In this episode, Lauren welcomes a very special guest: Dr. Jim Yong Kim, partner, vice chairman, and Global Infrastructure Partners (a part of BlackRock) emerging markets chairman as well as former president of the World Bank Group, director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, and co-founder of Partners in Health.

Dr. Kim’s background growing up in Iowa with Korean immigrant parents shaped his practical and moral approach to tackling complex global challenges.

Lauren Lavin:

Welcome to Plugged in to Public Health, where we bring you conversations with influential voices in global health leadership, innovation, and all things public health. I’m your host, Lauren Lavin, and today we have the extraordinary honor of speaking with Dr. Jim Yong Kim. Dr. Kim is a visionary leader whose career spans medicine, anthropology, and global development. From co-founding Partners in Health, a groundbreaking organization that transformed healthcare delivery for the world’s poorest populations to serving as the 12th president of the World Bank. Dr. Kim has tackled some of the world’s most pressing challenges with innovation and humanity.

Raised in Muscatine, Iowa, Dr. Kim’s journey is a testament to the power of persistence, practical skills, and moral commitment. He has been at the forefront of efforts to combat diseases like HIV and tuberculosis, advance equity in healthcare, and inspire a new generation of global health leaders. Today we’re going to dive into Dr. Kim’s fascinating path from his Iowa roots to leading on the world stage, and explore his thoughts on the transformative power of leadership, collaboration, and staying grounded in the values that truly matter. Stay tuned for an inspiring and insightful conversation. Let’s get plugged in to public health.

Hello, everybody. I’m super excited to welcome Dr. Kim to our podcast today. He just gave a brilliant lecture, and so we’re kind of following off the heels of that, and if you have a chance to watch that, that’ll be up on the University of Iowa College of Public Health website. So I highly encourage watching that first, but I would love to start out by just talking about your early career and how you grew up because you’re from Iowa, sort of, right? So we’d love to talk about how you grew up in Iowa with parents who had fled the Korean War and how that personal background has affected your worldview and career up to now.

Jim Yong Kim:

Well, thanks for having me. And I’ll first tell you, our whole family is just incredibly loyal and devoted to the University of Iowa. My brother did his undergraduate work and his medical school here. My father taught at the dental school for I think almost 20 years, and my mother did her PhD in philosophy and religion in the department…

Lauren Lavin:

Here? Wow.

Jim Yong Kim:

… in the University of Iowa, one of the first women to do PhDs in that field…

Lauren Lavin:

That’s incredible.

Jim Yong Kim:

… at the University of Iowa. So we have deep, deep ties here. But I guess the story kind of starts, I was here for a year and a half, and then I went to Brown to finish my education. And so after my first semester at Brown, my father picked me up from the airport, and we were driving back along Highway 61 at the time, and he asked me, “So Jim, what are you thinking of studying? What are you going to do at Brown?” I said, “You know, Dad, I’m so excited by philosophy and political science, and I met all these Asian American students. I think I’m going to study philosophy and political science and be part of a movement for Asian Americans.” And so my father slowly pulled the car over to the side of the road, because there was a big shoulder at that time. He pulled the car over to the side of the road, he looked at me and he said, “Hey, once you finish your residency, you can study anything you want.”

So I tell that story because I’m extremely grateful to my father. He said stuff to me like, “Look…” He would say things to me, because I only spoke English at the time, he’d say things to me in English like, “Hey, look, you’re a Chinaman. You think people are going to pay you to hear what your opinions about politics and philosophy?” Right? And he was joking, but what he was saying on a deeper level was that I don’t mind you trying to do good things in the world, but have a skill. And I’m just very grateful to him for having done that. So I ended up, not only did I get an MD, but I got a PhD.

And so once I got into medical school, he was very happy to have me go and study other things. He was very happy that I got into the MD-PhD program in anthropology. He didn’t mind it as long as he knew that I was also studying medicine. And so it was a really important lesson from growing up.

So my mother was a philosopher. I mean, she studied Neo-Confucian philosophy with some of the great professors here at the University of Iowa. And so very interested in big ideas, but my father was a dentist. They’re the most practical species in the world, right?

Lauren Lavin:

Practical.

Jim Yong Kim:

And so having both those influences and having grown up here in Iowa with a sort of really grounded kind of sense of what kind of person you should be, Iowa nice is a real thing.

Lauren Lavin:

It really is.

Jim Yong Kim:

It really is. And I think I benefited greatly from growing up here.

Lauren Lavin:

So was that advice that you would give to students nowadays is to pick something where you have a practical skill going forward.

Jim Yong Kim:

Yeah, no matter what problem you want to take on, coming to the problem with a real skill set, I think is just much, much more helpful, and it’ll be less frustrating to young people if you come in with a certain skill.

And the other thing is you never know where you’re going to end up. I used to tell students at Dartmouth this that there was this very interesting set of studies where they interviewed people at 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years old. They interviewed them over a long period of time, and what they found out was that looking backwards, so the 20-year olds looking back, the 30-year olds looking back, they ended up talking about how much more they’ve changed over that time than they expected. But then as they look forward, they always predict that they’re going to change much less than they actually change.

So you go through so many changes in life. For me, coming to the world with an expertise in medicine and a background in anthropology, which really in many ways is applied philosophy. We read all the great philosophical and social science tomes, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, even some of the sort of fancier people at that time, Claude Lévi-Strauss from France, Pierre Bourdieu. We read all of these great thinkers, so not only did I have a practical skill, but I was grounded in very complex social theory.

So having both of those coming into a situation where we’re fighting with public health people on MDR-TB, for example, for us, it wasn’t just cost-effectiveness analysis. We looked at sort of the moral implications of doing something versus not doing something. So coming to the game with a real skill set, I think it makes your life I think in some ways easier, some ways more challenging, but much, much better because you have a perspective to look at something.

Lauren Lavin:

Absolutely. You were one of the first to pursue both an MD and a PhD in anthropology at Harvard. How did that dual focus help you bridge that gap between the social sciences and some of those bigger ideas along with some of the more practical applications in global health?

Jim Yong Kim:

So I tell people, I’m a medical doctor some of the time, but I’m an anthropologist every minute of my life.

Lauren Lavin:

I love that.

Jim Yong Kim:

And so one of our great professors, Sally Falk Moore, Sally Falk Moore was a brilliant political anthropologist, and she once said to us, “Look, anthropology and ethnography, it’s really very simple, you walk into a room, you walk into a field, you walk into the situation you want to understand, and you just ask yourself, ‘Who the hell are these people, and what do they want?’ And you keep asking that question over and over and over again until you get some sense of what…”

Another professor, Arthur Kleinman, who’s still a very close mentor of mine, Arthur used to say, “You’ve got to get at what’s at stake for people, what really matters to people.” So in trying to analyze how certain decisions had been made and who are the people who could actually make the decision to change a particular policy, it was almost like doing kinship analysis.

So kinship analysis is one of the key things that you do in anthropology. Who is related to who, who is marrying whom? And we’re trained in kinship analysis. And so in global public health or in running an organization like the World Bank, you’ve got to do the kinship analysis, who’s connected to whom? If someone does something in this particular way, how does it relate to all the people around them? Seeing that not as just sort of, “Ah, that’s just politics, ah, that’s just the silliness,” but seeing this as something that you’ve got to take seriously to understand what’s happening around you, that’s always been incredibly helpful for me.

Lauren Lavin:

That kind of makes me think a lot about how even in academic research, sometimes I don’t know that we always get to the root of the problem because we’re not on the ground. And I think that’s something… We’ll kind of talk about throughout your career, you were very much on the ground seeing what the problems were and how they affected people, and I think that’s really directed your life, and that’s something that as academics or researchers, that’s something I think we need to focus on a little bit more is how can we get on the ground to find out what’s really affecting people, which then kind of leads to Partners in Health. Was that your first job or venture after you graduated?

Jim Yong Kim:

Yeah, it really was. So Paul Farmer and I graduated from our MD-PhD programs, and the very first job I had though was as an intern at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. And so we started together, and we actually shared a residency, it’s called Research Residency where we were on for six months and off for six months, on for six months, off for six months, and we traded off. We had the same clinic over a long-term longitudinal clinic.

And so that was really my first job. But we’d already started Partners in Health, and so Paul was the first executive director for Partners in Health, I was the second, and then Ophelia Dahl was the third, and only the fourth has only taken up the job in the last few years. So it was just the three founders who really had run Partners in Health for the longest time. So that was my first job.

But the job that I got paid for was being a house officer, an intern and a resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and later an attending physician, a faculty member. But my vocation, the real vocation was Partners in Health.

Lauren Lavin:

Can you, for our audience, describe what Partners in Health is?

Jim Yong Kim:

I think the most important part of Partners in Health is that Paul Farmer and I and Ophelia Dahl and the founders, we spent a lot of time trying to decide what are the most foundational commitments that we’re going to make? And the most foundational commitment came from our reading of liberation theology, and liberation theology was this incredible movement among mostly at first Latin American priests, and they asked themselves a very specific question, if Jesus were in Latin America today, where would he be? Would he be with the poor, would he be with the outcast, would he be with those who are marginalized and cast out, or would he be with the generals and the rich in the cities? And it was an incredible critique because many, many Catholic priests were spending all their time with the generals and the rich people. It was thought of by the Catholic Church at various times as a very, very frightening and dangerous challenge to the way the Catholic Church was operating, but we found them incredibly inspiring.

Now, inside Partners in Health we had Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, we had everybody. And so it was not a religious kind of commitment, but it was our own sense that the liberation theologians were asking the right question, what does it mean to take some deep fundamental moral, ethical commitment and then live it? We always pledged that we would make an option for the poor, which means in the language that it was originally in Spanish, but the notion was that we love everybody, and we do, and it was important for us because there was nothing wrong with taking care of the wealthiest people in the hospital because they were sick, and we love everyone, but our preference is for the poor, our preference is to serve the poor first because they’re always last in everything else.

So that was the initial strong commitment. And then there was a lot of other things that came along, accompaniment, the importance of community health workers, the importance of equity, the importance of having high aspirations for the kind of healthcare that we would provide in even the poorest settings. I still think this, the foundations are really important.

Lauren Lavin:

Absolutely.

Jim Yong Kim:

The other part of it, you said it very well that the importance of being on the ground, right? At one point early on, a group of younger people, we were all pretty young back then, but a group of younger people came in and they say, “Well, what’s the most important thing about somebody who joins Partners in Health?” And I remember saying one day, “Well, you know I think the most important thing is that you always have to remain open to having your soul fractured by the suffering of the poor.” You can’t ever sort of say, “Oh, well, I’ve seen it all before,” because there was a lot of people in global health who had become so used to seeing suffering that it didn’t bother them anymore, right?

One of my great heroes, Bill Foege, who was the architect of the smallpox eradication campaign, used to say, “The constant struggle I have is to not avert my gaze when I see suffering.”

Lauren Lavin:

That’s something that I personally resonate with. It’s so hard to see it. So do you have advice for that?

Jim Yong Kim:

I think of it as a fundamental moral practice, right? Some people pray, some people meditate, some people say Hail Mary’s and the like. There are all kinds of moral practices in the world, and facing directly the suffering of the poorest, feeling deeply the injustice that have led them to this situation, I think you kind of always have to test yourself to see, okay, have I really become so used to this that my soul isn’t capable of being fractured anymore? Then if that’s the case, you probably should get out of the field.

Lauren Lavin:

It’s great advice. I think here in America, we can very easily avert our gaze.

Jim Yong Kim:

It happens right here in Iowa. There are people who are not getting care, there are people who are suffering greatly. It’s anywhere that you look. There’s no place that’s free of not just suffering, but unjust suffering.

Lauren Lavin:

You started in Haiti, is that correct?

Jim Yong Kim:

Yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

And then scaled past that. What were the challenges that you encountered as you started to scale Partners in Health to more countries?

Jim Yong Kim:

Scale is always really difficult. I think we achieve scale in a lot of different ways. I mean, the work in Haiti now has grown, and we built probably the best teaching hospital in the entire Caribbean in a hospital in Mirebalais. But scale is always difficult, and I think our focus has not been on treating the most patients. I think our focus has been on launching new projects that take on new problems, that try to focus on how do you provide care for this set of problems in a way that’s equitable and effective in the poorest settings?

There are many organizations that treat many, many more patients than we do, but I think what we have done is, for example, at first, it was taking on drug resistance in tuberculosis and HIV. We showed that it could be done, but we’ve also done cancer care. We have a very well-developed cancer care program because not all cancer care requires tertiary care hospitals like we have in the US. There are lots of treatments that you can do even in the poorest settings. And lots of people would say, “Okay, well, okay, I understand TB and malaria, but come on, cancer care?” And we have fought against those kinds of limitations every step of the way.

Surgical care is another one that people say, “Well, come on, we can’t do surgical in developing countries.” But of course, poor people in poor countries suffer from surgical maladies requiring surgery more than anybody. I think our role has been less at huge scale and more at demonstrating that things can be done that other people say can’t be done.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s so important. You have to be a leader, and then other people will follow suit.

You also mentioned this in the talk, the idea of accompaniment and how powerful that can be. I think our listeners would benefit from you describing that and then what that has looked like as you’ve developed that as a practice in Partners in Health.

Jim Yong Kim:

This is an idea that goes back a long way. I mean, Paul Farmer, in calling it accompaniment, it was a brilliant sort of insight into what it really is. But the start of community medicine dates back to the ’50s and ’60s in South Africa. There’s a wonderful physician named Sidney Kark who really came up with the idea of community-based healthcare. And he trained community health workers to do things like make sure people got their medicines, that you would re-bandage their wounds, just the very basic things, but they would go and check on people. And so utilizing community health workers as part of your medical intervention was something that we were convinced was important from the very earliest days.

And in fact, in Haiti, once we found out that the mostly male community health workers were not paying enough attention to women, we started a women’s community health worker, Proje Sante Fanm, literally project in health for women, right? And every time we found that certain patients or certain members of the community were not getting seen, we would adjust these community health worker programs.

We also believe that community health workers could be the key to getting much better outcomes in so many different fields. And what I talked about today, the fact that Tom Insel, the great mental health guru, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, identified accompaniment as the key to better outcomes in mental health.

I think that is borne out by lots of data and also doing what we call task sharing. When you don’t have enough physicians, when you don’t have enough nurses, often the most important parts of providing care can be done by relatively unskilled people. Now, they’re not going to solve all the problems. And some people have said, “Well, we just give them an iPad, connect them here, and they can solve it.” They can’t. People still need surgery, people still need skilled health personnel.

But the notion that when you have a difficult medical problem and when you are going through an even more difficult treatment process, having someone accompany you through the process can make all the difference. We showed that having community health workers who helped people through tuberculosis and HIV treatment improved outcomes dramatically. I believe that even in the United States, community health workers could have a huge impact, especially in places like Iowa.

Lauren Lavin:

Well, we’re fundamentally a communal species, and sometimes we isolate ourselves, not purposefully, but we miss some of that community aspect. So even ingratiating that into our healthcare system seems like a really important next step.

We’re going to go past your time at Dartmouth. You were the president there.

Jim Yong Kim:

Yes, I was.

Lauren Lavin:

Can you just share the story of how you ended up at the World Bank because that’s where I’m going next, and I loved it when you talked about it?

Jim Yong Kim:

I was in my third year of the presidency, and I got a call, I think it was in April, no, March, it was in March, from the Secretary of the Treasury at the time, Timothy Geithner. And Tim had become a friend. Both he and his wife were class of ’83 at Dartmouth, and I had him come and speak and got to know him. And so he called me and said, “Hey, how would you like to be a candidate for President of the World Bank?” I told him, “Tim, I wrote a book. I was part of a movement called Fifty Years is Enough trying to close the World Bank on its 50th anniversary. I was the editor of a book that called for the closing of the World Bank. Did you know that?” He goes, “Yeah, we know, we know. And I said, “That doesn’t disqualify me?” And he said, “No, no, no. We read it, we read it. And yeah, it’s critical, but that’s good.”

I went to see President Obama two days later, and his first question to me was, “So, Jim, why should I nominate you a physician, an anthropologist when I could nominate, say, a macroeconomist?” And so just immediately I said, “Well, President Obama, have you ever read your mother’s PhD dissertation?” And he was surprised, of course, but his mother was an anthropologist. She had done her PhD at the University of Hawaii, and she’d written about her work in Indonesia where, of course, everyone knew he’d grown up for a while. He actually speaks a bit of Bahasa Indonesia.

So he said, “Well, yes I have.” And so I said, “Well, then you’ll remember,” and I don’t know still if he’s actually read it, but he probably did. He’s a meticulous scholar, so I’m sure he did. But I said, “You’ll remember that your mother showed that macroeconomists predicted that globalization would destroy the Indonesian metal sculptor industry and that they would not be able to sell the goods anymore because they’d have artwork coming from all over the world. But she actually showed that the metal sculptors flourished under globalization, and she showed that she knew more about what was going on than the macroeconomists.”

And I said, “I’m not going to be able to give you a view of the world from 30,000 feet like a macroeconomist, but I’ve been on the ground doing development work my whole career. I’ll be able to tell you if these programs work on the ground.” And he said, “I get that. I get that.” And then he nominated me, right?

And then later over dinner, he once said to a group of people when they asked me how I got my job, I told the story. And he said, “Yeah, that was a great ploy to get a job, read the president’s mother’s…” But the thing is about it is he had to know that I didn’t just do it because I was seeing the president the next day. The only way to get her thesis at the time was through the University of Michigan archive, and it took me a couple of weeks to get access to it.

Lauren Lavin:

So you had it way ahead of time. Oh, wow.

Jim Yong Kim:

I had it in 2006, right?

Lauren Lavin:

Oh, my gosh.

Jim Yong Kim:

So when he became a senator, I was so fascinated by his story. He’d written a couple of books by that time, read them all, knew that his mother was an anthropologist, and I requested her dissertation from the University of Michigan archives. I think it was 2006 or 2007. So I had read it five years before, right? So I knew it well, I knew about him.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s incredible. Would you categorize yourself as a lifelong learner?

Jim Yong Kim:

Oh, I’ve had to, I have no choice, right? I am still learning new things. I’m learning about mental health, I had to learn about valuation and investment and infrastructure. I’ve put myself in positions where I was forced to learn new things. I haven’t learned everything to the extent that I’d like. I relearned Korean at the age of 24. I learned Spanish at the age of 28, and those are difficult things to do because once you get past 12 or 13, gets much harder to learn new languages.

So yeah, I’ve taken on new ideas, and ultimately what’s happened is that I’ve now had so many different experiences, I tend to look at a situation or a problem a little bit differently than most people because most people haven’t had all of these different experiences.

Like today, it was wonderful. I got a chance to spend some time with President Wilson here. People in the room could sense it, but when a current president and a former president are talking to each other, they’re experiences that we’ve had that only presidents have. And so whenever I’m with a sitting or a former university president, again, it’s an experience that we share.

As a president of the World Bank, I was in every G20 and G7 leaders meetings. I was literally in the room where it happened. I was in the room and got to see how heads of state and heads of government interacted with each other, how deals get made, how deals get broken, right? So all that has, I think, given me a perspective that I hope is helpful in tackling things like mental health or poverty.

Lauren Lavin:

Absolutely. So you’ve been around leaders a lot, clearly.

Jim Yong Kim:

I have, yeah.

Lauren Lavin:

What takeaways do you have about good leadership considering you yourself are an incredible leader and you’ve been around lots?

Jim Yong Kim:

First of all, I’d say that being at the World Bank, the lessons were so painfully clear about how good leadership can transform a country and how bad leadership can destroy a country. Leadership is incredibly, incredibly important.

But I was really lucky in that I’ve had a series of leadership coaches. The most important one is still my leadership coach. His name is Marshall Goldsmith. Marshall is, without question, I think the number one leadership coach in the world. I met Marshall at Dartmouth because he was teaching there. He enjoyed teaching business school students, and of course, he was the number one leadership thinker. He’s written, I think, 38 books now, the most bestsellers of any person in this area.

And one of the business professors said, “Why don’t you talk to Marshall?” So I talked to Marshall, and we hit it off. He did his usual sort of 360 analysis, but he did it pro bono because he charged far more than I could afford or the university could afford, because his usual clients were the very top Fortune 20, Fortune 50 CEOs.

And so Marshall has been my coach since 2009, so now 15 years. And the things I’ve learned from Marshall are, one, first of all, to have a coach, you have to think that there’s a need for a coach. The best article ever written about coaching was written by my good buddy, Atul Gawande, who is a writer for The New Yorker, and I forget the title of it, but it’s about getting coaching as a surgeon, right? Atul said in this article that once he became an attending of a senior physician, he never got coached anymore because he was always spending his time coaching. He then realized that Roger Federer and Tiger Woods, the best in the world at their profession, had coaches. So he said, “If Roger Federer and Tiger Woods have coaches, why don’t I have a coach?”

And so he asked a retired, brilliant senior physician to come into the OR and watch him do surgery. The physician said, “Atul, I know you’re a brilliant surgeon. I’m sure there’s nothing I can teach you.” And Atul said, “Well, just humor me and come into the OR and just observe, and then tell me.” And so he went in and observed, the physician, Bob Osteen, who is just a legend at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital where Atul and I both trained, after the surgery he said, “Atul, you’re a wonderful surgeon, and I really don’t think there’s anything I can teach you, but here are 15 things I saw.” I don’t know if 15, but it was a bunch of things, right?

Lauren Lavin:

It was more than one. Yeah.

Jim Yong Kim:

But it was tiny stuff that Atul would never have thought of himself, and just tiny… Even things like the position of your arms, and the tiny things that only a master surgeon would see, right? And so he then learned that having coaching is a great thing.

And Atul is one of the most brilliant humans on earth. He’s head of Global Health at USAID right now, but he keeps statistics of all his surgical outcomes, and they were already really good, they got better. I really believe it’s important to get coaching, and then being coachable is so important.

Marshall, his most famous book had a huge impact on me. The title of it is What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, right? And it’s about the 16 most common mistakes that leaders make as they take on the next role, right? So they rely on all their old tools, but some of the lessons in it are so powerful.

One of the mistakes that leaders make is they add too much value. And you read that and you think, what on earth does that mean? And what it means is that a lot of leaders will walk into a room and the people that they’re leading will be sitting around a table and they’ll tell them something that they think is really important, neglected and an insight that’s important, and then leaders, mostly out of their own insecurity, instead of just saying, “That’s wonderful. Thank you for that. Tell me more.” They say, “Well, not only that, but there’s this, this, this, and this.” Right?

And in that case, Marshall, what he tells a leader is just think about what that means to the people who report to you, right? For the people who report to you, they see this as, well, this arrogance such-and-such. He can’t just accept what I’m telling him. He has to make it feel like he or she is adding to an idea that was deficient to begin with, right? These are such valuable lessons and lessons in humility, lessons in how to talk to people.

Marshal coached some leaders who, during somebody’s presentation, they would say, “Yep, yep. Got it, got it, got it.” And Marshal would say, “What do you think that communicates to people, that what you’re saying is trivial, I already knew all this. Do you know what that makes people feel toward you? So what about when you roll your eyes as a CEO, and people think they’re going to get fired?” Right? He gives you a tremendous amount of sort of self-awareness and awareness of different situations. But in order to benefit from it, you have to be coachable, you have to know how to ask for help, and then humbly accept their critique.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s the real key. Yeah.

Jim Yong Kim:

The greatest leaders are ones, in my experience, who really listen, who listen to what you’re saying, who take it very seriously what you’re saying. The most dangerous leaders are the ones who are just all about themselves, who don’t listen to anybody and who only take into account people who say things to them that they like.

Lauren Lavin:

Do you find that that’s true or relevant to leaders of countries as well?

Jim Yong Kim:

Absolutely.

Lauren Lavin:

So a lot of students listen to this podcast, what advice would you have for them if they’re interested in learning more about global health or want to be an emerging leader? What practical steps do you think they should start taking in undergrad or grad school to be able to make an impact like you have in the field?

Jim Yong Kim:

My great hope is that many students listening to this will have a much bigger impact than I’ve been able to have. I think it’s more than possible. So first, I think every young person, like we did at Partners in Health, take a look at the book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, but they’re more coming out, take a look at the film, Bending the Arc, which will be on the Partners in Health website soon, and really sort of get your head around the fact that we spent a lot of time trying to decide what our most fundamental moral commitments were going to be, right? And they were things like, we’re going to serve the poorest, we’re going to not accept the limitations that everyone else wants to put on us and the poor, and then we’re going to go forward with real stuff that we’re offering. We’re not just going to bemoan the situation of the poor. We’re going to do something about it.

And then I think it’s really important to have self-awareness. So leadership coaching and becoming a better leader, the overwhelming majority of leadership coaches start with a 360 analysis, because the key to great leadership is self-awareness. So really understand what motivates you and what doesn’t. There are some people who are just like superhuman human beings. Paul Farmer was that. I mean, he was so smart and he worked so hard. He had an encyclopedic memory of knowledge of global health. He could memorize just huge things. He could write an entire book in a couple of weeks. I mean, he was superhuman.

People like Tony Fauci, the great Tony Fauci from NIAID. Tony is another one of these people that are just superhuman in a way. You don’t have to be superhuman. I’m certainly not any of those things that those guys are, but I think I had good advice. My father telling me that I should have a skill, I think that was really good advice. I had great teaching from people like Arthur Kleinman and Sally Falk Moore in the anthropology department.

One of the things that I think really work for me is that I always have known how to be a really good number two. I was absolutely a number two to Paul Farmer after school anyway, for the first 15 years of my life. I was a really good number two. I learned a lot from him. People like Michael Porter, the great Harvard Business School professor, he taught me so much. And even though I been head of the HIV department, I was a full professor, even at that point, I sort of said, “Mike, look, I just want to learn at your knee. Tell me about how you think about implementation, delivery, value chains.” And I learned from him.

And then even when I was at the World Bank, I was at the top of the heap in the World Bank, but the Secretary General was Ban Ki-moon, my good buddy and fellow Korean. I learned so much from him, and I always made it very clear that I was the second banana to him who was the leader of the UN system, and he thought it was funny, but he also liked it, right? I always called him Sunbaenim. Sunbaenim literally means the honored person who came before me, right? In Korean culture, that’s exactly what you call somebody who you want to give great respect to. I always use the most polite language, I always walked a few steps behind when we were visiting countries together, and because of that, the relationship between the United Nations and the World Bank was never as good as how it worked when anyone else was leading the two institutions.

In fact, we traveled a lot together, and on the very first trip, he came up to me and he said, “You know, we looked, and this is the first trip ever that the President of the World Bank and the Secretary General of the UN have made together.” Right?

Lauren Lavin:

That’s incredible.

Jim Yong Kim:

So I think there should be more of that because all the organizations should be working together. So what I would say is really get good at learning from others, and really show that you are ready to learn, that you have the humility to say, “Yes, thank you so much, can you teach me more?” Right? And it still serves me today. I’m still learning from lots of different people.

Lauren Lavin:

So it’s a lifelong journey, right?

Jim Yong Kim:

Absolutely.

Lauren Lavin:

Always a student. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. This was great, and I hope everyone enjoyed listening to you as much as I did.

Jim Yong Kim:

Well, Lauren, I’m really honored to be here at the University of Iowa, and thank you for having me on your show. It’s been fun.

Lauren Lavin:

Thank you for joining us on Plugged in to Public Health for this incredible conversation with Dr. Jim Yong Kim. From his early days in Iowa to his leadership at the World Bank, Dr. Kim’s story reminds us of the impact that vision, dedication, and a commitment to equity can really have in the world. If you are inspired by today’s episode, be sure to check out Dr. Kim’s work with Partners in Health and his ongoing efforts to create a more just and healthier world. Don’t forget to share this episode with others who might find it as enlightening as you did.

As always, this episode was hosted and written by Lauren Lavin and edited and produced by Lauren Lavin. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook.

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Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.