Bonus: Advice to young people

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:01)
Hi, everybody. I'm Nicolai Tangen, and you are listening to In Good Company. Now, you might know that I like to end every conversation on these podcasts the same way. Whether I'm sitting across from the head of a Formula One team, the boss of a global bank, or some of the sharpest investor alive, I always ask them the same thing. What's your advice to young people?
It's become a bit of a tradition on the show, and to be honest, it's often the part I look forward to the most. So in this special episode, we gathered some of the really great advice from some of our amazing guests. You will hear about mentors, resilience, and why specializing too early might be a mistake. And right at the end, one piece of advice I really wasn't expecting. Whether you're a student trying to figure out your path, just starting out in your career, or simply after a bit of fresh perspective, there is a lot of wisdom packed into the next few minutes.
Let's start with Zak Brown, the CEO of McLaren Racing, one of the most famous names in Formula One. His advice is all about mentors, and he explains why the best mentors might be both older and younger than you.

**Zak Brown** (1:08)
Get mentors.
I was fortunate at a young age, because I was racing cars to hang out with CEOs when I was 21 years old. The gap in experience between being a 21-year-old who's just full of adrenaline and picking age 40, 50, 60, 70-year-old. I think about how much, you know, I'm 53 now, and I look up to Roger Penske, who's 85-ish, and I think, look at how much I've experienced. He's got 30 years more of what I've experienced, and I can't even imagine what I'm going to see in the next 30 years. But if I go talk to Roger Penske, he can share some of that with me. So I think mentors are critical and all along the way, because there's always someone smarter than you, and there's always someone who's more experienced than you, and I'm going to want to have that the entire way. And then, when you do get old, which I'm not there yet, but I'm getting old, then you want to be mentored by the youth, because the youth are growing up with technology that us old guys are like what. So I think you can get mentored by people that are more experienced, that are older, and people that are more experienced and are younger because of how fast this world is moving.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:31)
Next, Karin Rådström, the CEO of Daimler Truck, one of the world's largest commercial vehicle makers. She shares the advice she wishes somebody had given her earlier.

**Karin Rådström** (2:41)
I think one advice I would have needed to hear myself is to just believe in yourself.
I don't think I realized that I could make a difference in the world.
And also coming in, both applying for my first jobs and coming into my first jobs, I didn't have the self-confidence to believe I could contribute. So even when maybe this gut feeling was telling me things, I was holding it back. But I think that's this energy and the clear sightedness of young people we need in business. So believe in yourself, speak up, go for it and really dream big. Anything is possible. Usually it's yourself stopping your mind. Don't make those limits, just think big.

**Nicolai Tangen** (3:40)
Now to Vas Narasimhan, the CEO of the global pharmaceutical company Novartis. He's got a few connected pieces of advice to share, drawn from a career that hasn't always gone the way he planned.

**Vas Narasimhan** (3:52)
Not one piece of advice, but a few pieces of advice. One, build range, build breadth and experience early on. I mean, try to get diverse experiences. It's so tempting and I fell into the trap of wanting to raise up the ladder.
And Novartis actually ended up pushing me into all kinds of lateral directions in R&D, in marketing, in manufacturing. And all of those experiences actually now enable me to do the job that I have right now, though I didn't realize it at the time. So I think building range and getting different experiences, functions, geographies, even things you may not expect. You'll always learn something if you go in with an open and curious mindset. I think too, you know, it's not a race. I mean, it feels like it's a race, it's not a race. In the end, you got to enjoy the whole process of whatever direction. And there's no plan. I never expected to be a CEO. Most of my career moves were not the plan that I actually had. Frankly, they went up going in a different direction. So there's no plan. It's not a race.