Transcript of Confidence Classic: How to Unlock Your Full Potential in a Changing World with Julia Boorstin

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How is 97% of financing not going to female CEOs? I think it's something like 85% is to all male founding teams, and then there's a little chunk in there that is co-ed founding teams. The numbers are so crazy, but yet why are people missing out on these financial opportunities? It's not malicious, and that's the thing. I don't think anyone out there is saying, I want to exclude female founders. I don't care if they would make me more money. I want to exclude them. People get stuck in these loops. And there's this pattern matching that's going on at every level where people say, I've never seen a CEO who looks like her. She doesn't seem like what a CEO looks like. I'm used to CEOs looking like Mark Zuckerberg.

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Hi, and welcome back. I'm so excited for you to meet my guest today, Julia Borsten. She's CNBC's Senior Media and Tech Correspondent, and has been an on-air reporter for the network since 2006. She also plays a central role on CNBC's Bicoastal Tech Focus program, Tech Check, delivering reporting, analysis, and CEO interviews with a focus on social media and the intersection of media and technology. In 2013, Borsten created and launched the CNBC Disruptor 50, an annual list and event series she oversees, highlighting private companies, transforming the economy, and challenging companies and established industries. She also helped launch the Network's Closing the Gap initiative, covering the people and companies closing gender and diversity gaps. A graduate of Princeton University. Impressive. She has been a reporter for Fortune magazine, as well as a contributor to CNN and CNN Headline News. She was also an intern for Vice President Gore's Domestic Policy Office. She lives in LA with her husband and two sons, Julia. How do you find time for all of this?

Well, you know what? I feel I'm very lucky that during the pandemic, I was safe at home with my family. I was broadcasting on CNBC from home, and all of a sudden, I had all this extra time that I wasn't using to travel and commute where I could report out this amazing book. And I actually found that even during the hardest and most frustrating times of the pandemic, interviewing inspiring women with such a jolt of energy. And I loved reporting this book so much. I was happy to be able to squeeze it in.

All right, so let's get into When Women Lead, What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from them. What prompted you to write the book to begin with?

Well, so it all goes back to my reporting at CNBC. You mentioned that I do the Disruptor 50 list, and this is a list of the 50 fastest-growing private companies. And in interviewing hundreds and hundreds of CEOs over the years, I noticed, obviously, there were fewer female CEOs. There's a lot of data about how there are fewer female CEOs, but particularly when it came to these really innovative, cutting-edge companies, the female CEOs I was interviewing were so remarkable. At the same time, I was working on the Closing the Gap coverage, and I was looking at the statistics talking about how women get such a tiny % of venture capital funding. I mean, women are 8% of the CEOs of the Fortune 500, but they get 3% or less of all the billions of dollars of venture capital dollars. So you combine those two facts. The fact that these women I was interviewing were so interesting. Their approaches seemed so different. And then the fact that they weren't getting the same access to capital, I thought, of course, these women are amazing. They are by definition exceptional. And I thought that we could all learn so much by trying to figure out how these women had managed to defy the odds.

And I thought by telling the stories of these women who had defied the odds, I could learn from them and other people can learn from them. But what was interesting about the reporting process is the more women I interviewed, the more I really wanted to understand what the strategies were that they were I wanted to dissect the stories and say, okay, in this incident, this is a woman using contextual thinking, or this is a woman leading with empathy and finding the data to explain why these approaches are actually incredibly valuable. So in the book, I weave together the stories of about 60 women with about 100 different academic studies explaining their approaches and breaking it all down so we can understand why what they're doing is working so well.

Okay, Julia, before we lose my entire male audience, tell the men listening right now why they should listen to the rest of this podcast and why is it relevant to them?

This is more important for men to listen to than it is for women. I think a lot of women will find my book resonates. They'll find a lot of the stuff feels familiar to them and really speaks to them. But the reality is that men have a huge opportunity here in emulating and adopting some of these practices. If everyone should want to be someone who can defy the odds, right? So these women happen to use characteristics and techniques that maybe are not widely used by people in business, but they are so effective. They are effective if either men or women use them. And that's the reason I wanted to drive them to the data. I wanted to find out if these things that women were doing, like servant leadership or focusing on gratitude, are these things that only work with women or only work if women use them? But no, in fact, these strategies are just as effective for men as they are for women. And men would be able to tap into a lot more value if they could understand how leadership is not just this archetype of one way to lead. There are so many different ways to lead, and we can all tap into our own superpowers and figure out how to amplify them.

I was in corporate America for 25 years, and I was in the C-suite. And for me, back then, the idea of leadership from a place of empathy and gratitude might signal weakness. That is how I perceived it at that point in time. I no longer do Here We Are five years later, but I was so focused on getting to that next level and being perceived in a strong fashion that I was afraid to show up as that true version of myself. What are your thoughts for women or men that feel that way?

What you're describing is exactly what I'm seeing in the data and in so many stories. And that's why I want men to read my book and to listen to this podcast, because there is this archetype of what a CEO looks like. There's an archetype of what a CEO is either a man in a suit on Wall Street in the C-suite, or it's a young guy in a hoodie in Silicon Valley. And this whole Mark Zuckerberg, this idea that he talked about early in his career of move fast and break things, or the archetype of the CEO is authoritative and always confident and top-down leadership, making decisions that everyone follows. Guess what? All the data shows that doesn't work that well anymore. And especially when you're in crazy volatile times like these, where you need to be super adaptable, super able to listen to people on the ground and figure out what's actually happening, not making decisions just top down. These are the times when we all would benefit male or female from reevaluating what leadership skills are actually effective, not the stereotypes and the archetypes that are seared in our brains and in many ways holding us back, but actually figuring out what skills we might already have that would be useful and really valuable in leadership, but also what skills could develop that aren't the intimidating idea of the guy in the suit top-down authoritative management?

How do people discover what those traits are that they already have within them that maybe they haven't recognized yet?

Well, I think it's this idea that leadership can look like a lot of different things, and success in business doesn't only have to look like that authoritative, competent leadership. The most surprising thing I found in interviewing hundreds of people for this book is I thought I would find that these amazing CEOs were born that way. They came out of the womb knowing how to lead. They graduated from college ready to go. And it's not the case at all. Everyone has to develop their skills. There's one CEO I interviewed for the book named Christine Hunziker. She's a CEO of a tech company that helps retail companies called Castle. And she is super competitive. She played all of the sports. She played all the sports in college, and she was always really competitive. And that was an advantage to her. But she had to figure out how to use that competitive and apply it to improving herself. So the most reassuring thing I found in this book is that nothing is inborn, everything can be developed. And the CEOs who are most successful are those who are able to say, look, maybe I'm good at asking questions, which I think it's my superpower.

Maybe I'm good at being really driven. Maybe I'm good at bringing in lots of ideas to come up with the best solution. Whatever I like doing and I'm good at, I can always get better at it. And the key way to get better at it is not traditional competition. Position as we think of it, pitting herself against another company or another person. I'm just going to fight to get the job so she doesn't. That's not what it's about. It's about creating your own benchmarks and saying, Okay, if I'm going to be really solution oriented here, I'm going to figure out where I am now on this thing that I think I'm focused on or I'm good at, and how can I measure my progress? And this idea that by creating our own benchmarks against ourselves, not against anyone else, that's where you have the biggest potential to find what you're really good at and push yourself to grow.

I totally agree with that. So first of all, I would think it would be very difficult to get this many meetings to interview this many exceptional CEOs. How did you break through that noise and get these appointments?

Well, I have to say that was another advantage of the pandemic. When I started off on this project, it was early 2020, and I was doing interviews and meetings in person. But as the pandemic happened and everyone was stuck at home, I would just jump on Zooms with people. And in a way that was more intimate, because next thing you know, you're sitting with a CEO, and she's in her living room, and her kids are running by, or there's a CEO trying to hide out on the porch of her house because there's so much chaos inside, and the dog is jumping on her lap. So I think that I was lucky to get to have the advantages of Zoom and feel like I could really have intimate conversations with people when we're all spread out across the world. And also, I think in a way, everyone was feeling really vulnerable and open and thinking really hard about how to be good at their jobs in the way that maybe didn't get the attention of other people in the office because that didn't matter anymore, but how to be good in their jobs in a way that was incredibly effective, really, at the end of the day, going to be valuable.

So since you were speaking to many of these, most of these people during the pandemic, were they sharing their challenges of what was happening to their business during the pandemic? How they were thinking? What were you able to glean from that?

Yeah, I think that watching people in times of crisis is a great way to figure out how they Seed. And I have one specific chapter in the book about managing in crisis and how to be adaptable in crisis. But I do think this idea of figuring out how to succeed when times are tough, that's really what it's all about, whether you're a CEO or an employee. It's easy to make things work when everything is going easily, but we're not in those times anymore. I mean, I think with how crazy volatile the past couple of years have been, it seems like we're in this phase of constant crisis and upheaval. So one thing I found that was a really consistent theme talking to these women, these CEOs and investors, is that particularly in times of crisis, being prepared is key, and women actually have more of a tendency to overprepare and also being willing to adapt. And a lot of times in business, people think, Okay, we came up with this plan. We put this plan in motion. It's going to be really expensive to change the plan. We don't want to change the plan. We got to figure out how to make this plan work.

Sometimes that's the case. But when the world around you is changing and everything is crazy, sometimes it's better to actually say, look, we had this plan. It's going to be expensive to change this plan. We don't really know what the alternative is, but we know we need to make a change. I think it's sometimes painful and hard to be adaptable. But the more you can build that into your company's DNA and into your own outlook, the more successful you're going to be, especially in times of crisis.

Did you see or I don't know how many tradition, I know you work with a lot of innovative new companies, but when you look at more traditional companies, Isn't that more the norm that they don't want to deviate from that plan that they developed versus these more innovative, newer, younger companies?

Yeah, we talk a lot about the startup DNA and the advantages of being small and nimble. I definitely saw companies tap into that. But I also think that's something that big companies need to do now more than ever. I always talk about disruptors, but the big guys need to evolve, too, because everything around them is changing so quickly. I think there's this idea of the adaptability quotient. I mean, we talk about IQ, and then there's EQ, which is emotional quotient, but then EQ is adaptability. And that, I think, is going to be essential for everyone in business, big company, small company, CEO, employee, going forward.

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I ask you to try to find your passion. She's What is something that a leader can do to increase their IQ?

That's a big question because there are so many things you can do. One key thing is humility. If you are humble, then you're able to go through the data, read the data without your ego being tied up in the original plan. There's a lot of data about decision making in crisis and how women are more likely to focus on the data and responding to the data, as opposed to maybe being distracted by things that they've already done or by ego. I think if you could strip out ego, focus on your own humility and the value that you're going to get from learning from other people, then you're going to be able to make the best decisions. I think a lot about confidence, which I know you're so focused on. One of my favorite takeaways from the book is this idea that you shouldn't be super confident all of the time. You want to be super confident when you're executing an idea, but that you actually benefit if you can dial down your confidence. And you want to dial down your confidence when you're gathering information. So let's say there's a crisis, the world is changing, there's a pandemic, whatever it is, your business is facing upheaval.

You don't want to be super confident in that moment because you actually don't know what to do. And if you try to be too confident, you might actually execute without having the right information. I love this idea that you should, in those moments of crisis, dial down your confidence. Learn from everyone. Say, I don't know what to do. I'm going to be vulnerable here. Tell me your ideas. What are you seeing from your side of the company? What are you seeing from a division that has nothing to do with mine? Tell me everything you can so I could just learn and gather information. Then actually in that information gathering moment and in the analysis of information, you will benefit if you are not so confident. Then once you've come up with your plan, your new plan, that's when you're supposed to dial up your confidence and execute feeling good knowing that you've done the work. But I just love this idea that is actually okay not to be 100% confident all the time.

Do you have a story in mind that you can share with us when somebody actually acted on that, dialed down their confidence, said, I don't have all the answers, and it worked out for them?

Actually, I have two examples of companies that are nonprofits, and I include these stories in chapter in Managing in Crisis, specifically about the pandemic. And one is Feeding America, the CEO, Claire Babino-Fontanou. She was running this huge organization, biggest food bank organization in the country. And then another woman, Michelle Nunn, was running Care USA. So this is international aid organization that operates in 69 countries. Both of them, at first, were just executing on their plan, trying to get just ramp up whatever was that they were already doing. For instance, in Care USA, pandemic hits, and they thought, Hey, pandemic, we need to send soap and hand sanitizer to all these women who are spread out all around Africa and India and different emerging markets. That's what we should do. They started hearing more and more from the women who are on the ground. We can't eat soap. We do not want you to send us soap. Stop sending us soap. That's not helpful for us. And if Michelle Nun had just kept on executing and going with her plan that all the data shows that this is what she should be doing, she wouldn't have actually been serving the people she needed to serve.

And so I think it's this idea of listening to people on the ground. And care has these amazing organizations that are these savings groups, savings and lending groups. So mostly women come together and they lend out money to each other when they need it. And this was a great way for them to pull these groups and figure out, what are you guys seeing? So all over the world, they could actually get data. And for Feeding America, for them, it was about pulling their food banks and saying, what do you guys need right now? What are you seeing? They used to poll every quarter. It was more infrequent. They started doing these intensive polls every two weeks, and that revealed to them how many people were going to food banks that had never gone before. That was the key data point that helped them raise money, helped them get more donations. But they wouldn't have known that if they had waited a month to get the data. It was all about getting the information from the people there on the ground.

Oh, my gosh. I could not agree with you more. Just from my own personal experience, in corporate America, the closer I would stay to the ground, the more successful I would be. And the people I would always see fail would be the ones that would retreat to the white tower that you never saw, that became so distanced from what reality was in real time and start making poor decisions as a result. So I couldn't agree with you more there. Were there certain commonalities when you looked across all of these successful CEOs that you said pretty much they all had these traits or they all implemented these strategies?

I would say the one thing they all did is they all tried to improve on their own skills. No one was like, I got this. I've always been good at this. Everyone had this approach of a growth mindset. I think a growth mindset is so important. We talk about it with kids, we talk about the workplace, but everyone believe that they could improve and they should keep on pushing themselves to improve. Growth mindset was a key thing. But I also think humility to understand what they didn't know and when to be open to help or feedback. Some women built in systems to allow everyone across their organization to participate and share ideas, or even a system to let people who are introverts and quieter to speak up in meetings. So I think this idea of humility, growth mindset, and also wanting to gather the best ideas from everywhere, even if it wasn't their idea, they would want to gather it from everywhere. And I think all those three things really fit into each other. If you have humility, you'll see that you have an opportunity to grow. You won't say, I'm already great at this thing, and that ties a growth mindset.

And if you really want to push the overall organization to improve, you will want to pull in the best ideas from everywhere.

Do you remember what the strategy was to get feedback and engagement from those more introverted employees that don't like to speak up.

This is something that Zola, the wedding planning platform, their CEO, Shannlyn Ma, she describes herself as an introvert. And she said that in meetings, she would notice that the same people who were louder, would tend to dominate the conversation and drive the decision making because everyone would listen to them and say, Okay, I guess that's what we're doing. But she noticed that it was hard for her to speak up, but she had to because she was the CEO. But she didn't want other people who are introverted like her not to have a voice in the meeting. So what she started establishing, and a bunch of different companies have started to do a lot of things similar to this, is when you get into a meeting, she would have people basically vote and give their opinion on something before the conversation and debate really started. Let's say you had a brief, you could review the brief, everyone could say, Okay, here's what I think we should do, and maybe they put it on an email or they just write it down. Then you have an open discussion. Maybe you ask the people who are required or to participate first, or you just have an open debate.

But everyone has already shared their opinion. So you don't have one person who's the loudest, railroad everyone else into agreeing because you've already given everyone an opportunity to share before this loud dominant position is established. So that way you just get more of an even sharing of an idea separate from whoever is the loudest getting to win. And I think that's something that's incredibly effective just to make sure everyone's voice is heard and it's not about who's most extroverted.

Oh, my gosh. That is so good because some of those best ideas come from that really random person that you never hear from that isn't confident in the environment or like you said, it happens to be introverted or intimidated by that really extroverted individual. But in every company I've ever been in, it's always the same people, myself included, dominating meetings, because if nobody else is going to speak up, you're just going to grab that mic. I love that example of how to pull more participation from others because it's so needed.

Yeah, and it actually increases the diversity of ideas. There's a venture capital fund called First Round. They're based out of Philly, and their CEO, Josh Koppelman, started making changes to try to make sure that their decision making wasn't biased. He said, We want to make sure that we're not just having the same guy say, We're going to invest in this company. It's like the other companies I've invested in. The founder reminds me of myself. In order to have more diversity in their investments, he made sure that their investment meetings, after they heard a pitch, they would have people vote quietly before they started the discussion. And what he found is that drove much more diversity in which companies they invested in, because, again, it wasn't just about the loudest voice in the room. And the good news is that if you bring in more perspectives, you get diverse ideas. And there's so much data showing that a diversity of ideas are more financially valuable. That goes back to why men need to be listening to this and acting on this even more so than women do, because diverse leadership up, diverse founders. If you just invest in the same type of person, it is not going to yield the same massive returns as if you invest in women, people of color, not just people who look the same.

So what is the answer since you've gone down this journey, you're diving in all this data, you've got all the research, you've done all the interviews. It's so clear that the numbers tell us having more women, female representation at the C-suite level, at the leadership level, in any and every company on boards. It's so needed and it produces better results for shareholders. Everyone's telling us we've got the information, yet it's still not happening. What is the answer?

I think really talking about the data, that's why I wanted to include so much data in the book, and also talking about pattern matching. I think we talk about these numbers, how it's so crazy. 3% of financing goes to female CEOs. What? Why is it only 3%? How is 97% of financing not going to female CEOs? I think it's something like 85% is to all male founding teams. And then there's a little chunk in there that is co-ed founding teams. The numbers are so crazy, but yet why are people missing out on these financial opportunities? It's not malicious, and that's the thing. I don't think anyone out there is saying, I I want to exclude female founders. I don't care if they would make me more money. I want to exclude them. I don't think it's malicious. I think people get stuck in these loops, and there's this pattern matching that's going on at every level where people say, I've never seen a CEO who looks like her. She doesn't seem like what a CEO looks like. I'm used to CEOs looking like Mark Zuckerberg. There's an article I quote from the New York Times from about 10 years ago where VC says, I'll invest in anyone if they look like Mark Zuckerberg.

I mean, literally, that's what people were saying up until very recently. So I think there's this cycle that people get in. And I also think there just isn't as much representation of female leadership. So every rung along the way, the number of women decreases. And if you don't see a variety of archetypes of leaders, and if your stereotype of what a leader looks like is very limited, it's going to be hard to promote women into senior roles and to invest in women if you don't understand that there are plenty of examples of success that look very, very different from each other. There's a diversity of success. And that's one reason I wanted to tell these really fun stories in this book is these leaders are so inspiring for men and women. Their stories are so crazy and so cool. They've navigated the hardest challenges, and they don't look at all like Mark Zuckerberg. And in fact, their story is not that of Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. I think in the media, there's so much focus on a couple of these big failures. And I watched all the Elizabeth Holmes TV shows. I thought they were fascinating.

But it doesn't help other female founders when they know that there aren't that many positive examples out there of female leadership. I think it's so easy to focus on the crazy, salacious failure of someone like Elizabeth Holmes. But in doing so, we're missing out on some of these great, positive stories. I think it's important to have the other types of images and archetypes out there to help share a diversity of that. I think the more people realize they're missing out, the more they're going to start to change their behavior. So I'm optimistic because I think ultimately people want to make money, they want to be successful, and if they follow the data, they're going to invest more in diversity.

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What was your favorite story or your favorite interview when you look back on the book?

Oh, It's so hard to pick a favorite. I love how different they all from each other, and that was really fun. But I think the ones that were most surprising, I mean, I would just pick out a couple. My interview with Gwyneth Paltrow was really surprising. She was nothing like... I mean, I interviewed her a couple of times for CNBC, but as a leader and really digging into her leadership style, she was nothing like what I expected and really good at using vulnerability, both in the content of Goop, but also in her management strategy to make sure she was doing a good job and pulling in different ideas and learning stuff she didn't learn. She was surprising and interesting. But also the story I love of a woman named Toyan Ajayi, who's now CEO. She founded a company called City Block Health. And what I love about her is she's all about getting to the root of the problem in solving the structural issues and avoid keeping on putting a bandaid on something. And so her whole health care system is not about getting paid for the volume of care, but in the quality of the outcomes.

So there's this whole problem, the medical system, where people keep on going to the emergency room, and it's very expensive, and they're not getting structural help for their lives because they're just getting treated in the emergency room and being sent back home or sent even out to the streets if they're homeless. And so she has figured out a system of helping people get the social services they need, get the long term treatment they need. And so they don't keep on having to be going in and out and in and out of the emergency room. So I love this idea of fixing problems as opposed to putting a bandaid as a solution. And one of the women I interviewed who's a professor, she talks about being a fire preventer as opposed to a firefighter. And firefighters get a lot of glory. What they do is very important, but it would be better if we could just prevent the fires. And I think a lot of women in the book, Toyina Jai being one of them, is thinking, Hey, maybe we don't want to have the high profile image of just swooping in to fix a problem when it's broken.

I'd rather just not have the problem in the first place and put in these fire prevention strategies. And that's something I think is really powerful and also is a theme throughout the women I interviewed.

It's an incredibly daunting task, though, to take that on. You know it's going to be an uphill battle. You know that's a long term, that's not a quick fix. The other thing that I see typically in many industries and companies in corporate America is resources Roses are thin, especially in days like today. So people are doing double time. There's so little time to take a step back and think, what were some of the keys that empowered these women to push through those moments and take these visions forward?

It's all about the long term vision. You are totally right. It's so hard. It seems more expensive. It seems like you're not going to make your investors happy. Now it's so hard. There was this one nugget, one study I kept on coming back to you because it was so surprising. It was about the power of gratitude. So the social scientists did a study where they said, offer people in a college setting. They said, you can either have $50 now or $84 in the future. And people were more likely to pick the $50 now. They would pay them and they actually handed out the money. They gave another group of people this assignment, which is before we give you this question, we want you to do a gratitude practice. Talk about the things you're grateful for, write them down, just spend a certain amount of time really feeling gratitude and writing about it and thinking about this. We know you're really feeling grateful. Then they would ask them if they'd rather have $50 now or $84 in the future. People were willing to wait. There is something crazy about what happens when people feel grateful. They're more willing to plan for the long term to say, Hey, $84 is more and it's worth waiting a month because I'm not panicked and anxious about what I have or don't have right now.

The more people feel secure, the more willing they are to wait for the long term. A lot of the women in the book, particularly women whose companies also have an environmental or social benefit, they are doing long term planning. And so many women in the book use the term grateful or feeling blessed or feeling lucky. They're no more lucky than anyone else or certainly any male CEO. But there's actually data showing that women feel more comfortable with gratitude. Gratitude is a great feeling for everyone to practice. Obviously, it has all these benefits, makes people happier. Now, I've learned makes people more willing to plan for the long term. But I was surprised to learn that women are trained to feel good about feeling grateful, whereas for men, they're more likely to feel anxious like, Oh, do I owe someone something? Is gratitude more tied up in like, Owing someone a favor or something. So the more men can get away from that and realize how valuable gratitude is, it'll make us all probably happier and better leaders. So that was something that I noticed really helped the women think long term.

That is so interesting. I have not seen that study. So give me an example of someone in the book that's putting this gratitude practice into motion in their organization.

I'll give you the example of Julia Collins. And so she's had a fascinating background. She was the CEO of a company a couple of years ago, maybe five years ago, called Zoom Pizza. I don't know if you remember this, but it was a robotic pizza making company. It was peak Silicon Valley insanity. It was like a Jetsons company where there was a truck that was going to bake the pizza, a robotic pizza making machine in the back a truck and deliver the pizza to your house. It was very Jessie's like and crazy. She had this amazing experience. And then ultimately she was like, This is nuts. This is not right. I'm taking a step back. She had a baby, and she was like, I want to focus on what's really important, which is environmental sustainability. And the food industry and how the food industry can be more sustainable. Which was originally what got her into this robot piece of making industry in the first place. When after she had her kid and she was learning about the impact of the agriculture on environmental sustainability, she thought, Wow, this is crazy. I've had such amazing experiences that position me to actually help the agriculture industry and help the package goods industry that makes snacks and crackers and all these things to use my skill set to actually help the environment.

She felt this great gratitude to be at a point in time where her work could actually have an impact on the environment. Also, she happened to have learned all of these different things and knew different people in the industry where she could actually take her knowledge and execute on it. She now is a company called Planet Forward, which has a snack line of all regenerative agriculture-based snacks. They taste like great crackers. I really like them, particularly that's made of basal flavor. But she has specifically has a platform now where she helps consumer package goods companies like the ones that make chips and snacks, source all their ingredients from farmers who are helping the land as opposed to stripping the land of nutrients. She has this plan that is not a one year plan or a two-year plan. She is thinking like 100 years from now, how can I make sure that what I'm doing now has a real impact on agriculture and the environment? She talks about how grateful she is to have been in a position where she actually could do something. So she feels a ton of gratitude, and her vision is a really long one.

Wow. It's so interesting to you because since the pandemic, I feel like having a long term vision is incredibly challenging because there is so much uncertainty. But to hear that a leader like her can look to a hundred years in the future based upon her commitment to gratitude and her vision is incredibly impressive.

Well, I think in a way, it's impossible to plan for two weeks from now, right? It's impossible to plan for two weeks or a month from now, but you're better off if you can plan for five years from now because you have to figure there's going to be some normalcy. Things are going to even out in some way or another. So in a way, it's almost in the craziest times, you're better off planning long term than trying to predict what's going to happen in a month.

Wow. Yeah. Very well said and something that I need to work on myself. What was your biggest surprise takeaway from writing the book?

How much it would impact the way I go about my own life and the things that I do differently working in corporate America and dealing with a lot of different companies.

So how have you changed?

So I think that I have been able to identify bias when it's bias and to not let it bother me as much. And there's a story I tell the book about how I did an interview. It was great. I asked the same types of tough questions I always do. I got a phone call saying, Gee, I thought you were really mean in that interview. You're really harsh. Previously, if Before I started writing this book, if someone had said that to me, I'd have been like, Oh, my God, really? Was I? Oh, I hope I wasn't like, Really? Do I need to go back and rewatch that? But I knew I had done a good job in that interview, and I'd been really fair. I'm always fair. I thought a study I had read about in that moment, I just was reflecting on a study I read about how women are more likely to be judged on their style and their tone and less on the actual content. I was like, Wait a second, you're not judging me on the content. You're judging me more harshly because you expect me to be nice and nurturing all the time, but I'm just doing my job.

There was this moment of being like, Wait a second, this has nothing to do with me. This guy's comments have nothing to do with me. I don't need to take this Personally, and I asked him, I said, Will you give the same comment to one of my colleagues, one of my male colleagues? And this PR person was like, Let me think about that. Actually, you maybe have a point. And there was something that was just so liberating about that of realizing bias is out there. I don't want to let it get me down. But if I can identify it, then it's super liberating. It's not about me. It's not my problem. This is something else. But just to be able to draw the line and delineate the stuff bias and not something I need to take personally.

And what's cool about you sharing that with the other person is I'm sure they were not aware that they were even doing it.

It was a man. He was older than I am. And I'm sure he had certain expectations that a woman who's younger than he was was going to have a really friendly, light tone in interviewing a female CEO. And guess what? I'm just doing my job. I was totally fair. But there was something about I really caught him off guard. And I hope I made him think a little bit.

It sounds like you definitely did. You definitely made me think, and I know everyone listening, how can everyone get When Women Lead, what they achieve, why they succeed, and how we can learn from them?

Well, you can order it online. It's at all the major booksellers, and you can learn more about When Women Lead on my website, which is juliaborsten. Com. You can buy the book now, and I hope it's interesting and helpful to people.

Well, I'm so proud of the work you're doing, Julia. Keep up this amazing work, and I can't wait for everyone to get the book, guys. Check it out. We'll put all the links below. Thanks so much for being here today.

Thank you. I decided to change that dynamic.

I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear, start learning and growing.

Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while.

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