10 Remarkable People on Having a Career That Matters

Every year, HBR interviews 10 people who’ve had fascinating careers. Here, a few highlights from 2014.

British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes has never been afraid to stand out. Her eponymous clothing line soared in the 70s, only to shutter its doors in the 90s. But she’s moved on to other projects, and today’s hottest designers credit her influence.

We talked with her about overcoming setbacks through hard work.

“Keep going by whatever means you can. Don’t let people crush you. Have an inner belief in yourself. In the end, what you do will come through. We suffer today from people wanting fame rather than earning fame through their work. Your work is what you’re there for, and you should do it regardless. If it brings you something else, that’s a plus.”

Alain Ducasse runs a global empire of more than 20 restaurants with a collective 19 Michelin stars. We asked him about his reputation as a tough boss. “It is true that I am demanding and not always nice,” he admitted. “If a colleague opts to do poor work when he could have performed very well, that upsets me.”

Still, he says, “You shouldn’t focus on supervision….“You must allow people to evolve, help them grow, make them feel gratified.”
He also told us that, at 27, he was the sole survivor of an airplane crash. He spent a year in a hospital being treated for serious injuries. It was a defining moment.

“You spend your time lying in bed, but you are not tired, so you are able to think nearly 24 hours a day, with nothing to disrupt you. I had to keep working, even if I might never walk again. I managed my restaurant from my hospital bed, by writing the menus, for example. It really improved my ability to delegate, and I understood that I was able to lead without being physically present. My career would not have been the same had the crash not occurred.”

Ruth Reichl has been a cook, a food critic at the LA Times, Editor of Gourmet, and a novelist, among other ventures. We asked her how she knew when a dramatic career move was the right one.

“I always thought they were the wrong ones,” she explained. “When I was offered Gourmet, I told one of my adopted mothers, ‘It’s just not the right time. If it were a year down the road, I would do it.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Ruth, it’s never the right time.’ It’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten. It’s the things that scare you the most that you have to do…One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don’t know how to do, to keep learning.”

And she admits she “was not initially the best manager.”

“It took a while for me to understand that management is an art… I learned that you really can’t expect everyone to be just like you. The big secret of management is to find what people do best, not to fit them into a mold. Find out what everybody on the staff does well and tailor their jobs to them, instead of the other way around.”

 

Pele is a soccer legend, and led Brazil to three World Cup victories. He says he “never wanted to be a leader.” But it came naturally. “I just tried to pass on my best to the other players.”

Yet he never became a team captain. “Reporters at press conferences would always ask me about that, and I would tell them, ‘Listen, I don’t need to be captain. If we have another player as captain, then there are two leaders in the game.’”

Biologist J. Craig Venter made waves in 1998 when he and his for-profit company challenged the public Human Genome Project to a DNA-sequencing race. (It ended in a tie two years later.)  Fired from that firm in 2002, he now runs a nonprofit and two biotech companies. We asked him about setting audacious goals.

“The goals are only considered to be audacious by other people. I consider them to be achievable. …One of my early teachers described my method as jumping off a high diving board into an empty pool, expecting my team to have the pool filled before I hit the bottom. I think the best people like to work on multidisciplinary teams where they can bring their expertise to problems and projects much bigger than themselves.”

And as for the controversy and criticism?

“You have to believe in what you’re doing and your own processes. My military service in Vietnam taught me a lot. I was one of the lucky people to serve there and return. As a medic I dealt with thousands of young men who didn’t make it back. So I learned at an early age that the worst thing you can lose is your life and that taking risks and suffering setbacks is part of moving forward. One of the things I jokingly say is that I know so much because I’ve made so many mistakes.”

Bobbi Brown launched her cosmetics line in 1991 because she was sick of red lipstick. Four years later, she sold the natural-look brand to Estee Lauder – but retained full creative control.  We asked her how she stays ahead of the curve.

“I’ve learned that the best thing for my company is to do what I believe in… Don’t put something on the market just because everyone else is doing it. Do what you think is right.”

Norman Lear reinvented American television in the 1970s with All in the Family and a string of other true-to-life sitcoms. A producer, director, and activist, he’s relished a life behind the scenes. 

We talked with him about managing his bosses:

“There were times when they raised reasonable questions and the solution made the show better, but with the questions that were just silly, I stood my ground. It didn’t make sense to me that some faceless executive would be responsible for a decision that affected my show and its relationship with the audience. They used to tell me, ‘It won’t fly in Des Moines’ or ‘There will be knee-jerk reaction in the middle of the country.’ But one thing that played well for me is that I spent months in Iowa, making the film Cold Turkey. So I was able to say, ‘Don’t tell me about Des Moines. I know Des Moines. I know the middle of the country. Don’t give me this bullshit.’”

Boris Johnson was a magazine editor at 35, a shadow cabinet minister at 39, and the mayor of London at 43.

We asked him how he sees leadership: “You’ve got to understand an issue very well and be able to simplify it and make people understand it and believe in it the way you do. If you can do that, you’re at the races.”

He also cites the power of momentum. “The forces of inertia are so huge, we need to have a clear agenda, so as soon as one thing is done, we’re starting the next.”

Educator Salman Khan – who left his hedge-fund job to found the wildly successful online learning nonprofit Khan Academy – talked with us about the importance of work-life balance. “I’ve been up on stage at speaking events and said, ‘I have to go give my kids a bath now,’ and everyone is shocked. But if I can’t have dinner with my kids, give them a bath, and read them a book before bed, something is wrong in my life.”

He also challenges the notion that kids today have worse attention spans:

“We think that because this generation has Facebook, Twitter, and mobile phones, they don’t have attention spans. But it’s clear from the studies that we never really had the attention spans the classroom-based lecture model expects of students.”

Comedian John Cleese is perhaps best known for his work on Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and the Oscar-nominated script for A Fish Called Wanda. But he does everything from corporate trainings to stand-up to memoir. We asked him about working alone versus working with a team.

“When you collaborate with someone else on something creative, you get to places that you would never get to on your own. The way an idea builds as it careens back and forth between good writers is so unpredictable. Sometimes it depends on people misunderstanding each other, and that’s why I don’t think there’s any such thing as a mistake in the creative process. You never know where it might lead.”

When he asked him about his legacy, his answer surprised us. He said he hoped his friends thought he was “reasonably kind.” Really? we pressed, Nothing about your contribution to the world of humor?

“No,” he replied. “I don’t regard any of that as anything other than an amusing way of passing the time. I love the fact that I’ve made people laugh, but the important thing, ultimately, I do believe, is a relatively small number of really close relationships.”

This blog first appeared on Harvard Business Review on 12/24/2014.

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