Anna Wintour

In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best for what other people have already figured out.

Anna Wintour got fired for refusing to compromise her vision.

The magazine that fired her, it's dead.

Anna, she runs every magazine at Condé Nast, including Vogue at age 75.

This is the story of how a British girl who couldn't type or so built the most powerful position in global media, then made it impossible for anyone else to take it away by continuously reinventing herself.

Here's what a lot of people get wrong about power.

They think it's about climbing ladders.

Anna understood it's about building the ladder itself.

While her competitors fought for promotions, she built infrastructure.

While they protected magazines, she created platforms.

While they pleased bosses, she made bosses need her.

The result?

Four decades at the top of an industry that reinvents itself every five years.

She survived the death of print, the digital revolution, the great financial crisis, the social media transformation, and a pandemic that killed most of her competitors.

How?

By mastering the principles that sound simple, but almost nobody executes.

First, she figured out that being fired for your uncompromising standards is very different than being fired for your performance.

One is failure.

The other is intelligence.

Second, she learned that in creative industries, speed beats perfection because perfection without deadlines is just procrastination with better excuses.