How Good Leadership Is Connected to Good Books and a Good Night’s Sleep

Key takeaways

You can’t afford to give up your daily walk. It’s an investment in your leadership.

— Arianna Huffington, Thrive Founder & CEO, The Huffington Post Founder

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How do we use this device to serve you digital nutrition, versus digital junk?

— Padma Warrior, Fable Founder, President, & CEO, Microsoft Board Member, Spotify Board Memberr

Navigating uncertain times

Future Perfect is M13’s thought leadership series, where we convene investors and founders to reflect on the lessons and innovations that inform how we will build the future. In May, we gathered in New York City to hear from the vanguards of technology, innovation, and investing.

We’re in a moment when companies and individuals are up against new stressors and challenges, from the Covid-19 pandemic to rampant burnout to the market turndown. Amid these challenges, how do we go forward? How can we redefine success to see more clearly and build resilience?

Arianna Huffington (Thrive Founder & CEO and The Huffington Post Founder) and Padma Warrior (Fable Founder & CEO, as well as a Microsoft and Spotify board member) sat down to discuss the importance of wellness in uncertain times.

The third metric of successful leadership

For Arianna, true success is a balancing act—and a focus on wellbeing is nonnegotiable.

“We often look at success in terms of two metrics: money and status,” she explains. “But the truth is that these are like two legs of a stool, and you need a third metric: health and wellbeing.”

She tells the story of Ellyn Shook, the Chief Leadership & Human Resources Officer at Accenture, who told Arianna that she had to give up her daily walk due to the demands of juggling 700,000+ employees across time zones. To which Arianna replied, “You can’t afford to give up your daily walk. It’s an investment in your leadership.” Now, Ellyn texts Arianna regular updates on her 400-plus-day walking streak.

This investment in wellness pays returns in the form of productivity and better decision-making. “I love finding leaders who are proving to the world that when they take care of themselves, they're actually better leaders,” says Arianna. “Their decision making is better. They make fewer mistakes.” In her own businesses, Arianna says some of the biggest mistakes she’s made have been hiring mistakes, which have come as a result of trying to interview when she’s exhausted and just wants to get everything over with. As a result, she no longer does interviews when she’s tired.

This is just one way that making space to focus on wellness is connected to building better businesses. “Leaders are realizing that wellbeing and performance are connected,” says Arianna. “Focusing on the wellbeing and mental health of our employees is ultimately in the service of productivity, high performance, and strong business metrics.”

Digital nutrition

In researching for her book Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success, Arianna encountered Padma, then a technology leader at Cisco with a reputation as a wellness champion. Today, Padma is Founder, President, and CEO of Fable, a social reading app where readers can discover, read, and talk about books in an online social community.

Padma’s journey to focusing on wellness began with her background as an engineer. Her interest in using AI and machine learning to improve people’s lives led her to researching healthcare, where she came across report after report about how mental wellness was declining across the globe. “This was way before the pandemic,” she says. “Mental wellness—things like burnout, anxiety, stress, loneliness—all of these things were trending in the wrong direction.”

As a reader herself, Padma was interested in reading as a wellness tool. (One study out of Yale found that people who read for just 30 minutes a day live, on average, two years longer than non-readers.) It was also natural for her to turn to technology as a way to help relieve these problems—and to leverage mobile devices, so often cited as harmful and addictive, for good. “These devices are with us. I cannot live without my mobile device, and I think for the younger generation that’s even more true,” she says. “But how do we use this device to serve you digital nutrition, versus digital junk? Can we create an app that’s as fun as Tik Tok or Instagram, but is actually serving you digital nutrition?”

Her company Fable now seeks to bring the wellness benefits of “nutritious” reading to people where they are: on their phones. “The idea is not to hate on technology, but to apply technology in a useful way,” says Padma. “That’s the opportunity.”
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Thank you to our speakers

Arianna Huffington is the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, the founder of The Huffington Post, and the author of 15 books, including Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. In 2016, she launched Thrive Global, a leading behavior change tech company with the mission of changing the way we work and live by ending the collective delusion that burnout is the price we must pay for success.

She has been named to Time Magazine's list of the world’s 100 most influential people and the Forbes Most Powerful Women list. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge University with an MA in economics. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.

She serves on numerous boards, including Onex, The B Team, JUST Capital, and Gloat.

Her last two books, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder and The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night At A Time, both became instant international bestsellers. Most recently, she wrote the foreword to Thrive Global's first book Your Time to Thrive: End Burnout, Increase Well-being, and Unlock Your Full Potential with the New Science of Microsteps.

Padmasree Warrior is the Founder, President, and CEO of Fable, a mobile-first company that brings stories for everyone, anywhere. She also serves on the boards of Microsoft and Spotify.

Previously, Warrior was the CEO of NIO US and Chief Development Officer and Board Member of NIO Inc., a manufacturer of smart, electric, and autonomous vehicles. In this role, she scaled the company from startup to a successful IPO (NYSE:NIO) in three years. Prior to NIO, Warrior served as the Chief Technology & Strategy Officer for Cisco.

Padmasree Warrior has been widely recognized for her creative, visionary leadership. Accolades include “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women” for three years running (Forbes), the World of Difference Award (International Alliance for Women), “25 Most Influential Women in Wireless” (Business Insider), “50 Women to Watch” (Wall Street Journal), “100 Most Creative People in Business” (Fast Company), “the 11th Most Influential Global Indian” (Economic Times), the United States Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce’s Excellence Award, and YWCA Metropolitan Chicago’s Outstanding Woman of Achievement Award. In 2007, she was inducted into the WITI Hall of Fame.

Warrior has served on government initiatives, industry advisory boards, and charitable and community organizations. She holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and a Master of Science degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University in New York.

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