How to Lead: Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers

WARREN BUFFETT Founder and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

That stereotype of a general manager is not really how the world works today. Now the managers are uniquely good at something, and then they learn other things.

RB: Surrounding yourself with great people. Learning to delegate early on—not trying to do everything yourself. Making sure you’ve got the kind of people who are praising the team around them, not criticizing them. And having people who are willing to really innovate, be bold, and create something that everybody who works for the company can be rea

At the time I was in college, the late 1980s, about 37 percent of college undergrads in computer science were women. We were on our way up, we thought, like in law and medicine. That has since dropped to about 17 or 18 percent. Now it’s on a slight uptick to 19 percent. One of the things I’ve learned about data and the data we collect is we think d

JEFF BEZOS Founder and CEO, Amazon; Owner, the Washington Post

Then you have to identify who your customer is. At the Washington Post, for example, are the customers the people who buy advertisements from us? No. The customer is the reader. Full stop.

What I’ve seen in twenty years of work with the foundation is that if we can help lift up all women, we will change the world. There are a lot of forces pushing women down today. I’ve seen it in country after country, all over the world. If you lift up women, they lift up everybody else around them. That ultimately lifts up a community and a countr

One area that Indra did not sacrifice while at Pepsi was empathy for her employees. She regularly wrote to the parents of her senior employees, giving them a type of report card (invariably a positive one) about how their children were performing. How can your mother get a favorable report card from your boss and you not feel undying loyalty to tha

MELINDA GATES Cochair, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation