Mellody Hobson on race and teaching children financial literacy
The universally adored American businesswoman, who was voted one of 100 most influential people in the world last year, tells Katie Scott what it means to be colour brave rather than colour blind.
Mellody Hobson is immaculately dressed, beautiful - and tired. She is on a week-long Asia-Pacific trip that has been packed with meetings, interviews and conferences. She jokes that she saw "to and from" the airport in Sydney, and there won't be any time for sightseeing in Hong Kong, either. The day's engagements include an interview with Bloomberg and a keynote address at AsianInvestor's forum on diversity.
Yet, when she starts to talk, after we meet in the Mandarin Oriental's M Bar, she glows. Each answer is measured and meaningful. She is attentive and honest, in fact kind, and everything she says makes sense. After two minutes in her presence, I am an acolyte. And when she quotes from Star Wars, the universally loved creation of her husband, film director George Lucas, I regress from admiration to childish adoration.
Hobson, who turns 47 today, is the president of Ariel Investments, a Chicago-based company with US$10.7 billion in assets under management. She is visiting Hong Kong en route from Sydney, where the company has opened an office. That decision was made off the back of a trip to Australia with Lucas.
"While I was there I thought, 'Why don't I research the pension market', because that's what you do when you're travelling," she says, with a laugh. Some calls to friends in the United States led to a meeting in Australia and then the decision was made. "We thought our personal message would resonate there and it would be a good place to hang out the shingle outside of the US."
Hobson is also the chairwoman of the board of the DreamWorks Animation studio and a director at make-up manufacturer Estée Lauder and coffee chain Starbucks. Last year, she was in Time magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In his entry on her, former US Senator for New Jersey Bill Bradley wrote: "Mellody exudes a cheerful confidence that makes people want to follow her." It was Bradley who walked Hobson down the aisle when she married Lucas at the director's Skywalker Ranch, in 2013.
Hobson seems universally adored. A profile published in Vanity Fair in April last year is packed full of praise from many of the most influential entrepreneurs of our age: Dick Parsons, the former head of Time Warner, states simply, "Someone once told me that the secret to success is being the person who other people want to see succeed … And Mellody is the person others want to see succeed."