Name: Mentorship Matters: Shaping Tomorrow's Leaders
Uploaded: 2025-10-16
Duration: 18 min 35 s

Dina Powell McCormick’s resume spans senior roles in the public and private sectors, including stints as the deputy national security advisor in the first Trump administration and leadership roles at Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, and Meta. Today, she’s vice chairman and president of Global Client Services and a partner at the merchant bank BDT-MSD, as well as an author: earlier this year, she published Who Believed in You?, a book about mentorship. Ranked No. 77 on this year’s MPW list, Powell McCormick joins us to discuss what meaningful mentorship looks like across sectors in today’s dynamic times.

Mentorship Matters: Shaping Tomorrow's Leaders

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Before we dive into mentorship and the book, I want to ask you, just because this is such a historic week, during the first Trump administration as deputy national security adviser, you helped lay the groundwork for the Abraham Accords. And obviously we're now seeing a ceasefire, hopefully a lasting ceasefire in effect in the Middle East. Give us your thoughts on just this historic moment, what led to it, and what are your takeaways and hopefully hints of optimism this week. Yes, well, there are, well, first, I'm so delighted to be here to be with all of you. What an impressive summit Fortune Most Powerful Women 2025 is. I'm really impressed with it. Congratulations Mihal to you and Ellie and all the co-chairs and a shout out. I don't see I saw Anastasia somewhere and Allison, um. I cannot believe this marks the 20th year 20 years ago that with Patty Sellers and Lisa Koukas we started the Fortune Most Powerful Women mentoring program with the State Department and to this day when I go places I meet extraordinary. Ordinary women who many of you mentored that are truly changing the world and so I'm really happy to be here. Speaking of some of those women, we had a really robust program in the Middle East and that was a very difficult time, of course, after 9/11. And it was very hard to get women, you know, from the region to come at that time with all that was going on. So I've seen this very long sort of journey, if you will. I'm born in Cairo, Egypt, a small Coptic Christian community, and my family immigrated to the United States, so it's also, you know, personal for me. I think what we are seeing this week is extremely historic and God willing and God hoping we will see a continuation. I think the efforts of President Trump, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Secretary Rubio really are extraordinary given how difficult this was to wade through. I also think one of the things that has not been talked about as much is how many countries in the region worked together to make this possible, not always working together, this group of countries, but to have the Qataris, the Emiratis, the Saudis, the other Gulf countries, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia that's remarkable. That doesn't happen and I think that. That unified coalition of what I would call pressure frankly on Hamas was very important. And then I think working with Israel to see a path, getting those hostages' homes, I'm sure you saw the videos on October 7th my husband and I joined an event to commemorate October 7th. We had gone to Israel after the horror and We went and was hosted by the foundation of Howard and Alison Lutnick. Almost all of the hostages were there that had been in captivity. I actually got to talk to Noah Arghani and just imagine, you know, she was in captivity. She did not know if she would see Avatan again. And I just said, it's like you're the age of my daughter, my one of my daughters, and you are so strong. I don't think I could be as strong as you've been. And she said to me, I have to be because I'm hanging on to the belief that I'm going to see him again. And I just seeing that one video of them reuniting was extraordinary. This is a couple that couples that were separated, you know the horrible motorcycle image of them, you know, her trying to reach him. And if you haven't seen their reunion, it's extraordinary. And so I'll just end by where do I think this goes somewhat by also looking back a bit. My last event when I was deputy national security adviser in 2017 was an event hosted in Washington. By the ambassador from Israel, Ron Dermer, and the ambassador from Egypt at the time, it was an event to celebrate the 40 years of peace between Egypt and Israel, and I had the honor of being seated next to the widow of Anwar Sadat, Jihan Sadat. And it was overwhelming for me, obviously being from Egypt, and I was just saying to her what an honor it is that you're here, and she said, you know, I knew that when he chose to make peace with Israel, that probably he would not live much longer. Sort of a stirring thing. She said we didn't know how many years left we would have, but we had 4 more years. And yet sitting here today, how many leaders are there that can count a legacy of 40 years of peace as their legacy? So it brings me to this hope that the leaders of today will recognize the most important thing now is to build on this peace, to build on the Abraham Accords, and going back to that coalition of countries that stepped up, that gives me hope. They want to keep stepping up and building out the next phase of with bumps, it's the Middle East with a lot. I'm sure ups and downs. I just think that the population, 65% of which are under the age of 35, have had enough of death and destruction and really want to try to see economic development and hopefulness. Thank you for sharing that. It might seem like a weird segue to mentorship, but it's actually not because the very premise of the book you co-wrote with your husband um is that what You call transformative mentorship can actually help sort of heal some of the divisions that we're seeing in our country here and abroad, which we just talked about. So give us a little bit of context for why you wrote the book, why now, I think that's probably an obvious one given what I just said, but you could have written a book about a lot of things. Why mentorship? Why now? I think you're saying why with your husband, which would be a very good question. That's one of my questions. As Dave says, we've lived through having 6 daughters, a losing Senate campaign, a winning Senate campaign, but the Mount Everest of marriage for us has been writing a book together, which is true. Um, you know, it started during COVID, as I said, we have 6 daughters who were tweens and teens during those years, and it really struck us how much they lost human connectivity, your first boss, how do you present at work, how do you get feedback? None of that happens over Zoom. That really happens in person with mentors. deeply care about you and give you that feedback that you need to grow. So we started telling them about the mentors in our lives that truly without one or two people I would not have had the privilege of the journey that I've had and neither would my husband. And we started to ask other people who was that person for you at the time it wasn't who believed you. It was sort of who was your mentor and Tory Burch to Christine Lagarde to Mary Barra to Governors Westmore and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who were not governors at the time, the stories are just remarkable. The stories of people that you've never heard of, the unsung heroes that without whom we would not have benefited from these extraordinary leaders, and to the unifying point. I think people do want to have a say in what's going on in the world, but whether you have power or not, investing in one person and helping them find their purpose is really the most powerful thing you can possibly do. And that's the story. I'll share, you know, maybe my favorite one because it's both the who her mentor was and then she was my mentor, one of my dear friends and mentors, Condoleezza Rice. So as you know, Secretary Rice grew up in segregated Alabama. Um, when she was in high school, her dad became a football coach, a high school football coach in Denver. She ended up going to the University of Denver and her whole entire life, she believed that she was going to be a classical pianist, and she was extraordinary. But during high school, I'm sorry, during college, she went to a music festival. In Aspen, and she realized the 12 year olds were better than her. And in that one moment she said, Oh my God, I'm not going to be a classical pianist. What am I going to do now? And she had taken a course, foreign policy course focused on Eastern Europe by a professor named Joseph Korbel, who was an immigrant from Hungary. And he at the end of this course says to her, You're really good at this. And she says, What is this? And he said, national security, foreign policy, you, I, I'm begging you, you've got to get your PhD. She gets her PhD and that's what leads her to the career that she had. That professor was Madeleine Albright's father, if you can believe it. And Secretary Albright once told me that before he died. He said, I had two daughters that were secretaries of state. Can you imagine the impact that he had in in that knowing how to spot the talent in Secretary Rice, pushing her, being her mentor over many years. So I think there's one story after another, and our hope is that people will read the book and kind of ask themselves three questions, 3 questions. Who believes in me? Have I thanked them? Every chapter is filled with stories of people who I wish I had thanked that person more, and a lot of people have taken the book and sent it to their mentors, which has been really special. And finally, who am I going to believe in? Who am I going to invest in in the next generation that I can, you know, ensure will have a big impact on the world. And you distinguish between transformative mentorship and transactional mentorship, uh, can you explain sort of what the difference is and, and really what, uh, defines on the transformative side? What are the pillars, the values? Sure, well, look, they're both important. Transactional is a bit more the can you help me get the interview? Can you look at my resume, uh, can you, you know. you know, promote me for this role. But transformational is a lifetime of mentoring both your professional and sort of personal sides, and it's a deep commitment. It requires a vulnerability of both people and it really requires um the mentor being committed to caring about that person deeply. And in the book we talk about what successful transformational. looks like. The first is caring enough about the person to give them the tough love. One of my bosses, the CEO of Goldman at the time, Lloyd Blankfein, used to say to me, some people say I'm your mentor. I know you may think of me as your tour mentor, but without his feedback, without his honest, tough, tough love, which, by the way, in male dominated industries, you need the male. Mentoring or tormenting to really get better and that was so critical. But the, the big, big thing about transformational mentoring is opening up about how failure is the thing that often happens right before success. It's really amazing how much people have lobbed on or grabbed on to this. We do not talk enough about failure. If you're sitting in this room. And you look at your resumes, it looks like it was all like this, but we know it wasn't, certainly not in my case, certainly not in my case, uh, you know, it goes like this because how could you possibly grow without failure? How could you possibly know what you didn't know without making some mistakes? And we really focus on this because that's when you need a transformational mentor in those moments. when you are down when you think I can't get back up, I'm totally now probably ruined my career or whatever it is, and the idea of a transformational mentoring saying mentor saying, what are you going to learn from this? Because you can't look back, you can't change what happened, which sometimes I do. It's a bit of an Achilles heel, I bet for some of us, but it's wasted time. It's what what can you do to move forward? Um, I was really struck also in the book by the fact, and this is so obvious, but we don't think of it, a lot of these incredible people who you interviewed mentioned their parents, obviously educators as early mentors, and I love the stories also of. I think it was Westmore whose mother found mentors for him. Um, talk about the role of parents because again I think you know for the parents out here in the room you don't think of our, especially if you have teenage daughters like me. I don't think of myself as a mentor. No, it's interesting. So many people did cite their parents as mentors. Um, and in some cases, the, the people that were talking about their parents as mentors were like, I didn't appoint them as my mentor because it's different being a parent and a mentor. And the interesting parallels between Westmore and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, her dad played like an obviously outsized role. She grew up in the governor's mansion in Arkansas. She worked on his campaigns. I He had such, you know, a presence, but I think it's more of how much he believed in her. I mean, she grew up thinking women are supposed to be the leaders and to have him really instill that in her, I think was extraordinary. And in West Moore's case, his mom just said to him, I'm not going to allow you to go down the wrong track. Like, I'm going to do everything I can, including when he kept getting in trouble, put him in military school, and we got when he got expelled, she went to the military school and said, Too bad he's your problem. And she went and found a mentor for him at VMI and said, I think it was VMI and said, You're now in charge of my son. And I can't do it as a single mom, and that gentleman was transformational, you know, for Wes, and you probably know his book The Other West Moore, which describes somebody that lived in his neighborhood that went down a horribly different track, ended up actually being convicted for being part of a murder and and is in life in prison, and his book The Other Westmore talks about that when he went to visit him, this the West, the other Westmore said. Uh, we had pretty similar backgrounds, but the difference between you and me is you lived up to your expectations and I lived up to mine. Nobody expected anything different from me. And so when you think about the important role that she played in his life that could have gone totally different. And also I think Governor, now Ambassador Huckabee to Israel I think played a really big role in ensuring that his daughter thought she could do anything. Do we have a question from the audience for Dina? We've got one up here. There's a microphone coming to you. Hey Gina, Aidan Madigan Curtis. This is actually fun because Dave was one of my mentors at Bridgewater for many years. Um, I was gonna make that joke. No, unfortunately he's a pretty nice guy. Um, and Bridgewater is a unique environment. So Dave was actually really awesome to have as a mentor. Um, you know, we live in a really interesting time where, to your point earlier, more and more of our youth are spending time online. They're interacting with AI models or social media, you know, the people who are crafting these foundational models right now are needing to tackle tough questions like. When young people go to Chat GBT for mentorship, how do they navigate those topics? So I'm curious if you could give advice to the folks who are navigating these tough topics at these big tech companies, how would you advise them to tackle the tough topic of mentorship where so many young people are looking to these types of tools for mentorship today? Sure, well, full disclosure, I'm on the board of Meta and um so we have these kinds of conversations uh obviously um. I, if I'm being really humble and honest, I, I don't know, and I think we are in the middle of a major transformation of humanity, of the workforce, of technology, and the only thing that is certain is it's happening. Um, I think where the book comes in and mentoring is I think it's actually never been more important for the human connection. It's just never been more vital, kind of back to those people that were parents who picked mentors for their kids. I mean, everyone here instilling in their kids or the people that work for them, you really need a mentor and you need Someone who is really gonna care about you in a transformational way um because I feel and maybe this is like hopeful but I think we also are missing that we missed it during COVID we miss it because we're attached to devices all day long and I don't think that you can possibly have those meaningful relationships uh obviously uh in the same way one of the things that we see with a lot of our clients. That BDT and MSC partners is that we work with families and founders and the next generation and these are often privately held enterprises, there is so much human connectivity there because they're passing on to their next generation the values of the company that they founded and started and so there's this almost automatic kind of human mentoring dimension to it but I think companies. not just tech companies, really have to think about that and be actually more directive and purposeful about creating mentoring programs. I do think that's one of the reasons the Fortune program was so successful because I think it was a model that not only would some of the women and companies be mentors to these extraordinary female leaders, but the rest of the company would really see what an impact that had. Well, Dina, uh, we do need to wrap up. We're all very uh happy that your marriage survived the book and that you were able to share it with all of us. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you guys. Great to see you.