Name: Leadership Next: Janet Yellen and J&J
Uploaded: 2023-10-12
Duration: 4 min 37 s
Description: Highlights from Fortune's annual CEO Initiative event include U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Johnson & Johnson CEO Joaquin Duato.

Highlights from Fortune's annual CEO Initiative event include U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Johnson & Johnson CEO Joaquin Duato.

Leadership Next: Janet Yellen and J&J

Leadership

I suppose I should let this group in on a little secret about our past. I have a master's degree in Economics, which I got at the London School of Economics for which was the one year that secretary Yellen taught there. So she, she taught what little I know about macroeconomics. I learned from Janet Yellen. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Mia Allen. I see you're back in New York after a whirlwind few days in DC, there was so much going on there, including our very own fortune CEO I conference. So for listeners who don't know the Fortune CEO initiative was created seven years ago to give ceos of purpose driven companies that really want to focus on improving their positive social impact on society. Give them a forum where they could exchange ideas and best. I got a master's degree in Economics at the London School of Economics for six months. I would go in uh every day and get a uh what I'm sure was a brilliant but completely incomprehensible lecture from George Akerlof. And then in the afternoon, Janet Yellen would come in and tidy it all up. She's still the same person who stood at the front of that classroom uh so many years ago and can take very complicated subjects and make them sound very simple and clear. This was very exciting. She joined you on stage actually, just a few days after the government narrowly avoided shutting down. The first question for you is, is this mess going to change the relative optimism you had about the US economic outlook. Look, I'm very optimistic about the US economic outlook. Short term. Um inflation is coming down in the context of an extremely strong labor market, what people would normally call a soft landing um which is amazing by the way, it hardly ever happens. Correct. And um it it's great because of course, we want to see inflation come down. It's been burdening Americans, but we want to maintain the good strong labor market that we have. And we seem to be on that kind of path and medium term. Um We are now engaging in a very substantial program of investments to strengthen our economy, to boost our productive capacity, to boost productivity growth, to draw more American workers into the labor market and to address long-standing structural problems like um climate change and inequality across people races and places. One of the interviews that we're really interested in sharing with all of you uh was an interview that our editor in chief Allison Chantelle did with Johnson and Johnson, Ceo Joaquin Duato. Um Tell us a little bit about that one. The thing about Johnson and Johnson is, it has been a purpose driven company for many years. It has this famous credo that they really train everyone at the company and and Joaquin was a perfect representative of that credo. I think you'll get that in this conversation. I think there's a number of reasons for having low attrition. One is the size of the company that enables people to work in different sectors and have careers between Johnson and Johnson. Sometimes I say Johnson and Johnson has its internal job market. The other one is that people simply like to work for Johnson and Johnson. Uh our engagement levels are high. People like to work for a company with a purpose in health care. We are a company that pays a lot of attention to inclusion, so everybody feels good when they come to work. And certainly we like to believe that we are a caring company that we care, not only for the patients, but we also care for each other. So we, we try to have a strong health and wellness offering for our employees. So overall, people like working in Johnson and Johnson and stay longer in Johnson and Johnson, our average tenure, for example, in the US is more than a decade. So people can do careers and and we are happy of that. We, we, we are glad that people like to stay at Johnson and Johnson longer.