No matter how good you think you are as a leader, my goodness, the people around you will have all kinds of ideas for how you can get better. So for me, the most fundamental thing about leadership is to have the humility to continue to get feedback and to try to get better - because your job is to try to help everybody else get better.
If you look at three diseases, the three major killers, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, the only disease for which we have really good drugs is HIV. And it's very simple: because there's a market in the United States and Europe.
What we have found is that because of smartphones and access to media, and because everybody knows how everyone else lives, you have no idea where the next huge social movement is going to erupt.
Water and sanitation has not had the same kind of champion that global health, and even education, have had.
One of the most important things about leadership is that you have to have the kind of humility that will allow you to be coached.
Hope is a moral choice.
My father came by himself across the North Korean border when he was seventeen. And hasn't seen his brothers or sisters or parents since then. And he died some time ago, but never saw any of his relatives. My mother was a refugee in war-torn Korea.
Look at the problem of drug-resistant TB in the world. Look at HIV in the world. What's going to be required for everybody in the long run is the ability to do complex health interventions in poor settings.
What happens when corn and wheat prices rise is that we see real increases in malnutrition and under-nutrition. And when children are malnourished, their brain development actually slows down and is affected. So this is not just a short-term impact.
I feel like I'm calmer, I'm kinder, I'm more patient the more I do my own meditation.
I want to eradicate poverty. I think that there's a tremendous passion for that inside the World Bank.
We will never end poverty if we don't tackle climate change.
One of the lessons of leadership worth emphasizing is that you want to get to know other great leaders and take their advice. At some point in your development, it's only people who've been in the seat of having to be leaders who can help you in a deep way.
What I learned from my work as a physician is that even with the most complicated patients, the most complicated problems, you've got to look hard to find every piece of data and evidence that you can to improve your decision-making. Medicine has taught me to be very much evidence-based and data-driven in making decisions.
One of the things I had to really work on is, when you're the leader of an organization, people look at the expression on your face. Your mood has a lot to do with how people think the whole organization is doing.
I've spent my entire life working to invest in human beings and human communities, to help them move down the path of economic development.
The water issue is critically related to climate change. People say that carbon is the currency of climate change. Water is the teeth.
World Bank is a bank that's focused on economic development and poverty alleviation.
If I care about poverty, I have to care a lot about investments in the private sector. The private sector creates the vast majority of jobs in the world, and social protection only goes so far.
Institutionalized discrimination is bad for people and for societies. Widespread discrimination is also bad for economies. There is clear evidence that when societies enact laws that prevent productive people from fully participating in the workforce, economies suffer.
