This is something bigger than you can ever imagine.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: How important is it for leaders to help people see a potential that maybe they never even thought about. How important is that?

Misty Copeland, ballet dancer: For leaders to be able to show people that they have potential beyond what they can imagine I think is so vital. Especially someone who’s not been given support and not kind of prepared for this trajectory, it’s hard for them to see what’s possible.

And, my first ballet teacher, Cynthia Bradley, was really incredible at that. She didn’t give up on me. She saw and she said things to me and at the moment, I was like, “This lady is out of her mind.” You know, she said I was going to be dining with presidents and kings and queens and dancing on the world stages.

And I just thought, “You know, I’m living in a motel at this moment with my single mom and five siblings. Like, there’s no way this is possible.” But, you know, it was really about preparing me to become an amazing human being, who is going to thrive in society and different communities. And it was through ballet that I could get to that place.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Jagan Chapagain is the head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the IFRC. But he got started as a teenaged volunteer for the organization in Nepal. The Red Cross has more thanb 17 million volunteers all around the world, all helping people on their darkest days. He shared with a mindset that he uses to help motivate teams and volunteers. It’s one anyone can put into practice: Here’s Jaganl from our chat in 2024.

Jagan Chapagain, IFRC: You know, for me, I repeated many, many times, you know, the one of... the critical quality of the leaders – and it's probably true for everybody – but if you want to be a leader, is ability to listen. I think it's extremely, extremely important, in any context. Ability to listen and learn. Listening without learning is not useful. And, I think, when the leader have that ability to listen and learn, that's when you engage with the purpose of the people who you want to be associated with, your organizations and the value and objectives of your organizations.

And I'm not claiming that in the Red Cross, we are perfect. I think we do have issues. You know, when you are working with people, there will be issues. But that listening and learning, and defining a clear purpose on why we are doing something as an organization, or any component of the organization,I think that's what engages people.

In COVID-19, you know, when lockdown was happening and, you know, people were asked to stay at home, we had on average, one million volunteers every day going out to help others. One million volunteers. And the first volunteer who died because of COVID-19 was 18 of February 2020. 18th of February. Before it was declared a pandemic. I'm very sorry that that's what happened. And he was a young man from Italy.

But that belief in the purpose, and that belief that I can make a difference in somebody else's life, motivates these volunteers. And as a leader, and for me personally, as I started myself as a volunteer, it becomes critically, critically important. Listen, learn, help define a purpose together, and demonstrate that you are delivering on that purpose.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Brad Smith is 30-year Microsoft veteran and in his role as Microsoft's Vice Chair and President he leads a team of experts in business, legal and corporate affairs – all on the crossroads of tech and society. He talked to me about understanding this disruptive time in tech, but also the importance of having a personal sounding board – about nurturing someone you can talk with and how this has helped him navigate big shifts.

Brad Smith, Microsoft: You know, I think that somebody once said to me who had an important position that every success that he was part of, he was part of with other people. And every big mistake he made, he made by himself. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that.

If there's a habit that is just indispensable to me, it's, frankly, the ability to always have somebody I really trust to talk things through, as a day progresses, or a week, or a project, or a month. Yeah, I think sometimes we don't really know what we think until we verbalize or write down our thoughts.

And we don't have time to write everything down, but the ability to talk things through, the ability to get a reaction. Sometimes it's reaction that validates: “okay, that makes sense”. Sometimes it's a reaction, “No, that's really a bad idea.” Sometimes it's a reaction that says, “That's a good idea, but there's a better way to pursue it, or just change the way you present and talk about it.”

And that is a habit for me. I couldn't get by without it, you know, both at work and at home. And it doesn't mean a lot of people, although you want to consult with a lot of people over the course of any day or week. But I always have one or two on whom I rely tremendously.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Our best leaders challenge us to think out of the box. I was lucky to chat with Water.org’s Co-founders Matt Damon and Gary White all about their unique approach to micro-loans and investments, and how that has bridged the water gap for 85 million people. Of course, microfinance wasn’t either of their first approaches – and they shared the importance of an experimentation mindset to finding new solutions. Here's Matt Damon:

Matt Damon, Water.org: Yeah, for me, Gary came exactly as advertised as the expert in this space and I think there were a number of things. I mean, I did ask him every question I could think of and he had an answer for everything. He'd already been doing this for a couple decades. He had a huge wealth of experience and he talked really openly about failures.

He actually led with those, because… he explained because of the lesson that would come out of each one, “Well, I did this, and this didn't work, and here's why.” And then he started to talk about market-based solutions. And now that is, that's a thought leap for somebody coming into this and going, “Well, wait a minute, we're talking about the poorest people in the world. You want them, you want to give them a loan?”

Very quickly, he just explained. People in these communities are paying already. This loan is going to be the loan that they pay off is going to be less than they're actually already paying for water. And within two years, once the loan is complete, they're connected to the system and they're completely free and clear of this daily expense that's burdening them right now. And so it was counterintuitive until he told me that and then it made total sense.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I love this idea of leading with failure when it comes to considering innovation. Why is that so important?

Gary White, Water.org: Well, because if you're not failing sometimes, you're not experimenting. You're not probing. So yeah, we could have kept with direct impact in drilling wells. And we wouldn't have failed probably very often at all, because that becomes kind of like making widgets. You just stamp one more out and you kind of go on.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Some of our most interesting leaders have unexpected backgrounds -- people like Nela Richardson. She’s the Chief Economist at ADP, but in college she was a triple major: economics, math and philosophy. She explained, at the turn of 2025, how philosophy helps her better get to the heart of economic change and understand its human side. Here’s Nela...

Nela Richardson, ADP: I was interested in how an individual thinks about the world and so that's why I double down. And it's funny because I use philosophy quite a bit. I did a lot of math in undergrad and graduate school, in my PhD training, I'm going to say that I use philosophy a lot more than I do math right now.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: How so?

Nela Richardson, ADP: Because when you're looking at change, it helps to step back and think about the grand scheme, the context, how people learn, how people interact, what the result is. The pandemic was a huge opportunity to think about what it meant in terms of where the world was going and evolving.

When I saw so many jobs lost in the United States during the pandemic, I thought to myself, “Wow, that's a lot of jobs, that's 20 million jobs lost in a period of a few weeks. And as much as we're going to talk about the next three or four years about those lost jobs, it's going to get interesting when change becomes a choice, because then we're not all mandated. Then we can make different decisions. Those decisions are going to be unique to the people making them and that's when things are getting interesting.” And Linda, I tell you, I think we're there now.

We have access, as the global workforce, as corporate society, to so much information, so much data, so much technology. Each business is going to make a slightly different choice and collectively those choices are going to form the future path of the economy, and the future path of the human experience. I think it takes a philosopher to really understand how profound the moment we are in right now is.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: How would your work be different if you'd never studied philosophy?

Nela Richardson, ADP: I'd be giving you predictions on inflation and the labour market right now. I mean, I think it changes the questions you ask. It changes the value of the work. It's funny because labour in grad school, in economics, and labour in the real world is very, very different. In the real world, when people talk about the labour market, they talk about the jobs report, how many jobs were created, what wages were like, what that means for a central bank.

In graduate school, when you talk about a labour market, when you talk about labour economics, you're focused most times on the individual and how the individual is responding to a lot of different incentives. A labour economist, an academic one, is focused on the well-being of the individual.

So instead of the macroeconomy, and the facts and the stats around the labour market, you're focused on how to help people attain their best state of well-being. I think that's a philosophical – I mean, economics is a philosophical degree so in some sense I'm practising philosophy all the time – but that sense of how to move people to the best state of their well-being, I think is embedded in economics, is embedded in philosophy.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Creative thinking also helped Arctic Base Camp connect with people about the most important issue of our time – climate change. Meet the Leader talked with founder Gail Whiteman and her board member, activist and actor Rainn Wilson about how they strategically "speak science to power", to grab the right kind of attention. That can include inviting activists camping out in tents in the snow at Davos, or a special initiative using ice cream to rally people to help mitigate a warming world. I’ll let them explain more.

Gail Whiteman, Arctic Basecamp: But if we look at the favourite flavours, like what's your favourite?

Rainn Wilson, Arctic Basecamp: Pistachio?

Gail Whiteman, Arctic Basecamp: Pistachio. Huge risk. Huge risk. Yeah. Like, get it while you can.

Rainn Wilson, Arctic Basecamp: There's climate risk endangering the pistachio, the mighty pistachio?

Gail Whiteman, Arctic Basecamp: Yeah. So actually as climate changes, and is changing, it's putting a lot of risk on pistachio and how it grows, because of drought conditions, not getting the rain at the right time, and pistachio needs rain at a certain amount of time. Also, extreme weather affects pistachio. Pests and bugs and fungi are changing because of the climate. And it's not just pistachio, it's chocolate. I'm a vanilla girl, that is being affected. It's mango, it's strawberry and coffee, which is more than just ice cream. Let me tell you.

Rainn Wilson, Arctic Basecamp: It was called Save the Flavours and what we did is at Union Square in New York, we had an ice cream truck and we handed out free ice cream of endangered flavours and had conversations with all kinds of people, but kids as well, about how their favourite flavours are in peril due to climate.

So, how can we … Gail mentioned, like, don't call it climate communication. It's really like life communication or Earth communication, you know, to get people kind of where they live and thinking in new ways, not just saying like CO2, you know, and...

Gail Whiteman, Arctic Basecamp: … parts per million.

Rainn Wilson, Arctic Basecamp: Yeah.

Gail Whiteman, Arctic Basecamp: And one of the beauties is raising awareness is one thing, but we have to have calls to action. We're in a really critical time, so it's all hands on deck. So, with the endangered flavours, the Save the Flavours campaign, what we want people to do is actually do social media to pressure the manufacturers and the grocery stores to label “these are endangered flavours”, so people know. This is not about politics actually, it's about our life and the things we love and we hold dear.

Rainn Wilson, Arctic Basecamp: I truly believe that there is a young, movable middle in the United States that, with the right kind of climate communication, can be reached and can be swayed, maybe not with hard data, but in some imaginative ways.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: No Meet The Leader is complete without advice, which our top leaders have generously shared. Like Daphne Koller. She’s an AI pioneer whose career has taken her from academia to founding the drug discovery platform Insitro. You can take a listen to our episode, where she told me about the shift that she made moving to entrepreneurship from the hard sciences.

But she also shared with me a critical insight that she learned and how your strengths can actually be your weaknesses – especially when you're in a position of authority. Here's Daphne...

Daphne Koller, insitro: I would highlight one that I found useful, both in understanding myself and in understanding others – for example, in coaching situations or even in interaction with anyone – which is that oftentimes our areas for development are our strengths taken into extremes.

So, oftentimes when you have something that you're really good at, you end up overusing it and that ends up being a minus. And that's certainly something that I found for myself in cases.

For example, I've been considered as very good at ideating and, you know, coming up with new ideas. When you overuse that and you're not careful in how you use that, especially if you're in a position of authority, every new idea somehow miraculously spawns a project that an entire team is working on – even if that was just really not your intent. Your intent was just to say, "Oh, this is a really interesting thing." And so being very conscientious of what your strengths are and not overusing them.

And then also the same is true for others. You sometimes see people like, “Why are they doing that?” That's just such a horrible thing. And you realize that this is just like their strength, but taken to extremes. It makes you more empathetic and more able to give them feedback that will actually be received in the right way.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Effective leaders adapt. That's something that Fidelma Russo, the CTO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, knows first-hand. She runs a team that has worked on everything from hybrid cloud technologies to developing technologies of the future. You can listen to our episode on how she taps her team's creativity. But she also shared with me an insight that she got early in her career. Here's Fidelma on why that's helpful – and what it unlocked for her.

Fidelma Russo, CTO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise: You know, I got a piece of advice once. I didn't appreciate it at the time, and I am immensely thankful for it. It is the following, which is: you always bring yourself with you.

As I said at the time, I didn't appreciate it. And so sometimes when you are having challenges and difficulties, you really have to look in the mirror and think about, is it you? Is it how you react? And really own that, yourself. What it really does, is it kind of clarifies things for you. And I've always appreciated that piece of advice, which I got many, many years ago.

I got it when I resigned from my first job. Actually, I got it from a woman. I had the luxury, I worked for a woman VP, which was incredibly rare, and when I gave her the reasons I was resigning, she told me this, and I was highly indignant. And I ran into the same challenges a few years later. And then the penny dropped. And then I said, “Okay, if I have to progress, I'd better do something about these couple of things.” That was kind of how it has informed me.

And, you know, you you kind of have these 360-degree feedbacks, you have these coaches and, you know, they all constantly tell you the same things, because you are who you are. And so for me, you know, I know those are my little Achilles heels. And, you know, I work on them every day and try to overcome them. And I know what triggers me. And so it is the most precious piece of advice I've ever gotten. And I think it applies to everybody. And so that’s how it’s helped me.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Ulrika Biesèrt is the HR Chief for Ingka Group, the parent company for global retailer IKEA. Her career spans three decades at IKEA and roles in every part of the company, including logistics, product development and retail. She shared advice from her mother, and it’s a reminder that can help anyone, at any stage of their careers.

Ulrika Biesèrt, Inkga Group / IKEA: I'm always talking about my mother. Unfortunately, she is not with us anymore, but she was a very strong woman and very vocal. And she said to all her four children that you need to be financially independent. And my advice to you is that you educate yourself. You never know what is happening in life, but knowledge, people can't take away from you and education will most likely help you to have a job. So that was one.

And the other one where I think she was probably ahead of her time, specifically to her three daughters. She said, take the space. If you don't take the space, someone else will take it and don't allow that. And it actually helped me, to be honest, in, you know, in management meetings, in the beginning of my career, I always have been the only female, and I always had that in my head, take your space and don't excuse yourself for taking some space.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Now for the last section, how leaders can meet the moment. Some of my favourite interviews unlock the surprising ways experts make sense of the moment we’re in – while the context is always changing, those strategies can help us look beyond the obvious.

Habitat for Humanity’s CEO Jonathan Reckford talked with me in 2024, in plain language, about the state of global housing. Listen to that and have a sense for what the problem is, and what we need to do to solve it. But he also shared with me the simple virtues that inspired his book Our Better Angels. Knowing those virtues can right side leaders during a chaotic time.

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity: I wanted to focus on virtues because I think that the headline to me and I won't pick all of them, but it is, you know, if you think about community and kindness, which were two of the ones that we focused on, along with joy, along with generosity, which is so tied to gratitude.

But my thesis, in many ways is, if you stay at home and sit on screens, you tend to focus on how others are different. And the algorithms then reinforce that. When you're out in the community serving other people, you're actually focused on what you have in common. And so in many ways, I think the most healing thing in our cultures around the world is for people to go out, and do something for someone else. You know, my hope is when people read the book, the reaction will be, I need to go do something. It's really a storybook, not a strategy book, because it's stories of people doing extraordinary things and individuals in communities transforming their communities, by acts of of love and service.

And so it's an optimistic book. And I think my hope is, you know, our public discourse has gotten so coarse and dark, and we know that politically you get rewarded from an engagement. The advertisers sell more ads by scaring people and getting them upset. And, I think, the antidote in many ways to that is when people serve, they build community, build connection.

And so even though it's not our primary mission, over and over again, I get volunteers thanking me when they come out and volunteer with Habitat because when they're out on the build site, working together with other people, you experience community the way it is supposed to feel, but too rarely does. And I think we actually have an epidemic of loneliness and separation. And I think part of the answer to that is for people to find ways to reconnect and go out and serve others.

People are very quick to claim rights and slower to claim their obligations or responsibilities. And the two come together and I think as we think about that, it's actually more joyful. You know, we actually have a mental health crisis. We have so many people who are unhappy. And part of when you go out and, you know, do for others, it's actually, in a way, a selfish act. We feel better about the world. We see the world differently. It creates a little bit of hope.

And so if I had to start, I'd probably start with gratitude and kindness, because my experience is when you're feeling grateful and you're treating people kindly, it's very hard to then go do bad things. It tends to positively infect the way we do the other parts of our lives.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: In 2021, 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. Their chat highlighted how anyone can lead – and the unsung qualities that are so important to truly making change possible. It’s a chat that is particularly relevant today.

John Amaechi, APS Intelligence: We've all grown up with the idea of the strongman leader and it is a strongman 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 invulnerability. 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 be a leader. His entire life isn’t 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 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? What are 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.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: And to take us home, we have David Miliband. We chatted with the Head of the International Rescue Committee last December, all about the simultaneous threats that leaders face – from climate havoc to geopolitical instability and, as he puts it, a more chaotic form of globalization.

He has tracked a trend – the “age of impunity” – for several years and he talked to me what’s needed for leaders to stay accountable to what matters.

David Miliband, IRC: I think you bring order through consistency. I think you bring order through alliances. I see alliances as sort of buoys that can help stabilize the ship when the anchor's pulled up. I think one also has to recognize that we have to look for orders plural, not just order, singular. I think there's gonna be multiple.

At Columbia University, Professor Adam Tooze, talks about ordering, not just order. And I think that's a clever point. It's not going to be an age of pure order, but the danger is chaos and that hurts people. And I think we have to be looking for ordering through consistency, through alliances, through keeping the superordinate goals in mind, because it's easy to be tactical, it's hard to be strategic – and the superordinate goal is what makes you be strategic.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: If we are able to put in order or orders, if we're able to have a little bit more consistency, what might be different? What might be different, maybe, in 2030?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, there are some known knowns and then some known unknowns. We know that there is a digital revolution of extraordinary reach and meaning that is transforming lives.

We know that the rise of the rest is real. America has sustained its share of global GDP in the last 30 years, but Europe, Canada, Japan have lost share of global GDP. So there's a reordering of economic power around the world that I think is translating into shifts in political power.

What we don't know is whether coalitions of the willing will be stronger than those who want to flout the rules. And I think that's really important as we look forward.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And if we don't get this order in place, what will happen?

David Miliband, IRC: Well, I think that one of the things that I would say, especially speaking to the World Economic Forum, is that recession in democratic rights, recession in human rights, ends up as recession in property rights. The slide doesn't stop at the private sector. And, I think that it's easy for people to scorn public/private partnership, I think it's really important.

And it's really important, because the rules-based order applies internally and externally. The whole point of the rules-based order that was built after 1945 was to safeguard liberal democratic, that means pluralist democracy, but also safeguards of property rights. The international order was designed to buttress the democratic order at home. And I think that's what's under enormous strain at the moment.

And I think that what's at stake, therefore, is the ability of people to make their own choices, because in the end, the definition of impunity is that someone else makes the choice for you.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: That was our 200th episode. Thanks so much to every leader who has made time for our programme, at events, on Zoom calls, in offices, in hallways, sometimes. We appreciate it. And thanks so much to you, for listening.

If you know a leader that’s looking for advice or inspiration, make sure to send them this episode.

To find a transcript of this episode, as well as transcripts for my colleague’s podcast, Radio Davos, go to wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was produced and presented by me with Taz Kelleher as editor and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.