Mellody Hobson

“The role of a board of directors is to be a sounding board for the vision of the company - to hold executives accountable in executing that vision and to ensure a management succession plan is in place.”

“I've never met Colin Kaepernick, but he's a hero of mine. I'm in awe that he took it upon himself to publicly promote the American values of life and liberty that we all cherish.”

“I was in the Woodrow Wilson School of international relations and public policy at Princeton. You have to apply to get in, and I did not originally get in. I lobbied really hard and called many people. I just would not take no for an answer.”

“I can't tell you how many resumes we get from business schools across the country from black women and black men and Hispanic women, men, etcetera, who say I'm interested in working for your company because they can see someone at the top who looks like them.”

“I take vitamins when I wake up. One of them I need to take is to wake up my brain. It has some caffeine in it, and it stimulates my brain and I'm literally not a person without it.”

“I've told stories about people coming to my office and giving me their coats and requesting that I hang them up and get coffee - which I dutifully do. And then I come in and sit at the head of the table. It's awkward.”

“I think the one thing about the Zoom calls is unlike being in a room with people where you can look away or drift off, I feel like with Zoom, everyone's face is just dead center, head on, there is no drifting. It takes a lot of energy from me.”

“I grew up going to a school where there weren't a lot of black kids. And so my mother, from a very, very young age, has sensitized me to race.”

“Now I know there are people out there who will say that the election of Barack Obama meant that it was the end of racial discrimination for all eternity, right? But I work in the investment business, and we have a saying: The numbers do not lie.”

“We don't prognosticate macroeconomic factors, we're looking at our companies from a bottom-up perspective on their long-run prospects of returning.”

“You can teach someone with basic smarts to be smarter; you can't teach cultural fit or personality. But you also want someone who has a passion to win; someone that is all in.”

“The average American has 11 jobs in their lifetime, and I've only had one.”

“You know, when you're the youngest kid, you kind of get the last of everything.”

“I honestly think I'm going to rot my brain with all the news. I'm a news junkie.”

“The way I go about it is that we should all be inviting people into our lives who don't look like us, speak like us and don't come from where we come from.”

“Diverse perspectives lead to a better outcome. There's so much data, when you look at the math, in terms of the investor returns and the shareholder value that gets created from more diverse boards.”

“How many people, though, do I meet that I think have talent? Well actually a lot. That's what drives my enthusiasm in the conversation about diversity.”

“I loved college, I loved Princeton.”

“Being aware of challenges doesn't make them sting less, but once you see them, you can assess the best way to handle them.”

“Sometimes those apartments we lived in weren't finished, sometimes the rooms would be heated by the gas stove, sometimes we would heat our water on hot plates to take baths, and that was very sobering, especially as a child.”