CEO

A C.E.O.'s incentive is not to learn, because he's not paid on real value. He's paid on cosmetic value. So he's paid to be nice to the Merrill Lynch analysts or the Wall Street analysts. So this is where the problem starts.

Of the 50 largest companies in the United States, you are the only woman CEO. Why?

That’s a good question. I think there should be many other women CEO s. It feels natural to be a CEO of WellPoint, and part of the reason may be that women may be drawn to healthcare as a profession. Women make 70 percent of all healthcare decisions. Women are currently available—ready, willing, and able—to be CEOs of major Fortune 50 or 500 companies. And I expect them to emerge as such over the days, weeks, and months ahead.

If you weren't CEO, what would you really love to be doing?

In some next life, I want to do something where I could give back. Teaching is one way. I would probably teach business, somewhere, someplace, somehow. I'd love to say I could teach math, but I can't even help my daughter with that.

The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that's what's really going to effect employees. No, you can't assume anything but very smart. They understand when you're really communicating with them, they understand when you're treating them as adults, as equals. And it takes a lot of effort to go out. You've got to be candid, you've got to be fair, you've got to give the bad news as well as the good news. Communicating with your employees is a very sophisticated and very time-consuming activity.

The best CEOs in our research display tremendous ambition for their company combined with the stoic will to do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal (within the bounds of the company's core values), to make the company great. Yet at the same time they display a remarkable humility about themselves, ascribing much of their own success to luck, discipline and preparation rather than personal genius.

There is a direct relationship between the absence of celebrity and the presence of good-to-great results. Why? First, when you have a celebrity, the company turns into "the one genius with 1,000 helpers." It creates a sense that the whole thing is really about the CEO. At a deeper level, we found that for leaders to make something great, their ambition has to be for the greatness of the work and the company, rather than for themselves. That doesn't mean that they don't have an ego. It means that at each decision point -- at each of the critical junctures when Choice A would favor their ego and Choice B would favor the company and the work -- time and again the good-to-great leaders pick Choice B. Celebrity CEOs, at those same decision points, are more likely to favor self and ego over company and work.

I think it's not good for a company in terms of its own bottom line to allow too great a gulf to open up between the compensation of the boss at the top and everybody else. Because what is it that holds a company together, that makes the average worker feel that he or she is part of an enterprise that they have a common fate, that it is necessary to put in the extra mile to make sure that that company works? It's the sense that everybody is working together, that there is not too great a gulf between people at the top and people at the bottom. The best companies in this country, the best companies, try to encourage a sense of teamwork, of common enterprise, of everybody in the same boat together. You cannot do that if the CEO is earning 140 times what the average worker in that company is earning.

The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that's what's really going to effect employees. No, you can't assume anything but very smart. They understand when you're really communicating with them, they understand when you're treating them as adults, as equals. And it takes a lot of effort to go out. You've got to be candid, you've got to be fair, you've got to give the bad news as well as the good news. Communicating with your employees is a very sophisticated and very time-consuming activity.

Listen.
In every office
you hear the threads
of love and joy and fear and guilt,
the cries for celebration and reassurance,
and somehow you know that connecting those threads
is what you are supposed to do
and business takes care of itself.

First of all, I just want to make a distinction about who zaadz is serving. When we first came up with the idea for zaadz, we talked about creating a community for ‘spiritual’ people. Unfortunately, the word ‘spiritual’ normally conjures up a vision of groups of monks sitting in silent meditation or perhaps... a bunch of idealistic vegans.

Our big realization is that ‘spiritual’ doesn’t have to be put into a box (or a silo). We believe that spirituality is about following your soul’s purpose, whether that’s about doing yoga,  spinning poi or creating the next big thing on the web.