Reverse Mentoring

If you could choose a personal mentor, anyone at all, either current or from history, who would it be and why?

I've been fortunate to learn from a lot of people I've worked with, starting with President Reagan, the Great Communicator. I just learned a lot about communicating from him and leading and also just about common decency, which is something that he demonstrated to everyone. So that was a great learning experience. Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, I can rarely think of a time that I have met with him on any subject and haven't come away looking at things from a slightly different point of view. Just learning a different type of thinking. But now I'll tell you, when you're young, your mentors are older people. When you become older, your mentors become younger people. I learn from the junior people in the Washington Post newsroom about their uses of technology and the way they consume things and where they see the future of journalism going. I learn a lot from them, so I have mentors there who are much younger than me.

There's actually a term for that now. Reverse mentorship.

Yes.

The learning process never stops.

Hopefully not.

But, you know, in listening to you talk, I'm struck by something. You said you spent several years as a top aide to President Ronald Reagan. You later served as chief of staff after he left the White House. You were the key person in meetings with heads of state and international business leaders. How did you go from that, the world of politics, to the world of media?

Well, both are very much focused on communicating and understanding the world, understanding what someone stands for, understanding where they're going to take us. That's the politician side of it, and the media side is examining that and in asking questions and having a better understanding of it. So they're really not two separate fields. One is very much integrated with the other and reliant on the other.