Assertiveness, dominance, competition, risk-taking: these are the hallmarks of traditional leadership models, and theyre overwhelmingly associated with men. From corporate boardrooms to political offices, the archetype of a strong leader has been built around commanding voices, hardliner decisions, and lone-wolf thinking.
This framing isnt just outdated: its dangerous.
The traits weve long sidelinedcompassion, collaboration, long-term thinking, humilityare no longer soft skills. Theyre survival skills. And theyre overwhelmingly found in what are often called feminine leadership styles. In fact, businesses with gender-diverse executive teams are 25% more likely to outperform financially, and companies led by women CEOs have historically delivered around 223% return on equity over 10 years, versus 130% for companies led by men. Alternatively, Gallup research indicates that employee performance can drop by up to 30% under authoritarian or top-down management.
Its clear that aggressive leadership styles are not working, and that inclusive, emotionally intelligent leadership must be embraced by organizations that want to achieve greater success and longevity. But there are other leadership styles that are redefining what effective leadership looks like.
Collaborative Leadership: Power With, Not Power Over
Aggressive leadership thrives on control: the leader speaks, others listen. But in a world where the best solutions come from diverse voices and interdisciplinary teams, this model falls short. Collaboration isnt just a buzzwordits a prerequisite for success.
Consider the turnaround of Korean Air in the 1990s. Plagued by fatal crashes, the airline discovered that junior crew members were too deferential to challenge their captainsa cultural deference to hierarchy that proved deadly. When Korean Air implemented training that encouraged teamwork and empowered all voices in the cockpit, its safety record transformed.
In modern organizations, collaborative leaders flatten hierarchies and empower team members to think, speak, and lead. They listen more than they talk and make decisions informed by a wide range of perspectives. They know that authority doesnt mean having all the answersit means creating the conditions for the best answers to emerge.
Purpose-Driven Leadership: Inspire, Dont Intimidate
The traditional model of leadership motivates through pressure: meet your targets, or else. But this approach is a major driver of disengagement. According to Gallup, close to 80% of the global workforce is disengaged at work, costing businesses $8.8 trillion in lost productivity every year. Many are not just unmotivated: theyre working against their employers.
Intimidation is costly, but leaders who inspire with purpose reverse that trend.
Take Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, who focused not just on profits but on sustainability, health, and human well-being. Paul expanded the circles of connection and well-being, see circles in figure below. He ended quarterly earnings reportsan industry norm that drives short-termismand embedded social and environmental goals into the companys core strategy. The results? Unilever outperformed competitors and built one of the most admired brands in the world.
Purpose-driven leaders dont lead with fear. They lead with vision. They make people care not just about what they do, but why they do it. In a generation of workers increasingly driven by values, this is your competitive edge.
Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: Strength Through Empathy
For decades, leaders were taught to leave emotion at the door, or at best at home. But the truth is, emotional intelligence is one of the most powerful tools a leader can have. The ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotionsboth your own and othersis essential for building trust, diffusing tension, and guiding teams through uncertainty.
Nelson Mandela is perhaps the most powerful example of this. After 27 years in prison, he emerged not bitter or vengeful, but focused on reconciliation. His leadership brought South Africa back from the brink of civil warnot through force, but through empathy, humility, and vision.
In business, emotionally intelligent leaders like Satya Nadella at Microsoft have reshaped company cultures by prioritizing learning, psychological safety, and inclusiveness. These leaders dont mistake kindness for weakness: they understand that people do their best work when they feel seen, heard, valued, and respected.
The Future of Leadership Is Balance
The traits that aggressive leaders dismiss as weaklistening, collaborating, empathizingare actually the ones that foster resilience, innovation, and long-term success. Masculine or feminine, theyre simply effective. And theyre precisely what todays challenges demand.
The real question is whether leaders can meet the momentand the moment calls for balance of a wider range of leadership skills, our full human leadership potential. We need leaders who can be bold and humble, decisive and inclusive, confident and caring. For too long, leadership has rewarded those who speak the loudest and dominate the room. The future will reward those who can listen, connect, and bring people together.
The age of aggressive leadership is over. The age of collaborative, purpose-driven, emotionally intelligent leadership has just begun. Ask yourself: What masculine and feminine leadership traits do I lead with? Are they balanced and effective to drive performance?
In 2021, Sanaa Shaikh was burned out. As a South Asian woman working in an overwhelmingly white and male profession, she had spent years experiencing her fair share of discrimination and microaggressionswhile at the same time being tasked with designing housing developments for underserved communities where she routinely felt like her ideas and perspective were dismissed. She was ready to move on.
A friend asked whether shed consider going into public-sector work, and mentioned Public Practicea social enterprise that works to build the design skills and capacity of the public sector across the U.K. by bringing established professionals from architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, city and town planning, engineering, transportation, and ecology into local government.
Sanaa Shaikh [Photo: courtesy Public Practice]
After completing Public Practices program last year, Shaikh has remained in the public sector, working as placemaking lead for the London Borough of Bexley. In the role, she shapes urban design and develops planning guidance for the area, initiating efforts to reanimate its disinvested public realm to support local businesses and to ensure overlooked groups including young people and the elderly have free and accessible spaces to spend time.
You have way more impact by designing for the everyday in the public sectoryoure actually contending with wider societal issues, Shaikh says.
Public Practice was cofounded in 2017 by Pooja Agrawal and Finn Williams, both of whom were working for the Greater London AuthorityLondons city governmentin response to what they saw as a challenge facing local areas within the city. They found that nearly every local authority was struggling to attract qualified architecture and design professionals with the right skills to support their work.
We set up Public Practice to see how we can make the public sector a player in driving development with public purpose in mind and raise the ambition and quality of what is being driven and delivered, Agrawal says.
Pooja Agrawal [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice]
The rise and fall of public-sector designers
Until the 1970s nearly half of U.K.-based architects worked in the public sector, with some of the most admired architects of their time working for local councils. But by 2020 that rate had dropped substantially. Agrawal attributes the decline to stagnant wages in the public sector, the increasingly outsize influence of the private sector in urban development, and a perception of local government as bureaucratic and ineffectual. These problems arent unique to the U.K.they are challenges for the urban planning and design professions in the U.S. and Canada as well.
In their work, Agrawal and Finn could feel a marked difference in those local councils that had design skills in-house in their ability to deliver projects. And on the other side we were seeing increasing dissatisfaction with our peers and friends in the built environment sector but who hadnt seen public-sector work as a desirable option. They studied design because they had a social agenda and wanted to make a difference but ended up designing toilets instead, Agrawal says.
Public Practice’s spring 2024 cohort [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice]
To address this, Public Practice devised its central associate program to partner up local authorities looking to build their in-house design capacity with yearlong cohorts of mid-career professionals, the majority of whom come from the private sector and are looking to transition into public-sector work. In their placements, these designers address everything from affordable housing and the climate crisis to town center redevelopment in response to changing retail patterns.
Since that initial group, Public Practice has delivered more than a dozen cohorts and scaled from a focus on London to cities and towns across England and into Wales, placing more than 370 people with upward of 97 different public-sector organizations; nearly 75% of those people have remained working in the public sector. Alumni stay part of a community of practice, getting ideas and inspiration from other public-sector designers through a dedicated Slack group, learning trips, and public forum.
[Photo: Dion Barrett/courtesy Public Practice]
Redefining meaningful work
Designer Laura Keay felt like she was hitting a wall after spending years as part of a two-person sustainable architecture studio doing low-embodied carbon, adaptive reuse, and retrofit buildings for multifamily homes, community spaces, schools, and cultural hubs in the U.K. and internationally.
I felt like I was waving a green flag in a larger system that isnt always set up to support our values, Keay says.
Laura Keay [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice]
She decided to do Public Practice to scale her impact beyond the few projects she was able to work on at any given time. Working across a diverse range of projects showed me how much design can do, but also where its influence stops without the right policies and systems behind it.
Keay became a community retrofit officer with the London Borough of Merton, shaping planning policy and building retrofit strategies and sustainability frameworks to guide the area toward its transition to net zero by 2050. If we want sustainable and equitable places, change has to happen systemically from planning and policy and not just project to project, she says.
In parallel to its placement program, Public Practice has been trying to instigate a wider culture and perception shift in how local government and public-sector work is thought of and talked about, even launching a magazine, Public Notice, that looks at the backstory of public space and public-sector projects.
Theyve flipped that narrative and created a space where the public sector is now seen as an opportunity for real leadership and where the most meaningful work happens behind the scenes in policy writing and strategic planningthat it isn’t always about designing buildings, Keay says. I can’t believe Im saying that as an architect.
[Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice]
In the past seven years Public Practice has already had to weather and respond to ongoing internal and external crises, each of which has had implications for public planning and designfrom the pandemic, implementation of Brexit, changes in the U.K. government, and the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Public Practice is continuing to adapt to an ever-changing economic and political context with local authorities under increasing financial pressure and expectations to do more with less.
The group has received inbound interest from cities in North America and Europe curious about the model and is starting to explore what it could look like to adapt its approach within different contexts. For us, international expansion isnt simply about rolling out the associate program globally, Agrawal says. Instead, its about developing new, locally embedded models that respond to different political, spatial, and institutional contexts while holding true to our core mission of building public-sector capability in place-based work.
Every weekday morning, across the country, parents fall into the same routine. A line of SUVs and minivans snakes around the school. Engines idle as mothers and fathers inch forward, phones in one hand, coffee in the other. Kids sit in the back seat scrolling on their own phones, waiting for their turn to be unloaded by a staff member in a reflective vest. One by one, the doors open, backpacks are lifted, and the vehicle pulls away. The factory-like process is orderly, efficient, and utterly dehumanizing.
The school drop-off ritual is a powerful curriculum, teaching kids that they are packages to be delivered and picked up, and that they require constant adult supervision.
In 1969, about 48% of children walked or biked to school. By 2009, that number had dropped to just 13%, according to Walk, Bike & Roll to School statistics. Today, the figure hovers around 11%, largely unchanged for a decade, per Rutgers University. Even among children who live within a mile of school, walking or biking has fallen from nearly 90% in 1969 to just 35% in 2009.
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Whats going on?
The shift didnt happen because children stopped being born with legs or because they stopped wanting independence.
Schools were moved to the edges of town, often on cheap land surrounded by parking lots and wide arterial roads.
Roads were engineered to maximize long-distance automobile throughput and minimize short-distance walking and cycling.
Parents were persuaded that it was unsafe to let kids walk or bike, even though most child fatalities happen while they are passengers in vehicles.
Logistics management
Line up, inch forward, unload. It looks like logistics management because it is logistics management. We have turned the beginning of a school day into a miniature supply-chain operation. This logistical worldview carries profound consequences.
Physical health: Walking and biking to school once provided children with reliable daily exercise. Today, U.S. teenagers walk about 5 miles less per week than teens did in the 1990s, The Wall Street Journal reports, and rates of childhood obesity have tripled since the 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mental health: Independent mobility builds confidence. A child who can walk to school learns to navigate space, manage risk, and take pride in independence. A child chauffeured twice a day learns dependence, passivity, and helplessness.
Safety paradox: Parents believe driving is a safe way to get around, but an average of three children are killed and another 445 injured every day in traffic crashes, National Highway Transportation Administration’s traffic safety data shows.
Packages dont talk back, dont take detours, dont linger to climb a tree, don’t stop to pet a dog, and don’t notice the smell of honeysuckle on the way to class. Car dependency trains kids to be passive and dependent cogs in a machine. The irony is that the very efficiency parents cravefaster lines and predictable behaviorincreases congestion, frustration, and risk to everyone on the roads.
The alternatives
We dont need a time machine in order to reintroduce childhood independence to our culture:
Walking school buses are groups of kids who walk together, accompanied by one or two adults. This approach offers safety in numbers while teaching kids independence.
Bike buses or bike trains do the same with cycling, helping to normalize two-wheeled commutes for kids.
School siting reform could reanchor school construction back in neighborhoods, instead of exiling buildings to distant parcels accessible only by car.
The morning line is more than a nuisance; its a ritual of indoctrination. Every inch forward in that queue trains children to see themselves as cargo, delivered by others, rather than as capable individuals navigating their world.
But if we flip the script, if we give kids back some autonomy, the benefits ripple outward. Parents reclaim sanity. Communities reclaim healthier, calmer streets. And children reclaim one important thing the car line strips away: freedom.
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Who discovered the lightbulb? If you answered “Thomas Edison,” you’re not aloneand you’re also not quite right.
Despite conventional wisdom that associates great inventions with lone geniuses, breakthrough inventions are team efforts. Incandescent light bulbs existed before Edison was born. His patent built on prior versions of the light bulb, aiming to make it practical and affordable. Even then, it wasnt a solo achievementEdison collaborated with a team of skilled collaborators, known as the Muckers, whose contributions have largely faded from memory. Yet it was Edisons name on the patent, and thats the version of history that stuck.
Were suckers for lone genius narratives like Edisonsthe brilliant scientist, the fearless military general, or the savvy CEO. The version of history we glean from popular books, movies, and the internet attributes greatness to single individuals.
But individual greatness is rarely the whole story. Research shows that teams are the main creators of new knowledge across most industries. New ideas dont emerge fully formed from the mind of a single personit takes collaboration and teamwork to develop them to their full potential.
In reality, the engine behind sustained successwhether in science, business, or governmentisnt a singular mind. Its a well-designed team.
The illusion of individual success
We tend to over-attribute both success and failure to individuals. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error: we explain peoples behavior by their traits, rather than their context. If a product flops, we blame the CEO. If a startup takes off, the founder is a genius. We rarely ask about the teams that surround them.
It gets worse. Even inside groups, people regularly overestimate their own contributions to collective endeavors. In one study, researchers asked each team member to estimate what percent of the groups success they were responsible for. The total? A whopping 235%. Thats a lot more than 100%!
Our individualistic tendencies lead us to build groups and organizations around the wrong assumptions. If you believe success comes from star individuals, you hire stars and hope for fireworks. But for complex problemsand most of our work now is complexit takes more knowledge and skill than any individual has to solve it. Thats why we need to put the conditions in place for individuals to combine and build on what each alone can bring.
What good teams do differently
In my research, Ive found that high-performing teams arent built through charisma, happy accidents, or trust falls. Theyre designed for success. There are four key elements of group structure that maximize your chances of creativity:
Composition: Many teams are composed haphazardly, based on whos available and office politics. But the best teams are small (i.e., three to seven members) and have a task-appropriate, diverse mix of knowledge and skills.
Goals: Its hard to achieve a common goal when members have different ideas about where theyre headed. Thats why clear, measurable, vivid goals are a critical antecedent for building teams that can outperform individuals. For instance, innovation at NASA spiked when John F. Kennedy swapped the vague goal of, advance science by exploring the solar system, to the vivid goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Task design: Teams can bring ideas to life when they have well-designed tasks that require a variety of skills, give members autonomy over how to conduct their work, and allow members to see progress toward their goals. For creative work, poorly designed tasks are repetitive and control the process, like a manufacturing assembly line. Well-designed tasks give teams whole pieces of work and the freedom to explore, such as the design firm IDEOs effort to redesign the shopping cart to better fit the needs of users.
Norms: Too often, groups are places where members fall into bad habits. In many organizations, workers are used to sitting passively in meetings. They worry that experimentation and suggesting new ideas will be scornedor even punished. But the most innovative teams actively fight these norms. Leaders actively encourage members to share their ideas, experiment, and learn from one another. And the battle against norms toward conformity and the status quo never ends. IDEO, for instance, plasters reminders of these norms on the walls of their buildingsthings like defer judgement, encourage wild ideas, and build on the ideas of others.
The real edge
We live in an era that celebrates ideas: TED Talks, startup pitches, visionary founders. But ideas dont execute themselves. And many great ideas die in bad teams. The reverse is also true: A good team can turn a mediocre idea into something extraordinary. Not because theyre smarter, but because theyre structured to think together better.
The great innovations and businesses of today were never built by a solitary lone genius. For all the credit Steve Jobs gets, he couldnt have built Apple and its collaborative innovation engine without the help of his cofounders and teammates. As you dig deeper into stories of great innovations, you almost always find a great team just under the surface.
The next time youre tempted to credit a lone genius, remember the people behind the curtain. The collaborators, the editors, the dissenters: the ones who made the idea betteror made it real.
Good ideas matter. But good teams matter more.
Getting dressed for work takes some effort. You have to buy the right clothes, choose what you want to wear each day, and think about how the way you dress affects the way people see you. Some people like to use their clothes as a way to call attention to themselves, while others are not interested in having their clothes make a statement.
While there are always some special occasions at work when you want to think carefully about what you wear that day, there are probably many days when you would like to be able to get up and choose an outfit quickly, because there are more important things you have to do in the morning before you head out the door for another day.
For that reason, it is helpful to develop a uniform for yourself. That is, a simple look that allows you to make at most a small number of choices that allow you to get dressed and ready. Of course, your uniform need not be an identical set of outfits the way Steve Jobs adopted a black turtleneck and jeans (famously copied by Elizabeth Holmes).
Here are a few considerations as you develop that uniform.
Stand out or blend in
In any environment, there is a certain amount of similarity in the way people around you dress. Those patterns of style set expectations about what people with different roles within your organization typically wear and how that is affected by other factors like gender.
Your choice of uniform affects whether other people are likely to notice your clothes. The more that you dress similarly to others, the less that your appearance is going to be a factor that makes you leap out of the environment to others. To the extent that you select clothes that display a more individual style, you are inviting others to notice you because of what youre wearing.
You should decide whether youre comfortable with the impact of the decision you make. When you wear something that you feel will call attention to itself, that can influence how you feel when walking the hallways, going to a meeting, or even sitting in a public area having lunch. If you dont like that sort of attention, then a unique outfit is likely to make you uncomfortable. If you dont mind the occasional smile from coworkers or comments about your clothes, then a more individual style can be a welcome point of conversation.
Of course, you do want to be aware of the difference between friendly conversations about how youre dressed and comments that veer toward harassment. Talk to a supervisor or your HR rep if you get comments that make you uncomfortable. Everyone should have the chance to display their individual style without fear of unwanted advances.
Dress up or dress down
One of the dimensions of difference across people in a particular role is whether they tend to dress more formally or more casually relative to their peers. Casual dress tends to lean toward outfits that are more strongly associated with leisure rather than work. More formal dress is often associated with people higher up in the work hierarchy.
Casual dress evokes a less serious attitude about work. That doesnt mean that people who dress casually work less hard. But, they are dressing in a way that creates the impression that work is not a strong driving force in their lives. As a result, casual dress is often easier for people to get away with when they have more power within the organization. That power enables them to overcome the initial impression conveyed by their outfit.
When you have relatively less power (or are trying to make a positive impression about your workplace attitude), then dressing more formally than is required is an easy way to leave an initial impression of your dedication to the work you do.
When in doubt, find a guide
Choosing a work uniform (particularly if youre new to an organization or a role) can create some stress. Before investing in your clothes, take a look at other people around you. In particular, notice the ones whose sense of style you admire. What is it about the way that they are dressing that leads them to look comfortable in their surroundings?
You need not copy the people whose uniforms you admire. Instead, you want to learn from them. Think about how those people are conveying something about themselves through their work attire. Then, think about what you would like to say about yourself.
If youre like most people, you may be able to answer the question of what you want your clothes to say about you, but you may have more trouble figuring out how to get your clothing to say it. Thats where you should seek help. If youre very lucky, you have a friend who knows a lot about clothing who can take you shopping to help you develop your uniform.
If not, find a clothing store with a well-trained sales staff. Talk to the staff about how you want your clothes to make you feel and what you want to communicate to others by your look. Let them help you pick out a couple of combinations that will convey that message.
Of course, the stores that have great staff are often (somewhat) pricy. If youre shopping on a limited wallet, then pick one or two outfits from that store as a baseline for the rest of your work uniform. Use what you learned to pick similar things at a store that fits your budget.
Also, remember that your ideas about the ideal uniform will change over the years. That is going to reflect a variety of factors including your growing confidence in yourself over the course of your career, changes in your role within an organization, and changes in the amount of money you feel like spending on clothes at different points in your life. As a result, you may go through this exercise periodically to reset your look.
Imagine youre Mark Zuckerberg. What does an average day at work look like for you?
Most people with experience in management would probably guess the Facebook boss spends his working hours in an endless series of meetings. Maybe he even schedules his time down to the minute like his fellow billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
But when Zuckerberg sat down for a fireside chat with Stripe co-founder John Collison recently and described his productivity system, it looked nothing like the overscheduled meeting mania many leaders suffer through. Instead, Zuckerberg claimed favors an alternate approach to productivity (and sanity) favored by many other superachievers, from Google executives to Albert Einstein.
Its called the 80% rule.
Why Mark Zuckerberg avoids one-on-one meetings
The relevant portion of the conversation kicks off when Collison asks Zuckerberg how he organizes his time “to actually spend time on the things that you think are valuable for the company.
Its a key question faced not just by the CEOs of multibillion-dollar behemoths but by everyday small-business owners and middle managers too. Which makes Zuckerbergs answer even more fascinating.
While he talks to his team informally frequentlyI talk to all these people more than they want to talk to me, he jokesZuckerberg generally tries to avoid standing, regular one-on-one meetings.
Instead, he tells Collison, I try to generally keep a bunch of time open in his schedule.
Why? Stuff is pretty dynamic and you wake up in the morning and you’re like, Okay, I need to work on these three things today. I want to make sure that I have a block of time where I can go do that, he explains.
Slack in his schedule allows Zuckerberg to be more agile, but it also helps him keep an even keel mentally.
I get really frustrated and in a bad mood if my whole day is scheduled and there’s a thing that I know is really important and I don’t get time to do it because I’m sitting in other things that are not the most important thing to be doing, he complains. You have too many days like that in a row and I just like explode.
Which is why hes such a firm believer in keeping a meaningful amount of your time open. That way we can have space for reflection and self-development and respond to issues as they rise.
Googlers call Zuckerbergs approach the 80% rule
Zuckerberg may use the vague phrase keep a meaningful amount of time open when describing his approach to productivity. But there is a more formal and precise way to think about this principle.
Laura Mae Martin, Googles in-house productivity coach, helps the search giants execs make the best use of their time. She calls this idea the 80% rule. It states you should schedule only about 80% of your days. Leave 20% open to absorb whatever craziness comes up.
I always tell people, shoot to under-commit because you end up then committing at the right level. Shoot to that 80%, and thats really where you end up being involved in the right amount of things, Martin explained on the HBR IdeaCast.
Superachievers and productivity experts swear by the 80% rule
Data obsessed Google might have formulated a precise rule for the trick of leaving slack in your schedule, but a variety of superachievers have, like Zuckerberg, intuited and applied this basic logic over the years.
Einstein was famous for leaving big chunks of time in his schedule open to tinker and think. But the approach doesn’t just work for dreamy scientists. Steve Jobs was another superachiever with a legendarily open schedule.
Various productivity experts have come to the same conclusion too. More than 20 years ago, software engineer Tom DeMarco wrote a whole book arguing for what is basically the 80% rule. Titled Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency (Crown Currrency), it explains that when your days are too full you cant absorb the inevitable shocks and surprises that arise. You end up getting less done in the long run than if you kept a looser schedule.
Sociologist Christine Carter is another author who wrote a book advocating for strategic slacking. Journalist Oliver Burkeman has a number of bestsellers focused on less rigorous scheduling.
I dont embark on each day as if on a tightrope walk, needing everything to go exactly right in order for me to make it through the plan, he writes.
What percentage of your day is scheduled?
Zuckerberg might not call his approach to scheduling the 80% rule, but the underlying principle is identical. And there are advantages to using Martins more precise formulation to describe the idea.
First, its catchy. The 80% rule is more memorable than just saying, Hey, um, maybe its like a good idea to leave some meaningful time open in your schedule.
Its also a exact target to aim for. With a hard number in hand, leaders can review their calendars and make adjustments. Which is just what Zuckerbergs recent interview should probably nudge you to do. What percentage of your days are currently booked up in advance?
If the Meta boss can manage to clear enough space to have time for strategic thinking and quick pivots, certainly you can too. A boatload of experts suggests youll get more done if you schedule less.
By Jessica Stillman
This article originally appeared on Fast Company‘s sister website, Inc.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
