Learning came naturally for Sherry Lansing, seventy-three, the most powerful female movie mogul of all time and the first to head a major studio. But first, she was a schoolteacher, actress, and film executive, before becoming chairman of Paramount Pictures for twelve years. While the overall movie biz may have been more gender diverse, the corridors of power were exclusively male until Sherry came along; perhaps it was a result of her unique perspective that her whole career, as she tells it, was often mentoring or being mentored without even knowing it. Like me, she loved what she was doing until her calling turned into a job and it was then she knew it was time to get curious.

Their [Frank Dobbin and Jiwook Jung] results showed that although adding more women to boards did not change the firms’ performance, it led to a decrease in the firms’ stock valuation. These findings highlight an alarming reality: irrespective of the actual performance differences between men and women, people—and, in this case, investors—are unlikely to change their beliefs, and beliefs drive decisions.

In our case, Mark Parker from Nike and Mary Barra from General Motors are two perfect examples. Both have witnessed profound disruption to their businesses, and both are keenly aware of the perils of not adapting quickly to change.

The nearest approximation I have found is Li Ka-shing, a refugee from China who is now Hong Kong’s richest man. Li left school at the age of fifteen and set up a small business manufacturing plastic flowers. From these modest beginnings he developed the massive Hutchison Whampoa group, of which Eversholt, another rail rolling stock leasing company, is a subsidiary. None of the, admittedly small, sample of railway employees I interviewed had ever heard of Li, far less experienced resentment at his oppression or exploitation. If they did express resentment, it was – appropriately – directed at the management of First-Group and most of all at the Department for Transport. Li is svelte, noted for his relatively modest habits and second only to Bill Gates for the scale of his global philanthropy.

On June 15, 1971, The Washington Post Company went public at $6.50 per share (adjusted for a subsequent 4-for-1 split). When Kay stepped down as CEO on May 9, 1991, the price was $222, a gain of 3,315 percent. During the same period the Dow advanced from 907 to 2,971, an increase of 227 percent.” Now that I have studied Graham’s life and leadership, my own assessment is that she stands as one of the absolute best examples of a leader who took a company from good to great, with some of the gutsiest business leadership decisions of all time.