Leaving Apple gave Steve Jobs two unfamiliar classrooms: a computer company called NeXT and an animation studio called Pixar. The return that followed carried lessons a product launch could never teach.
Joel Podolny is an economic sociologist turned operator who has spent his career on a single question: how do people actually learn to lead? Handpicked by Steve Jobs in 2008 to build Apple University from scratch, he spent over a decade teaching Apple's executives to think like the company. Before that he was the youngest dean of the Yale School of Management and a tenured professor at Stanford and Harvard. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Honor Education, a San Francisco startup putting human connection at the center of online learning.