When Maria Ross was trying to teach her son that empathy was a way to success, the world around them seemed to be sending the exact opposite message. So Ross took her years of experience as a management and brand consultant to make the case for empathy not as a moral imperative, but as a business strategy. It's an equation worth studying. Here, in her 2021 conversation with Guy Raz, she describes the way she turned her research into a book called The Empathy Edge: Harnessing the Value of Compassion as an Engine for Success.

When the COO of Chase Bank told Jacqueline Novogratz that she had the potential for a high level career at Chase, she knew she had to quit her job. She continued to use the skills she learned from investment banking, and used them to change the way the world sees capitalism and philanthropy. Today Acumen has delivered more than 100 million dollars in loans, grants, and investments to projects and businesses that help low income people around the world.

It's little wonder that as a child Jacqueline Novogratz was drawn to the stories of saints--or, rather, "narratives about women who directed their own lives," as she tells Guy Raz in this conversation from 2020 (reprised, fittingly, during a month that honors the power and history of women).