THEIR BREAKTHROUGH FORMULA

Volum

e 9 Issue 3

4 2

018

$ 1 4 . 9 5 U S • C A N

Fuel consumption (in l/100 km) combined 2.5; CO2 emissions combined 56 g/km; electricity consumption (combined in kWh/100 km) 15.9

Best in class?Only in class.

The new Panamera Sport Turismo.The Panamera provides its own benchmark. As a Sport Turismo it is now in a

class of its own. With powerful engines delivering up to 404 kW (550 hp). And

a design that sets standards of its own. Built for people who go their own way:

www.porsche.com/PanameraSportTurismo

The countdown to major global talent shortages has begun. As early as 2020, knowledge-intensive industries will struggle to find the 21st-century skills on which their future depends. By 2030, the challenge will be so big that not even artificial intelligence or automation will be capable of bridging the widening gap.

While some markets are building their skills pipelines, many are not.

What does this mean for your organization, market and sector?

The future of work is human. Find out more at kornferry.com/futureofwork

THE

IS TICKING

TALENTCLOCK

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Gary Burnison

Chief Executive Officer

Michael DistefanoChief Operating Officer, Asia Pacific

Jonathan DahlEditor-in-Chief

Russell PearlmanManaging Editor

Nancy Wong BryanCopy Editor

Amy RobertsCopy Editor

Creative Directors

Robert RossRoland K Madrid

Art & Production

Daniel BoteroMary Franz

Marketing & Circulation Manager

Stacy Levyn Rozen

Project Manager

Tiffany Sledzianowski

Digital Marketing Manager

Edward McLaurin

Marketing Coordinator

Naz Taghavi

Contributing Editors

Lexie Barker David Berreby

Simon Constable Martin Coyne

Patricia Crisafulli William J. Holstein

Karen Kane Doron Levin

Christopher O’Dea Glenn Rifkin

P.J. O’Rourke Shannon Sims Meghan Walsh Peter Zheutlin

Contributing Illustrator

Peter Horvath

Contributing Photographer

Randall Cordero

Women CEOs SpeakSee the latest updates, including podcasts and TV news coverage, from Korn Ferry’s landmark study, “Women CEOs Speak.” A summary of the coverage is at engage.kornferry.com/womenceosspeak.

Lose the Resume, Land the JobThis year’s job market is strong—but how to find the right opportunities? In his just-released book, “Lose the Resume, Land the Job,” Korn Ferry CEO Gary Burnison provides rare insights from his own (and the com-pany’s) years of hiring. See his weekly columns at kornferryinstitute.com.

Leadership News, Every WeekKorn Ferry’s experts reveal leadership lessons from the news each day, be it on the latest Brexit talks or a major merger, summarized in our “This Week in Lead-ership” email on Thursdays. Sign up at kornferryinstitute.com.

Korn Ferry Briefings The Voice of LeadershipClick

@KornFerryInstitute.com

4

Contents

Think About This:

Cover StoryWomen CEOs: Their Breakthrough Formula

In a landmark study, Korn Ferry researchers interviewed and assessed the top women chiefs. Is there a pattern to how they got there?

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The division president warned

her she would likely be fired if

she took the tough job in Atlanta.

“I went anyhow,” said the woman,

a future CEO.

5

A World with No Backup PlanDigital systems and

AI are taking over many functions before software

designers can make them fail-safe.

Is there time to fix this?

44

The Face of Leadership

Forget facial recognition.

A world-renowned

photographer uses only a

camera to dive into the psyche of

world leaders.52

New from Down Under:

American Toll Roads

Crumbling US infrastructure

hurts many firms. Could help come from Australia?

36

Downtime: Lessons in Taking It Easy

Starts on page 59

FeaturesVoices on...

Risk ManagementCorporate chiefs are getting back to taking some big risks—just as the

world may shift on them. 10

HiringThe surprising consequences of

treating job candidates badly are forcing smart firms to update an

outdated system. 12

LeadershipBig media outlets have been publish-ing more commentary on leadership.

Should the C-suite listen? 14

HistoryIndustrialist George Pullman built a

town to keep his workers happy. It ultimately enraged them. 16

Emotional Intelligence

In an age when technol-ogy moves at such hyper

speeds, adaptability is especially critical. 22

Starts on page 9

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The Global Economy

Why a seemingly small 3 percent pay raise can

cause major headaches for organizations. 18

On the BoardThe three most pressing issues for board directors. 20

6

A Moment in Time

Although it may seem that we are more divided than united

these days, there is a sincere desire among organizations to be more inclusive overall. Hope-ful and genuine, this desire is changing the conversation within organizations today.

Korn Ferry is committed to helping foster this change. We joined with The Rockefeller Founda-tion’s “100x25” campaign, which has a goal of advancing 100 women to the top role in Fortune 500 companies by 2025, to learn more about female leaders. Our joint report, “Women CEOs Speak,” produced some important takeaways for women and organizations. Here are some highlights:

n Women could be ready for the CEO role sooner. On average, women are about four years older than

men when they take their first CEO job. Organiza-tions can identify potential future CEOs early and get them in profit-and-loss and operating roles.

n Building expertise and credibility in STEM or finance/business early in their careers enables women to show results in measurable terms and get close to how the business makes money—two keys to getting more promotions and roles that move a person closer to the CEO role.

n Women are driven by achieving business results and making a positive impact. Challenge is motivating for women, but so is purpose and mis-sion. Organizations can frame roles in terms that energize women.

n Women’s leadership qualities—courage, risk-taking, resilience, managing ambiguity, and collaboration—prepare them to be leaders in a complex and uncertain future.

Among the women who participated in the Korn Ferry-Rockefeller Foundation study was former Western Union CEO Christina Gold, who today is a member of several boards, including Korn Ferry’s. Over dinner, Christina recounted to me her career path, which led to the top spot at Western Union, where she nearly doubled the revenue during her leadership tenure. Like many leaders in the Korn Ferry-Rockefeller Foundation study, Christina never thought about becoming a CEO early in her career. When she started out, there were few opportunities for women. Her first job out of college was counting coupons for the local grocery store—at a time when a man with a college degree could easily land a supervisory

From the CEOGary Burnison

Chief Executive Officer, Korn Ferry

7

that can open the door to the C-suite and the boardroom.

As our discus-sion turned to the headlines today

about sexual harassment and misconduct, Christina described how boards are asking tougher questions these days about whether incidents have occurred at any level of their organization. It’s more than knowing whether training and prevention programs exist; rather, boards want to know about their effec-tiveness. “This is a moment in time when things are changing ,” Christina said. “I don’t think it will ever be the same.”

Amen to that. Times, they are a-changin’—for the better.

position. Her break came when she was hired by Avon Products as an inventory clerk in Canada.

Christina went on to a series of firsts as a woman at Avon, from becoming its first female marketing planner to eventually becoming the first female presi-dent of its North America operations. But when she first went into mar-keting there, Christina told me, she was asked whether her husband would mind if she trav-eled. That question seems unfathomable today.

But Christina took it in stride: “I never thought of what I faced as being obstacles. My solution was to work really hard, do a great job and keep pushing. You have to deliver—there is no shortcut here.” Her advice for women who want to become leaders (com-pletely in line with the “Women CEOs Speak” report) is to pursue operating roles. As she put it, senior roles in human resources and legal are valuable, but do not provide the kind of experience running parts of a business and having profit-and-loss responsibility

State Street Global Advisors installed “Fearless Girl” on

International Women’s Day 2017 to spark a

conversation about the power of women

in leadership.

Senior roles in human resources and legal are valuable, but do not provide the kind of experience operating roles do

that help open doors to the C-suite.

Sculpture by Kristen Visbal

Korn Ferry Briefings The Voice of Leadership

A NEW BOOK BY GARY BURNISON

PROVEN ADVICE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR

& CEO OF KORN FERRY

LoseTheResume.com

ALMOST EVERYONE GETS IT WRONG. THIS IS HOW YOU CAN GET IT RIGHT.

NOW AVAILABLE

WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD

Voices on...

The Rise of Risk page 10

“Risk-taking is perhaps the most difficult decision

a leader will make.”

Risk Management page 10

Elizabeth SchaeferKorn Ferry senior client partner,

Industrials practice

Hiring page 12

Sarah LimKorn Ferry managing director,

leader of European Retail practice

Leadership page 14

Kevin CashmanKorn Ferry senior client partner

and leadership coach

Voices on…

Corporate chiefs are getting back to taking  some big risks—just as the world may shift on them.

The Rise of Risk

B y R u s s e l l Pe a r l m a n

t’s something that corporate chiefs may dread at times and embrace during others: risk. They know full well that most businesses and markets don’t

grow without taking bold moves. After all, where would Netflix be if it hadn’t poured bil-lions into the unorthodox step of making its own television shows and movies? Or Coach, if it hadn’t expanded well beyond its ubiquitous style of leather bags? 

But rarely has the decision to open corporate wallets ever been so hard. A revived global economy has many leaders feeling it’s the perfect time to be bold. But activists and stockholders are chomping at the feet of boards and CEOs, questioning higher costs. Is there any right move? “Risk-taking is perhaps the most difficult deci-sion a leader will make,” says Elizabeth Schaefer, senior client partner in Korn Ferry’s Industri-als practice. “It’s even more difficult in a good economy like this.”

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Risk Management

Voices on...

Increase in US firms’ capital spending in 2017.

At the moment, many companies seem to be in a dice-rolling mood. The headlines say it all, with multibillion-dollar mergers almost common, global hiring up, and stock markets breaking all sorts of records. Last year, capital spending at US firms rose 4 percent, after years of being flat (and the year before actu-ally falling), while the country keeps adding jobs. Clearly, it’s game on at one company after another.

But should leaders be so confident—and, more importantly, how best to make such a critical call?

Certainly, many analysts are nervous about a number of economic developments across the globe that they feel will bring down all these cheery results. They believe any savvy CEO needs a very clear strategy and process for determining risk—a playbook of sorts.

According to Christopher Metzler, CEO of the wellness consulting firm HFW, that playbook starts with a simple but often overlooked step: looking inward. He suggests CEOs make sure to ask their own charges and C-suite members for guidance, and invite dissent. Studies have shown, in fact, that hearing dissenting voices can provoke more thoughtful decision-making.

“I lay out my vision and let them rip it to shreds,” he says. “The result is stronger decisions in real time.” Even hearing the same opinion from people of different backgrounds helps. Simply adding social diversity to a group makes people believe

that differences of perspective might exist among them, and that belief makes people change their behavior, says Katherine Phillips, a professor at Columbia Business School.

Experts say leaders also shouldn’t let their own personal circumstances cloud their risk-taking decisions, because their natural preferences may not be what’s best for the organization. That may sound obvious, but there’s a library’s worth of research showing

that CEOs are, well, human. Older CEOs invest less in research and development than younger CEOs and tend to make acquisitions that diversify the company’s business, rather than buying direct competitors, says Matthew Serfling, a professor at the University of Tennessee who has studied how age affects CEO decision-making. “Risk-taking decreases as CEOs age,” he says. Other research shows how female leaders take fewer risks than male counterparts, and that CEOs who served in the military take fewer risks than those who didn’t.

Finally, before the leader makes a move, he or she has to ask whether the organiza-tion has the workforce to pull off the risk-taking endeavor. Indeed, experts say getting the talent right within the organiza-tion is about as important as the decision to take the risk in the first place. A lack of a talent strategy has scuttled calculated risks in good and bad economic times. “It’s not just about filling open positions—a CEO must step back and determine specific talent requirements that need to be filled in order to execute business strategy,” says RJ Heckman, a vice chairman of Korn Ferry.

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Korn Ferry Briefings The Voice of Leadership

The Takeaway

With the global economy changing more rapidly, corporate leaders need better strategies for deciding on bold moves.

12

The surprising consequences of treating candidates badly is forcing firms to update an outdated system.

Hiring, the Nice Way

ob applications are responded to within a day. Candidates to be interviewed receive helpful emails with directions and nearby coffees shops and landmarks.

The interviewer has snacks ready and knows the candidate’s history. A rejection may come, but is prompt and with a full explanation.

If this isn’t the kind of hiring process most people would recognize, it’s because companies across the globe are struggling with a deluge of applications while hoping to save on rehiring costs with careful scrutinizing of candidates. But it turns out that job applicants are not just getting angry with the system—they’re getting even.

According to a new Korn Ferry survey, three- quarters of job candidates around the world say they likely would stop buying products or services from a company where they had a bad interview experience. Worse, nearly half would urge friends

and family to stop being a customer as well, says Sarah Lim, a managing director at Korn Ferry who heads the firm’s European Retail practice.

Experts say the problem isn’t so much turn-ing down candidates, it’s the typical “ghosting” that has been endemic to the process. So the best firms are revamping the whole approach, with speedy replies, better talent matching and more thoughtful interviews. Johnson & Johnson created an online system that tells candidates how long it will take to move to the next phase and what that next stage entails. The pharmaceutical giant also is looking at artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality and other technologies to help create “an exceptional, more diverse workforce,” says Sjoerd Gehring, J&J’s vice president of talent acquisition and employee experience.

Changes like these may not eliminate the sting of being rejected for a job, but experts say they may keep candidates from becoming angry critics.

J

By Chana Schoenberger

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WHAT AGGRAVATES CANDIDATES THE MOST

WHAT SOME COMPANIES ARE DOING ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE

JOB HIRING: A BROKEN SYSTEM

NORTH AMERICA EUROPE LATIN AMERICA ASIA PACIFIC WORLDWIDE

...would likely turn down a job o�er if they were treated poorly during an interview.

75%82% 79% 79%

72%

...would likely urge their friends and family to stop being customers after having a bad interview experience.

34%48% 51%

45%47%

...said recruiters did not paint an accurate picture of the hiring company or the job role.

36% 30% 29% 31%25%

Not hearing back from the recruiter or hiring manager.

1.

Researching the candidate beforethe interview.

1. Providing detailed directions to the o�ce, including nearby landmarks and cafes.

2.

Acting professionally (turn o� phones and shut down computers).

3. Introducing candidates to the culture and potential bosses and colleagues.

4.

Sending constructive feedback quickly, even to candidates who didn’t get the job.

5. Encouraging candidates to contact the company even when there’s no specific job to apply for.

6.

People being rude during the interview.

2.

Not receiving enough information about the job.

3.

Getting conflicting information about the job or the company.

4.

...would not likely remain a customer with a company after having a bad interview experience.

56%

81% 86%75%76%

CANDIDATES WHO...

?

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Source: Korn Ferry survey, October 2017

Korn Ferry Briefings The Voice of Leadership

The Takeaway

Critiquing leaders is one thing; hands-on experience or training to lead is another.

How to Run a Company (According to the Media)

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A number of big-name media outlets have been publishing more commentary on leadership. Should the C-suite listen?

B y M e g h a n Wa l s h

t goes as far back as the ancient Greek philosophers, when Plato famously asked, “Who should rule?” (He contended leaders ought to be well-trained—and

insisted, naturally enough, they should be philos-ophers.) In more modern times, business-school professors then built an entire industry on devel-oping leaders for tomorrow. Now comes a new breed of experts on this: the media.

With the topic something of an irresistible buzzword (and, yes, this magazine likes it), media outlets in growing numbers have been appointing “leadership editors” and creating entire sections on leadership. Not surprisingly, skeptics are quickly questioning the trend, asking what these newly minted “experts” can tell society about how to and who should rule. 

Apparently, in the media’s view, there’s quite a bit to tell. Dive into one of the many “leadership” tabs appearing on mainstream news sites and you might come out with everything from “five easy tips to becoming your best self” to a detailed look into Howard Schultz’s delicate transition of power at Starbucks. Fast Company’s section on leadership offers career advice, while the Washington Post focuses on

management positions in its “On Leadership” column. Fred Allen, who writes on this topic for Forbes, describes that title’s coverage as a pyra-mid, with aspirational leadership content serv-ing as the foundation that builds to the C-suite. “It’s a term that’s been growing up,” Allen says. 

While no one seems to think journalists have deepened our understanding of how leaders are culti-vated, to their credit, they have made the study of it more accessible to more people—even cable networks have designated leadership reporters. And, when done well, the media provides a framework for understanding. “We’re looking for ways to connect the academic research to the world we see around us,” says Lillian Cunningham, host of the Washington Post’s Presidential podcast, which during the election famously took listeners, with journalist as translator, through every executive term since George Washington, in a search to understand each commander-in-chief’s legacy. 

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Leadership

Voices on...

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Still, both editors and reporters typically have little formal training on the topic—give or take a handful who have MBAs. The oversimplifi-cation of the medium doesn’t help much, either. (Spoiler alert: You can’t conquer the global economy in five easy steps.) Meanwhile, expectations change rapidly—sim-ply consider how the country went from electing Obama to Trump. “It’s all action and reaction,” Allen says. And what we expect from women leaders can sometimes be very different than men, points out Fast Company senior edi-tor Kathleen Davis. 

 To some degree, of course, leadership ten-dencies are something people are born with or come from the result of some disruption. There is no Abraham Lincoln without the Civil War, for

Google search results on “corporate leadership”

example, or even a Jack Welch with-out General Electric. “Many of our most fundamental leadership mod-els originate deep in our life story,” says Kevin Cashman, a Korn Ferry senior client partner and longtime leadership coach. 

But leadership skills can cer-tainly be sharpened, so a growing number of aspiring chiefs are

trying hands-on leadership training. Results can be mixed, but case studies have shown some promising results. Made aware early on of their strengths and weaknesses, and provided a roadmap for growth in leadership, a surprising number of alumni from these courses have wound up in senior ranks, or even became CEOs over time. That’s a high bar for any media organiza-tion’s leadership section to beat.

Korn Ferry Briefings The Voice of Leadership

16

Industrialist George Pullman built an entire town to keep his workers happy. It ultimately enraged them.

Employee Engagement: The 19th-Century Edition

B y L au r e n C o v e l lo

t sounds like a worker’s paradise. Your employer builds a stunning headquarters and surrounds it with a grocery store, dry cleaner, hair salon and parks. You can even

live right next door, in company-built apartments. Facebook is doing all that and more, building a new headquarters and what it calls a “village” in Menlo Park, California, in an attempt to be a good neighbor and keep its workforce enthusiastic and engaged. Other Silicon Valley firms are consider-ing following suit.

But the company town concept has been tried before, and history shows that the roles of landlord

and employer don’t always mesh. The most promi-nent example: Pullman, Illinois, a model town built by George Pullman, the visionary industrial-ist whose luxury sleeper cars and first-class porter service revolutionized long-distance travel. Built in the early 1880s a few miles south of Chicago, the town of Pullman was designed with similarly grand intentions. George Pullman’s hope was to create an aspirational environment for workers and their families, in part to avoid what he report-edly described as the “loss of time and money consequent upon intemperance, labor strikes and dissatisfaction, which generally result from pov-erty and uncongenial home surroundings.”

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Pullman, Illinois, circa 1890

History

Voices on...

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The town of Pullman was nothing like the cramped, squalid company towns that existed at the time. It had well-manicured gardens, multiple churches, a hotel, a theater, a bank, a restaurant and a post office. The homes were well ventilated and had indoor plumbing, and trash was removed regularly. In decidedly modern fashion, the streets were named after contemporary inventors, includ-ing Samuel Morse and John Ericsson. Everything in the town was owned by the company.

At its peak, the town housed more than 14,000 people, all within walking distance to the factory. But instead of creating engaged employees, the town ulti-mately enraged employees. Residents resented that they couldn’t buy the homes they lived in and felt they were under constant watch by their employer.

In 1893 a devastating recession swept the nation. Pullman laid off workers and slashed wages of rank-and-file employees, but he refused to lower prices in town. Rents alone were 25 per-cent higher in Pullman than in surrounding areas.

“I think Pullman had a conscience, but at the end of the day, when the chance came to realize more profit, he took it,” says Raymond Hogler, management professor at Colorado State Univer-sity and author of “Employment Relations in the United States: Law, Policy and Practice.”

Pullman listened to grievances listed by a workers’ committee. He promised that he wouldn’t

punish anyone for complain-ing, but that he wouldn’t raise wages or cut prices in town. The next day, three men on the com-mittee were let go—Pullman claimed they were going to be fired anyway.

On May 11, 1894, Pullman workers went on strike; within days, hundreds of thousands of railroad workers in other parts of the country also walked out. The nation’s train service was derailed for two months. In an unprecedented move, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to break up the strike and get interstate commerce moving again.

George Pullman died in 1897, and two years later the town of Pullman was annexed by Chicago. Histo-rians consider the town’s downfall as an important event in the evolution of US labor rights. Experts also see it as a lesson in employee engagement gone awry. Leaders can build towns and offer free food and other incentives to engage employees, but work-ers will anger fast if leaders aren’t ultimately open and honest with them. “For any leader, it’s tough to balance your civic or social responsibility with that of the corporation,” says Michael Shymanski, presi-dent of the Historic Pullman Foundation.

Company Towns: Then & Now

‘He had a conscience, but at the end of the

day, when the chance came

to realize more profit, he took it.’

Korn Ferry Briefings� The�Voice�of�Leadership

18

The Dark Side of Pay Raises

The word is out and it is surely much-needed news for workers at all levels: After a decade of barely keeping pace with infla-tion, experts say, wages are poised to rise significantly in the

United States. That matches what countries in emerging markets have already seen, and is expected to help nudge paychecks in Europe up as well. But for companies, of course, there’s a bottom line and talent-jarring impact from any increase. The big question is how disruptive the Year of the Pay Raise will turn out to be. 

As we know, the whole wage issue has been a bit of a mystery. Unemployment has been falling steadily for years and now is at levels unseen since the dot-com bubble of 1999–2000. “We have a global expansion; Europe is doing well, and so are the US and UK in terms of employ-ment growth,” says Kurt Karl, chief economist at Swiss Re in New York. But what hasn’t happened much is wage growth. Growth of private sector hourly earnings hovered around 2 percent a year in the five-year period through mid-2015. Most employees didn’t have much incentive to switch jobs because the odds of them getting better pay

somewhere else were pretty low.But they do now. Job openings have picked

up as companies are now investing more in innovation and hiring. Salaries rose 2.5 percent in 2017, and Karl says the bidding war for talent—now mostly confined to computer programmers or other highly skilled specialists in small niches—could well burst into the broader market. Cer-tainly, the raw numbers suggest this: In July 2009—just after the financial crisis—there were 2.2 million unfilled vacancies. By the end of 2017 there were around 6 million. In this market, many see a 3 percent annual hike in wages. 

The Global Economy

Simon Constable

19

That may not sound huge, but it’s the big-gest since the financial crisis. It would also be at a level when things can start getting diffi-cult talent-wise, inside an organization. “Marginal employees will leave for the very tiniest increases in compensation, and the more talented employ-ees will be hotly pursued by competitors,” says Bob Bruner, dean emeritus of the Darden Graduate School of Business Adminis-tration at the University of Virginia. “This creates turmoil and can threaten the culture of the company.” 

Indeed, the dilemma is a tough one: Organizations want to keep their committed, skilled employees, but an economy with soaring wages can hurt even firms that have created a culture of high employee engagement. Employ-ees start basing their tenure not on the company’s purpose or career-path potential, but on when they can find another firm to pay them significantly more. If a company isn’t careful, its strategically crafted culture of employee engagement can be reduced to just a series of job transactions. 

According to Bruner, the first line of defense is to throw a lot more effort into company culture.

Many young managers, for example, haven’t been through a hot market. It will be essential to act pre-emptively by discussing future opportunities for young leaders within the company and map-ping out a long-term career for them. That future with the company will likely be appealing to those committed employees who want to stay through the ups and downs of the business cycle.

The whole recruiting effort may need to be revamped as well. And even in a higher-pay market, the smartest firms still try to avoid overpaying, knowing that the market for talent has a memory. Workers remember com-panies that have a history of hiring tons of people and paying big wages only

to fire people en masse and eliminate hiring when the economy turns south. The commitment level of those workers, even if they’re paid well, will likely be lower than of those who knew the organi-zation would stick by them in tighter times. 

“CEOs often play a short game, like earnings management,” says Bruner. “But they shoot them-selves in the feet because the employees want to play the long game.”

Constable is a former TV anchor for The Wall Street Journal and a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and the Study of Business.

A 3 percent wage increase doesn’t sound

like much, but it can create key difficulties inside organizations.  

20

Beyond the Activists:Three Pressing Issues

It’s a question board directors ask all the time these days: “What should we do about activists?” To some, it’s an overriding concern that activists will be arriving at any moment to tear apart their

companies. Directors want to know how they can defend their firms, and, if they’re being honest, their own board seats.

There have been a handful of high-profile campaigns over the past few years at huge firms, including GE and Procter & Gamble. But those mega-battles mask the fact that activism fights just don’t affect that many firms. The stock research group FactSet tracks more than 4,000 companies worldwide, and only about 600 of them, or about 15 percent, were targets of major activism campaigns in 2017. At the same time, activists most often target firms that are undergoing some sort of distress. If the firm is earning competitive returns, activists usually look elsewhere.

But just because activists leave a firm alone doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of key issues for its board to contend with. These change over time, and while there are several that may not be in the spotlight at the moment, they are never-theless critical.

1. RISK MANAGEMENT: Figure out what’s an opportunity and what’s a threat.In today’s active global economy, the lines between competitive markets have never been blurrier. Even defining which industry sector is involved can be hard to peg. For example, is Amazon a consumer or a technology company? Is it a retailer? Or, since it owns and operates a large web-services business, is it a digital technology player? This is just one example of many. With all the crossover, it’s very difficult for board members to assess whether market disruptions are accel-erators to the organization’s growth, or roadblocks that could endanger their business.

2. TALENT ALIGNMENT: Close the gaps between strategy and talent.This is a huge topic because of the rapid pace of strategic change and the evolving needs of leadership as our society potentially moves from

On the Board

Jane Edison Stevenson

21

an exchange of goods to a more thought-centric exchange. Boards really need to be able to see around hairpin turns and to fly at a high enough elevation to anticipate these change trajectories appropriately.

That means stepping up in a different way—not just by identifying problems but by anticipat-ing them. Said simply, it’s about awareness and courageous consideration of the impossible. Boards need to ask the right questions (not just regulatory ones) that help elevate leadership’s view of the road ahead.

One way to think about it is through the lens of succession: Do you have the right board to pick the next CEO? Do you have the right CEO in place to develop the right leaders? Are the leaders the ones who will define and cultivate the right workforce for the future?

3. INFORMATION OVERLOAD: Everyone has information. Learn how to connect the dots better.Access to information used to be a huge cost for businesses. That has gone down enormously.

Today, the real questions are: What does the information say? What does it mean? And how do we use it? Whole businesses are changing. Today’s boards have to adapt, stepping up to a different kind of leadership: anticipating what will create value, how that impacts the organization, and evaluating whether the right leadership is in place to make those pivotal operating decisions on a

day-to-day basis. Boards of the future will need to look forward in a different way and think with a different level of expansiveness, involvement, and opportunity building.

In the end, it all comes back to the link between business strategy, talent and succession, which all need to be tightly aligned. Talent

in this equation starts with the board and goes down to the lowest level of employees. It will take different kinds of thinking in the boardroom to effectively anticipate all of these issues. The need for diversity in the boardroom will be paramount to doing that effectively. Having the right mix of views and access will be important to achieving the nimbleness in thinking and diversity of per-spectives to make that happen.

Stevenson is vice chairman of the Korn Ferry’s Board & CEO Services practice.

It will take different kinds of thinking

in the boardroom to effectively anticipate

the right issues.

22

Handling Curveballs From All Corners

In hindsight, the questions only become more nagging. Why didn’t Kodak jump into digital photography? Couldn’t BlackBerry, with such a hold on the corporate market, have adjusted better

to the iPhone? And then there is Sears, probably the granddaddy of the never-saw-it-coming firms.

We call the missing skill set here adapt-ability. Companies (and the executives who run them) continually need to balance exploring new possibilities with exploiting what works. Adaptability takes many forms, from simple flexibility in handling change and juggling multiple demands to coming up with innovative approaches and openness to fresh ideas. You stay focused on your goals, but adjust how you get there.

Certainly, corporate leaders have always needed to adapt—just ask the folks at some of the companies that failed, or their competitors who put them out of business. But you can make a good case that in an age when innovation and technology move at such hyper speeds, this frame of mind is especially critical. We know and probably admire the type: the leader who doesn’t focus on the causes of a problem, but who, with a

remarkable ease, goes straight past “Go” to look for solutions.

Here a particular neural circuit comes into play, the brain’s superhighway between the pre-frontal cortex and the amygdala—the interaction between the executive center and the emotional circuitry for rising to an emergency. To the brain’s danger radar, any radical change looks like a threat, and so this circuitry mobilizes us into a state of readiness for action—and sometimes overdoes the anger, panic or such that result.

Cognitive neuroscience defines “resilience” as the time it takes to recover from this emergency arousal to a state of calm and clarity. While we are in high alert, our responses tend to be rigid; as we recover we can be more flexible in our thinking—even strategic. All of which is exactly what makes adaptability so critical in dealing with today’s

Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman

23

state of constant change. No leader, company or sector is immune. Largely paced by the drive of technological innovation, every aspect of busi-ness faces disruption of one kind or another.

C-suite strategies, of course, need to revolve around managing and leveraging these changes. But what about upgrading the people who will execute those strategies? Successful strategic implementation, no matter the particulars, depends in large part on how well the people who execute them can adapt.

At a meeting of 100 CEOs from legacy companies (17 sectors, $2 trillion total) there was con-sensus that a huge opportunity lies in the next phase of product development, where the historic expertise of these organizations will give them big advantages as they combine with tech. The one problem they face is not in technology, the CEOs agreed, but in their people. They need a culture, as one report put it, that “can embrace and adapt to technological change.” And that culture needs leaders who can thrive on change.

The power of adaptability may explain a paradox about IQ and leadership: While there’s a

correlation between intelligence and leadership performance for leaders up to an IQ of around 120, there’s none at all for an IQ above 120—and actually a negative impact for a leader’s effec-tiveness for an IQ above 128. (An IQ of 100 is the average.) Researchers at the University of Lausanne who conducted this study surmise the super-high-IQ leaders may not know how to tune

into how other people think about a given issue or challenge. For example, they couch what remarks they think are motivat-ing in ways that people cannot understand, let alone find resonating.

But whether executives have a high IQ or not, other research finds that their adapt-ability links to better revenue

and sales growth, employee effectiveness and team performance. And it doesn’t stop there: My colleague Richard Boyatzis at Case Western Reserve’s Weatherhead School of Management followed MBA graduates up to 19 years later and found adaptability predicts career success and satisfaction. Another not-so-small plus? This adeptness at handling curve balls leads to a satisfied life.

The power of adaptability may explain a paradox

between IQ and leadership.

Goleman is author of the international best-seller “Emotional Intelligence.” See keystepmedia.com for his new series of primers, “Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.”

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O FF I C I A L L I C EN S ED P RODU C T

IN A LANDMARK STUDY, KORN FERRY RESEARCHERS

INTERVIEWED AND ASSESSED THE TOP

WOMEN CHIEFS. IS THERE A PATTERN TO HOW

THEY GOT THERE?

BY MEGHAN WALSH

2 7

—the chairman, president and CEO of Colorado-based global engi-neering  and construction manage-

ment firm CH2M Hill—begins to say she has never encountered overt gender discrimination during her career. Then she catches herself. 

There was the time construction workers placed “No Women” signs at a building site. And then there was the Wite-Out incident. 

Early in her engineering career, shortly out of college, Hinman sat down with a senior manager for an end-of-year performance review. When he told her to write down her career goals, Hinman answered honestly: She wanted to be a partner. The manager, who she believes was well intentioned, said there was no doubt she had the prowess. But this office was never going to have a female partner in her lifetime. So he passed a bottle of correction fluid across the desk and told the eager employee to write something that didn’t make her look naïve.

While  Hinman eventually  did realize her youthful ambitions, that old boss wasn’t wrong. Unless a company intentionally fosters the development of its women employees, it’s nearly impossible that they will ascend to the corporate ladder’s highest rungs. As it stands, women represent roughly 6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs—and that’s an all-time high. The daughter of Italian immigrants, who grew up next door to her grandparents and among romantic notions of the American Dream, Hinman started looking for a new job the next day following her review, and when she saw that man many years later, she said thank you. “I knew that he was right; I couldn’t make part-ner there, not at that company,” Hinman says. 

THE PROBLEM

Only 6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Enough said.

WHY WORRY?

Studies show, aside from the obvious inequity, women-led companies out-perform their male-run competitors.

THE SOLUTION

Companies must move past just talking, and make putting women in top jobs a key

part of their strategies.

2 8

As the demand for diversity grows louder by the day and brand equity becomes more relevant than ever, companies consent to the status quo at their own peril. And it isn’t only the media’s spotlight that they risk anymore. Diversity has become a big topic in business today, and in a series of bold moves, state pension funds and some of Wall Street’s biggest asset management names, including State Street Global Advisors and BlackRock, have started voting against company board director slates that are not diverse enough or not moving in that direction. Such actions come against a backdrop of a growing body of research that suggests women-led companies outperform their male-run competitors across the board.

But calling for change in the corner office is a long way from creating actual change. In the space between the two, a variety of public and private initiatives have launched to try to instill results. Among the biggest is from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose “100x25” initiative aspires for female CEOs to lead 100 of the Fortune 500 firms by the year 2025. As part of that effort, Korn Ferry came onboard to draft a blueprint for how to build sustain-able pipelines of high-potential female candidates. The firm interviewed 57 women who were either currently or previously at the helm of the coun-try’s largest and most successful public and private companies, and put each through a science-based psychological assessment. “We didn’t want to just focus on why more women are not CEOs, we wanted to focus on their common success factors,” says Jane Stevenson, global leader for CEO Succession at Korn Ferry, who led the study. Or as J. Evelyn Orr, Korn Ferry Institute’s vice president and chief operating officer, puts it, “We wanted to learn from the women who made it, so we can increase the momentum of change.”

Real change, of course, may take years. But most experts say research-driven understanding and deliverable metrics are essential for corporations to achieve gender equality. “Women will not rise naturally to the top,” says Irene Natividad, president of the Global Summit of Women, an annual gathering of women leaders from around the world. “It has to be part of the business strategy.”

  

More than a half-century after women began entering the workplace en masse, and despite the fact they now make up half of the talent pool, the pace of female advancement in corporate leader-ship is often described as glacial. Or paltry. Or inconsequential.

“At the rate we’re progressing, we’re not going to see meaning-ful movement,” says Korn Ferry associate client partner Peggy Hazard, who works with organizations to achieve greater diversity. Along with the power imbalance come gaps in pay, implicit bias and, as we’ve been forced to reckon with recently, abuses of power like sexual harassment and assault. It’s disheartening to think it has taken us more than 75 years to go from Rosie the Riveter to 6 percent. The flood of women into historically male-dominated jobs during World War II was followed by a brief retreat to the status quo when men returned home from overseas, but rapid postwar

JACQUE HINMANCEO, CH2M HILL

FIRST PERSON

“I knew he was right; I couldn’t make partner there, not at that company.”

2 9

economic growth created new employment opportunities. The women’s labor force increased rapidly in the second half of the century, almost doubling between 1950 and 2000. Amid the growth, President Kennedy passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and, in 1972, at a time when women were still largely relegated to service-based, “feminine” jobs, Katharine Graham became the first female Fortune 500 CEO when she took over the Washing-ton Post parent company. The first woman to lead a company in the Dow Jones didn’t show up until Carly Fiorina was appointed at Hewlett-Packard in 1999. Only eight years ago, Ursula Burns at Xerox became the first black woman appointed CEO.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how gender influences hiring and promo-tion. Some argue that women choose human resources rather than finance and family over career. Others point to implicit bias, overt discrimination and disadvantaged structures that drive women away. There is no denying, though, that men and women are hired into entry-level positions in similar proportions, yet diversity begins to filter out by middle management. The siphon narrows until it’s almost exclusively white men who emerge at the top. “It’s a slow drip. Over time, women don’t get the types of key assign-ments, visibility, relationships or critical feedback—and that’s how you succeed,” Hazard says.  

  

Deanna Mulligan’s path to CEO can be traced back to the lunch-room of her first professional job. Like Hinman, Mulligan—now the president and CEO of Guardian Life Insurance—made an astute observation followed by a difficult decision. She noticed that the employee cafeteria wasn’t only segregated by gender—huddled with

the men were management promotions, sales mentors and future CFOs; among the women often waited a future in administration. Mulligan, who had recently graduated from the University of Nebraska, says the men didn’t welcome her but she sat with them anyway. “I remember thinking this is a very important decision,” she says.  

Many of the CEOs in the Korn Ferry study had similar stories: a time, usually early in their careers, when they came up against gender barriers of some sort. Instead of being detoured, though, they found a way through. On average, they were almost 51 years old when they first reached the corner office, taking a variety of career paths—some zigzagging between roles, departments and companies, and others passing through strategic check-points. Along with a majority having MBAs, about 40 percent started out with degrees in STEM, double those who had a background in arts and humanities or even business and finance. But what was most common among the women is they sought out challenge and found motivation in pur-pose. They took risks and learned to manage ambiguity.

“I’ve always operated out of an inner drive rather than the drive to beat somebody or get somewhere,” says Denise Ramos, president and CEO of ITT Inc., who has been at the helm at the company since 2011, after more than

DEANNA MULLIGAN

CEO, GUARDIAN LIFE INSURANCE

FIRST PERSON

“If you want to grow and attain

better results, you have to be

willing to do things differently.”

3 0

PATTI POPPECEO, CMS ENERGY

FIRST PERSON

“If you walk around questioning that maybe you don’t belong,  you will show up differently than someone who believes, ‘There is nothing I can’t do.’”

20 years at ARCO and several other companies. “Who am I? What’s impor-tant to me? What can I offer?”

In the case of Patti Poppe, who was appointed president and CEO of Michi-gan’s CMS Energy about two years ago, the winding road to the top included some 15 years at General Motors, where she says a mentor suggested she take essentially a demotion to a line job at a plant over an important staff role. “That changed everything,” says the Stanford MBA grad. “It gave me the operational experience essential for advancement.” She would wind up at CMS in 2010, where she says it helped that the company already had women in top roles, giving her the courage to think big for herself. “If you walk around questioning that maybe you don’t belong, you will show up differently than someone who believes, ‘There is nothing I can’t do,’” says Poppe, who has been known to scale 40-foot-tall utility structures in full gear. 

Poppe, Ramos and Mulligan say they were ready for the corner office when the nod came. Still, in one of the study’s more surprising results, only 12 per-cent of these women had early aspirations of leading a company. Two-thirds never even considered it a possibility until someone else brought it up. “We all internalize what a leader looks like; women need to see women in leader-ship positions to imagine themselves in those roles,” Orr says. It isn’t surpris-ing then that women-led companies also have more women in management overall. As any teacher will say, it’s the small moments of encouragement that go the farthest in igniting long-term ambition, which is why it’s vital to design mentorship programs that encourage as much as prepare.  

As experts are quick to remind, for every one of the strong-willed women who has shattered a glass ceiling, there are countless other equally qualified prospects who cannot break free. Or who, while looking for opportunities to prove themselves, marched right off the “glass cliff.” A 21st-century term, the glass cliff illustrates how women often have to take risky assignments. And when they fail, it only reinforces stereotypes rather than lay bare the double bind women face. 

As one woman told researchers, “When I went down to Atlanta to run that market for the company, the president of the division said, ‘You are going to be fired within a year, because no one has been able to make Atlanta successful.’ I went anyhow.”

  

These women who defied the odds, who’ve demonstrated their strength of character and wit, collectively scored in the 99th per-centile when compared to Korn Ferry’s benchmark CEO assessment, which gauges typical traits and drivers. In their assessments, which measured such traits as “risk-taking” and “persistence,” they matched

or exceeded Korn Ferry’s benchmark for CEOs in a remarkable 17 of those 20 traits. That means they are the best of the best, better than the men. They are unicorns. 

And if that is the standard women must meet, then change will remain glacial. Korn Ferry’s data shows that in the US it takes 30 percent longer to

3 1

place a woman at the helm of a company than a man. Meanwhile, women are already doing extra laps around the corporate track before even being con-sidered, which makes them on average four years older than men when they receive their first top appointment. In the end, women have to work harder and longer to get to the same place.

One might point out that women make up 24 percent of the C-suite, so perhaps we’re farther along than the 6 percent suggests. However, studies show 90 percent of new CEOs come directly from executive posts associated with line responsibility, a role that the majority of women in the C-suite don’t hold. As Orr says, “Not all C-suite positions are created equal.”

The unfortunate reality, despite signs of unrest, is that the vast majority of companies are not disrupting the everyday, homogenous flow in a way that will bring about significant change. It doesn’t matter how robust your pipeline is if it gets cut off before it can reach the top. And, at least in the case of Silicon Valley, media scrutiny and public admonishment haven’t been enough to overpower inertia.

That’s where the argument that gender parity is good business may offer hope. “Companies have to understand that having diversity is to their benefit,” says Ramos. At ITT, Ramos says they go to great lengths to ensure diverse candidate pools, going beyond the usual recruiting sources. They’ve also built development pipelines for women and minorities and created a culture that values ethics as much as performance. When it comes down to it, she says, “companies need to value diverse perspectives, experiences and backgrounds and get out of their comfort zones when selecting future leaders.”

For her part, Mulligan says she wakes up every morning at 4 a.m., two hours before she has to leave the house. In those unscheduled hours when her unbound mind has room to roam is often when she is able to find solu-tions to some of her biggest challenges. Indeed, under Mulligan, Guard-ian has claimed the highest earnings of its 157-year history, while winning a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.  

“If you want to grow and attain better results, you have to be willing to do things differently,” Mulligan says.

DENISERAMOS

CEO, ITT INC.

FIRST PERSON

“I’ve always operated out of an inner drive

rather than the drive to beat

somebody or get somewhere...

Who am I? What’s important

to me? What can I offer?”

57 FEMALE CEOS PARTICIPATED IN THE STUDY

38 ARE CURRENT CEOS43 IN PUBLICLYTRADED COMPANIES

23 IN THEFORTUNE 500

18 IN THEFORTUNE 1000

16 IN OTHERCOMPANIES12 IN PRIVATELY

HELD COMPANIES19 ARE FORMER CEOS

3 2

WHEN WOMEN REALIZED THEY COULD BE CEO

SOMEONE TOLD THEM THEY COULD

BE CEO

IT ONLY BECAME CLEAR WHEN THEY REACHED A HIGH ROLE

THEY HAD WANTED THIS POSITION FOR A LONG TIME

THEY NEVER ACTUALLY WANTED TO BE CEO

65%16%

12%

7%

ENGAGES AND INSPIRES

DEVELOPS TALENT

BUILDS EFFECTIVE TEAMS

DIRECTS WORK

COURAGE

MANAGES AMBIGUITY

2.64 X

2.62 X

2.62 X

2.41 X

2.33 X

2.09 X

Female CEOs were more than twice as likely to have high scores on these six competencies than middle managers. These are the skills women need to develop on their way to senior executive roles, especially if they aspire to be CEO.

DIFFERENTIATING SKILLS FOR FUTURE CEOS

THEFINDINGS 1

THESE WOMEN CEOS WORKED HARDER AND LONGER TO GET TO THE TOP.The women CEOs were an average of four years older than their male counterparts, and worked in a slightly greater number of roles, functions, companies and industries.

2THEY WERE DRIVEN BY BOTH A SENSE OF PURPOSE AND A DESIRE TO ACHIEVE BUSINESS RESULTS.More than two-thirds of the women said they were motivated by a sense of purpose and their belief that their company could have a positive impact on the community, employees and the world around them. Nearly a quarter pointed to creating a posi-tive culture as one of their proudest accomplishments.

3

SPECIFIC TRAITS SUSTAINED THE WOMEN’S SUCCESS ON THE ROAD TO CEO.Defining traits and competencies that emerged time and again in the research included courage, risk-taking, resilience, agility and man-aging ambiguity.

To provide a rare glimpse

into how female CEOs operate,

Korn Ferry spent four

months inter-viewing and

taking detailed assessments of 57 women

CEOs—from 41 Fortune 1000

companies and 16 large,

privately held companies. Six

key findings emerged:

For the full report, and videos and podcasts on it, see: engage.kornferry.com/womenceosspeak

3 4

4

THEY WERE MORE LIKELY TO ENGAGE THE POWER OF TEAMS.Scoring sig-nificantly higher than the benchmark group on humility—indicative of a consistent lack of self-promotion, an expressed appreciation for others, and a tendency to share the credit—the women CEOs were more likely to leverage others to achieve desired results.

5DESPITE EVIDENT POTENTIAL, THE WOMEN GENERALLY DIDN’T SET THEIR SIGHTS ON BECOMING CEO.Two-thirds of the women said they never real-ized they could become CEO until a boss or men-tor encouraged them, and instead focused on hitting business targets and seeking new challenges rather than on their personal career advancement.

6THE WOMEN SHARED STEM AND FINANCIAL BACKGROUNDS THAT SERVED AS A SPRINGBOARD.Early in their careers, nearly 60 percent of the women had demonstrable expertise in either STEM (40 percent) or busi-ness/finance/economics (19 percent)—all fields where they could prove themselves with precise, definable outcomes, and that were also crucial to the success of their businesses.

3 5

American Toll Roads

NEW FROMDOWN UNDER:

A CRUMBLING US INFRASTRUCTURE

HURTS MANY COMPANIES. COULD THE BEST ANSWER COME ALL THE WAY FROM AUSTRALIA?

BY CHRISTOPHER R. O’DEA

The Indiana Toll Road is a 157-mile stretch of asphalt crossing the not-particularly-pretty terrain of northern

Indiana. The only real landmarks the road passes are giant steel mills—some still operating, some shut down—and no one would ever call a steel mill beautiful.

But the toll road in some ways is a model of efficiency. It lets drivers traverse the Hoosier state, in barely two hours if traffic is good, much more quickly than other roadways. It’s a key artery to move goods from the West Coast to big markets on the East Coast. And with an $11 toll to run the road’s length in a car—and as much as $93 for a big truck—it raises

36

THE PROBLEM The US—like much of the world—is facing an infrastructure crisis, especially over its aging roads and highways.

WHY WORRY? Old highways are bad for safety and can hinder economic growth.

THE LESSON Leadership can come from some unlikely places to help solve seemingly intrac-table problems.

considerable funds to help pay for road repairs and other main-tenance. The only wrinkle: Some of those funds are also used to help people 10,000 miles east of Indiana—Australian retirees.

Even in a world where anyone can own anything anywhere, it’s still a little jarring that a stretch of highway through northern

Indiana is owned, in part, by Australian pension plans. But this road, which has been Aussie-owned since 2015, is considered a prize among the many toll roads owned around the world, in part, by Australians. Private ownership of roads in the United States has a checkered history at best, but it may become one of the ways the country—along with many other nations worldwide—builds and replaces its infrastructure. Indeed, much of President Trump’s initial plan for revitalizing US roads involves private-public partnerships similar to the Indiana Toll Road. How well private Australian investors run a toll road in Indiana may forecast how transportation networks will be run in the US and beyond.

NO MATTER WHO OWNS THE roads, there’s broad consensus that the United States needs

to spend more on them. Congestion cost US drivers alone nearly $300 billion in 2016, ac-cording to INRIX, a Seattle-based technology company that compiles traffic data. Bad roads not only increase commuting times, but also play a role in decisions about where to build an office or manufacturing facility. No leader wants to place a factory along a road whose poor condi-tion creates shipping delays. “The real justifica-tion for improving transportation infrastructure is to make our economy more productive,” says Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based think tank. “It’s the means to the end of faster and more reliable goods movement, better matching of employer needs and employee skills, and shorter and less stressful commutes.”

The problem, of course, is how to fund those costs. While engineers and federal officials differ in their estimates of what it will cost to refurbish American roads, the tab for rebuilding promises to be steep. In its new “Report Card”

on the condition of US infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) said a total investment of $4.59 trillion would be needed to restore US infrastructure to an adequate grade by 2025. Roads and transit sys-tems account for the lion’s share of the funding gap. In 2016, the ASCE says, the country faced a $1.1 trillion backlog of maintenance work needed on surface transportation assets by 2025, and only 46 percent of that was funded. The US isn’t alone; the world needs to spend $34 trillion from now to 2040 to build and main-tain healthy road networks, according to the Global Infrastructure Hub, an Australia-based nonprofit.

Toll roads might be an answer—but the con-cept isn’t welcomed in the US. Ironically, they were actually among the best way to travel by vehicle until the 1950s—when the US Inter-state System was built, providing a national highway network without user fees. Americans have been unwilling to confront the true cost of road infrastructure for decades, says Tanya Langman, director at Fitch Ratings, a firm that reviews debt deals that finance infrastructure.

38

Briefings On Talent & Leadership

Art

wo

rk b

y:

Fil

l in

bla

nk

s

39

That’s created “unrealistic expectations about the real cost and the obligation of the public to pay for it,” she adds, leaving the US facing “an infrastructure investment cliff.”

All of which opens up the road for Aus-tralia—whose pension funds are happy to help. “In Australia, infrastructure is front-page news all the time, a lot of funds are investing in it, and people are talking about it,” says Julio Garcia, head of infrastructure for North America at IFM

Investors. Australian interest in urban toll roads stems from having a small population, about 23 million, concentrated in a few state capital cities, rather than more evenly dispersed across a land mass about the size of the lower 48 US states, Garcia says. In contrast to the heavy use of the US Interstate network, Australians fly be-tween dense urban areas, resulting in relatively infrequent travel on long-distance highways. Toll roads have evolved to serve the major

“IT’S THE MEANS TO THE END OF FASTER AND MORE RELIABLE GOODS

MOVEMENT... AND SHORTER AND LESS STRESSFUL COMMUTES.”

Robert Poole DIRECTOR OF TRANSPORTATION POLICY AT THE REASON FOUNDATION

39

metro regions around Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, where the need for financing meant many main arteries were built as toll highways from the start. “People could see a new benefit in terms of a road they didn’t have before, but it did come with a user fee,” Garcia says.

A UNIQUE ORGANIZATION, IFM IS owned by 28 Australian pension funds that formed a consortium more than 20

years ago to invest in infrastructure. Today, IFM manages about $58 billion on behalf of pension savers, with about $25 billion invested in 29 infrastructure assets across the world. While it’s based in Australia, IFM today also invests on behalf of North American and European pen-sion plans, and counts more than 75 US pension funds among its 175 institutional investors.

All told, the Australian retirement system, called superannuation, now has more than $2 trillion in capital. Created in 1983 as the solution to national union negotiations, the system requires employers to contribute 9.5 percent of salary to a retirement account for workers over age 18 earning more than $450 per month. Contributions are directed to “super funds,” large pools of capital managed by professional investment teams. Because many workers won’t retire for decades and won’t need to tap their accounts, those investment teams are able to invest in illiquid assets with very long-term income streams. Toll roads fit the bill, and the ITR fits especially well. “We try to find assets that are critical to the economies and communities that they operate in,” Garcia says.

The Indiana Toll Road is one of IFM’s prize assets—which is something of a turnaround for the venture, given that a prior consortium that was hit by the financial crisis filed for bankruptcy court protection. Under IFM, the road has benefited from heavy traffic by import-laden trucks from West Coast ports. “Anything going either to the Midwest or to East Coast

40

THE DEAL HAS ENABLED INDIANA TO CONVERT THE

LONG-TERM ECONOMIC POTENTIAL OF A STRATEGICALLY LOCATED ROAD—

WHICH HAD BEEN LOSING MONEY UNDER GOVERNMENT OPERATION—

TO READY CASH FOR IMMEDIATE UPGRADES TO ROADS.

41

42

The Global Toll-Road Market

While few toll roads in the US are privately run, they are prevalent in many other parts of the world.

COUNTRY

ENGL

AN

D

26

ITA

LY

469

UN

ITED

ST

ATE

S

157

AU

STRA

LIA

99

215

TOLL ROAD NAME MILES PRICE TO TRAVERSE

M6 TollThe only major toll road in Great Britain, built in 2003 to relieve traffic congestion in the Midlands region.

Opened in 1964, the Autosole (Sun Motorway) is the major road down Italy’s spine, connecting Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples. Italy has nearly 4,200 miles of toll roads; most are privately run.

Indiana ran this toll road itself until 2006, when it traded 75 years of future toll revenues for a $3.6 bil lion up-front payment.

This network of nine motorways forms a ring around Sydney and its suburbs. Instead of booths, fees are deducted from drivers’ accounts.

Connecting Tokyo to Japan’s third-largest city, Nagoya, this road is so congested that another toll road, the New Tomei Expressway, was built parallel to it.

A1

Sydney Orbital

Network

Indiana Toll

Road

Tomei Express-

way

$8 cars

$15 trucks

$68 cars

$167 trucks

$10.70 cars

$93.10 trucks

$39 ± cars

$99 ± trucks

$62 ±JAPA

N

Prices as of January 2018, converted to US dollars.

cities, in all likelihood, is going to go out in a truck over the ITR,” says Garcia.

In general, the concept of privatizing the Indiana Toll Road’s operation has proved to be a boon to Indiana’s aging roads. While the road opened as a free highway in 1956 (it’s techni-cally a stretch of Interstate 90) the $3.8 billion initial lease payment the state got for selling operating rights in 2006 funded a statewide transportation investment program, including deferred maintenance on the toll road. It also helped seed “Major Moves,” a $2.8 billion on-going highway construction program that has paid for hundreds of road and bridge projects in Indiana that had previously lacked funding.

The deal has enabled Indiana to convert the long-term economic potential of a strategically located road—which had been losing money under government operation—to ready cash for immediate upgrades to roads. But it’s not just Indiana that has tapped the potential of privately operated toll roads. Motor along the two major interstate arteries that feed into Washington D.C. from Virginia and you’ll find adjacent tolled express lanes operated by yet another Australian firm, Melbourne-based Transurban. The firm, which runs a fund for Australian higher education and research professionals, says it specializes in building and operating “smarter motorways” that use emerging digital technologies to smooth out the bumps in daily commuting.

Toll revenue there is already up, but the firm says its unique traffic management system is only going to boost the number of cars passing

through. The company is piloting autonomous and connected driving technologies to control vehicle position, speed and lane changes in heavy traffic, as well as technology that digi-tally connects cars to sensors embedded along the motorway.

The goal is to form rush-hour drivers into “platoons,” computer-guided groups moving in sync like the Tour de France peloton, with vehicles just close enough together to allow maximum speed for prevailing conditions. High-speed platoons can increase the capacity of a roadway by as much as 25 percent without compromising safety, the company says. In a novel take on board engagement, company directors are literally going the extra mile to support Transurban’s tech initiatives—several have served as passengers for connected-driving tests conducted on the express lanes around Washington.

Ultimately, experts say, the future of the toll roads will likely come from more public acceptance and more public funding. “It would be great if the Trump administration could offer some sort of incentives like the capital recycling we’ve done [in Australia] or through additional loans,” says Scott Charlton, CEO of Transurban. The Australian federal govern-ment grants a 15 percent subsidy to states that privatize infrastructure and reinvest the capital raised from private investors into additional infrastructure. Will the US take that route? “Tolling isn’t the right answer for every road,” says IFM’s Garcia. “But I think it’s a sensible direction for the country.”

“TOLLING ISN’T THE RIGHT ANSWER FOR EVERY ROAD. BUT I

THINK IT’S A SENSIBLE DIRECTION FOR THE COUNTRY.”

43

Julio Garcia HEAD OF INFRASTRUCTURE FOR NORTH AMERICA AT IFM INVESTORS

Briefings On Talent & Leadership

Art

wo

rk b

y:

Fil

l in

bla

nk

s

45

BY DAVID BERREBY

A

World

with No

Backup

Plan

4 6

AMERICAN AIRLINES EXECUTIVES (and hundreds of thousands of the car-rier’s passengers) got a serious scare late last November. As the Christmas travel season began, the airline found it

had no pilots for 15,000 flights scheduled for the last two weeks of 2017. The problem was—as it often is nowadays—a software glitch. The airline’s algorithm for matching planes and flight crews should have granted time off in accordance with schedule needs and seniority. Instead, it gave time off to any pilot who had put in a request. There was no procedure in place to repair the breach.

Fortunately, American was able to come up with a fairly low-tech solution to a modern-age problem: bring humans in to improvise a solution. The company offered pilots 150 percent of their normal pay to work unstaffed flights, and quickly negotiated other details of an emergency plan with the flight crews’ union.

Another day, another glitch. It was a fairly typical digital hiccup, the sort of which we’re all getting accustomed around the developed world. In organiza-tions, such mishaps ground flights, shut down phone systems, mislead medical devices or crash autonomous vehicles. In private lives, the same phenomenon freezes video calls and creates those moments when

46

THE PROBLEM

WE KNOW FROM PAST FAILURES

THAT COMPUTERS ARE FAR

FROM PERFECT—BUT WE REFUSE

TO ACCEPT IT.

WHY WORRY?

AI SLIP-UPS CAN SERIOUSLY

AFFECT BUSINESS AND FINANCE,

NOT TO MENTION LIVES.

THE SOLUTION

ENCOURAGE TECH LEADERS

TO SHOW THE REST OF THEIR

COMPANY THAT MORE INVESTMENT

IN BACKUP PLANS IS NEEDED.

DIGITAL SYSTEMS AND AI ARE TAKING OVER MANY FUNCTIONS BEFORE SOFTWARE DESIGNERS CAN MAKE THEM FAIL-SAFE. IS THERE TIME TO FIX THIS?

THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, WHICH TRACKS

AUTONOMOUS-CAR ACCIDENTS, HAS FOUND THAT

THE VAST MAJORITY ARE CAUSED BY THE FACT

THAT ROBOT CARS DRIVE LIKE, WELL, ROBOTS.

you try to type “but maybe I’ll come” and find your instant message “corrected” to read “Bugs Mugabe will cope.”

We shouldn’t be too quick to get used to these sur-prises. All these supposedly minor incidents add up to a major problem that is worsening with every new step toward a completely digitalized society: More and more often, complex systems of software and hardware fail unexpectedly. And when they do, we discover there is no Plan B and no safety net.

The incidents are increasing as we further digitize our lives and connect more of our tools into one infi-nitely complicated web. As the science writer Fred Guterl has noted, in 21st-century society, all important infrastructure is computer-controlled, waterways as much as airports. Getting a barge down a river, he says, depends on “water-level monitoring, navigation, signaling and locks—all of which are in some way under computer control. Even the rivers are digital.”

So are the people. As the game designer and Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost points out, we are relent-lessly turning all the familiar devices of home and work—the can opener, the toaster, the garden hose, the overhead light—into computers. Today, for example, you can buy smartphone-enabled bike locks, faucets, propane tanks, juicers and baby monitors. The market for these sorts of Internet of Things devices, all capable of gathering and crunching data and of talking to each other, is expected to reach more than $275 billion a year by the end of the decade.

“There’s not much work and play left that com-puters don’t handle,” Bogost wrote in The Atlantic. “People don’t seek out computers in order to get things done; they do the things that let them use computers.” Why else do you need a blender that reports to your smartphone?

Indeed, it is a transformation that is easy and satisfying—so much so that most of us are on this road without giving it much thought.

Until, that is, something goes wrong.

MANY OF THESE SUR- prise failures don’t end nearly as well as the American Airlines incident. On July 8,

2015, trading on the New York Stock Exchange was suspended for four hours because a software update didn’t go as expected. That very likely contributed to a 1.7 percent drop in the S&P 500. Worse, in May that same year, an Airbus A400M Atlas military transport crashed near Seville, Spain, after computerized controllers slowed three of its four engines. The cause was a mistakenly erased file, which caused the digital engine controllers to misread data from the engines. Four crew members were killed. Similarly, Asiana Airlines blamed poor software that “led to the unexpected disabling of airspeed protection without adequate warning to the flight crew,” resulting in a Boeing 777 crash near San Francisco in 2014. Three people were killed.

According to a review of FDA data by a group of thoracic surgeons, surgical robot mishaps were involved in 144 deaths and 1,391 patient injuries from 2000 to 2013. To be sure, as critics point out, that’s an extremely low failure rate amid a total of 1.7 million surgeries, and no one compared it with humans-only surgeries. But the study makes clear that no one should assume that robots will always perform flawlessly.

Nor can we apparently count on the US system for emergency calls to firefighters, police or medical help. Once a string of locally run exchanges, pro-grammers years ago created a national 911 system that included a simple code telling the server to assign 40 million unique ID numbers. It reached that limit on April 10, 2014, leaving 11 million people in the entire state of Washington and parts of California, Florida, North and South Carolina, and Minnesota that night with no emergency-call service

48

MANY PEOPLE

CONFUSE ARTIFICIAL

INTELLIGENCE

WITH THE HUMAN

VERSION, BLINDING

THEMSELVES

TO TECHNOLOGY’S

LIMITATIONS.

for six hours. The callers who heard a busy signal or a dead silence, according to an FCC report on the inci-dent, included “calls reportedly involving domestic violence, assault, motor vehicle accidents, a heart attack, an overdose and an intruder breaking into a residence.” (That particular caller, in Seattle, tried 37 times before finally chasing away the attacker with her kitchen knife.)

To be sure, one reason our intelligent systems stumble like this is due to our own overestimations of technology. Many people confuse artificial intel-ligence with the human version, blinding themselves to technology’s limitations, argues the AI pioneer Alan Bundy, a professor of automated reasoning at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “Any machine that can beat all humans at Go must surely be very intelligent, so by analogy with other world-class Go players, it must be pretty smart in other ways too, mustn’t it?” he recently wrote in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. “No! Such misconceptions lead to false expectations that such AI systems will work correctly in areas outside their narrow expertise.”

The fact is, Bundy said, even the most advanced computing technology has been designed to master a narrow range of functions. Outside of those, it is

no smarter than a person, and often—because of limits on our ability to map and create intelligence—is quite a bit dumber. Failing to remember this can lead to overconfidence that a complex, algorithmically controlled system cannot go wrong.

Such assumptions probably fostered one of the first deadly failures of a high-tech software-controlled system. Over the course of a few months in 1985 and 1986, a radiation-therapy device called the Therac-25 overexposed six patients to its rays, leaving four dead and two seriously injured.

Predecessor versions of the machine had been operated by a human tech-nician; they’d also had mechanical fail-safes that made it impossible for the technician to exceed safe dosage levels. But the Therac 25 passed many of those former human-operated tasks to the computer-controlled system. And the design removed the hardware safety features, relying on the soft-ware to detect and respond to trouble.

50

Murphy’s Law,, In the \Digital Age

A world run by complex, interconnected digital systems is subject to sudden unexpected failures. Here are some examples:

INCIDENT CAUSE COST/CONSEQUENCE

Robot surgery errors (2000-2013) Varied: some software errors, some hardware malfunctions 144 deaths

911 outage (2014) Long-ago decision to set maximum call count to 40 million

11 million people in the US had no emergency-call service for six hours. More than 6,000 calls failed to go through.

Military transport crash in Spain (2015) Digital file wiped clean of data Three dead

Google self-driving car hits municipal bus in Mountain View, California (2015)

Software made wrong assumption about what bus driver would do Minor damage, no injuries

NYSE outage (2015) Software update Dip in S&P 500

No pilots for 15,000 American Airlines flights (2017) Software glitch

15,000 holiday-season flights in danger of cancellation; emergency negotiations with pilots’ union

According to a report on the failure by MIT professor Nancy G. Leveson, an expert on software flaws, the Therac 25’s human operator sat at a computer terminal, reading lookalike messages that didn’t distinguish minor problems from life-threatening anomalies. The machine reported “malfunction” all the time, usually for very minor problems. Operators became used to responding to the messages by quickly resuming the treatment.

In this tragedy, of course, the digital process did involve human beings, but in a way that made it impossible for them to take meaningful action. In other circumstances, people aren’t blinded by confidence in computers—they’re simply blind. Many of the systems on which we depend can’t be completely grasped by the human mind.

ULTIMATELY, IT ISN’T all overconfidence, or lack of knowledge about what software does, that keeps us from making our new tech

fail-safe. Unlike mechanical systems of the 20th-century industrial age, they aren’t rooted in reality. Indeed, code doesn’t have any natural connection to the objects and processes it is control-ling. A screwdriver will fit into a screw,

and a rivet will bind steel pillars, but the zeroes and ones of a program could be supplying recipes or plot-ting missile trajectories. At the level most coding is done, there is no difference.

This abstraction from the world it controls means that code can be technically flawless and nonetheless go wrong—because its programmers didn’t anticipate the problem it tripped over, or how it would interact with other software, or how people would use it. During last December’s massive fires in Los Angeles, authorities were forced to warn drivers not to follow directions from mapping apps. The reason: The apps, designed to steer users to roads clear of traffic, were sending drivers toward highways that were empty—only because they were engulfed in flames. “Software failures are failures of understanding and of imagina-tion,” wrote author and programmer James Somers in a recent article in The Atlantic.

To counter this, and offer more protection, most experts say the effects of complexity, speed and abstraction must be ameliorated. Somers, for one, argues that programmers need to be encouraged to think about the real-world problems their algorithms are supposed to solve.

Another possible defense is to pay more attention to the shape of the human minds that must interact with machines. For instance, a growing field of research in autonomous cars concentrates on how to make them able to deal with human beings. It’s an essential task as the sector ramps up. The state of California, which tracks autonomous-car accidents, has found that the vast majority are caused by the fact that robot cars drive, like, well, robots. Human drivers don’t expect other cars to halt completely at every stop sign or obey every speed limit and traffic sign; failure to recognize this caused almost all 43 fender-benders involving self-driving cars in the state. One famous fatal accident involving a computerized driving system—the Florida crash that killed Joshua Brown as he drove in his Tesla—occurred after the human ignored warnings (to place his hands on the wheel) that a computer would have attended to.

Most digital development doesn’t take place in such a realm of far-reaching principles. In the main, it is high-pressure, fast-paced work, in which the tempta-tion is usually to just solve the problem at hand with whatever is handy (including ready-made, “off the shelf” code or old legacy code that can be tweaked). Nonetheless, as the disconcerting failures without backup occur more and more often, the stakes are becoming clear. We need to pay more attention to the digital home we are making for ourselves.

The Face of Leadership

5 2

PLATON photographs Prime Minister Tony Blair at the United Nations in 2009for the series “PORTRAITS OF POWER.”

Forget facial recognition. A world-renowned photographer uses only

a camera to dive into the psyche of world leaders.

B Y G L E N N R I F K I N

PH

OT

O O

N T

HIS

PA

GE

: NIC

KO

LA

S R

AP

AZ

Russian PresidentVLADIMIR PUTIN,

photographed by PLATON

people haven’t heard of him, they have undoubtedly seen his remarkable work. His portraits of world leaders in politics, business, sports and the arts are unmistak-able and iconic. They have graced hundreds of magazine covers, from Time to Wired to Vanity Fair, and the pages of countless other publications. Among his subjects: Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Muammar Gaddafi, Serena Williams, Bill Gates and Muhammad Ali.

His name is Platon, and he is a world-class photogra-pher who has been face-to-face with a remarkable lineup of world leadership and power. His striking portrait of Russian president Vladimir Putin, which graced Time’s “Person of the Year” issue in 2007, offered an unblinking and penetrating look into the cold blue eyes of the intimi-dating but inscrutable Putin. It is a photograph worth well more than a thousand words.

“I’m one of the few people who got to be an inch and a half from Putin’s nose, and I could feel his cold breath on my hand as I focused the lens,” Platon says. “I got to look into his eyes more than Bush ever did. I was really in there.” What he saw in Putin is the same refraction of the light of leadership that he has encountered throughout his career. He feels it is his job to try to humanize the power system by presenting an honest portrait, good or bad, and finding the truth in that portrait.

With his 50th birthday looming in 2018, Platon is in a long process of taking stock. He claims that photography

is actually “boring” to him. “The camera is just a tool,” he says. “What is interesting to me is what’s happening in front of my camera.” To that end, Platon (pronounced Plah-ton) considers himself a storyteller, a speaker and an activist who brings a deep level of passion and com-mitment to the world’s trouble spots. In 2013, he founded The People’s Portfolio, a nonprofit foundation that aims to create a visual language that breaks barriers, expands dignity and enlists the public’s support for human rights around the world. His photos are all about capturing a moment in time in which that particular truth speaks volumes, even within the fast-changing, dynamic, tech-nological world in which we live.

Born Platon Antoniou in England to a British mother and a Greek architect father, Platon spent his childhood in the Greek islands before moving to the UK, and now lives in the US. Trained as a graphic designer, Platon later picked up a camera and found his calling. Extremely dyslexic, he struggled to read and eschewed technology (he has never written or sent an email), and through the lens, he found a method for telling the stories that drew him near. After working for British Vogue for several years, he got a break when John F. Kennedy Jr. spotted his work and invited him to New York to photograph for his new publication, George. With newfound access to A-list celebrities and political and business leaders, Platon’s career skyrocketed and his unique portraits created insatiable demand. We spoke with him about his efforts to illuminate the face of leadership. (Questions and answers have been edited.)

Even if

● SOMEBODY ONCE DESCRIBED YOU AS “CAPTURING THE ESSENCE OF A WORLD LEADER IN A SINGLE FRAME.” THAT’S A POWERFUL STATEMENT. DOES IT FEEL THAT WAY TO YOU?There is no such thing as a complete truth. There are just true moments. And depending on how you catch somebody, depending on the context of that experience, you get a different side to their

personality. My role is to always be authentic. If I’m true to the moment I was living at the time, I’m going to give you that specific moment. I’m committed to it. I will die for it. It’s the truth as I felt it. But it’s never all the truth. You can’t tell a complete truth in five-hundredths of a second.

● STILL, YOUR PORTRAITS HAVE OFTEN SPARKED CONTROVERSY.I’m often criticized by many

intellectuals for showing charm in dictatorial leaders. What they don’t understand is that my job is not to go in with a preconceived idea and paint a dictatorial, two-dimensional cartoon. My role is always to be honest. And what you find when you are a few inches away from someone’s nose is that you experience things that no one can write about from the comfort of their armchair and laptop. It’s complicated. If a world leader has great charm but has done terrible

TH E SO LUTIO N

Even in an age of facial recognition, perhaps the simple lens offers unique clues.

WH Y WO R RY ?

Our misunderstanding of what drives leadership can send government and companies in the wrong direction.

TH E PRO B LE M

The usual way of studying heads of state and CEOs often leaves many questions unanswered.

5 4

Microsoft founder BILL GATES,

photographed by PLATON

EyebrowsThe most expres-sive part of the face can help convey almost any emo-tion. According to an MIT study, eyebrows are more important in facial recognition than the eyes.

Head Tilting it up or down indicates either happiness or sadness. It’s one of the easiest expres-sions other people can identify.

MouthIt’s particularly good at conveying desire or revulsion. But don’t just read lips; a Princeton University study showed some mouth movements are easy to confuse.

ChinUpturned, it conveys disap-proval. Indeed, it’s so universal that researchers call an upturned chin, combined with a furrowed brow and pressed lips, the “not-face.”

things to humanity, I think it’s an important thing for us to know. Because we will always underestimate [such leaders] if we assume they are charmless. If they are charming, they are capable of recruiting, of winning people over, of persuading people.

● SO YOUR GOAL IS TO GET TO THAT ESSENCE?Absolutely. To strip away artifice. And that’s difficult to do because everyone is media-trained right now. If you look at how our leaders are presented to us around the world, there’s this air of glamour and perfection and control and ease. I don’t see a connection between that propaganda and the reality. So I set about this challenge to try and humanize the power system. Whatever it is, I’m going to find it. Picasso always said, “If there’s something to feel, I’ll feel it.” I’d rather say if there’s something to find, I’ll find it.

● YOU’VE CERTAINLY HAD A UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE. Many people meet world leaders with a very stiff, formal handshake, but do they ever break through that barrier and get in their spirit, in their soul? I use a little apple box, not even a proper chair, for them to sit on and I’m guessing more world leaders have sat on that apple box than any single chair in history.

● HOW DO YOU DEFINE LEADERSHIP?I’ve seen power, authority, intimidation, charisma, seduction. But there’s a side of good leadership that I often don’t see.

That is something called service. I humbly believe that if you are a great leader, you have to be strong, you have to be charismatic and inspirational, but you also have to think of yourself as a servant of the people. That is a very complicated conflict to resolve. Because on one hand you have strength and then you have submission. I would say there are only a handful of world leaders in history who were ever able to take those two opposite poles, put them together and drive positive change.

● IT’S ONE THING TO PHOTOGRAPH A FAMOUS PERSON BUT QUITE ANOTHER TO CAPTURE THE ESSENCE OF THAT PERSON AS YOU SEEM TO DO OVER AND OVER. IS THERE A SECRET FORMULA?I am not blinded by authority. I’ve never been dazzled by the light. I always thought it was a bit weird that this person seems to think they are superior to everybody else. I just never got that joke. So I am able to just say, “Well, hold on a minute, with great respect, I know you are so-and-so but you are still a person. You have the same weaknesses that I have. So let’s just be authentic with each other, right?” So it’s up to them. It’s like putting a spotlight on the truth. Some people find that very liberating and others feel very threatened by that.

● SO IT TAKES A BIT OF CHUTZPAH AND COURAGE.You have to be courageous. You can’t expect your opponent or collaborator to be honest with

you unless you are going there first. And I always go there first. It’s devastating, frightening for me every time, even now. It’s not a trick. It’s just wiping the slates clean of all facades from myself and my subjects.

● IS THERE A PORTRAIT THAT YOU CONSIDER YOUR MOST SUCCESSFUL?My picture of Bill Clinton was my first-ever president—and it probably should have been my last. It was certainly not like any other official portrait of a US president. There was so much criticism. But it was about charisma. Clinton—everybody says it—had more charisma than anyone on the planet. Of course, that same charisma got him into trouble. But it also took him to greater heights.

● THESE DAYS, IT FEELS AS IF THERE IS A DEARTH OF GREAT LEADERSHIP OUT IN THE WORLD. HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THAT?If I were to ask you who is the next Martin Luther King Jr., the next Gandhi, the next Mandela, who are the inspirational figures in society that teenagers would have posters of on their walls, I don’t think you or I would be able to come up with more than one or two. To me, I know the leaders are out there because I know them and work with them all the time. But their voices aren’t getting heard because of the sea of white noise. We have to amplify those voices. That’s our responsibility as storytellers. My goal is to give a voice to the voiceless and an enhanced platform of leadership.

Great photographers try to reveal what’s

behind a face. Here’s what the best science

(and some educated guesswork) says about what each feature conveys.

Reading into Faces

5 6

•

Human rights activist DR. DENIS MUKWEGE,

photographed by PLATON

59

Culinary Arts, for the C-Suite Crowd

Lessons in Taking It Easy

C hef Sharon Oddson pushes her bicycle through the front door of La Cucina del Garga, a trendy restaurant in Florence, Italy, just as

her son and fellow chef Alessandro Gargani brings in crates of arugula and kale from the market. She fin-gers the intensely green leaves and inhales the herbal profumo. “The quality and variety of food in this region are unsurpassed,” says Oddson, a Canadian expat who has made Florence her home since the 1970s.

Oddson is here, hours early at her restaurant not far from the Museo Leonardo da Vinci, to offer us some of the finer points of Tuscan cooking—and to tell us about

B y P a t r ic i a C r i s a f u l l i 

Downtime

60

What I know to be true...“Sauces can be made in less than five minutes with fewer than five ingredients.”—Sharon Oddson, chef and instructor of executives/aspiring chefs, at La Cucina del Garga

a rather curious trend in the Great Foodie Move-ment. Certainly, the movement, spurred by one cooking show after another at outlets such as the Food Network, has attracted more than its share of longtime devotees. Joining them now are also high-level executives, a group whose idea of gastronomy is typically a succulent meal cooked by someone else. In small but growing numbers, they’re show-ing up at one-day programs and weekend boot camps taught by some of the world’s best chefs. 

Oddson herself has taught groups from the Young Presidents’ Organization how to prepare four-course meals. According to her, virtually every one of her dishes can be prepared pretty quickly, in less than 10 minutes (not a bad sell-ing point to the busy C-suite/would-be-chef crowd). “Sauces can be made in less than five min-utes with fewer than five ingredients,” she says. 

However long the recipes take, many newbies come determined to learn firsthand how to whip up showstopping meals. But there is a practical aspect of all these classes, too: Knowing ingredients and how to combine them provides more options for those who want to eat healthier while traveling or those who have dietary needs. For example, one can reduce salt and fat by substituting creamy salad dressing with splashes of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, or by squeezing a lemon wedge to enhance flavors instead of reaching for the salt shaker.

In its purest form, the culinary art was once the purview of only professionally trained, high-hatted chefs. Today, even Le Cordon Bleu in Paris offers a smorgasbord of programs, from a two-day workshop on “The Art of Making Sauces and Jus” to a three-hour demonstration of “The Art of Cooking Like a Chef.”

Halfway around the world, Executive Chef Events teaches cooking to executives at a who’s who of technology firms—Google, Facebook, Yelp—as well as pharmaceutical and energy com-panies in Silicon Valley, Southern California and Dallas. And business is booming. Chef teams will

From Silicon Valley to Tuscany, time-pressed

executives are discovering a host of reasons to join

cooking boot camps.

Downtime

In the kitchen with Executive

Chef Events, professionals learn

cooking—and team building.

61

go anywhere to put on cooking programs for corpo-rate off-sites, which companies in multiple indus-tries use for team building. “Collaborative-cooking classes bring people together,” says Charles Gall, event producer for Executive Chef Events. “Cook-ing is more accessible to people than it used to be.”

And it isn’t just entertaining; cooking teaches business and life skills such as patience and precision. “When people come together to cook, they learn things such as adding ingredients at the right time and time management,” Gall adds. Then, there is the ultimate payoff: Seeing—and tasting—what you’ve cooked is a tangible and tasty way to express and experience creatively.

For her part, Oddson says some of her students quickly join the ranks of home chefs who enjoy cooking for family and friends. But there will still always be others who prefer sipping to simmering—the “culinary Peeping Toms,” as she describes them with a wry smile. They don’t really cook, but love watching artful prep and savoring the results.

Korn Ferry Briefings� The�Voice�of�Leadership

WORLD-CLASS COOKING SCHOOLSLE CORDON BLEU (Paris)

Famed cooking school (where Julia Child studied) offers short courses and workshops in the culinary arts and wines.

CULINARY INSTITUTE OF AMERICA (New York, California, Texas) Full-fledged culinary college offers boot camps on cooking,

baking and tips from professional chefs.

LANGLOIS CULINARY CROSSROADS (New Orleans) With full immersion in the style of Louisiana cooking, it offers

culinary entertainment and private cooking classes.

MIETTE CULINARY STUDIO (New York) Small classes focus on seasonal produce and farmers-market specialties.

62

Working AppsMore executives are turning to apps for help with everything from scanning docs to meditating.

B y A d a m Pe ne n b e r g

Even before Elizabeth Dukes rolls out of bed, she pulls up an app. In fact, the co-founder and chief marketing officer of the software firm iOFFICE subsists on a

steady diet of apps—more than a dozen a day. They help her wake up in the morning, control the air conditioner in her Houston home, and even provide daily Bible verses. (“It frames my focus,” she says.)

At work, the apps keep on coming, helping with tasks from project management to organizing conference rooms. “With this thing in my pocket,” she says, referring to her mobile phone, “I have everything I need to run the company.”

The mobile app market has certainly come a long way since the iPhone first came out a decade ago. Today, Google Play alone lists 2.8 million apps, while Apple’s App Store boasts 2.2 million. Though many of them are just for fun, the future appears to be in apps for the “deskless” workforce, says venture capitalist Kevin Spain, a general partner at Emergence Capital. People who aren’t tied to their desks during their workdays represent 80 percent of the world—including people in construction, manu-facturing, retail, law enforcement and healthcare. “About a quarter of a trillion dollars a year is spent on software for information workers, and that’s only 20 percent of world’s workforce,” Spain says.

But, for those who have desks or not, the options just keep on getting more handy. Here are five top ones.

TodoistThis app makes it easy to manage the most

time-intensive, complex projects as well as

remember to pick up a carton of milk on the

way home. You can also flag tasks based on

“priority level,” so you can check off the 17

most important tasks you need to accomplish

for the day.

Downtime

63

ALICEFor the overcharged executive on the

road, what could be better than toting

a concierge service in your pocket? At

least, that’s the conceit of ALICE (it

stands for A Life-Improving Customer

Experience). A hotel guest downloads

the app upon check-in and can use it to

arrange for a constantly updated list of

services or amenities: pre-order room

service or have the valet bring the car

around—you name it.

HeadspaceCo-created by a Brit formally

trained as a Tibetan Buddhist

monk, Headspace teaches the

basics of breathing and visual-

ization associated with secular

meditation. It provides a full set

of guided meditations in the

form of audio sessions designed

to lead you on a journey of

contemplation.

Korn Ferry Briefings� The�Voice�of�Leadership

ColorNoteAkin to Post-it Notes, this app lets users

create notes and lists in different colors

and stick them to their home screens.

They can set reminders, check off items

as they’re completed, protect notes with

a password and sync to the cloud or

archive. And, unlike paper notes, there’s

a search function for easy recall.

PrompsterSay goodbye to cue cards, flash cards,

paper notes and scripts with this app.

Simply mount an iPad or iPhone on

a tripod and the app functions as a

mobile teleprompter that lets you

practice and deliver speeches—plus it

keeps track of time.

64

Self-driving cars certainly offer plenty of dreamy potential, particularly when it comes to traffic. With roadways becom-ing more efficient, we’ll be scanning our

smartphones or watching videos while cars that sync up to each other zip through downtown Lon-don. At least, that is the vision.

In the meantime, there is the very unpleasant reality of sitting and stewing in highway jams and city traffic for hours, trying our best to stay

cool while someone not so cool honks behind us. And, yes, it’s all gotten worse, with traffic spiking 10 percent around the world since 2015, according to traffic navigation company TomTom.

We know the cause is generally the global economy’s own success. “On one hand, many cit-ies are seeing job growth, population growth and a boost in the economy,” says Nick Cohn, senior traffic expert at TomTom. “On the flip side, it’s almost impossible to see these benefits without

Traffic’s TollWorldwide, the morning commute has never been worse. Our global guide to hot spots—and possible solutions.

B y R e ne e M o r a d

UberAir’s concept

taxi/aircraft

Downtime

65

also experiencing an increase in traffic.” But who has the strongest bragging rights to the worst commute in the world? (Hint: Drivers in that city waste almost 10 full days a year traffic.) And what are some of the worst cities doing about it? Here’s an overview that might be handy for executives who plan to visit or move to any of these cities.

Mexico City Often called the world’s worst, with

the average driver wasting 59 minutes

a day in traffic. “The city has been

growing a lot, primarily in outer areas

that don’t have public transportation

options,” says TomTom’s Cohn.

BangkokDrivers in Thailand’s capital log an

average of 64 minutes a day during

their commutes. “More people are

buying cars, and the infrastructure’s

not there to support them,” Cohn says.

Los AngelesRecently chosen as a future test bed for UberAir’s

futuristic flying taxis, but that’s years away. For

now, prepare to sit in traffic: Trips that should take

60 minutes based on posted speed limits take, on

average, 87 minutes because of congestion.

BostonThough it has the second worst overall congestion

rate in the US, according to global traffic analyst

INRIX, it is on a fast track to improvement. It now uses

data from traffic apps to reduce congestion as much

as 18 percent at some notoriously

bad intersections.

StockholmTo deal with congestion, the Scandinavian city

introduced a toll for drivers who enter the city

center—with higher prices for rush hour. Traffic

dropped 20 percent.

New York Great mass transit doesn’t solve everything: New

Yorkers spend an average of 16 percent of their

travel time during weekdays in traffic, says INRIX.

An effort to introduce Stockholm-style tolls never

got off the ground.

San JoseWith commuters spending roughly 32 percent of

their travel time in traffic, the city implemented

connected traffic lights and is developing

self-contained “urban villages” to encourage

public transportation and cycling.

Worldwide, traffic congestion is up 10 percent since 2015.

Korn Ferry Briefings� The�Voice�of�Leadership

66

Winners and Losers

Whatever direction it’s heading, it’s almost a joke how

crazy Bitcoin has become: Up $10 Billion in 12 Hours…Down 25 Percent in One Day. And then there was this one from Forbes: Why Bitcoin Is Worth $0, $20,000, $200,000, Or $∞.

With such bouncing around, I can’t tell you where this cryptocurrency will be when you’re reading this. But one thing is certain, in most corporate offices, all but a very small and likely very young and savvy group of workers will understand how it all works. Most of us will remain pretty clueless.

And for good reason. Only a year ago, a fairly sizable number of great minds on Wall Street dismissed it as penny candy or worse. (In a famous line he now says he regrets, JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon once called Bitcoin a fraud.) Today? Goldman Sachs, in a report entitled “Bitcoin as Money,” predicts it could be viable currency, at least in emerging markets. And yet, most big brokerage houses were still block-ing clients from trading digital money, saying it wasn’t a suitable investment. Go figure.

So where do companies come in on all this? I’d argue the thoughtful firms should be keep-ing a close eye on the Bitcoin movement—for the sake of their employees. As my colleague, senior principal Mark Royal, so well explains, the end of corporate pension plans in favor of 401(k)-funded retirement means “we’ve moved from companies taking direct ownership of financial well-being, to a model where they are asking employees to control it.”

But handing over control doesn’t have to mean ignoring it. Indeed, some companies may soon want to invest in educating workers about digital cur-rency. Royal, a spe-cialist in employee motivation and engagement, says

turnover can clearly be affected by financial windfalls—and debacles. Go back to the hous-ing crisis last decade as one classic example: How many workers might not have suffered so much personally, and performed better at the office, had they had little more financial ed?

Now comes a different kind of potential bubble—smaller in scale but already a lot more volatile. Certainly, this head-spinning cur-rency will likely produce a lot of winners and a lot of losers among those bold enough to try it. No company can stop that—they can just help level the field of knowledge.

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