Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz's daughter was 12 years old when she asked him whether the company had a pay equity gap.
He told her no. She asked how he knew. He had asked questions, he said, and the company had 100% pay equity among employees doing similar work. She asked whether he was certain.
"You know what?" he told her. "Why don't you talk to our head of HR yourself?"
She sent Mattel's global head of human resources a list of questions, came in to conduct the interview herself, and reported back that her father was right.
"At that age, when you see your child that actually cares about that, that is even aware of the possibility that there will not be 100% pay equity, that was very telling," Kreiz said.
Kreiz, who has served as CEO and chair of Mattel since 2018, shared that story at Columbia Business School earlier this month after receiving the 2026 Botwinick Prize in Business Ethics from the Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics. The prize, established in 1989 by CBS alumnus Benjamin Botwinick and Bessie Botwinick, honors an individual who exemplifies the highest standards of professional and ethical conduct. CBS students, faculty, alumni, and the dean's office select each recipient.
Kreiz accepted the prize in conversation with Modupe Akinola, Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business and faculty director of the Bernstein Center.
Values that don't need enforcing
Kreiz runs Mattel on three values: collaboration, innovation, and execution. A leader's job, he noted, is to foster all three, and to insist that they operate alongside integrity.
"At Mattel, we believe that how we achieve results is as important as the results themselves," he said. The company's brand promise is trust: Families welcome Mattel's brands into their homes during the most formative years of a child's development, Kreiz noted, and that is a privilege the company does not take lightly.
Kreiz said he has never once had to put his foot down on a values question, because the team already shares the same north star.
A new definition, not a new hire
When Kreiz arrived at Mattel in 2018, supply chain was one of the company's biggest challenges. The company had cycled through heads of supply chain, and each replacement left the problem more tangled. Kreiz decided against hiring a specialist from another company, reasoning that an outsider would struggle to find their footing.
So he shifted the question. What if supply chain was not a cost center or a service center, but a commercial part of the business? And if that were true, who was the best commercial executive at Mattel?
The answer was a leader in Latin America with no supply chain background at all, who said as much when Kreiz offered him the job. Kreiz told him to stop picturing factories, machines, and automation. He moved his family to Los Angeles and reshaped the function within months.
“I learned a lot from that process,” Kreiz said. “You have to read people and know where people can surprise and change the organization's thinking.”
'They can smell anything that is not authentic'
Beyond defining a mission for the company, Kreiz gave each Mattel brand its own purpose. Barbie's, for example, is to inspire the limitless potential in every girl. Those purposes now govern what the company makes and how it markets.
The reason is that Mattel's core audience is unforgiving. "Children are the most sophisticated consumer out there," Kreiz said. "They can smell anything that is not authentic a mile away."
That conviction shaped Mattel's biggest bet. Rather than hire a traditional filmmaker for the Barbie movie, Kreiz turned to Greta Gerwig, then a 35-year-old director who had never made a big-budget film. The script she wrote with Noah Baumbach was critical of Mattel and unsparing about Kreiz himself. Mattel held approval rights, and voices inside the company said it would never clear them.
Kreiz chose to embrace the script and amplify it. The goal, he said, was never to make a movie that sold toys. It was to create an original cultural event.
Timeless brands, made timely
Mattel's job, as Kreiz describes it, is to take brands that are timeless and make them timely. Today's fans do not care that Barbie has been around for more than six decades or that Hot Wheels is nearly 60 years old. The heritage matters to Mattel because it proves the brands endured; keeping them current is what keeps them from going obsolete.
Kreiz noted the people who buy Mattel products are fans with an emotional relationship to the brands and not consumers picking items off a shelf. In the aggregate, fans become an audience, and speaking to an audience is a different conversation entirely.
Hot Wheels is the clearest proof. Now bigger than Barbie, it has hit all-time highs for nine consecutive years, selling die-cast cars from $1.39 up to $700 for adult collectors, one of the toy industry's fastest-growing segments.
Asked whether transformation is a destination or simply a way of doing business, Kreiz said it is a process, and that continuous improvement is how you run a company. When one program ends, the next begins. What does not change, he said, is what the work is for. Play is one of humanity's greatest unifiers, and it does not end at childhood
"We don't just make toys," Kreiz said. "We make joy."
His advice to current and future leaders alike: stay focused. Define what you want to achieve. "Having clear goals is more than half the journey."
