Monocle’s Tom Edwards guides us through a selection of highlights from the year’s interviews. From CEOs to city mayors and presidents, Tyler Brûlé sat down with those at the top to talk leadership and strategy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Chiefs with me, Tom Edwards.
Today we're looking back through 2020's impressive catalogue of interviewees to share with you the best bits from a year that was quite unlike any other.
Indeed, the Chiefs was in fact started as something of a reaction to the challenges the pandemic brought to businesses and those at their helm across the globe.
And so it follow that we begin today by looking back to April, when the CEO of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, Vas Narasimhan, joined our editor in chief, Tyler Boulet for the inaugural episode of the program.
Vaas and Tyler began by discussing the importance of benchmarking.
Let's take a listen.
It's almost unprecedented the amount of benchmarking you see in daily news feeds around the world.
What are the Austrians doing?
How has the New Zealand PM dealt with things?
You've got then people scratching their heads in Canada and the UK saying, well, why is it working, working this way?
Why are there no dates attached to anything?
Do we need to look to Geneva?
Do we need to be looking to a philanthropic billionaire sitting in Seattle to be giving some type of foundation that everyone should be working towards?
Because of course, on one side, nations are sovereign and then they can do what they want.
But there's so much disparity between different approaches to coming out of lockdowns and also what daily hygiene measures are as well.
It's interesting.
We had an exponential effect of a virus, of course, started in the last part of last year.
Growth was exponential.
Exponential things tend to catch human beings by surprise.
And so in March we had this explosion and then people are scrambling.