Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Founder, Chair and CEO, Council for Inclusive Capitalism
CEO, E.L. Rothschild
Believe that we can change things to make this world better. Whether we're doing it one person at a time or with an institution, it doesn't matter. We really, really can do it.
Summary
This week on Leadership Matters, Alan is joined by Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Founder, Chair & CEO of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism and CEO of E.L. Rothschild. Throughout their conversation, Alan and Lynn discuss Lynn’s early life and influences, her fascinating career journey, her charitable work, her passion for the value of moral leadership and the many lessons in leadership she’s learned along the way.
Mentions & Resources
Management, by Peter Drucker
Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL, by Roger Martin
Guest Bio
Lynn Forester de Rothschild is Founder & CEO of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a global not-for-profit organization which develops groundbreaking initiatives with global CEOs and distinguished leaders in government and civil society to catalyze actions that transform capitalism and make our economies and societies more inclusive, dynamic, sustainable and trusted.
Lynn is also Chief Executive of E.L. Rothschild LLC, a family office with interests in private companies, public markets and real estate. She is a member of the Board of Directors and Nominating & ESG Committee of The Estee Lauder Companies, and previously served on the boards of The Economist Group, Gulfstream, General Instruments, Bronfman-Rothschild and Weather Central.
As part of her charity work, she serves on the Advisory Board of Focusing Capital on the Long Term (FCLTGlobal), the McCain Institute for International Leadership and the Eranda Rothschild Foundation (a de Rothschild family foundation) and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House.
Previously, she served as a member of the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Committee and the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board under President Clinton, the Board and Executive Committee of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and as a member of the United Nations Advisory Committee on Inclusive Financial Services (2006-2011).
Lynn has been a featured speaker at global forums and corporate and university events, including the World Economic Forum, United Nations, World Bank, G20, OECD, Bloomberg New Economy Forum, Future Investment Initiative, Aspen Ideas Festival, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Tsinghua University, and Peking University. She has also published in Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time and The Guardian. In 2007, Forester de Rothschild was awarded the Commendatore Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. She graduated magna cum laude and beta kappa from Pomona College in Claremont, California and from Columbia University School of Law, with a Juris Doctor degree with honors as Harlen Fiske Stone Scholar.
Episode Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
Welcome to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and leadershipmattersshow.com I'm your host, Alan Fleishman. Today, I'm honored to be joined by an extraordinary leader, Lynn Forrester to Rothschild. Lynn is a business icon, philanthropist, a pioneering advocate for inclusive capitalism. She's the CEO of E.L. Rothschild, a family Global Investment Office that specializes in media, wealth management, infrastructure, real estate, agriculture and consumer goods.
Lynn has had a fascinating career that has spanned sectors. She has served as a trusted advisor to policymakers, built successful ventures in telecommunications and tech industries, and works tirelessly to promote a more equitable and sustainable approach to global capitalism.
Lynn is the founder, chair and CEO of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, an organization that brings together leaders from across the private sector to create a more inclusive, sustainable and trusted economic system that works for everyone.
I'm excited to have Lyn on the show today to discuss her journey, her early influences, her inspiring career, her guiding principles, and the many lessons and leadership she has learned along the way. Lynn, you're a great friend. You're someone I have always admired, personally and professionally, I'm so glad you're joining us on Leadership Matters today. It is an honor to have you on with us.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Well, I'm very glad to be with you, and I am honored to be with you, because I have always admired everything that you do, where we're in the fight together to make the world a better place.
Alan Fleischmann
I would say this behind your back, I'm always a little bit more inspired and a little more ready to take on the next, and I'm very, very grateful. And I guess what I want people to know is, you know, kind of your journey.
You were born and raised in New Jersey, even though I think of you so much as a global citizen, tell us a bit about your early life, what your parents did, any brothers or sisters, what life was like around the house, and anything special about the place where you grew up.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Oh, my well, in my prayers every day, I thank God for my mother and father. Um, they were, they're not with us anymore, but both of them were, in their way, salt of the earth, and they were very, very simple people. My father was entrepreneurial. On the weekends, he had an aviation business, and during the week, he worked in a cable company. He was the chief executive of a small cable company, and definitely worked very, very hard. He was an old-fashioned American who believed that anything was possible in America, but most importantly, you had your duty, your duty to your family, and a bit of duty to community, although that was more my mother than my father. My father just believed that his duty was to take care of his four children, put them through college.
There was a big emphasis on University. My father had dropped out of college because of the war and became an Air Force pilot, so he never finished college, but he wanted that for us, and he basically was of the view that he would, he would take care of us through any level of education that we wanted, but then we were on our own, and we shouldn't look to him for anything beyond our education and kind of what he taught us. He was very, very clear about that.
And I have one brother, three brothers, but one went to the Air Force Academy and became a captain in the Air Force and served for many years. My other brother went to Amherst College and then medical school and as a doctor. My third and youngest brother moved to Wyoming for college and stayed there to be a farmer. So we're sort of all over the United States.
My mother was very active in the church, more than like the community at large. She made sure we were at church every Sunday. She took us into New York, into the Bronx and different neighborhoods in New York on Sundays. To worship and to do, you know, sorority work, you might call it, and that was kind of – went to a public high school. I was sort of a nerdy one in the high school. I wasn't one of the cool kids by any shot, but I did focus on my grades. That was my that it's a little town called Oradell New Jersey, which is hardly a global town, although the year I graduated, The New York Times had an article on the quintessential American middle class town, and they highlighted Oradell and had a picture of a street one block from mine. You know, little houses, little yards, lots of Country Squire station wagons, very, you know, aspirational in its way. It was a good neighborhood. It wasn't at all diverse or anything like that. I knew nothing about diversity except on Sundays, what my mother kind of showed me, and that was it.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. And did you already have interest in elementary, middle and high school that kind of is looking back and you see in the Lynn of today, kind of the beginnings of Lynn of tomorrow when you're looking back?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Oh, that's such an interesting question. Very funny. I convinced my mother and father to let me go to France when I was 16 on a sort of student program. And the letter that they saved, and they showed it to me, but I haven't found it since they showed it to me when I was much older, but I was 16 years old, and I was writing back to them about whether America should sell things, F16s to the French, whether we should be arming Europe and a whole rift on allies and shared values and all of this stuff. So I think, and I know, actually, that I have always had, I now call it a genetic defect, where I am just kind of obsessed with public policy and and, you know, and government. I didn't know what I would do, but I knew I was always thinking about that, so I would say that there was something of an indication of what interested me. You know, I didn't want to be in the movies. I didn't want to want to be a great chef or a ballerina or any of that stuff. I wanted to be substantive. I always wanted to be substantive, and that's why –
Alan Fleischmann
You studied political science in college. I guess that's where Pomona became part of your life. Pomona College, when you knew you wanted to study political science, that sounds like you were the policy and the international elements of your life started to become a part of your college experience too.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Yes, yes, exactly, and college, going to a private college, and meeting, meeting people who had true world views. My worldview at that time was so limited. I was really just a middle class girl, you know, kind of watched Leave It to Beaver growing up. And when I got to college, not only did I start to study, you know, great minds, but I was with great minds and people who were from all over the country, and they had different views, on, on, on, really, everything. So it was, it was, yeah, pursuing Political Science and Government was very much natural for me. I also studied economics. So I got both. I always saw the two of them as related.
Alan Fleischmann
And did you actually, so true, actually, but that probably wasn't that came from you, probably from others. The idea how important it was to study economics as well. But did you, was it hard to pick? Was it hard to go to Pomona College and figuring out where you wanted to go? Or how did that get, how did that happen?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
So, it was very unusual for anyone from the East Coast to go to Pomona, but my brother had gone to Amherst, and he was, still is, you know, the smartest one in our family, and he was the one directly in front of me, you know, he was three years older than I was, so most of our teachers, you know, saw, oh, another Forester is coming. You know, she's going to be really smart, like Gary. And I was always kind of in his shadow. He was a guy who, you know, he thought Tolstoy was good, so he studied Russian so we could read it in the original. Just one of those real geniuses. So he had gone to Amherst. I wanted to go to the west coast, where my father had been born and raised, so I had uncles and cousins out there, but I wanted to get to California. And I was told that Pomona was the Amherst of the West. So it was really my top choice.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that, that's a great school. And then did you go right? Anything exciting you happen to promote it in leadership, or anything that you test drove when you were in college that you look back on with great memory, great fondness?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Yes, yes. Several, several things. One is, and you might not really know this about me, but I'm a very devout Christian, even though I converted to Judaism, which we can talk about that. Bbut my freshman year, I worked for the Hollywood Presbyterian Church in Hollywood and Vine, And I lived in the basement of the church, and every day I went out to basically proselytize Jesus on like Hollywood and Vine, when it was really quite tough. I mean, we're talking in the early 70s, and a lot was going on.
I'm lucky. My children say, I'm lucky I physically survive that, but so that was a great summer, and then one of my my professors was able to get me a job in Camden, New New Jersey. It was a very proactive mayor, and I was able to work with him. He had an idea of a homesteading program for the dilapidated parts of town. So as you know, our homesteading program in the 19th century was the government would give you land in Iowa. And in fact, my ancestors were homesteaders and settled a large part of Iowa, but the idea here was an urban homesteading program, and so I was able to work on that and give apartments to people with the understanding that they would stay in them for seven years, improve them and have housing and also have some wealth. So that was very exciting to me to work on a small scale project. I was, for my age, given we were just this little tiny office within the mayor's office, and it really showed me a lot about how public-private partnerships could change real things for real people. We put several hundred people into housing, so that was really important to me in college, and perhaps so my most important educational connection came because Peter Drucker, who was the management guru in America In the 60s and 70s, he was the advisor to Sloan at General Motors.
He was, we don't have anyone like him today, where all chief executives would look to Peter Drucker in those days, the 50s, 60s into the 70s, he kind of bumped up against Milton Friedman, but he retired out to California and Claremont, and I took a class with him. And that was a really important to me for what I learned, but it was also important to me because it was a class of 600 and I was the only A+. And because of that, I became magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and all that stuff. So I'm very I'm very grateful to him, and in most of my speeches on inclusive capitalism, I go to the last page of his 1954 book on management, which was a handbook for everyone, where he says so beautifully that the definition of the American Revolution in the 20th century essentially that managed teachers understand their duties to the community, and that if that is ever lost, then the corporation is lost. Not only is our society lost, but we really don't have any more right to operate. It's a beautiful book and and he was really the first one to cause me to have a connection between how business and society have a sort of hand and glove relationship, that you really can't have a good business environment if you've got a bad social and political environment, he was the one who really made me understand that.
Alan Fleischmann
So if we're telling our listeners what they should read, what would you recommend specifically for the read? This is, this is amazing.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Well, that book by Peter Drucker is called On Management. It was written in 1954 so a lot of it might not be completely relevant. I would say, if your listeners are interested in reform of capitalism, there is a book called Fixing the Game. And I would suggest that it's a short game. It's a short book, and it's, it uses as a metaphor, the NFL, which American listeners can relate to, particularly as we're going into the Super Bowl – Go Eagles. And I was, I think I would, I still would recommend that book I read that very early in my journey on inclusive capitalism, but I think I'd say that one.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. That's really great. And then you went to law school. I would have thought at that point you may have gone to business school. When you went to law school at Columbia, well, maybe was that food because you were trying to formulate thinking about policy, or you wanted to practice, or there was a public life, there's a big part of your life that is public life that you're just curious where the law school came at. It's great training.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Yeah, so my brother, who I told you about, I was always like, 15 steps behind. He went to medical school, and I knew I didn't want to go anywhere near blood, but I thought I should have some I should have some kind of professional training. I still was not clear what I wanted to do. I didn't have a big plan, but the gap between Pomona and law school is very important, because after I graduated, I graduated in 1976 so it was a beautiful year to come back. We were celebrating Independence. It was a very patriotic kind of time, and I had read everything that Daniel Patrick Moynihan had written because of my major in political science, and when I got to New York, I read in all the papers that then Ambassador Moynihan, he was ambassador to the UN, was going to make a run for the United States Senate.
And so I thought, oh my God, here I am in New York. He's running for the Senate. I've got to get a job with him. So, knowing no one in New York, but knowing that the Statler Hilton was going to hold the the New York State Convention, where they were going to hear from all the all the candidates, and there were quite a few. Bella Abzug, who was a big name at that time, a big feminist, was the front runner, for sure. Uh, Ramsey was running, Hirschfeld was running. It's a big group.
So I went to early in the morning, I went to the Statler Hilton. I had studied photography in college, and I wasn't that good, but I knew how to use a camera, and I knew how to develop pictures. And I waited for Ambassador Moynihan to get out of this car, and then I ran up to him, and I said, Ambassador, this is your first day with this group. I'll stay with you all day and take photographs, so then you can send the photograph to the various delegates about how nice it was to be with them. He said, yes, yes, yes. Very good. So he just said, yeah, go ahead. Do what you want. So he had no campaign staff. I stuck with him all day. I was in his face. I was climbing on tables. I was shooting pictures of these people. I had no idea who I was shooting, because I didn't know anybody either, and I took the photos to a dark room like right off of Times Square.
That night, I stayed up all night, and then the next morning, I went back to the Statler Hilton, and somehow I found out where the which room the Moynihans were staying on and I knocked on the door, and his incredible wife, Elizabeth Moynihan answered the door, and I said, I have these photographs from yesterday. So she said, oh, come in. We'll look at them. So she let me in and and then I just stayed all day. I, like, took phone messages. I went to get a coffee. I did like everything. And at the end of the day, all these Harvard boys were lining up outside to get interviews for a job, and Liz turned to me and she said, what are you doing this summer? Would you like to work for the campaign? And I got this wonderful job with Senator, well, Ambassador Moynihan, who became senator, but because of that long story, long way to answer why I went to Columbia. I wanted to stay in New York, and he wanted me to stay in New York, so I applied late to Columbia and and Senator Moynihan made a phone call, and I got accepted, and that's kind of how I ended up at Columbia Law School. I worked for him through the campaign. Never went to Washington with him, but stayed friends with him right to the very end, and with his wife, who died not too long ago.
Alan Fleischmann
And he was a special senator. He was such a bright light intellectually as well. I mean, he was not afraid to think big and to think a lot, you know, think of things that no one ever thought about. And he had a great value system too.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
He really did. And the way he mean, he worked for Kennedy, and he worked for Nixon, and his whole life, he defended Nixon as much more progressive than society. Could give him credit for after Watergate, but he created the Department of Education. He created the EPA. He worked very closely with Moynihan on Moynihan’s signature legislation, which was a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, you know, but he couldn't, but he couldn't get it through Congress. So Moynihan was incredible, and Moynihan taught me a lot about, well, the importance of thinking, the importance of ideas, but also the importance of bipartisanship, like, it doesn't matter who you're working for, if what you're working to do is good for America. I definitely feel that very strongly.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. And law school was a great experience?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Law School was a great experience. Incredibly intimidating. I had never been with such just colossally brilliant people. Um, and there I was. I've just, you know, the reason I thank God every day, because I've been so lucky. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of my professors. She was still at Columbia at the time, she hadn't gone on the bench, and I had her for a small seminar my third year, and when I was graduating, I didn't really know much about her. I knew I was hanging on every word she had to say, but I didn't know much about her past or her future. But she said to me, Lynn, you're going to have a much easier time with your career than I did with mine. And of course, she was referring to the fact that when she graduated, she was only interviewed for secretarial jobs, except for one little law firm that let her do associate work. I mean, it's just incredible how the world was changing for women. And she was so good to me.
She just said, you know, follow your dreams. I didn't really have a specific dream at the time. I knew I was on to go to work for private law firm, but I focused on Simpson Thatcher and Bartlett, because that was where Cy Vance had come from, and this was the Carter era, and Cy Vance was Secretary of State, and I thought how great go and have your career be a be a substantive business force, and then be an important policy maker. So I went there to basically learn how he did it.
Alan Fleischmann
And you were there for how long, and you specialize in you. Corporate practice. Litigation, right?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
No litigation. I was always on the corporate side. I stayed there for four years, and actually, Cy Vance was part of the reason that I decided to leave because, you know, I was one of those associates who you know, worked 80 hours a week. If someone said jump, my only question was how high. I was killing myself. I was working in our Park Avenue office with hermetically sealed Windows on a Sunday in August, when the air conditioning was off, I was dying of the heat, and I'm just doing yet another negative covenant for manufacturers, Hanover Bank or something, and my eyes were drooping, and I looked up and in walked Cy Vance. He was working on a Sunday in August in New York. And I said, no, no, this is just no good for me. I can't do this. I can't become Secretary of State and then be back to the same office where I am working as a fourth-year associate. So I made plans to leave.
Alan Fleischmann
What did you end up going right after this? I know that you serving on the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council and on the secretary of Energy's Advisory Council under Bill Clinton, but there was a gap, I guess, in between right, right?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Yes, yes, so would have been the mid 80s. I graduated from law school in 1980 so ‘84-85 I knew I really wanted to be a client, not a lawyer, and one of the clients of Simpson Thatcher at the time was a man called John Kluge, and this generation won't know of him, but he was the richest man in the world when the lists were just starting, and no one had heard of Bill Gates, and he was a client. And he was an incredible entrepreneur. He had a company called Metro media, which he then sold to Rupert Murdoch and became Fox. And I was there for all of that, so that that certainly made him very wealthy.
But the real source of his wealth was that he was attending a cocktail party in Washington because he had television and radio, so he was sort of in that world. And he heard that the Federal Communications Commission was going to begin to issue licenses for two way telephone use, called cellular telephones, and no one wanted them. Very few people paid attention. As soon as John, being the brilliant entrepreneur that he has, heard it, he decided, oh my God, I am going to be the biggest in this. And so he created a new division, the Metro media cellular division. Nobody wanted to work in it, because this was like people thought it was like radio paging business, which it was at that time. It was all people in polyester suits and, you know, like little high heels. So John asked me if I wanted to join it. And he was such a dynamic man, I would have done anything.
But I was really lucky, because he put me in the telecom business really early on, and he made me executive vice president. I was, you know, in my early 30s, and I had the time of my life, because my job was to go around the country and buy these small paging companies that had applied or were applying for cellular licenses. So I was really on the ground floor of cellular, and that's how I got into the telecommunications business. And then John, a few years later, not that many, I would say maybe three, another three or four years later, John sold his, he had New York, Chicago, LA Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston. He had most of the big cities all tied up. And this is really early days. Nobody had a cell phone. And of course, a smartphone wasn't even imagined, and the phones were the size of bricks at this time. So he sold it. Southwest Bell bought it. He became the richest man in the world. And I said, you know, I can't move. I can't work for a phone company, number one, number two, I can't move to Texas. So by that time I had had, I had two children. So I said, I don't know what I'm going to do.
He said, you've been in the business of finding me these businesses. Go buy one. I'm not buying anymore. Go buy one yourself. And, you know, become an entrepreneur. And I said, I want, I said, you know, I barely have money to pay the grocery and the rent bill every month. How can I buy one? He said, come on, he said, you know my banks, you know my partners, and go ahead and do it. And there was a company down in Puerto Rico that I was priming to bring to him, and so, but he said, I'm not buying anything. I'm selling.
And so I talked to Motorola, which was the Apple of its day. At that time, it controlled the mobile phone business. It was a great Chicago company, a great old fashioned company, anyway, long story short, I convinced them that they should understand from the inside how these cellular businesses work and the rate reason, and the way I convinced them to do it was I said, you're valued on the stock market as a multiple of earnings. Cable companies are valued as a multiple of revenue. Cellular companies are valued as a multiple of the number of people who are within its license area. So huge valuations. And I said, so anyway, I convinced them to invest in me, and they said, we will put in the equity. And I knew the bank so I could, I put the debt in states, banked me, and we bought the company, but Motorola wanted me to own the majority, so I essentially was given a 60% carry, which those people in the in the private equity business – no, that's an amazing amount, amazing multiple an amazing carry.
And anyway, so, I bought it, I ran it, I extended it into Latin America. And right about then was when the internet was coming into focus, and President Clinton wanted an advisory committee to talk about what the internet would mean for society and how to regulate it, a little bit like the conversations we're having now around AI, but this was about the internet. And he very kindly, by that time I had worked on the campaign, and he put me on that committee, which has made an enormous amount of difference. Again, it was public policy. It gave me access to really, the biggest players in my industry, and I was still a pretty young woman, so it was an incredibly important break for me.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. Did you then go back and forth to Washington at that point with the beginning of that?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Yeah. That was when I, you know, the first time you go into the White House and have a meeting in the, I guess we used to meet in the Roosevelt Room. You know, it's pretty awe inspiring, yeah, and it was just, it was so fantastic to be able to to think big about my industry with other geniuses, I mean, and there were people from the creative industries, because the biggest issue back then about the internet was, what will it do to music rights and movie rights, and Jack Valenti, who was the iconic head of –
Alan Fleischmann
Motion Pictures Association, yeah.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
That's right. Motion Pictures association was a very, very vocal member of the Council, and it was, it was fantastic. So that was a big break.
Alan Fleischmann
For me. So many parallels to the conversation. We're having that disruption from AI. I mean, maybe, maybe different levels of concern, but certainly similarly, of how does government play its role, and where, what do we imagine it to be, and what do we make sure it doesn't become – it's amazing, actually, how the parallels exist.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one question is, is the transition from analog or analog world, which I think you probably remember, but you know, dial telephones, pagers that beeped from analog to digital, is that bigger than from, you know, Apple iPhones to AI, I don't know, was a pretty big switch, pretty big change.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, when you consider what a change in human behavior, and how quickly an immediate, the immediacy of which we had to get information and then respond, probably even more profound in that area that you transitioned us to. Then today, because we're, we're getting used to speed. The question is, you know, other disruptions that come along with what AI brings. But there was, that was a huge, profound change in life, you know, waiting, waiting for information and then responding to it was a slow process that you could control until you know what they were in the analog to digital.
Yeah, amazing. That's a good thing to worry about. And then, you know, you this way at this point, you were already doing a lot. Then in the public sector, the private sector, you've been an entrepreneur very successfully. You know, you've been a lawyer as well. So, you know you were covering the basis of being, you know, a leader in both public, private and civil society as we learn more. And then you, I guess, you and your late husband, then connected, Evelyn, forces that became E. L. Rothschild, and that might be skipping here, maybe skipping a little bit here.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Well, when I met Evelyn, and again, I met him at a policy conference. So if anyone is listening, you're going to get the drift that being involved in policy and politics and kind of making the world a better place is definitely part, not only of an interest in life, but of a really good career path. And I didn't actually figure that out. I just followed what I was interested in. And I always said, if there was a door there, I always tried to push it open, and that's really what I did with my career, but I don't think so.
So I was doing that in answer to your question, and I went to a conference in Scotland at a place called Bilderberg, which is now a golf course owned by Donald Trump, wasn't then. And the Bilderberg conference brings together European and American leaders from business and policy, well, really politics and policy to cement the European-American relationship. It still goes on. It was created after World War Two by David Rockefeller and Johnny Agnelli from Italy and the King of the Netherlands. And as the first meeting was in Bilderberg, and it still goes on, and Evelyn and I were both delegates that year. So that was when we met. And I, by that time, had sold my Puerto Rico business, but I had another business in wireless broadband that I had started. And it was sort of in that context that I was invited to Bilderberg, and that was the year the Wall Street Journal had a little article, the most important company you've never heard of, which was a profile of me, because I had a very distinguished group of directors, and I met Evelyn, Henry Kissinger was on my board, Bert Roberts and the head of MCI. Probably people don't remember that, but very important company, Vernon Jordan, an iconic Washington figure, they were all on my board, which is why the Wall Street Journal wrote the article, actually. But then I met Evelyn, and I asked Evelyn to go on the board. And I think he was just shocked because people, people didn't invite him to do things. He was so intimidating to people, but he came on the board, one thing led to another, and we ended up in romance, and –
Alan Fleischmann
Then you work together, yeah, which is amazing. Was E.L. Rothschild formed soon after he got married. Or was it, you know…
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
It was four years after? It was because four years afterward he sold his interest in the bank, and I sold my interest in all my telecom companies. So, so we just formed E.L. Rothschild, really, as a family holding company.
Alan Fleischmann
And he was very active for many years prior with the Rothschild as a member of the Rothko family with the bank and as a leader as of his generation as well.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Oh, yeah, yeah. He was the CEO for probably 15 years. Yeah, before we met, yes, yes, he was the head of the bank. So he was very active, amazing.
Alan Fleischmann
And then your time, he being a former CEO, you being a former CEO, coming together to work together was that hard? Two CEOs coming together can be a great partnership. Being married could be I mean, I'm married to my wife who is also my business partner. You know, there are many, many benefits to it. You speak the same language and same priorities. You, you know, you you can, you understand each other's life and missions. But I'm sure it's also difficult because you're both working together.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Yeah, I think, I think it's it's not always going to work. It worked really well for us, partly because Evelyn and I had two very different sets of strengths. I mean, I am, I'm the nerd. I'm the one who's poring over the spreadsheets, and he's kind of the vision guy, and he's the person who had incredibly brilliant people sense, like he could smell if a deal or a person was no good from a mile away. And I don't have that, I don't have that skill. So it worked, but, and it's obviously working for you and your wife, but I would say it's not a self-evident path to success. It's not necessarily a good thing.
Alan Fleischmann
And the fact that you had had such a rich experience and journey and so heavy maybe you often knew what you loved and what you didn't love, so the two of you could settle into what you both did best, and that made it probably not easier, but certainly made it much more enjoyable.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Yeah, exactly, and this isn't so true for young women, but also Evelyn was so iconic that my success was no no type of intimidation to him, and basically, I grew up with a generation of men who weren't necessarily comfortable with strong women, but he was. He was definitely comfortable with everything that I was and that really helps. That's why I often tell women, you know, make sure you marry right, because if you marry somebody who doesn't want you to have a career, it's really tough going.
Alan Fleischmann
That's right, did you guys decide together what you wanted the focus to be?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Um, no, not really. I mean, he knew I was always going to work, and once I sold the company. It only made sense that we would run our own investments. And so we just, again, it wasn't much of a plan. It wasn't a plan at all, I would say. But it just kind of evolved and we ran that, and we made some pretty good investments along the way. And that was fun.
Alan Fleischmann
And you've been also involved in boards along the way, too. And then how did the conversation for you lead to what clearly was the gap, or the urgent gap that you are seeing between those who are part of capitalism, those who felt they were less so, and the role of CEOs, the role of leaders, because it really is gotta be at the top if we're gonna make capitalism work. How did we how do we make it work? And what? Where did that become a big part of your journey? And then, how did you start building the building blocks you got to get to what you've created, which is really a global movement?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Oh, thank you. Well Evelyn always understood the problems he was he was as a banker at Rothschild. He was very focused on, what are we doing for society, what is our obligation to society and so forth. So he was always focused on it. As a banker, I became focused on it, really during the great financial crisis, because my working assumption my entire life had been a rising tide will lift all ships. So if I pursue my career, and I do it honestly, and I do it, you know, kind of according to the rules that everyone, the whole of society, will be lifted up, um. And so it wasn't exact.
It was sort of, it was basically a Milton Friedman point of view, um, and I had no moral question about that. Then, when the great financial crisis happened, and I saw that all these kids were out in Zuccotti Park protesting capitalism, like just protesting the idea of something that I thought worked really well, my children were then in college at the University of Pennsylvania, and I said, you know what's wrong with these people? And they said, mom, there are no jobs. You had four job offers. You had this, you know, career glide path. Well, it's not like that for our generation. And that was kind of shocking to me, but it also shortly after the Piketty book came out, just showing what had happened with inequality in the world, and I got really concerned about it. It was clear that my perception of how capitalism worked, ie that it worked for everybody was totally inaccurate. And again, just by good fortune, I was, for whatever reason, asked to co-chair with the then head of McKinsey, a group of I had to put the I put, I was asked to put the group together, but to put a group together to do a task force on capitalism and kind of, where is capitalism gone wrong? And so I readily agreed to do that. Dom Barton, who was my partner in that, we put together Tory and Labour in the UK, Republicans and Democrats in the US. And we got a really good group, and we were very bipartisan. So for instance, Larry Summers was on it, on the commission, and so was Carly Fiorina, who ran for president as a Republican and who had also been the CEO of Hewlett Packard, so she had thought a lot about capitalism, and we, we did a lot of work. I should say, McKinsey did a lot of work, the Commission, the commissioners did some, but McKinsey was fabulous with doing the heavy lifting. And we put together a report, and we were in a meeting. And you know, what should we call this? And I just threw out, we should call it a path to inclusive capitalism.
And an Oxford professor, actually, who I just saw the other day in Davos, said, wait, inclusive capitalism to Adam Smith, you know that would be a redundancy. And Adam Posen, the head of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, said it was a redundancy to him, but to everyone. Today, it's an oxymoron, at which point we said, ah, we've got our name, we got our title. That's it.
So that was when we first started using the term inclusive capitalism. And the report was issued, and you sort of thought it would go the way of all reports, you know, including the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, which is it goes and it sits on shelves, but it certainly opened my eyes, because I was involved in every paragraph and saw what was happening in companies. And one of the takeaways from our report was capitalism had broadly failed, but there were individual companies that actually were doing the right thing for people and for planet, and that it's really a matter of company choice to reform the system. And I thought that was a good you know, like philosophical base. But again, I thought that was the end of it. And then at the same time, or a few weeks later, I don't know the timing, I received a call from the then Lord Mayor of London. And for an American, you can't even imagine what that means. So the City of London has its own mayor. The financial part of London has its own Lord Mayor, within the larger London. And this Lord Mayor basically oversees the city and the financial aspect. And he called me and said he had read the report and he wanted London to be the center of inclusive capitalism. And he said, I want to have he called it the iconic conference on this topic, we've got to gather people from around the world to talk about this. So I said, Well, that's exciting. I'll definitely help you. I said to him, I said, it'll only be iconic if I can get Bill Clinton to come and give the keynote.
So we sort of said over to you, you put it together. How is it in the Mansion House, it's called, which, by the way, the Mansion House is after Buckingham Palace, the most gorgeous, prestigious building in London. It's incredible. And so the Lord Mayor said, you can have it as a venue, but you get the speakers. So long story short, I wrote a big, long memo to President Clinton about the idea. And he called me when he read it, and he said, Lynn, I'll do this. And then I was off to the races. And Prince Charles spoke, and Christine Lagarde spoke. She was then the head of the IMF, Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England. You know, Rattata came up. Steve Simon came over. It was an incredible gathering of people trying to figure out, post-financial crisis, we know something has gone wrong. What should we be doing? So that's really the way inclusive capitalism got started.
Alan Fleischmann
I remember you also were part of a trip that you galvanized the fortune without worry, but you brought a lot of prominent CEOs to the Vatican and met with the Pope at the time, you know, to kind of talk about, you know, the values and virtues of inclusive capitalism. And I've been called that yet, but I remember that being a big moment as well, where, all of a sudden, it became on the radar for so many who understood it, could actually act on it, but it wasn't necessarily part of the vocabulary yet.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Yeah, yeah, that was five or six years later. Yeah, Fortune had a conference that they invited me to, and it was about this topic, and it wasn't called inclusive capital. But then there was a priest who was part of it, and he was clearly upset, not upset, he was clearly concerned that all the good and the Great had gotten together and had this moment with the Pope, which is always very inspirational. But, you know, his concern was, okay, what is the takeaway? What's going to change? You know, we were. And so, I picked up on that, and I said, I said, well, I know that there are CEOs who care, who care intimately and profoundly about making the system work better for all. And I could and they will act and I suggested that we should come again with these CEOs and talk to the Pope, but also make commitments. And that's how the council got started. Make commitments that actually move the ball forward for inclusive capitalism. And that was the formation of the council which we met with the Pope in 2019 and then we formed it in 2020.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. And you've met, you've gotten a lot of partners. You've gotten a lot of CEOs who join forces with you. You know, sometimes I'm sure there feels like the headwinds are changing, but I want to talk about it. But the one thing that is so clear to me is that if we don't fix capitalism, if we don't make capitalism be something that everyone feels they're part of, we won't have a democracy. We can't have a democracy, and we won't have a society that is just, honestly, and where everybody can feel part of. So I think your mission is important. You feel like it's increasingly getting important and recognized or do you feel like those tailwinds sometimes make you feel like it's double the effort?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
When I go back to our first conference, I felt very strongly that, oh, my god, we're boiling. We're boiling the ocean. This is really hard. And then a lot of things clicked in. You know, when you think of 2015, in 2015 we had the sustainable development goals at the UN, we had TCFD, which was the first really found and hard-nosed effort to measure greenhouse gasses. We had the Laudato Si from the Pope, where he implored us to listen to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. And we had the Paris Accord. So it felt like the wind was really at our back in 2015. Yeah, and that beautiful Martin Luther King quote about how the arc of moral history bends towards justice, but like we are riding that wave that was very exciting and that lasted, you know, then, of course, 2016 happened, and that was a surprise election, but we had a conference for inclusive capitalism in Washington. In the first Trump administration, his Secretary of Commerce came, his head of the SEC came, and it was still reason to be optimistic. Then 2019 still during Trump, the Business Roundtable issued its letter saying the purpose of corporations is not just profit. We have to take into account our customers, our employees, our communities. So again, it still stayed at our back. It got a little bit, I say, the last couple of years, it's been a little more challenging to talk about this, but I think it's a great opportunity for inclusive capitalism, because we can get rid of all the alphabet soup. We don't have to talk about ESG, we don't even have to talk about DEI, we have to talk about business at its best. And business at its best is when it understands all of its constituencies, when it has the best people, regardless of color or gender, working for it. So unfortunately, the so-called agenda has been politicized, but I think that's in the rearview mirror. I'm optimistic now that we have a real opportunity to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, what makes business best, and what makes business best is to have results that work for all people. And I think that's very Trumpian, actually, so I'm optimistic right now,
Alan Fleischmann
And that diversity can't be. Make the best decisions. You can't do the right thing for your businesses, if you don’t have a global context, if you're not thinking about diverse points of view, and, you know, diverse perspectives, and that's the bottom line. Only gets better because of it, and then obviously people flourish because they're part of the system, yeah, which is a big deal. I mean, you're big on how do you, how do you broaden that tent and include more people in, that's what the inclusive capital is, I guess, by its title, is about. But I guess the idea being that the more people feel part of it, the better they're going to feel, and they're not going to have this pendulum swings back and forth. You know, in search of a desperate search of, where do I, what do I do? Where do I live? Where do I thrive?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
So exactly, and we don't have the lack of trust. We believe in each other, we believe in the system, that's what we really need to restore and you know, the last few years have definitely given us reason to question whether the system works for it.
Alan Fleischmann
Is faith. You mentioned, you alluded to faith earlier, and your upbringing and growing up and all that is, does faith play a big role in your life today?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Yes, very big role, the defining role, actually. I couldn't go on if I didn't believe that there's a higher purpose and that I live in grace, and that grace is available to everyone. It's a big, big, big motivator. Without the grace of God, I can't imagine anything good would have happened in my life.
Alan Fleischmann
That's a wonderful, wonderful to look at it. We all have a voice, and everybody has a mission. You just have to figure out what that is. In your case, you found a great one, which is very much about helping others as well and still be the best of what you do in private, public and civil society, so you can still be the best, seek the best and help the others find their way. So powerful thing.
I knew we’d need more than an hour. Probably have to do a part two with with you, Lynn, but this has been amazing as it would be, if there's one bit of message you want to leave to our listeners, and if there's one thing you'd ask of them, for those who want to get involved, what would you suggest that be? What would you ask people to consider?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Well, I asked them to go to our website, inclusivecapitalism.com, there are ample ways that you can put your business or your organization on the website and kind of announce to the world what you're doing, just to make the system more inclusive, more sustainable. So I would love if people did, if people did that, and sort of spread the word. And most importantly, I guess, believe, believe that we can change things to make this world better. We can always do that. Whether we're doing it one person at a time or with an institution. It doesn't matter. We really, really can do it. And there are so many people doing it that I'm so grateful
Alan Fleischmann
That's wonderful, and anything you'd want them to read, any one major principle that you want to leave with our listeners, that as they're jumping in and going on your website, that you'd want them to consider?
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Simply that we're stewards of this planet for as long as we're fortunate enough to be on it, and we've been blessed so much that to make it better for other people who have not been quite as blessed as we have been is definitely a worthwhile and incredibly gratifying way to live your life.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. Well, you're listening to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann, we just spent the last hour with Lynn de Rothschild, founder, chair and CEO of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism and CEO of E.L. Rothschild. It's been such a pleasure having you on, Lynn. We got to have you back on again as you start to push forward your your endeavors and how you fix capitalism. I know that we've got lots and lots of listeners who want to be part of it, they'll join up with your website and certainly want to be part of the battle for others and the crusade ahead. So thank you for all you do every day.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild
Thank you. Thank you. You're incredible.