Mellody Hobson
speaker
238 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Mellody Hobson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I have seen it that, you know, the person who leaves the job for the extra 10 grand and you're like, but this is the better opportunity. This is the better person to mentor you. This is the way that you're going to actually be exposed to things that you won't see in this other place. But it's the trade-offs that are made that where they ultimately nickel and dime themselves.
I remember being at Ariel. I remember someone saying to me, they tried to recruit me to another job. I never talked to headhunters or anything like that. This person asked me to come over and they're like, but it's so much bigger than Ariel. And I said, that's what you value. And I said, I'm valuing the experience. And this experience is giving me a lot of opportunity.
to grow and learn in ways big and small that are important to me.
Okay. So first of all, we all feel overwhelmed sometimes. And it's, you know, a question of how do you re-anchor yourself to get through it? And I somehow, I can push through and will myself to do unbelievable things. I cannot describe it to you. I can outwork any person.
First of all, it's waking up super early, not making any excuses about all the things I have to get done. It's a lot of travel, a lot of like landing in the middle of the night, waking up super early in the morning.
You still do that level of work. We had a big thing a couple of weeks ago where I had to get something out very last minute. We started off in Florida. We flew to Texas and, And then we were flying to San Francisco. This issue came up. We started on Friday at 3.30 in the afternoon. We needed to get done, which was really hard, by Monday morning.
I told my chief of staff, Serena, and I, I was like, we are going to be sitting at the kitchen table for the next two days. So we went all the entire flight from Texas to San Francisco. We work late into night in San Francisco. We work up, woke up early, very early. I still went to the gym somehow. And then we, but not always. I mean, some, this was a bad run.
So then we got up, we worked the entire day into the night, sitting in the same seat, the entire Saturday, the entire Sunday. But we had to fly to Chicago. We worked in the entire time flying to Chicago. We finished when we landed, when we hit the ground in Chicago. and turned it over to the next person, it was incredibly hard. But I said, we have no choice.
And everyone who was behind me waiting for the work, I said, when I hand this off to you, you're going to go into this non-sleep mode that I was just in.
Okay, this is going to sound strange and I'm going to make it hopefully not sound not great. but it's how I think about it. My mom had six kids. She mothered us all differently. That's just a fact.
It's a fact. In my group of people who work directly with me, I understand what they can do and how they can do it. John Rogers always used to tell me that the world championship Chicago Bulls that won seven championships, He said, Dennis Rodman rebounds. Steve Kerr shoots threes. Michael is the greatest player of all time. You know, he would go through each player.
And he said, but each one is really important. Michael can't play without them. They can't win. So Dennis may be out at night. but everyone makes sure Dennis is on the court so that he can rebound for them. And he's like, so he doesn't have the same rules as everyone else. And so Melody, you figure it out that you get the best out of each person, but everyone's not going to run the place.
You must, and I mean this with serious intensity, I think you have to care a lot and have a sense of urgency. You have to have a sense of urgency. You have to want to be great. You know, I love that book by Jim Collins, Good to Great. And the first line of the book, good is the enemy of great. Good is the enemy of great. Plenty of people are happy with good.
They say the worst student is the B plus student. Because the B plus student is like, it's fine. They're like, the C student aspires for something better. And the A student is just the A student. But the B plus student is, they live in that no man's land of it's fine. And so it's almost like the worst situation that you can be in.
So if good is the enemy of great, I want the person who wants to be great. But understanding that differential between good and great is...
really hard do you think you can train people into that or do you think it has to come from somewhere within themselves it has to be there yeah yeah some people just you know they come out of the wound with it some people don't but that doesn't make them um they can still be very valuable they're just going to be a certain kind of player and that's what john said he's like they're going to be other people they're just not going to run the place so you think people have to just work really hard want to be great and they need to have a sense of urgency
I think they have to want to be great. Let's start with that. And, you know, some people have to work harder than others. So I remember going to school with geniuses at Princeton. They didn't have to work as hard as I did. They, you know, sort of like skimmed the page and got it.
So I think it's just a function of you understanding yourself.
You did? Yes, a lot. I mean, I talked about Diane Sawyer. Yes. Diane Sawyer was so great to me. She saw me on the cover of Working Woman magazine in an article called 30 Under 30. I got the cover with another woman and I will remember it like it was yesterday because I remember how much I didn't like the suit they made me wear, which was just so bad.
She had her sister call me. I remember I was going to an event in Chicago. My cell phone rings and this woman says, my name is Linda Frankel and I'm Diane Sawyer's sister. And she saw you in this magazine and she wants to meet with you. And I'm like, who is this really? That's what I was saying because I didn't believe it.
Showing 41–60 of 238 · page 3 of 12
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