Leadership Next

For years Steve Case has been pushing venture capital investors to look beyond California, New York and Boston for startups to support. This has been the driving mission of his investment firm, Revolution, and his seed fund has backed nearly 180 companies in 80 cities. But now - finally - a growing number of investors are joining him."I do believe one of the silver linings of a terrible tragic pandemic may be this accelerant in terms of what's happening with these rising cities and more companies starting and scaling in cities," he tells Leadership Next's Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt.Case says this is of course good news for company founders, but it's also good for workers and local economies. And, hopefully, it translates into more diverse entrepreneurs attracting funding.Also in the conversation: the types of companies Case has his eye on now, his time as the founder of AOL, and why you may want to consider a trip to Chattanooga.The transcript of this episode will be available on Fortune.com.

In this final Leadership Next of 2021, Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt are joined by Joe Ucuzoglu, CEO of Deloitte US and long-time sponsor of the podcast. The team reviews highlights from the season, identifying themes that emerged from the 40 episodes, and discusses what's ahead for business in 2022.Voices from the season appear throughout the episode. Hear from the CEOs of UPS, Chipotle, Intel, S&P, United, Best Buy, Albertsons and many more.Leadership Next will return with more interviews in January of 2022. Subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss a thing!

After 24 years at Home Depot, Carol Tomé was ready to retire. But United Parcel Service - where she had served as a board member since 2003, had other plans. Why did she decide to accept the CEO job at UPS? That's just the first thing Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt want to know in this episode of Leadership Next.UPS is the leading delivery business in the U.S. Tomé says the company delivers six percent of the country's GDP each day. That requires a lot of employees! Tomé sees making these workers happy and developing them into leaders as one of her top priorities. She explains the various ways she's tackling that part of the job.Also in the conversation: growing the business, navigating COVID, smoothing supply chain snarls and innovating for the years ahead.

Before the COVID pandemic, roughly 10 to 15 percent of Chipotle's business came in through digital channels. Today, that number is closer to 40 percent."Sometimes, you know, your strategies end up finding an unknown accelerator. And the pandemic proved to be an accelerator on the strategy," CEO Brian Niccol explains.The company was well positioned to excel during the pandemic in other ways too. Thanks to its previous food safety scares, Chipotle had stringent health and safety protocols in place. Raising wages and outlining opportunities for career growth have helped the company weather the current labor shortage. And now, Niccol is looking ahead to another big challenge: climate change.Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt dig into all of the above, and more in this episode of Leadership Next.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby was one of the first leaders of a major American company to insist all employees be vaccinated against COVID-19. The move was controversial. But in the end, over 99% of workers complied. Kirby tells Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt that while he was confident the mandate was the right choice, he's glad the process is now in his rearview mirror. In this episode of Leadership Next Kirby shares how he makes hard decisions. He talks about United's commitment to be "100% green" by 2050. (He's quick to point out that carbon offsets do NOT figure into the company's plan.) And, he explains how his military training and love of reading have set him up for success.

When Adrian Gore decided to build an insurance company in South Africa in the early 1990s, he took a novel approach: the company should aim to make people healthier. This was not - and is not - a common tactic in the insurance business. But in a country with lots of sick people and not enough doctors, it seemed like the only sustainable choice Gore told Leadership Next.His gamble paid off - Discovery is now a very successful global business that has expanded beyond health insurance. In this conversation with Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt, Gore explains how he founded Discovery, the power of incentives to drive healthy behavior and where the company is headed next.

Cruise, backed by General Motors, plans to have one million of its self-driving cars on the road by 2030, according to CEO Dan Ammann. But the cars won't be sold to individuals. Instead, Cruise plans to introduce the public to its autonomous vehicles via ride sharing. The idea is that instead of calling an Uber or a Lyft, passengers will call a Cruise AV.On this episode of Leadership Next, Ammann tells Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt how the company plans to pull this off. He also explains why he's so eager to get more self-driving cars on the road. For him, it's about safer roads and saving lives.

In the past, offering executives leadership training was an expensive proposition. This meant only a handful of employees were able to participate. But what if you blew that model up? If you could lower the. cost, you could increase the number of employees being trained to excel. The result: a broader and more diverse group of up-and-coming corporate leaders. This is exactly what ExecOnline's CEO and co-founder, Stephen Bailey, has done. His company partners with top business schools and offers their material online to nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies.In this episode of Leadership Next he tells Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt why he started ExecOnline. The three discuss how the responsibilities of corporate leaders have changed, and what it takes to be a successful leader today.

Jack Dangermond founded Esri over 50 years ago and has grown it into a giant private company that provides software to global corporations, governments and NGOs. At its heart, it's a map-making company. Customers pull data into Esri software to create maps that help inform all sorts of decisions. As Jack tells Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt, "Our customers run the world ... and they do it through maps."But Esri's mission runs deeper than this."We look at issues of a social nature or an environmental nature, and try to build some of the parameters of that kind of thinking into the basic tools. So when our users buy those tools, they wind up doing usually a lot more than their basic mission. ... They do things more efficiently. They do things more sustainably, ... So we can't actually control them or tell them what to do. But we can introduce to them this geographic way of thinking and acting that ultimately drives better action and behavior on their part."

Michael Dell had a reputation for not paying attention in school. But apparently, reading computer magazines in the back of his high school classrooms paid off - he went on to found Dell Technologies. This story, and many others, appear in Dell's new book, 'Play Nice But Win.' And today he's sharing several of them on Leadership Next.Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt spend some time digging into Dell's decision to take his company private in 2013 and then return to the public markets in 2018.You may not be surprised to hear that the CEO of Dell Technologies also has a lot to say about tech itself. He believes "nobody is going to be spared" from transformation, that the experience will be "wicked and brutal" but also "wonderful and amazing."