Narayen: Every leader has three essential duties: vision, team, and execution cadence
Shantanu Narayen · How Adobe is leveraging AI (with CEO & Chair Shantanu Narayen) | Masters of Scale · Feb 28, 2025 · at 7:37
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen explains his fundamental framework for leadership and management at scale.
0:00 / 0:44exact quote · 44.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Most leaders, and it doesn't matter at what level you're providing leadership you know, you have three things that you have to do. You have to create a vision. You know, and if you're a first line manager, you're creating a vision for the group. If you're a CEO, you're hopefully creating a vision for the company. You have to have the team in place and, you know who is the right team? Are you leveraging the superpowers of the team that exists? So I mean, again, whether it's a small group or a large company, and third, I would say you have to have You know, cadence for execution, because having the strategy without the associated execution is not going to be effective.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Shantanu Narayen
Narayen: Adobe trains AI models only on fully licensed data
“If we create models, one of the things that we have to do is create a model where every piece of data that went into the creation of that model, we can testify to the fact that, you know, we have license to do that.”
Narayen: AI will potentially replace people who don't use AI
“We said, people who use AI, this is an augmentation tool and it will potentially replace people who don't use AI.”
Narayen: AI will create far more jobs than it disrupts
“I think the reality with all technology, all automation is, you know, I, it introduces way more jobs, and it disrupts some, and I don't think AI will be you know, that different, and a lot of the, you know, automation or menial things that people do, it'll for…”
Narayen: Only 4 to 5 entities have capital to build frontier LLMs
“The large language models, I'm sure you'd agree there'd be four or five people who have the capital to create those large language models, and, you know, there'll be maybe one open source, there'll be three or four proprietary”