Leadership Gap

You attended a UN State of the Ocean meeting when you were just 19 years old, while a student at Georgetown, and you met politicians, heads of state, CEOs, yet you felt there was still a leadership gap. How do you define transformational leadership, and how does that align with the future?

Absolutely. So I remember sitting at the UN, and like you mentioned, I was surrounded by all these amazing mighty people that I looked up to. But at the same time, I realized two things Ñ one of them was that these people were not being inclusive. There weren't enough young people in the room. There weren't enough people from different places around the world. And the information that was being talked about in these high level UN meetings was not leaving these closed doors. So I think that when you think about transformational leadership, inclusivity is one value that I just wasn't seeing, I didn't see being practiced. And secondly, I also heard them talk about the problems and talk about the gravity of the problem, and they threw out all those statistics in the world at me, which terrified me, but at the same time, they weren't giving me any types of solutions. They weren't giving me any hope. And so I think that when you think about leadership as well, you need to be open-minded. You need to ask questions and be able to admit what you don't know and look for innovation.

And come up with solutions, which is what you felt was lacking at the time.

Absolutely.