Anna Wintour

She says people work so much better when feedback is fast, direct, and honest, and they know where they are.

Nobody works well when the atmosphere feels slow and lazy.

Okay, I want to get into some of the lessons and, you know, some of the recurring themes that we see over and over again.

The first is a taste for saltwater.

Anna spent five years at Harper's on a skeleton crew of three people doing everything from market visits to layouts to captions.

There was no coffee fetching or filling.

She was just thrown in completely over her head.

She said, I was thrown into my career, frankly, with ignorance.

I knew nothing.

She treated this grinding apprenticeship as education, not exploitation.

Most people would have complained or stopped trying.

That's why most people don't get the education that Anna got.

Two, unreasonable standards.

Anna returned every borrowed item with original tissue paper intact.

She'd send steaks back three times for being insufficiently rare, then only eat two bites.

At Vogue, she instituted the look, a daily assessment of every employee's appearance from shoes to hair.

Her AWOC system meant nothing, not even a comma moved without her approval.

Excellence is a tyrant you invite in.

Once it moves in, mediocrity has no place to hide.

Three, high agency.