Anna Wintour

Find the narrow path where both can win.

Follow the money wasn't a default, it was data.

Anna learned to speak money fluently while thinking in art.

That's how you survive four decades at the top.

In 1994, just one year after the introduction of the very first web browser to seamlessly integrate text and images, many in the publishing world were still pretending the internet didn't exist.

Anna wasn't.

But she also wasn't particularly tech oriented at this point.

When a new feature editor sent an email to the entire Vogue staff in 1994 to introduce himself, he received a fax from Anna in Europe that said, Joe, this is Vogue.

We don't email.

It's so impersonal.

But even as Anna dismissed email as impersonal, she was obsessively asking Conde Nast's digital team.

when can Vogue go online?

It's starting to get embarrassing that Vogue.com is not online.

Why aren't we online?

Here's what drove Anna's urgency.

The entire purpose of fashion is to be a reflection of the times, as one digital executive explained.

Anna understood that a fashion magazine that felt antiquated or out of date would lose its cultural authority, authority that Anna had been building for six years now at Vogue, with no intention of stopping.

While other editors saw the internet as a threat to their business model, Anna saw it as an opportunity to increase Vogue's influence.

The contradiction reveals her genius.

Email was internal.