In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Susan Cain: Why Introverts Make Great Leaders, Staying Human in the AI Age and the Bittersweet Life

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

What does it take to thrive as a quiet person in a world that rewards the loudest voice? Nicolai Tangen sits down with Susan Cain, author of the bestsellers Quiet and Bittersweet, whose work gave millions of introverts a voice. They explore why authenticity will be the great advantage in the age of AI, what defines the "highly sensitive" 15 to 20 percent of the population, and how our culture shifted from valuing character to valuing personality. Susan explains why introverted leaders often deliver stronger results, the hidden cost of "toxic positivity", and how she calibrates her own days to avoid burnout. She also reflects on the bittersweet outlook, the joy found in sorrow, and her advice on how young people can rediscover who they really are. Tune in for a thoughtful conversation on personality, leadership and what makes us human.In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson, Karoline Woie, Olav Vhile and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen and Håkon Klemsdal. Background research was conducted by Une Solheim.Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone, I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Welfand. And today I'm in really good company with Susan Kane. Now, Susan is the author who gave the world of introverts a voice because her book, Quiet, spent eight years on the bestseller list, and her TED Talk has been watched by millions and millions of people. She changed how millions of us think about personality, leadership and creativity. And Susan, warm welcome. Thank you so much, Nikolai.

It is such a pleasure to be here with you. Susan, I'd love to start with AI because the world is changing. Is it changing the relationship between introverts and extroverts? It's very interesting with these technologies in general. I often feel that they often at the beginning offer more promise for introverts to have multiple ways of communicating beyond the conventional ones of being always in person, always on, always activated. And then somehow they end up often becoming additional platforms for self-presentation

because that's so prevalent in our culture. So actually with AI, I am adopting a bit of a weight and see attitude. Yeah. There is a new expression which I hear, which is the kind of the high agency people, people who kind of really leverage their technology to make them even louder. And I'm just wondering whether that's one of those things, you know, which amplifies the extroverts even more. What do you think?

Well, not necessarily. I mean, from the dawn of the internet, there's actually been this kind of concept of the, people call it sometimes, the online extrovert, the in-person, I'm sorry, yeah, online extrovert, in-person introvert. And introverts are just as high agency as extroverts

in terms of having goals that they're excited about, projects that they want to accomplish. and having high agency in the service of those goals that they care about. And in fact, I would say what is singular about introverts or what distinguishes them is that they tend to focus on one or two or three goals in their lives. They tend to focus on people in their lives that they really care about. If they're committed to a given company or to leading a company, they're really, really, really committed.

And so they're high agency in that sense. And in that sense, being able to mobilize AI towards those highly directed goals can be incredibly amplifying and powerful. So who do you think are going to be more robot-proof in the future? I don't know that it's going to be introverts or extroverts are more robot-proof. What I would say is that the most robot-proof people are going to be. the ones who care very deeply about maintaining human authenticity. We as human beings, we are evolutionarily designed to pick up a thousand unconscious cues

from the people around us. And so we take an information from the people around us without even quite knowing that that's what we're doing, which is how we can often tell that somebody is speaking the truth versus telling us a lie. You know, you just get some kind of a sixth sense about that. So when we talk about introverts and extroverts, I don't know that there's a difference there. However, there's this category of person that I talk about a lot in my work. It's a category called the highly sensitive person, and it describes about 15 to 20 percent of the population. Many of these people are introverts, although some of them, a few of them are extroverts who just like a lot of alone time.

But anyway, highly sensitive people, by their nature, react more to everything in their environments, both the positive and the negative. So they see a beautiful sunset or a beautiful spreadsheet or whatever it is, and they're very excited about it. And it's incredibly meaningful to them. By the same token, when there's, let's say, a conflict or an upset in their personal life, they might feel that more acutely. as well. Highly sensitive people care a lot about authenticity. Before authenticity was ever a word that people were using hundreds of times per day, this is the way highly sensitive people live and breathe. And so for that category of people, I believe there's going to be a huge advantage, if that's even the right word, in the age of AI, because they are the ones who are

going to be resistant to letting the machines take over their self-expression and their leadership and their means of connecting with people. And, you know, as we all know, that's going to be the big commodity in the next decade is actually being oneself and connecting human to human. It's interesting. When you say highly sensitive people, of course, there are some immediate characters to come to mine of my friends and so on. What character is, these people? What do they have in common? I mean, we could start with what's happening neurobiologically for these people, and that is that they have nervous systems that react more intensely to all different forms of stimulation. So if you think of people you know in your life who react more to a

noisy environment, like there's a lot of noise and it just really bothers them, that kind of thing. And by the same token, they react more to beauty. What's happening is that their nervous system is much more stimulated by those incoming inputs. And what they often have in common as a result of that is a deep appreciation of excellence, a commitment to having beautiful environments or to making beautiful things or products or whatever it is, and to having authentic personal relationships because their very nervous systems will react more in the presence of inauthenticity. And so, yeah, I do think that once you become attuned to the presence of this 20% of the population, you do see them everywhere and you become, yeah, one starts to notice them.

And I think the beauty of all of this kind of work about personality and temperament is you quickly start to realize that the world really could not exist without all these different kinds of people. You couldn't have an organization that was made up entirely of highly sensitive people, but you also couldn't have an organization without them. There would be a core essence missing there. Is social media making us all less sensitive and less social? In a sense, yes, because what it is doing, and it wasn't like this at the beginning. At the beginning of the internet or even at the beginning of social media,

there was a desire to use it to connect, right? Like people would get on Facebook and they would use that to connect with their oldest friends or stay in touch with people, whatever it was. And there's still that aspect to it. But in the years to come, social media has just become an amplification of our already overloaded culture of self-presentation. So one of the things I researched in my book is about the way that we moved in the 19th, or really at the turn of the 20th century, from what cultural historians call a culture of character to a culture of personality. So in the culture of character, this was in the time when we tended to be living in smaller communities with people who we knew intimately.

and if you are living alongside and working alongside your neighbors, what really matters is inner worth, character. Like, are you going to do the right thing in a difficult time? Those kinds of questions. Are you going to be a person of honor and a person of integrity? And if you look at the self-help manuals even from that era, they were teaching people how to have more integrity. Then we came to the 20th century,

and people started moving out of their small towns and moving into cities and working alongside people they had never known before and having job interviews and sales presentations. And suddenly what started to matter was how magnetic are you? How charismatic are you? How do you present yourself? And so that's when we came into this era of the culture of personality. And so to answer your question, we're now in the 21st century with social media.

And though at first it seemed like it was going to return us to an age of heightened connection with people we knew in love, it has become an amplified platform for self-presentation and for just presenting ourselves as a package as opposed to what we truly are. How do you see differences between the various geographies in the world when it comes to this? Oh, well, that's very interesting, actually, because there really are great cultural differences in terms of how we view introversion and extroversion as personality traits.

So you will not be shocked to know, for example, that the United States is one of the more extroverted cultures in terms of what it values. if you look at Confucian societies in particular, you see much more of a valuing of introversion because Confucian societies, of course, are cultures where people, where there's much more of a focus on group harmony. And if you want group harmony,

you don't want one person standing out too much or drawing too much attention to themselves. You want the strong functioning of the group. So in Confucian societies, for example, some of the common aphorisms would be the wind howls and the mountain remains still. So quiet is much more seen as a source of strength. How much of this is given from birth and how much is it because of the way we are brought up and, you know, encouraged by our parents? It's a good question. And of course, we know by now that everything is a combination of nature. nurture, but introversion and extroversion and also high sensitivity that we were talking about

are among the most heritable of all the personality traits. So like I was telling you at the beginning about how highly sensitive introverts will react much more to stimulation. That's something that you can see from the minute babies are born. So scientists have done these fascinating studies where they'll take newborn babies and they will follow them over the course of their lifetime or for many years, let's say. And they start with these newborn babies and they give them sugar water. And what they see is that the babies that salivate more in response to the sugar water, that's an indication of a nervous system that is reacting more to all different kinds of stimulation. So now you take that baby and they're two years old and they go into a, a,

play group of kids they haven't seen before. Those are the children who salivated for the sugar water are the same ones who are going to be more quiet in that play group because their nervous systems are sending them the signal that there's a lot happening right now. We should pause. We should check it out and figure out what's going on here. And let's get back to equilibrium. And as soon as those kids feel that they're in equilibrium and they've figured out the environment, then you'll see they get comfortable and they start to go and play. And this way of being can stay with that. It's a temperament.

So even though we learn all kinds of skills and we have all kinds of experiences as we grow, that temperament can stay with us. And so then you talk about, let's say, people in a company who are 40 years old and now it's time to make a business decision. Well, if you're the person who's nervous system tends to tell you, we want to get back to equilibrium here, you're probably going to be more attuned to, if you're contemplating a new business deal, let's say,

you're going to be more attuned to the potential risks along the way or just the subtleties that are involved in the business program because you want to make sure everything's getting, to that equilibrium point. So these things affect us in fascinating ways, and there are aspects, bottom line, that we really are born with. Although we do, of course, adapt and change

over the course of a lifetime. Susan, what are the implications for leadership? How should introverts and extroverts be led differently? If they should. Oh, how should they be led differently? And we should talk also about the difference between introverted and extroverted leaders. But yeah, in terms of being led differently,

it's really the idea of leading the actual person as opposed to just leading an undifferentiated mass of humans really applies here, of course, because introverts and extroverts have incredibly different needs for a perfect workday. So if you go back to that idea of equilibrium, and what is it that gets each person into a state of equilibrium? And by the way, so less sensitive people have nervous systems

that react much less to stimulation. So for them, the downside and the danger is that they're not having enough stimulation coming at them, and then they can start to feel unhappy and bored and sluggish. So we have to take care of that as well. So you want to be creating environments where each employee can have access to the proper amount of stimulation for them so that they can be spending as much of their time in a state of equilibrium as possible. So this shows up in terms of how do we design our office space.

Are we making sure that we have spaces where there's lots of interaction and stimulation and noise? which all of us, why introvert or extrovert, we all want that at some point during the day. And then do we have places in the office where people can go to be quiet and focus and have their heads down? In terms of how do we design schedules, an introvert will probably function at their best if they can have a schedule where they can focus a lot uninterrupted and get into that state of flow. whereas extroverted workers will need that some of the time because all good creative work meets that, but they're going to start feeling unhappy if they don't have enough social interaction during the day. So thinking about how do you structure the day, like do you want to maybe have designated zones where there's uninterrupted flow time, no meetings, and then zones where the meetings can happen.

in terms of how do you run those meetings? How do you make sure that you're hearing from everyone? There is a study outside from the Kellogg School of Business that found that in your typical large meeting, you have three people doing 70% of the talking. And that is a disaster. If you assume that on average, everyone has the same number of good and bad ideas,

and now we know we're only hearing from a few, few of the most vocal or dominant or senior people, whatever, well, that's a lot of bad, a lot of good ideas we're not hearing and there might be an overweeting of less good ideas. They are extrovert and also the most highly paid. Often. Often, that's true, which then it creates the, has the cycle keep on going. So your perfect day then. So you are, I mean, you are a self-declared introvert, right?

Yes. And I'm, I let's say I am a touch more extrovert perhaps. So your perfect day, do you have, how does it look? Oh, that's interesting. So I need to have social interaction in my day to look forward to. And then I like to have a lot of alone time in between. So every day I try to play tennis. And that's partly social, partly not, I guess you could say.

every day I absolutely must have my alone time with my laptop where I'm writing or otherwise thinking. That's incredibly important solo sanctuary time for me. Even when we're on family vacation, I have to have that time. And then usually I like, well, it depends. If it's a day where I have my family around, I don't really have other social needs. if my family happens not to be around, then I have to be scheduling something at one point or another. And then there's always business meetings and podcasts and that kind of thing.

But basically, like, I schedule my calendar. I can't let my assistant, even though she's amazing. I can't have her schedule a calendar for me because every single day, I'm precisely calibrating it so that I'm getting exactly the right amount of time of social time and solitary time. And it's so idiosyncratic that no one else could do it for me. But I...

What happens? So what happens now? I take over your calendar. You know, I'm going to work for you for a few weeks now. I'm going to take over your calendar. And we're just going to pack it full of stuff, you know? Meeting people, open door policy. Everybody can come and grab you when they want. There is no tennis, no nothing.

What would you do to you? I would just start to feel I don't know that I'd really show it, but I would start to feel overwhelmed, tired of it all, probably not focusing quite as well, just a little bit jangled, more likely to burn out, not enjoying the day by day. As I'm saying, I'm just talking about myself now, the word that really comes to me is burnout. I would burn out quite quickly, though I'd function in the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Well, somebody told me that if you pretend to be another person, then you are, you burn out straight away. And I guess that's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. It's a cognitive load. You also, you're not thinking as well because when you're having to fight against the way you really prefer to be spending your time, there's a kind of cognitive load that's involved with that. So literally your brain is just not quite as fluid as it would be otherwise.

promote so many extroverts, you know, charismatic people to become leaders? Even then when they're not, you know, first of all, why do we do it? And then, of course, are they actually better or are they actually worse? Well, I think there's two reasons. One of them is, you know, the very word charisma means a person who has a kind of magical quality about them. And we all love the magical quality. And it's one of, it's a great gift to have that.

And people like to be around it. So, I mean, that's just one really simple. explanation. But then the other one is this culture that we live in. I was talking about before that since the 20th century, we had lived in this culture of personality where we're taught from a very early age that what's most important is to be the most dominant, to talk the most. There are studies that show that people will rate as more intelligence, someone who speaks more loudly and who speaks more quickly and all of these things. But in terms of the actual outcomes, what's interesting about it is there are many studies suggesting that introverted leaders

deliver outcomes that are as strong or in some cases stronger than extroverted leaders. And that's a really interesting phenomenon. And we could talk about the reasons why that is, because I think there's a few of them. One is, so there was a study, you're probably familiar with the book, Good to Great, Jim Collins' famous work. And in that study, he looked at the top-performing CEOs in the United States at that time, and it was 11 of them. And he found that all 11 of these CEOs were described by their colleagues as quiet,

unassuming, soft-spoken, shy people, which is not, I think, what we expect. But they were also described as having a fierce sense of dedication to their companies and like a real commitment and a real vision for their companies. And this gets into the heart of what introverted people are like. Because I was saying this before, introverts by nature, we tend to invest. deeply in the subjects that we really care about and in the people that we really care about. And if you have an employee who's incredibly talented and dedicated in that way, they can end up becoming incredible leaders, but they'll often get to that leadership point through a different

means. It's like they're getting there through their commitment and they end up acquiring all this expertise. They end up building networks with other people who share their passion. And they end up attracting people around them who also share their sense of commitment. So it's a very different route to that leadership position, but it can be incredibly powerful. And they also, like, once they get to those leadership positions, they often have a very different way of communicating. So one of my favorite examples of this is Douglas Conan, who until not long ago, he was the CEO of Campbell's Soup. He is by his own description, a very shy and introverted person.

And he really cares about people, and you can feel that the minute you meet him. Like, you really cares. And when he was at Campbell, he would identify who were the employees who are really concerned. contributing to the company. And he would sit down and write to them these personal letters of gratitude. And people would carry those letters around, like it meant so much to them. And he wrote 30,000 of those letters during his 10 years at Campbell. Yeah. Yeah. And an extroverted CEO would connect in a completely different way.

No more, no less powerful. It's just different. So there are these alternative routes to leadership that we don't think about. And then there's also a famous study by the social scientist, Adam Grant, at Wharton. And he found, this is really fascinating, he found that extroverted leaders do produce better outcomes in situations where their employees are not as motivated. And the extrovert can come in and deliver a lot of inspiration and charisma and kind of like get them going. And the introverted leaders got delivered better outcomes than the extroverts when they had proactive employees. Because in those cases, the introverted leaders were more likely to listen to what those proactive employees had to say. The proactive employees would share their ideas and the introverted leader would take them in and think about them and listen to them.

And that would produce better outcomes in the end. So there's all kinds of factors to leadership that we're not well enough taking into account. And as a result, we're not cultivating for leadership opportunities many of our most talented people, which is just a waste, a shame. So now we are establishing a new company and it's called Susan Kane Limited. And we produce great stuff and do incredible, we just do incredible things. Awesome. Now, you are the CEO. You are now building up this company, recruiting. the people you want, making the mix of people you want, do whatever you want. Just how do you go about it?

What is the right mix? Who do you recruit? How do you think about all these things? Well, I mean, I assume you're asking kind of from a temperament point of view. And what I would really want to do is create, is hire a mix of people, a mix of introverts and extroverts. We know that teams who have introverts and extroverts on them, mixed teams, do the best. because introverts and extroverts really like each other.

Like they like working with each other. They compliment each other. And you see it in marriages too. I mean, I'm married to an extrovert, and that's not an accident. So that's what I would be looking for in the hiring. And I would also probably be looking for a co-CEO or a deputy or something like that who is more extroverted than I am. So that there would be, we each get to play to our own strength.

instead of having one person try to do everything. Is home office good for introverts? To some degree, but we all have social needs. So everyone's social needs need to get met just to differing degrees. And we all function better with people who we truly know. So there's got to be some way of having that connection. And it's really a thing. question of degree. I never write my books at home ever. I find it much too isolating. I always go

off to coffee shops to do my writing because I like to have people around me. So these things are not always as predictable as you might think. But yeah, I do believe hybrid is the way to go. Susan, 10 years after you wrote Quiet, you wrote another book, Bittersweet. Yeah. And I read it as someone where I was, you know, quite down and it just resonated so incredibly with me. Tell me what is a bittersweet personality? It's a personality that understands and is aware of the fact that in our lives and in this world, there is always a mix of joy and sorrow, that that's just part of the nature of being human, and that paradoxically to live with that awareness and with an awareness of mortality and all of it,

It leads to a richer form of happiness in the end, because it leads you to appreciate each moment. And there's also just a curious beauty in it all. I mean, you know from reading the book, I actually got started on this quest because I was curious about why I kept having such an ecstatic reaction to listening to minor key, sad music. And it didn't make sense. like this music that is by definition sad music, why would it make me happy? But there is a kind of heightened joy that comes from realizing just the fragility of being human

and the fact that all our fellow humans were equally fragile and there's a kind of connection in it all and a savoring of each moment that comes with that outlook on the world. You are critical to what some people call toxic positivity. What is that? Well, it's the insistence, the unspoken insistence that people show up every day at work or anywhere, really, with a relentlessly happy presentation. Okay, so I think about this all the time. I often get called in to do Zoom calls where it's like a company or a group of employees or something.

and everyone gets on the Zoom and the person who's leading it will ask everyone, tell us in the chat, what are you, how are you feeling right now? And everyone types into the chat. I'm feeling great.

I'm feeling excited. I'm feeling happy. And like there's no way that's true. There's no way that all those people are feeling that way. And yet there is this expectation that that's what we have to perform for each other. Now, I'm not saying actually that we should have

workplaces where people feel the opposite expectation that they should be disclosing everything that they feel the good, the bad, the sad, the happy. But when there's the expectation that you have to kind of pretend to be happy in a way that you're not, that that is an unspoken load, not only because it takes so much energy out of the individual people, but the real issue is the connections that don't actually happen when we're performing that kind of positivity. And, you know, in the book, I talk about a Harvard Business School study of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. And this oil rig had an incredibly masculine culture where you had to present a very positive face all the time. And also, you had to present that you always knew what you were doing. You had no

doubts, nothing bother you. And then what happened was this oil rig was moving to an even bigger oil rig. It was going to be more dangerous, more challenging, the whole thing. And the CEO, this guy named Rick Fox, he decided, he was worried about this move and about the safety implications. And he started bringing all his workers into rooms where they would talk to each other from morning until night. They like hold up together for like 10 days in a row and really encouraged each other to share what was happening in their personal lives, their family lives to the extent they wanted to. And they developed a completely new and more open way of connecting with each other. And as a result, the accident rates, even once they had moved to the

more dangerous, bigger oil rig, the accident rates plummeted and their productivity went way up. And a lot of this was just a result of the guys no longer feeling like they had to pretend that they knew what they were doing when they didn't. Or if they saw that there was a problem in the machinery, they would feel comfortable saying to their coworkers, there's a problem here. What should we do about it? these subtle little shifts of a culture can make a huge difference. But positivity isn't that a good thing? I mean, positive people are on average happier, aren't they? They recover easier from setbacks.

They make more money. I mean, how wrong is it to be both? I mean, the point is not so much positive, negative. It's great. Whenever we're feeling positive, it feels very good. It feels good to be around positive people. The point more is to be able to be more or less what you actually are. Is it a choice? Is positivity a choice?

It's a very good question because we definitely, I would say, in micro moments, have the ability to do things like fake it until you make it or to decide, you know, I'm going to put on a smile and that's actually going to make me feel better temporarily in the moment. I'm not even talking so much about moment-by-moment choices as I am a broader outlook. I think it's kind of funny because every time I'm asked to send pictures to a U.S., you know, whatever it is, seminar or speaker engagement, I get the picture back and I'm asked to send a new one with a big smile on. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, because I never smile on pictures because I don't think life is that funny, you know. That's very, very interesting.

Yeah, I was just having dinner the other night with a couple. The guy is American and the gal is from the Czech Republic. And we were talking about those cultural differences and how, like, you look at pictures of people from the Czech Republic, like no one's smiling in the pictures. So same thing. And from the US point of view, that looks so surprising. Talking about Biedas, what's the biggest mistake you have done in your life? The biggest mistake.

That's interesting. I don't know. I mean, there's something I ask myself about all the time is, you know, I wanted to be a writer from the time I was four years old. But I went to law school and I worked as a corporate lawyer for about seven years. And there's some ways in which that was a mistake because I was spending such a large part of my, extremely like protective, like inexhaustible years doing something that ultimately wasn't really my calling. But I don't know. In the end, I don't exactly regret it because I feel like I wouldn't have the outlook that I have now without having had that experience in the hardcore

business world. And one thing just led to the other. What are you, what are you reading just now? I just finished an incredible novel called Flashlight by Susan Choi. It's about a Korean family living in Japan in the World War II years. I love learning about history through reading novels. I will say, by the way, I don't know if you're noticing this, but I went through a period of time where I wasn't reading very many books, and I was really worried about the future of books, because I saw that I wasn't reading.

and I was always such a reader on my life, and I felt like, well, if I'm not reading, no one must be. And all of a sudden, in the last six months or 12 months, I'm back to books again. And I think it is a kind of just reaction, you know, to everything being screens. And so I'm hoping that I'm a kind of human barometer here, and I'm not the only one.

But how about you? Are you reading books right now? I'm reading all. all the time. I just think it's the most incredible thing and that's how I spend my holidays. But I don't finish all the books. I don't think you need to finish books. I think they really need to deserve to be finished. And so I probably finish. Yeah, not all of them. That's, to be frank. Have you read Ian McGilchris? He wrote The Master and His Emissary. I've been reading a lot of his work lately and I think he's fantastic. He writes about the left and right hemisphere of the brains.

I think he would like it. I'll put it on my list. Susan, lastly, what is your advice to young people? My advice to young people is to think about what did you really love and who were you really when you were a child? Because that gives you the clue to who you really are. And you're getting so much pressure in a thousand different ways, not just about introversion, extroversion, just a thousand different things. You're getting pressure to go in direction X. And if you remember what your childhood self was, it will tell you what you really want. That's a beautiful piece of advice.

And it's the first time I've ever heard it on this podcast. So big thank you. Susan, it's been great having you on. Big thank you for all you're done in terms of increasing our understanding of this super important topic. I mean, it means life and kind of life and death to so many people every day. So big thank you. Oh my gosh. Big thank you for having me on and for this podcast.

I really enjoyed it.