Time & Perspective Quote by Anita Borg

Borg is talking about “the future” the way a systems thinker does: as an inevitability you can design for, not a vibe you can hope for. The line starts by redefining leadership away from command-and-control and toward bandwidth: vision plus the ability to pull people into a shared project. “Bring people in” is doing pointed work here. It’s not just about charisma; it’s about building networks, translating across specialties, and making institutions permeable enough to absorb talent that’s historically been kept at the margins.

Then comes the strategic judo move: she frames those “real communicator” skills as women’s contributions, not as women’s deficits. In tech and science cultures that often treat interpersonal labor as soft, secondary, or suspiciously “non-technical,” Borg elevates it to the core competency of the next era. The subtext is a critique of the old model without naming it: executives who confuse authority with leadership, and workplaces that undervalue collaboration because it can’t be easily measured on a spreadsheet.

Context matters. Borg wasn’t tossing out a feel-good empowerment slogan; she was a computer scientist who built institutional infrastructure (including the Grace Hopper Celebration) to fix a pipeline problem that culture pretended wasn’t real. Her phrasing also walks a tightrope: it leans on gendered expectations (“these are things that women bring”) to open doors, even as it risks essentializing women into emotional labor. The real intent is pragmatic: if the market is about to reward inclusion, then exclusion becomes not just unjust, but obsolete.