Redefining Power: Moira Forbes on Legacy, Leadership, and the Meaning of Influence on She Leads

Power was seen almost as a dirty word. Who sometimes I feel impostor syndrome. Of course, that's why the tech executive saying, you know, and now she's a billionaire. I don't want, I feel uncomfortable being on this list she Felt like an impostor.

I at the time was devastated, devastated, sort of looking at all these magazines we published and knowing that wasn't going to be anymore, knowing that women loved it.

A lot of women at the time didn't want to be recognized for being powerful because they were a woman.

In terms of success, there's a word that I think very differently about, and that is...

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be sitting down with you.

I think some of the things that were most influential in my life was the fact that I grew up in a family business. Growing up, I was always very entrepreneurial. My favorite Christmas present from Santa Claus one year was a cash register because I wanted to open up a store in my parents' house, where there's not a huge market in your own home for customers. I did my own newspapers, and I always loved the idea of being able to build something. And that was coupled with a family business where we were very much put to work in the sense that very often we were with clients and customers and entertaining, and really understood that these were the people that were the foundation of our business. And so we would go and entertain, we would, you know, six or seven years old, sit down at dinner tables with extraordinary people in the world. But the entire goal was to welcome people into our family, to host them, but also to have such appreciation and gratitude for the ability to spend time and their contributions and to what they did at Forbes. So I was always very, very busy and active, and that hasn't changed either.

I would say it's only in retrospect that you sometimes realize the extraordinary community of people I was so privileged to meet. But at those ages, you have no idea who they are. It could be President Ronald Reagan, it could be Gorbachev, Mick Jagger. These were just people, and you knew that they were important because other people followed behind them. And I think what I always remembered most were who were the ones that were kind, who were the ones that really embraced the people around them, that didn't have attitude and ego. And that was always the greatest lesson to me. It wasn't until I got older that I then realized the fame and the power that they had, but it was the ones that didn't show up like they were the most powerful person in the room that really meant the most.

One of the things I was so fortunate is that I never grew up in a house where the sense of the magnitude of the brand was something we fully captured, but also business was business. We knew that Forbes was a brand and that was a business, and that we were a family. And so in some ways, all the attention and spotlight that was paid to that felt something that was removed from us as a family. And I was also very lucky because my parents wanted to make sure that they did everything they could, and this was their values, to really ensure that we had a strong work ethic, that we were always working, that if we wanted something, we had to get a job for it. So these fundamental life skills are important for anybody, but people sometimes seem surprised when you grow up in a family with a last name that people know that those are things that are important for anybody. And so I would say ignorance was a little bit of bliss in terms of not seeing that as a weight of a family name and a responsibility. It was a privilege, it was a business, and it was something that also, I'm one of five girls, but my parents were very, very clear that you have to follow your passions, you have to do what you want to do. So there was no expectation for any of us to go into the business because if we didn't want to, and if it wasn't our passion, then it would be a huge disservice not only to ourselves, not to our family, but to the business. And so for me, it was just something I had always loved and wanted to follow, but it never felt like an expectation.

I never a moment, but it was just I naturally gravitated toward business and entrepreneurship and the idea that you could build something out of nothing and the idea that you could tell the stories of amazing people. That was just sort of innately in me. And so I always knew I wanted to be a part of the business. It was never guaranteed that we could go into the business also. We had to be ready and be able to make contributions. The other thing is I started in the business as a receptionist, an assistant. I literally helped collect the mail, photocopy, all of those things in our London office. And the reason being is that my father very much said you need to learn every part of the business, you need to understand it from the ground up, you need to work in all these different dimensions of the company. And just because your last name is Forbes doesn't mean that you get a big job title in an office with windows. And so I never expected that, but now I'm all the more grateful that there was never a presumption that I would have a role in the company that would defy my age or experience.

Well, I think one of the most important moments really is what got me into transforming my work in the women's space. And in working at Forbes and looking at my family, I looked at the three generations before me: my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father. I was nothing like them, understandably they were nothing like each other. So I didn't necessarily see myself self-reflected in my family and the business. And looking at the business landscape, even though Forbes was so ahead of its time in our first issue of the magazine in 1917, before women could vote in this country, we had a department for women in business, which was really remarkable. So even if we were more progressive than other media companies, I didn't see enough stories of the types of women that I wanted to aspire to be like or to learn from. And that was really the impetus for me starting the work in the women's space. And so what I took away from that is when you feel like there's a problem that you want to solve or where there's something that you don't see and that you're wrestling with and you're constantly thinking about it, usually other people are as well. Usually it means there's some sort of opportunity there. And if it's something that you continue to keep yourself up at night about, if it's something occupies a lot of time in your head, it's also a sign that it means something to you and it means something personal in a way where you're willing to take the extra time and effort to see it through. And so that was a really important lesson for me. And it was not easy to start it. It was a very different time in the world in the States where people were looking at conversations around women in business. And I'm so proud and excited that that has evolved, but it was not the case at all when I started this work.