Audette Exel:
I believe the next 10 years are going to be the most important 10 years in all of our lives, facing existential threats to humanity. Business knows that companies that are not purpose-led are not going to be in existence at any significant way within a decade.

Andrew White:
Hello, you're listening to Leadership 2050, a podcast from Oxford University, Saïd Business School. I'm your host, Andrew White. I'm a leadership coach and director of the Oxford Advanced Management and Leadership Programme. Every year I work with global leaders helping them take bold, new strategic directions. In this series, I'm in conversation with people leading the transformation of the business world to meet the challenges of the 21st century. What does it take to lead the revolution in thinking we need? In this episode, I'll be talking to Audette Exel, the founder and CEO of the pioneering Adara Group. One of the world's first businesses to put purpose at the heart of its operation. Audette Excel is not afraid to rip up the rule book, in fact, she'd positively encourage it. "I'm a social justice business person." She says. It has been said over debt, she makes money to make change. I began by asking her to take us back and describe her leadership journey. What is the foundation upon which she's building the work she's now doing?

Audette Excel:
So yes, I was born as a very lucky Kiwi in a country where I never worried about whether or not I was going to have shelter or food on the table. Born of incredibly good people who taught me... my dad was a journalist, my mom a secretary, who taught me that the way you judged yourself was by how much you contributed of yourself to others. And as a little girl, we moved to Singapore. My dad was a journalist as I said and he was there during the Vietnam War. So I remember having a very clear moment of understanding of how different the lives of other little girls were to my life. And I actually don't really remember a time as a thinking young person, where I wasn't outraged by the situation of women and girls compared to my situation just by the great, good fortune of being born in a country like New Zealand.

Audette Exel:
So my journey started really as an activist. So I studied law because I wanted to be an officer of the court and do human rights work, spent quite a lot of time getting taken, dragged off the streets by the police protesting. Whether it was the Anti-Apartheid Movement or as a feminist activist, the peace movement. I very much perceived myself as, and people who knew me perceived me as, oh, that's Audette, she's going to be waving placards around and causing trouble for the rest of her life. By strange set of circumstances, I ended up having to finish my law degree in Australia. And so suddenly I'm at a university and effectively an Ivy League university, not an activist left university. And I have this moment of meeting a young man who tells me that he studies law because of how much a QC, a top QC makes a day.

Audette Exel:
And I remember being almost struck by a bolt of lightning, this alien species, that instead of thinking about changing the world and being an officer of the court was thinking about making money. And what struck me was, that I knew nothing about those people, and I knew nothing about capital and power. I came out of effectively the activist left, and so I made this huge decision right at that moment to go learn, to recognise that whole of my knowledge. So I took a huge step out of my tribe, horrified everyone who knew me, put on my first pair of high heels and my first makeup, and marched into what I considered to be the most right-wing law firm in the country. And of course what happens when you step outside of your tribe is you recognise your own prejudice. And there began for me, a very lucky career with great law firms through law, out of Australia into Hong Kong, great English law firm actually Linklaters & Paines, into Bermuda, into banking, strange story ending up as the CEO of a publicly traded bank and chairing the Bermuda Stock Exchange.

Audette Exel:
And actually my family have on the wall of our house, the Bermuda $5 note, because I also ended up when I stepped down from the bank, on the board of the Bermuda regulator, and I actually signed the Queen's neck on the $5 note in Bermuda. So they see that as the sort of complete antithesis of where I started from. The act of us who ended up signing the money in what somebody would see as an offshore tax haven, but actually what it was, was a journey of learning and recognising that I'd been thinking in silos and that if you can engage and understand how power and capital moves, you can make huge change. And so after nearly four years running the bank, I decided now or ever, I'm really a board entrepreneur. And so I stepped out of the more mainstream way of thinking about banking and into entrepreneurship and set up the Adara Group.

Audette Exel:
So that was now, I almost can't believe it nearly 24 years ago. And Adara as you know, is a model of social entrepreneurship, where I had built businesses that are effectively investment banking businesses, for the sole purpose of funding another organisation I set up at the same time, which is now a quite large international, not-for-profit providing service to people in extreme poverty and some of the world's remotest places. So the businesses are funding engines, there're little engines that could. And I now find myself with this amazing life where I've got colleagues all over the world. That some of them are investment bankers at the top of their game, some of them are educators, some of them are behavioural scientists, some of them are nurses, midwives, surgeons, all of us with these incredibly diverse set of skills, backgrounds, ethnicities belief systems, but one united purpose which is to serve people in poverty. So it's been a winding journey, I never knew I'd end up here, but it's been a joyous one. And I think a very lucky one.

Andrew White:
Yeah. I mean, I think winding but also incredible. And there's so much in what you've just said, but what I want to take you back to, what I would call the crucible moments along that journey. And I'll kick you off with one that I see, which was really the curiosity into another tribe. And I think when I look at the world today, there's so much relevance there. I think with social media, it's polarised as and/or it's more polarising in many ways, and yet that curiosity leads you on a journey. So that would be one crucible moment that I would see here, but I think there was probably several others in there. But I'd be really interested to hear from you, what were the two or three real turning points in terms of the journey that you were then to go onto?

Audette Exel:
I think you spot on with curiosity. And as a sort of side note, I think that if you are curious about people, life is always interesting. And it doesn't matter which decade I'm in, I'm constantly curious, I'm fascinated by human beings and that's allowed me to be open to new ways of thinking. And I think the moment came from being born in a family of what I would describe as thinkers and givers. So my father as a journalist, was totally curious about the world and our home was always full of really interesting people. And my mother's an incredibly deep, thoughtful giver. I think that setting created curiosity. I think there's another piece around that I just want to draw out a bit, which is, my father had come from a pretty religious home, and quite a closed religious group. And so he sort of drummed into his kids, question everything. Don't ever accept orthodoxy.

Audette Exel:
And so it framed the way that I looked at the world as, oh, that's interesting, I wonder if that's right. So I think for me, without question, the people that I was born of. I think other moments for me when the Springboks came to New Zealand during the Springbok tour, which was in the early '80s, I don't know how much listeners will know of that period of history, but 500,000 of 3 million people went out on the streets twice a week, for the 90 days the Springboks were in New Zealand to protest against the racism that apartheid represented. And I can remember being out on the streets with one of my great friends, a Kiwi named Jenny Morgan, who happens to be her ethnicity by origin is from China, but she's as much a Kiwi as I am of course. And I remember standing in a match with her and there were some guys in the pub just across the road and they were throwing bottles at us and they were screaming at her, "Go back to where you came from."

Audette Exel:
It was a moment for me of understanding that bigotry in any form is never okay but secondly, you've got to always, always stand up for what you believe in. And then if I roll forward, there's a lot of other moments of extensively travelling in the developing world and the low and middle income countries. Huge moments of recognition of how extraordinary people are, how much heroism there is in these communities that are so wonderfully different to me, and yet the size of the challenge that the communities that are living in settings in poverty are having to deal with and so, whether that was travelling. I travelled on a bicycle for quite a period and ended up in Romania. I don't know if you remember when the Romanian orphanages were just opening up and worked in a Romanian orphanage for a while and travelled through India, I was actually married in India to a wonderful Israeli man.

Audette Exel:
There're all these settings, there've been all these periods in my life where I've suddenly seen myself in contrast to others, and seen how much I have compared to other amazing people. So they've sort of have been a series of moments like that and certainly for me, the moment of recognising I didn't understand power and capital, that was an absolutely pivotal moment for me. It was a huge choice to step outside of human rights activism and move into investment banking, advice to the banks, mergers and acquisitions. But gee, I'm glad I made it because it's allowed me to think outside of construct and to bring respect to people who are quite different to me. So they've been quite a series of them and they still are.

Andrew White:
Yeah. I mean, what I love about your story is this ability to hold, not just what many people see as competing ideas or competing worlds, but institutionally, which are quite different. So we're going to go into Adara, but I just want to really underline what you said, because it may have passed by some people. But this is effectively, think of one hand, which is the traditional investment bank. It advises on M and A activity and other transactions and so it is like a J.P. Morgan or a Goldman Sachs in terms of its activities. But unlike those organisations, there's not a group of shareholders, there's a foundation which you've also set up, which from what I understand is a world expert in terms of neonatal care, where there's no electrical infrastructure, education and healthcare work in low-income countries.

Andrew White:
And the one is not just a foundation, which sits as it would in a large investment bank, it is integral to the institution that you've created. One is in service of the other, and you've created this wonderful community of people who don't see the world in terms of these divided ways. So, so much of Adara reflects your own journey. So if you could talk to us a little bit about the group, what does it do? And what was the journey to establish something? Which when most people think about investment banks, they either think about the City of London, or Hong Kong, or New York, or in places of global capitalism, which have had their ups and down. They've created huge problems through the financial crisis, they are struggling to know what their role is in the world of today, they've also done huge amounts of good.

Andrew White:
I mean, we wouldn't be in our houses or with our cars, without the financial services that they bring. But you've done something very different with that capability of investment banking. So talk to us a little bit more about that, because I think it's just so, so interesting.

Audette Exel:
And I want to pick up on your theme actually, because it's actually an underlying theme of a belief system. And yes, Adara is a manifestation in a way, it was a trial of me playing with ideas that I wanted to manifest. And one of them is that polarity is not useful. And I think as we start to talk about forward facing in the world, one thing that really strikes me particularly in the last decade I think, but increasingly over the last couple of decades, is that we want to go to black and white, we want to go to good and bad, we want to go to this is my team, that's your team. And we want to stand on hills and throw stones at each other, when actually at such a complex moment in our history, engagement across divide is needed for the kind of existential problems that we are now dealing with, that we have to lift way beyond our families, our communities, our companies, our nation states into global thinking.

Audette Exel:
And the only way we can do it, is to get out of polarity, but actually we are we're trekking further and further to polarity. So you're right, Adara represents for me a manifestation of that. I wanted to prove to myself first and foremost, that you could engage across divide, that an investment banker could be as magnificent as a midwife who works 20 days walk from a road, and puts her life on the line every single day to help others. I wanted to show that actually there's a chain, when we hold ourselves in chain together around the world, amazing things can happen. And that's exactly the way that Adara manifests. So yes, we are the banking businesses. I have a panel of 15 of Australia's leading investment bankers and advisors, including the guy who runs Citibank, the guy who runs Goldman Sachs, the Glitterati, the biggest non-exec directors, the most high integrity, but very high-profile advisors. They work for Adara for free, amazing.

Audette Exel:
Without recompense, advising on enormous mandates. So at the moment, we're advising a major company on a $16 billion contested takeover, we're advising the board. We're sitting at the highest levels of corporate Australia with one of the gentleman who's advising, who's on my panel was the chair of Goldman Sachs, the other one was the head of J.P. Morgan Investment Banking. These panel members, men and women alike, are so emotional about the fact that their skills, their mastery, is generating millions and millions of dollars for people they will never meet, who in need. And those people are amazed, my team's on the ground, who are doing the development work, the Adara teams. They can't get over the fact that they're connected to these Wall Street, investment bankers and it's joyous.

Audette Exel:
So it's interesting when I think about Adara now in terms of all the ups and downs, and I have to confess that there isn't a night that I don't anguish about how it's not enough, how I'm not turning the dial enough, all the mistakes that I've made, how big the need is. But if I think about what we've achieved, when I'm being proud of what we've achieved, I think about, okay, we are impacting people directly through service. So this year we'll touch about 170,000 people in extreme poverty in the streams of work we do, so tiny clients like preemie babies in remote Africa or kids who are in very remote Nepal who've been trafficked. So 170,000 people through education and health and our specialties, so direct impact. But then there's a second piece, which is, we're influencing change and we're using our networks and our knowledge sharing, to help others learn from all our mistakes as well as their successes.

Audette Exel:
And then the third thing to me to come back to the point you're making, is I hope we're inspiring others to make change. Showing people, this is possible, get out of your cage of siloed thinking. Investment bankers are not all evil and we can work together with one united purpose. And when I look again, if I bring it back to where do we stand as a world? That to me is going to be an absolutely essential thing and in a small way, we have to live to experience. I have 24 years of doing that and showing people, absolutely this is possible. And these are the kind of models that we need to co-create to affect change at this very complex time in our world.

Andrew White:
So I want to really delve into a little bit of the detail here, because I find it so interesting. And if I could take on the one hand, a typical person who would come out of another investment bank or perhaps a younger person who would come out of university and think, I'm going to join Adara and I'm not going to go into one of the traditional investment banking companies. So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, I'm somebody who's always thought I'm going to go into the development world. And then I presume at some point they're sitting in a room together in Adara.

Audette Exel:
Oh, they are all together.

Andrew White:
And so what I'm interested in, is what do I... as an investment banker, let's take them first. What do I need to go through? In a sense, what am I getting? Because I presume you're not paying them the mega salaries that they get paid in the other places. So, there's a premium above my salary. And then for the person on the development side, there's something that has to change in my mind I guess, to come into this world and I have to go through a process or some form of shift. And I'm interested, how do you find unity? I guess is the question

Audette Exel:
I believe profoundly in the magnificence of human beings. And I'm a bit of a counter view and at the moment there's an awful lot of darkness and despair, but I actually think this period in our history is going to be defined by the magnificence of humankind, not the malevolence. And the reason I believe in magnificence is I watch them interact with... First, I watch their brilliance. I watch our global health director who is a brilliant neonatal nurse specialist working day and night to make sure that we can figure out how you deliver a breathing device, blended air and oxygen without electricity in remote settings in Uganda, I watch her and then I watch the investment bankers pouring all over mergers and acquisitions deals. And working to a stand of absolute excellence because our panel, the Adara panel are the best in the business.

Audette Exel:
And you believe me, you can't deliver mediocre work to the best in the business. And what I love to see is, the thing that unites them is purpose. So, I give you an example of this it's... And when I started Adara, I thought if it's one life it'll be enough. But actually now, it's hundreds of thousands, it's millions of life since we've started. But it's still one life at a time. So we had four little quads born in an emergency right up on the Uganda-Sudanese border just recently. And there was this whole chain of events where we were contacted saying disaster, these babies are being born, they're about to be born, this mother... multiples in the developing world. Usually you lose the mom as well as the babies. Anyway, watching the Adara team focus on, we've got to get this woman seven hours drive away down to a Centre for Excellence to make sure she's safer to deliver those babies. And watching the whole Adara family worldwide, bring their hearts to how is she? How are they?

Audette Exel:
One of them was lost, but the remaining three triples, they went home, fat little babies from the NICU with their mom and dad, a miracle in those settings. And I sent out messages, not only the whole organisation, no matter which part you work in, did we celebrate. But I sent messages out to the chair of Goldman Sachs and the head of Citi saying this happened today, sending pictures, telling them and the emotion around it. People want to do good, sometimes they don't know how and sometimes we don't hear them or we don't believe them. But the thing that unites people, so coming back to your, what's the premium? Adara has become this amazing magnet for people who work with excellence, who want to change the world, who want to work with purpose. It's not marketing for us, it's very deep in the culture.

Audette Exel:
And one, it's interesting because over the years, of course we probably had thousands of people in the organisation come and go, but one thing that happens, people fall out of the culture very fast if they are not genuinely connected to purpose. And you can feel it, when you've made a mistake and the fit isn't right. So whether they're an investment banker, or they're a behavioural scientist, or a monitoring evaluation expert, or a teacher, people want to use their brilliance to do good, I profoundly believe it. So all you have to do is give them the vehicle and that's what Adara is, right? We're a vehicle for that, but it's very, very uplifting when you see it in action.

Audette Exel:
And I get a lot of stick in neck in corporate Australia. People laugh at me about oh, Audette Exel, she's saving the world one investment banker at a time. But actually I believe that, that's what we have to do. One child at a time, one investment banker at a time. We can move power and money in the direction of change, and when we do, when you see it working, it's incredibly powerful and it's very uplifting.

Andrew White:
And, and you set this up 25 years ago?

Audette Exel:
Yes. Can you believe it I'm that old?

Andrew White:
Well, I was thinking more in terms of, you were so foresightful into where the world was going. Because I can imagine 25 years ago, people would've laughed at you. But then we had the financial crisis. Well, we had the year 2000 and all the problems with the IT. And then we had the 2008 financial crisis. And then we've had the post financial situations where things haven't got back to the way they were before that. And through that time, the relevance of what you are doing has become greater and greater and greater. And then today, we're sitting with what we're calling the great resignation, 40% of people thinking of leaving their jobs because something happened during the lockdowns, which woke a lot of them up to, why am I doing this? Why am I doing the one or two hour commutes backwards and forwards into big cities?

Andrew White:
Why am I working in this way? I'm looking for something more and all of a sudden the relevance of what you are doing, the importance of what you're doing just goes up and up and up and up. So my question is, let's say I'm in my late 30s, I've been in the same job I've done exceptionally well. This will be some of our listeners, but I'm lacking purpose. I feel part of me is just down, I'm worried about what the next 20 years of my career looks like. So that's person one. Person two, I'm the CEO of a large company and I recognise that something is broken in the model of how we're working, or something isn't right. And I'm inspired by what you are talking about. What do I do? Because I've got shareholders, and I've got a career, and I've got a mortgage, and I've got to feed kids and I hear you and I understand you, but I feel constrained.

Andrew White:
So in a sense, and I think that's where probably where the world's at as well. How do we go through the transition in a sense, what do we do to take this journey of purpose which you've manifest so powerfully and make it available to others and make it easier for others to access?

Audette Exel:
We have to be brave. The first thing we have to do is encourage people to be brave. I could bring you back to the cage that I was talking about. Society puts us in a cage and then we put ourselves in the cage, and we don't actually realise that for many of us, not for people who are living in poverty generally, who have to get up every day and try to get food, keep their families safe and find shelter. But for so many of us, we are in a cage where the door is open. And I'm a very stubborn woman, and so I have had a lot of people who have told me, no, no, no and that has always spurred me on. So once I realised, gee, the cage door is open and I was born as I was saying, of a family that pretty much taught me that. Step out.

Audette Exel:
Step out, be brave. I've always admired people who have the courage to go first. So to both person A and person B, I'd say first of all, courage. Secondly, one of the things I feel hopeful about in terms of what we've done at Adara as I hope, because we have the lived experience of doing it, saying to people, first of all be brave and secondly, it really is possible. This is not thought leadership or people who are consultants, we've been doing it. And other amazing people have been doing a million versions of this around the world in different ways, foretaught nearly a quarter of a century. So, we now have the models, we have the data, if I was talking to person A, the 30 year old who couldn't find their passion, I'd say at the most moment that you are able to afford it, you need to step back from the world, from your job and you need to get in touch.

Audette Exel:
You need to go into nature if that's where you go, you need to talk to yourself, your body, your soul. You need to think about who you are in the world and what you want to achieve, because the idea of leading a passionless life is a tragedy. When so many billions of people can't afford to eat twice a day and yet those of us who can, to not be able to find a way to connect to a way of life that uplifts you and uplifts others, that is an absolute tragedy. So sometimes the only way to get out of that is to say, you know what? I don't want to be working for that consulting firm anymore. I've saved a wee bit of money, I'm going to take a few months off, I'm going to sit in the bush, I'm going to travel, I'm going to listen to music, I'm going to write, I'm going to draw or I'm going to create. So that's what I'd say to that person.

Audette Exel:
And then look around you, there's a myriad of people. The social entrepreneurship movement, the impact movement, great companies, major companies doing great things in the world. The purpose movement, it's real, it's here, it's completely different to how it was when I started. To person B, who's running the major company and who knows... and it's likely that he's a he, and he knows gee, something's not quite right here. I bring you back to courage. It's about first of all deciding, I will not think short-term, I will take a longer vision. And then it's about bringing people with you, so managing your stakeholders and sometimes it's about just pure grit determination.

Audette Exel:
A great example of that of course, is Paul Polman. In the way that he led Unilever and the way he steered down a hostile takeover where he didn't think the values fit was right. Sometimes when you're in that situation, it's hard to bring your stakeholders with you but there's a lot of examples of people who have. So I don't want to be prescriptive, what I want to say to people is, dream big and don't listen to that voice of no. Gee, society wants to box us in, gee society wants to tell us you are a failure if you haven't achieved the following sort of ticks. And now I'm nearly 60, I'm so glad I've had this wild ride. I'm so lucky to have had this wild ride and a lot of those ticks aren't there for me, but the flip side of it is, I have not had a stayed career in a traditional sense, but oh my gosh, it's been so joyous and so meaningful.

Audette Exel:
So yeah, what do I say to people? Be courageous. And if you're not in touch with your passion, find it, don't wait, don't be asleep. Ultimately, is quite selfish act actually in terms of the life that I've led, because it has been about joy, it hasn't been about sacrifice. So that's the other thing I hope that people see when they see me and all so many others that are doing interesting things is, gee, those people are having a good time, even though it's pretty stressful, there's a lot of anxiety and gee I've cried nearly as much as I've laughed. But it's about giving yourself permission to step out of the road that society is telling you, the boring old road that society tells you, you have to keep walking down.

Andrew White:
So wonderful, wonderful advice. And if enough people go through that transition, that starts to create a movement. And I think it's already happening.

Audette Exel:
Yes. It's a zeitgeist shift. It really is happening.

Andrew White:
I want to touch on one of the things you said, which was that this is a lived experience for you, it's not thought leadership, it's not thinking about how the future should be, it's manifesting that future now. And it's doing it in an institutional way. And so I'd really like your view on how do you think institutions will change over the next 10 or 20 years? How do you think companies will change? You've done it in a particular way by bringing together two very different activities and glueing them and making them one and uniting them through purpose. Do you see more of that? Or in a sense, what models do you see the world needing? At the moment, I'm very conscious that if the whole world operated like you, then pension funds would have a problem and therefore the retirement funds of people would have a problem. So these aren't easy circles to square in many ways.

Audette Exel:
You're right. None of it is easy. But I have had the luck of having a bird's-eye view on big institutions. So I'm the volunteer to my own businesses, to Adara and have always been. So the way that I've paid myself salary is, I sit on the boards of some major companies. So I sat on the board of Australia's largest public listed insurance company for eight years and I'm now on the board of one of Australia's largest banks. That's been so fascinating, right?

Andrew White:
Yeah.

Audette Exel:
Because it gives me the view. You talk about the big institutions and to see the change even from the... And I've been lucky enough sit on the boards of some other global companies. To see the change in the discussion in the old days, the old dinosaur days. Purpose and environmental social governance, or as it was known then, corporate social responsibility. That was the thing that was discussed. The mid-level manager came into the room in the last 15 minutes of the board meeting, as everybody was checking their watches to make sure that they could hop their plane to get home in time after the board meeting. And it really was ancillary, not very interesting. The entire focus of conversation was around the numbers and shareholder return.

Audette Exel:
And I remember on one board I sat on, there was one of those old dinosaurs and every time I spoke, he used to roll his eyes. Until I finally said to him, you don't need to roll your eyes at me, I actually do have something to say. But now, the change now, the front and centre discussion in the halls of power, not just in this country and down the centre of the world, but globally. About how do we make sure our businesses are not only great businesses, but businesses that are great for the world?

Audette Exel:
It is fantastic to see it. Sometimes I almost want to belly laugh when I'm watching the conversation thinking, wow, this is like an out of body experience to see how far we've come. And I give you examples of that in terms of, so do you ask me about what's shifting and where's the shift going to go and why are we shifting? Well, the first reason I think we're shifting is because the wonder of the internet. We are dealing with radical transparency now so nothing is hidden anymore. And the idea that we can operate our businesses as sociopaths with only one purpose, that's over. And I remember when Porter and Kramer first came out at Harvard and started talking about purpose. And I was just in the early days of Adara and I thought, hurray, someone else is saying this stuff.

Audette Exel:
And now here we are, the biggest investors in the world are turning the power that they have to move capital in the direction of, we will only invest in corporations that are actually great corporations for the world, and that understand that their job is not just to provide a great risk adjusted return for a shareholder, but to look after their staff, their consumers, to look after their environment and to look after their community. Multi-stakeholder models, the worship of Milton Friedman, it's over and it's wonderful to see it over. It's over at the highest levels and it's over in the pension funds are down here, the super funds you talk about. People like me, if everyone became like me, well actually the super funds are looking for people like me. They're looking for people who are sitting on boards who actually understand that we need diversity and inclusion, that we need to consider community, that we need good governance, we need to consider the consumer and our customer as well as our shareholder.

Audette Exel:
And so first of all, why is it happening? The internet brought radical transparency. The second thing is, through that radical transparency, and now we overlay that COVID unmasks for us inequality in a way that many people, I think everyone should have known it, but many people weren't seeing it now they're seeing it. I believe COVID is displaying to us an existential crisis. Which is inequality at an extraordinary level, partnered with public health and economic crisis and what that's doing, and then overlay that with climate change. So we stand here, I believe the next 10 years are going to be the most important 10 years in all of our lives, facing two existential threats to humanity and business knows that. And so as we stand and look at that, our role in businesses, big and small, whether it's the biggest publicly traded companies, the biggest investment managers or the impact crowd, the little social entrepreneurs, people are just out there trying to do something a bit different and fill their lives up.

Audette Exel:
We all stand facing the same thing, the same crisis. And we all stand knowing, gee, we have to find a way to lift us and we have to think completely differently to deal with this. 124 million people went into poverty last year because of COVID. I could give you data up the wazoo about the refugee crisis that we are currently experiencing, but what is coming because of climate change. The amount of child marriage that we're seeing because of COVID, the amount of trafficking we're seeing because of COVID, hunger and on and on it goes. So I think we've ripped off the sunglasses, but there's got to be a better metaphor than that. We look looking at the truth. No matter where we function in society, where we lead, if we lead in our family or our community, our companies, our countries or our world, we all have to stand and face that.

Audette Exel:
And we know that the old way of doing it, the siloed way of doing it is not working. And so actually I think it's a very, very exciting time in a very perverse way because we now get the chance to think completely outside of the box about what we do next. And I think that's what we're going to see. I think that companies that are not purpose led are not going to be in existence in any significant way within a decade. They will no longer be acceptable.

Andrew White:
Yeah. Well, it's wonderful what you're saying is, never before such a bigger collective challenge because of the degree to which we're all integrated and connected, but never before such a sense of humanity coming together. And in that hope, it feels so like we're on the edge, there's so much momentum coming in. So we are coming towards the end of this. So I'd like to end as I've ended with all guests with what I call seven quickfire leadership questions. So the first one of those is, which leader from history inspires you most?

Audette Exel:
Well, what probably what surprise you Rosa Parks. The woman who went sat at the front of the bus. Yeah, Rose Parks.

Andrew White:
Fantastic. And when you think of today, who inspires you most?

Audette Exel:
Oh gosh, I've got such a long list, so I really only have to give you one? Can I run through them?

Andrew White:
You can give more than that.

Audette Exel:
Thank you. Okay, I love the activist. I love Greta Thunberg, I love to Tarana Burke Me Too, amazing. At the WHO, the leadership I think that we've seen from Mike Ryan and Dr. Tedros, amazing. Helen Clark, Kiwi like me painting on a world stage. And I have to say, I've always loved Jimmy Carter, I love the fact that the presidency was a stepping stone for him rather than the sort of main event and that he spent his life giving. So that's the short list of a much longer list.

Andrew White:
Fantastic. And books are so important in that they capture ideas. Is there a book that's had impact on you and a sense of a long lasting impact on you?

Audette Exel:
Yes. I'm an absolutely avid reader, fanatical reader. There've been many, but one that I'd call out is a book called Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's the story of poor farmer who formed partners in health and what I loved about that book... you know the story?

Andrew White:
Yes.

Audette Exel:
Okay. I loved the fact that he's angry on behalf of the poor, even as a young med student, he was angry on behalf of the poor. And he went out and started one little project in Haiti without any strategy or plan. And then he went on of course, to discover astonishing things about multi-resistant tuberculosis and really to sort of touch the world was incredibly positive way. So it gave me at a period of time where I was thinking, oh gee, I'm never to make it, it's all too hard I'm going to fail. That gave me a huge amount of comfort and courage just to keep at it.

Andrew White:
And I can imagine you promote a lot of people. You bring a lot of people into leadership roles. Because of what you're doing, you have to trust a lot of people with responsibility. Is there one thing that you look for above all else in terms of what they have and what they bring to be trusted by you?

Audette Exel:
Yes. I mean, above all else, integrity. You have to stand like a tree with very deep roots with integrity, but I'd sort of cascade under that, compassion. You've got to have compassion for others and then passion, we talked about passion earlier. And then finally, determination to be excellent. So they're my four, but they all cascade... I guess three of them cascade underneath integrity.

Andrew White:
And this is a bit of a subset. When you look at the younger generation coming through, what inspires you about them?

Audette Exel:
Yeah. They're so much better, they're going to do so much better than my our generation did. In particular, I love the fact that they're global citizens. Again, back to the internet, they don't doubt it, they are citizens of the planet. And in that sense, they're really out of one of the big, most siloed cages that I think people of my generation grew up in.

Andrew White:
And we've already answered this one. And I don't know whether there's more to add or not, but what makes you hopeful about the future?

Audette Exel:
People, people, the magnificence of people. It's as simple as that, people are unbelievable.

Andrew White:
And then finally, you've talked about the need when we step out of the cage to go and spend time in nature, to read, to paint, to find art, to do what it is that we really love. Where do you go for inspiration and renewal?

Audette Exel:
Yeah, I'm a real Kiwi. And so we Kiwis, we grew up with our feet on the earth and our hands and the sky, right? So I'm a real nature girl. And so every single day, I'm on the beach, I'm walking on the beach. Every weekend I'm in the bush, when I'm really overwhelmed I'll go and lie down on the ground and connect to the wider world that's out there for us. Nature, the plants and the animals. I go into nature. It's a very Kiwi thing I think

Andrew White:
My thanks to Audette Exel. My name is Andrew White, and you've been listening to Leadership 2050, a podcast from Saïd Business School, at the University of Oxford. You can catch up with all our previous episodes from series one, wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, why not so subscribe so you never miss an episode and help others find us by taking a moment to give us a rating and review? If you'd like to hear more from Saïd Business School, exploring leadership and how the business world is re imagining the future, please visit oxfordanswers.org. Leadership 2050 is produced by Eve Streeter, original music is by [Syberg 00:00:40:00], our executive producer is David McGuire for stable productions. In the next episode, I'll be talking to former Unilever CEO, Paul Polman about his new book, Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take. Until then, many thanks for listening.