Hello everyone Welcome to the Superbosses course on Coursera. The third course in my specialization. I think you're going to find some really important and interesting takeaways that come out of this story a lot of it based on my book called Superbosses. And literally 10 years of research on trying to understand leadership and talent and how to advance our own careers in a variety of different ways. Let me start as I'd like to do with a story. It's a story about a woman who graduated from Berkeley, UC Berkeley back in the maybe late 1960s. And after graduating she moved to France. She loved France, she loved Paris, she loved the foodie scene kind of like me as well into it as well all of that. And she lived the Parisian lifestyle which meant of course going to the local markets and you see the beautiful auberges and the leeks and all the other ingredients and and what were these products at the market? They were they were trucked in that morning from farmers that we're all pretty local. It was classic farm to table right that we talked about today a lot needless to say organic food very natural ingredients. So different really than how so many Western countries at that time were actually eating because it was the post war era processed foods. And so this woman is going to the market and experiencing the food this way in the culture and she gets this epiphany, she figures out what she wants to do with her life, which is kind of amazing. And what she wants to do with her life is she wants to come back to America and teach Americans, how do we differently and better. I mean you want to talk about it crazy purpose in life, right, gigantic purpose. But you know what? She comes back to the US, she opens up a restaurant and the restaurant called Chez Panisse and her name is of course Alice Waters. If you're into the food scene, foodie scene, restaurant scene, you'd certainly know the name Alice Waters kind of a legendary name really at this stage of the game. And what, she actually has done, what she set out to do 50 plus years ago because if you look at how people eat and think about food in so many restaurants, in so many places around the country, people really do pay attention to where the food comes from. Organic food business is booming. Farm to table is normal. Every second restaurant talks about farm to table and she's disseminated these ideas into the culture and continues to try to go deeper and deeper. So for example, when Michelle Obama was planting a vegetable garden on the white house lawn in the Obama era as the president of United States, of course it was Alice Waters idea and Alice was there with Mrs. Obama and a bunch of kids doing that planting and taking care of that garden. I mean it was just, so kind of classic and typical for how she thought about it. But you know what, she did something else and there's something else that she did is this, if you look at the people that work for her over the course of literally decades, you would find over 200 people that have gone on to tremendous success in their own careers. These could be, sous chefs that became, executive chefs or head chefs are open up their own restaurant, it could be bakers and pastry chefs and it's also by the way, people that worked in the front of the house and in the business side of the restaurant. In the last 10 years, high end food has become a big business for French or capital for private equity coffee in particular. Companies like blue bottle out of San Francisco was acquired by by nestle and some of the players in the private equity and venture capital business that are focusing on, high end coffee and high end food, they actually worked for Alice Waters in the very earliest stages of her career. And so, if you want to look for someone that has developed, has built a track record of generating and regenerating talent on a continual basis. You have somebody of Alice Waters now, I was really intrigued by this story because this is really something I was trying to figure out and what I was really trying to figure out is how how can a company not just survive, but thrive into the long term. And it always boils down to getting great people, retaining those people, developing those people and not doing it once, not doing it twice, but doing it continuously. And so, when I heard about and started to research Alice Waters and I talked to her and I talked to many of her proteges, I said, wow, I got a story here, I got someone who kind of fits this model that can answer this core question that everyone wants that once the answer, which is how do you get world class talent, how do you keep helping them get better? How do you advance people's careers? How do you become successful? But if you know something about the restaurant business, the idea that you're a sous chef and you go on to become a head chef somewhere else, not particularly new idea happens a lot. So I knew I needed to keep looking and I decided the next sector I would look at was the National Football League American Football. And the question I asked was if you look at the history of the NFL, which head coach has had the biggest influence on the development of other head coaches. And the good news about sports is that there's lots of data and so what I did is I looked at the Super Bowl winners and losers, the two best teams every year and I looked at the head coaches and I did a genealogical study of them if you will. And of course, I'm not talking about their parents, I'm talking about who they work for, you know, what coaching staffs they were on. And when you do that, you start to build these kind of trees of talent. If you can picture it, where this person worked for this person who worked for that person. And when you do that exercise, you discover that there's one name far ahead of everyone else. Do you know who that is? Bill Walsh, former head coach of the San Francisco 40 Niners. Some of you may have thought it was Bill Parcells, very famous, well known coach as well, but in fact Bill Parcells happened to have one incredibly talented assistant coach that went on to lots of super bowls as Bill Belichick of course from the new England Patriots. But Bill Walsh had had had a dozen, and he's so far ahead of everyone else, including Bill Parcells. And so he has this track record of generating and regenerating town in this case head coaches. And so, it was kind of interesting, here's high end food, here's, football and sports, but I kept going and I started looking into lots of other different different industries. And I looked at, fields as diverse as hospitals and that was Tommy Fritz, comic books, Stanley legendary comic books marvel and all the rest nonprofit endowment investment funds, which was David Swenson was at Yale for years and years and filmmaking. It's Roger Corman in special effects George, Lucas, hedge funds, Julian Robertson newspapers, Jean Roberts, I mean goes on and on and on. I mean, take a look at this, look at all these names that you see on this slide, what do they have in common? They all worked for the same person and who that was, that was Lorne Michaels from Saturday night Live. Of course they did. And by the way, that's just one, list of names that you see, some of the names that you might recognize, I literally could have put up 10 different sets of names with lots of names you would recognize and they'd all have the same thing in common. They actually all worked for Lorne Michaels, the executive producer, the creator of SNL, how about this? All these people also worked for the same person in their careers. And who was that Norman Brinker, who is one of the real pioneers in the casual, the multi unit casual restaurant business. Let me show you my little photo album of some other super boss leaders, just so you can kind of see kind of match some faces to some of the, some of the names of some of the stories that I'm going to share with you in this module. And, and by the way, this is just kind of one quick page in a sense of my photo album, there are many other super bosses and I could literally put together something with, one photo after another. But this will give you a good field, so there's Jack Ma from Alibaba, in the upper left hand corner from, from china, very, very successful and an important company. On the opposite corner, upper right, who do you have? Well, you probably recognize her, Oprah Winfrey, number of people that Oprah Winfrey has helped develop is a lot, there's Dr Phil and all these other characters, but there's a lot of people behind the scenes as well. Below Oprah is Kv Kamath from India who was the CEO of a company of a bank called ISIS. And he's become kind of a legendary player in the Indian financial services business. Below him is Julian Robertson from hedge funds. And then just going across,, you see Cheryl Sandberg from Facebook, Miles Davis, right smack in the middle, bottom, kind of an example most people would not have thought of. But the legendary trumpet ear and when you look at the things that Miles Davis did in developing his band and how he worked with people, it's unbelievable how similar it is to what some of these more kind of traditional leaders were doing. You see Norman Brinker two to the left of Miles Davis. So I mentioned from the casual restaurant industry, Jean Roberts in newspapers and working our way back up. That's Alice Waters, who I started with and smack in the middle, you may recognize these names, pretty famous people. Ralph Lauren who really is for a long time, the, the creator, the generator of so much world class talent in the fashion industry, Joseph Abu ,John Varvatos, Tory Burch, Vera Wang John Idol has been the CEO of Michael Kors for years and years. The list goes on and on. And, and then Larry Ellison from Oracle, more unusual example because he was known to be a really, really tough boss and I'll say more about him later. But he also has helped develop so many people. So a little snapshot for you to be able to match some of the faces and the names and the stories to come. And so, you have this kind of fascinating pattern of people that have this long track record of generating and re draining talent on a continual basis. So now, you know what a super boss really is. I mean I made up the word, there's no word in the dictionary like that. I combined super and boss together. So what is it? Well, you know what? A super boss is a leader who creates other leaders. It's a leader who sees potential and others often before you see it yourself, a leader who generates and regenerates talent as I've said, but also very importantly a leader that produces results. These are among the most successful leaders in their in their companies and in their sectors. It's really kind of remarkable. That's what a super boss as super boss is. One more thing if you think about some really well known companies that have become talent factories, Salesforce, Google or Tata out of India. I mean, how did that happen? How do they become these talent factories? And I think the answer is by institutionalizing or inculcating into the culture of these companies, what I like to call the Superboss Playbook and that's a lot about what we will talk about throughout this entire module. I'll break it down for you, I'll give you lots and lots of examples and I'll give you lots of practice on how to pick up these these these tools, these these techniques yourself, many of my examples are about famous people and that's going to be interesting. It's going to be fun to learn from, but I don't want you to think for a minute that Superbosses are are limited to this kind of select crowd. Anyone can be a Superboss. Anyone can be a Superboss. In fact, when I wrote the book, super bosses and I did a lot of book signings and I travel all over the world to do that. And when you're signing a book, I'd ask, who would you like me to sign the book too? And they tell me they're the name of their boss, who they now say now that I heard you speak. I understand that my boss is actually a Superboss and it's a person I never heard of in a company I barely knew existed. In other words, there are Superbosses up and down so many companies. The problem is, we don't always know who they are and we'll talk a lot about how to figure out how to identify those people as well. So keep this in mind as we're going through this entire course. Anyone can be a Superboss. Anyone can enhance their Superboss leadership capabilities. Very important to keep in mind, this will be fun. Let's get going.
