Bill George on emerging leaders who lead with their hearts

What this conversation is about

Bill George spent his career at the top of one of the most admired medical technology companies in the world, and he has spent the years since writing about authentic leadership. He came on Personalization Outbreak with Glenn Llopis to talk about his book for emerging leaders, and the conversation quickly became an argument about what companies keep asking people to be.

Glenn framed it in one line at the top of the show: it is no longer about the business defining the individual, it is about the individual defining the process toward a shared mission. George agreed, and then said why the resignations keep coming.

The box, and the people who will not fit it

His answer to the Great Resignation is not about pay. It is about leaders who never brought out what people already had:

"They want them to fall into a nice little square box and fit right into a corporate mode ... They wanna be who they are." — Bill George · 00:01:37

Emerging leaders, he says, do not want to stand in line for ten years to become a manager, and they will not stay at a company whose mission they cannot identify with. Glenn connected that directly to one of the five shifts in his own method, the move from mission to contribution:

"the mission can't be stronger than one's contribution to it." — Glenn Llopis · 00:02:35

Everyone claims to buy into the mission, Glenn added, and that is simply not true; some people just want a job. What changes the equation is whether a person can see their own contribution inside it.

Inclusion is not a diversity statistic

George is blunt about the traditional model, which pushed everyone toward one narrow definition of success built on money, fame and power. It does not work, and it never made people feel they belonged:

"Everyone wants to feel fully included. It's not about diversity statistics." — Bill George · 00:03:40

He puts the responsibility on leaders rather than on a staff function. People want to know their purpose is aligned with the organization’s purpose and that they can contribute to it. If they cannot feel part of it, they leave. Reporting numbers does not create that feeling; leaders who bring people together around a common purpose do.

He is just as direct about boards. Many are still made up of people who read a generation’s desire for meaning as job hopping, and who have not given younger leaders a chance to show what they can do or to use their passion to make the company better.

The route he walked away from

George did not arrive at this by theory. He wanted to be a leader before he was one, and he had to learn the hard way that focusing on himself was not leadership. Then came the part of the story he tells against himself. He was on the route to running a very large company and, from the outside, he had everything going for him:

"I feel no sense of passion for the business. I don't really care about it. And it's just laying off people and making the numbers and chasing numbers." — Bill George · 00:08:12

He left for Medtronic, then a fraction of the size, because the passion for the mission was everywhere in the building. People on the production line did not talk about earnings per share; they talked about the heart valve they were making and the person whose life depended on it. Engineers in the lab wanted to show him what they were working on.

So he spent his time where the work was: a third of it with customers, a third with employees, and the rest on everything else. He gowned up and stood in operating rooms alongside doctors, not to sell anything, but to learn the business and see how products actually behaved in a surgeon’s hands. Glenn recognized the advice from one of his own mentors, who told him never to stop touching the business, and to touch it as much as he led it.

George puts the same test to everyone else:

"if you're not passionate about your business, you're in the wrong business. Go work somewhere else." — Bill George · 00:16:08

Agency has moved to the individual

The distinction he draws between generations is not about age. Traditional leaders were raised in a stable time: a five to ten year plan, delegate the work, sit in the office and measure it with statistics. What he sees now is different, and it is the line that gives this page its title. Of the leaders he has studied who failed, he says, none failed for lack of intelligence. They failed because they had no heart for the business, no self-awareness, no passion, no compassion for the people they served, and no courage to make a bold move.

He also thinks the balance of power has changed for good. When he and Glenn started out, a job was a job. Now:

"today employees have agency and they wanna stand up and they are standing being accounted and you need to represent them." — Bill George · 00:16:55

That is why he wants wellbeing treated as more than a health plan, and why he keeps pointing leaders back to the front lines, where the people who determine the customer’s experience actually work. Glenn named the pattern underneath the whole conversation:

"there's been a radical balance of power shift from institution to individual." — Glenn Llopis · 00:21:58

George’s closing message was addressed to the next generation rather than to his own: step up and lead now, take care of people, create a sense of inclusion and wellbeing, be clear about mission and values, and have the courage to do it.