The Disruptor
Contrarian and drawn to the edge; challenges the settled answer.
Charity Dean reads as The Disruptor because she refused to petition slow institutions to move faster and built the alternative instead. Having diagnosed the structural gap between government response speed and pathogen speed, she left her post as a California public health authority to co-found the Public Health Company, translating that diagnosis into a commercial technology solution.
“Sure. Well, I'm reading a book by Ben Horowitz called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. And I absolutely love it. You know, I'm a new CEO, and I'm learning, and I'm learning fast. And so that book has really influenced my thinking around making hard decisions and doing them sooner. And I, let's see, what podcast am I listening to?”
“We still have the same systemic problems. Look, the United States and companies and government have essentially duct taped together a response to COVID with individual vigilance and individual heroic efforts, but neither of those are an effective strategy in the long term for managing what we now know as an existential risk to the US econ…”
“Well, what I didn't know at that time, and he told me later, is before he even called me he had an entire file with my name on it. Everything I'd ever done, anything that was out there publicly about me.”
“An index of suspicion as if you told me I have a nineteen year old college kid that has meningococcal disease and lives in a fraternity. My next thought is well I generally know how fraternity social behavior goes. And I know there's probably a lot of cross pollination.”
Masters in Business: “Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19”
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