Ann Graber Hershberger spent nearly four decades connected to Mennonite Central Committee before she led it: first as a worker in Nicaragua and El Salvador, then through years of board service, alongside a 33-year career as a nursing professor. She is retiring this summer as its executive director.

When she set out to address racial equity at MCC, the question wasn't whether to act. The organization had tried before, more than once, and those efforts had ended up on a shelf. The hard part was how to do it so something would actually change.

This conversation covers how she chose a process built for quiet, lasting change over public declaration, and what it felt like to hold that decision as a white woman with institutional power and no personal experience of what she was trying to address. She also talks about the decisions a CEO has to carry without being able to explain them, the mental test she set for herself years ago to stay grounded, and what she wishes she'd understood about technology before taking the job.

Ann Graber Hershberger has served as Executive Director of Mennonite Central Committee, a relief, development, and peace organization that has worked through Anabaptist churches for over 100 years in approximately 45 countries.

Ted Esler launched a partially self-funded health insurance program for the staff of Missio Nexus member organizations. It grew from zero to $22 million in about 18 months. Then COVID arrived.

Claims went quiet while people stayed away from the doctor, so the program looked healthy when it was not. The bills landed all at once when they came back, and the losses grew large enough to threaten an association running about $2 million a year.

His consultants told him to ride it out. He decided to pull the plug.

Then he laid the full numbers in front of his members, against advice that this was too much transparency, and asked them to help cover the debt. Every one of them agreed, each paying an extra month's premium to keep the group whole.

The conversation opens out from there. Ted has watched many CEOs make these calls up close, and he names the inability to say no as the most vexing problem he sees capable leaders face.

He talks about strategy as choosing what you will not do, and the pruning season his own team is in right now. He also holds a quieter conviction: a CEO with no life outside the work will not last in it. His standard icebreaker asks leaders to name a hobby, and rules out family and reading, because he wants to know who they are when the job is not in the way.

Ted Esler is President and CEO of Missio Nexus, the trade association for the faith-based mission agency world. The organization is 109 years old and serves 340 member agencies whose staff work across the globe, including active conflict zones. Ted has led Missio Nexus for over 10 years.