Fearless Creative Leadership (Charles Day)

"The Gentle Leader".

A 15 minute edited highlight of our full-length conversation.

Cindy Judge is the President and CEO of Sterling-Rice Group, a Colorado based creative consultancy.

She is thoughtful, focused and sensitive about how to get the most creative thinking out of other people.

So this week’s theme is Influence.

"The Blessed Leader".

15 minute edited highlight of our full conversation.

Cecile Richards is the co-founder of Supermajority, which describes itself as a new home for women's activism that is fighting for gender equality. Before that, she spent 12 years as the President of Planned Parenthood, a that provides to 2.5 million women annually.

Public service and activism are part of Cecile’s DNA. 

Her mother — Ann Richards — shattered conventional wisdom when, as a woman and a Democrat, she was elected Governor of Texas in 1990.

In the seventh grade, Cecile was taken to the principal’s office for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. 

In the eighth grade, she brought food to the strikers on a picket line in her hometown of Austin.

Her first job after college, was as a union organizer in New Orleans, helping hotel workers trying to get by on minimum wage.

Cecile has been called “the most badass feminist EVER” and “The heroine of the resistance”.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

How much do you know about what’s happening at your company? 

Mark Read is the CEO of WPP. At last month’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, WPP was named the most Creative Company of the Year.

Mark took over the role in 2018 from WPP’s founder, Sir Martin Sorrell. It was one of the most publicized and dramatic changes in leadership that the advertising and marketing industries have ever seen. 

Taking the company from those turbulent times, to one of relative stability and success, has required a realistic, pragmatic approach.

Leadership of any creative business is a balancing act. Between dreams and reality. Belief and skepticism. The known and the unknown. 

Where you are on each of those scales depends on circumstances that can change by the day and sometimes faster than that.

Which means sometimes you have to make decisions based on instinct.

That’s fine, to a point. But as flawed human beings, even the best leaders among us are sometimes let down by their instincts. 

When you’re looking for a place from which to start the process of deciding what happens next, I have found that the best leaders prefer to begin with the truth. In fact, they seek it out.

As Mark says, when you’re in charge, that’s often difficult to find. 

But if you’re going to build scalable, sustainable success, finding out what’s really happening is a critical starting point. 

That might be difficult and sometimes painful in the short run. And a lot of leaders by-pass seeking out the truth because it makes life more complicated for a while. 

But starting with the truth pays for itself in big and small ways. Including in your ability to look yourself in the mirror.

A five minute edited highlight of our full conversation.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

How do you feel?

Tim Mapes is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Delta Airlines. 

Delta employs over 90,000 people and puts 4,000 flights into the air every day. As Tim points out, a Delta plane is in the air every second. It is a high-pressure, highly visible job.

Behind that job, is a person. 

Early in our conversation, it became obvious that Tim is very willing to look at himself honestly and at his own behavior with self awareness. 

I asked him where that came from. And he said, simply, counseling.

Invariably, in my experience, it ties back to an experience you had as a child that is being triggered by something in adult life, but it's evocative of a feeling that you either liked or didn't like or were scared of as a child.

Leaders are human too. 

It’s easy to forget that simple truth in a world in which leadership itself is too often deified. The more impressive the title, the more we imbue that person with mystical powers of knowledge and wisdom.

Leaders need to earn the respect of the people that choose to work for them. And re-earn it on a regular basis. 

The problem is that over time, successful leaders often tend to create a one way mirror that shows them the world they want to see. And the people that work for those leaders quickly learn that challenging that image is a ticket to nowhere.

The act of building that mirror is usually not one of arrogance or hubris. More often, much more often, it comes from a need to protect ourselves from a feeling that is too difficult to confront.

The willingness to ask ourselves how we really feel, and the courage to explore that question honestly, is the beginning of a journey that replaces the mirror with a window into the lives and feelings of others.

And from that beginning, anything is possible.

Edited highlights of our full length conversation.

What are you fed by? 

This episode is the fifth in a series of conversations that I'm having in partnership with the Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity. For the weeks leading up to Cannes, we're focusing our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.

Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries, or should we adjust and iterate, slowly and carefully? Do we follow the puck, or skate to where it's going? There are opportunities, and risks, around every corner.

Nils Leonard is the Co-founder of Uncommon, a global creative studio based in New York, London, and Stockholm. I invited Nils into the series because I suspected he would have a strong point of view about what AI is, and isn't, when it comes to creativity.

Nils has strong beliefs about many things, which is why I ask him back on the show regularly. One of those is the emotional leap of faith that every creative act demands. It's a deeply and uniquely human investment.

At the end of the series, I'll offer some thoughts on what we've heard and learned, and where we might go from here. In the meantime, thanks for joining us.

"The Listening Leader". 

15 minute edited highlight of our full conversation.

Carter Murray is the global CEO of FCB. He is 6’7” and shows up larger than that. In his own words, he lives on the front foot, charging forward. 

But the truth is more complex.

When he took the job 7 years ago, the agency was named DraftFCB and was seen by most observers as a turnaround. Others wondered if the world needed FCB anymore.

But some people had a different view. The people that still worked there.

What terrifies you?

This episode marks a couple of important moments. 

It’s the first of a series that I recorded last week at the Cannes Lions festival of creativity. 

I have come to learn that Cannes is invaluable on two levels. First, for the people you meet and the relationships you build and develop. Many of the most important and meaningful relationships in my life have been forged and developed over the years at Cannes.

And second, because Cannes, in my experience, is where the future first appears. Not on the main stages, but in the whispy smoke of quiet conversations and afterthoughts that happen away from the spotlight, and that, if you’re paying attention, tell you that something is changing.  

In the months leading up to this years festival, in a series of conversations that I had with Simon Cook - the CEO of Cannes - he and I came to learn that there are two things we both want to change. 

We want to change the expectations and structure of modern leadership. 

And we both want to change ourselves.

Simon is rare. A leader in a highly visible position, unafraid to show who he really is.

Together, we agreed that this year, we would share a stage at Cannes to discuss our own, very personal journeys and why we think they are reflective of a still quiet but rapidly emerging new form of leadership. One in which vulnerability is an expectation.

Here’s a question. What terrifies you?

Today’s episode was recorded last week at Cannes in front of a group of 37 young creatives from 29 countries who had won places to the Roger Hatchuel Student Academy.

It’s the most intimate expression that Simon or I have ever shared publicly of who we are.

Our hope is that this helps to catalyze a shift across the creative industries of how leadership is evaluated and what it is fair to expect of each other - and ourselves. 

A five minute highlight of our full conversation.

"The 'How Do I Spend My Time' Leader". 

Anne Devereux-Mills is the founder of Parlay House, which describes itself as a modern salon for women. Their mission is to provide a safe and supportive environment in which women can have authentic conversations and build meaningful relationships.

Anne has been the CEO of multiple companies. She’s also a wife, a mother and a four-time cancer survivor.

Edited highlights of our full length conversation.

What is your pain for? 

Taban Shoresh is the Founder of The Lotus Flower, a UK-based charity that supports women and girls that have been displaced by conflict, and helps them to build sustainable futures. Since 2016, the charity's projects have impacted more than 60,000 women, girls, and community members. 

Every now and then, you meet someone whose story stops you in your tracks. Taban’s story starts with her being arrested in Iraq at the age of four. Three weeks later, she's ordered onto a bus that will take her to the place where she and other members of her family will be buried alive.

At the end of 2021, before Russia invaded the Ukraine or the war in Gaza, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide stood at 89.3 million. There were 27.1 million refugees globally, half of whom were aged under 18, which makes Taban's story one of millions and completely unique. 

She has experienced staggering trauma, she has known realities that I'm sure I would not have survived, and she has taken all of that pain and turned it into creative leadership of the most consequential kind. As you'll hear, for reasons both global and personal, she's in a hurry. 

All of us have suffered pain. What we use it for is a question that will stay with me for a long time after this conversation. 

Sir Andrew Strauss is the former Captain of the England cricket team which he led to become the number one team in the world for the first time in England's history. He then became England's Director of Cricket and he's recognized as the architect of the country's first ever one day World Cup victory.

In 2019, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to charity, sport, and cricket.

Being captain of a cricket team requires the same skills needed to run a business. Amplified.

Managing world class talent while your work is being broadcast, and your success and failures, both personal and collective, are being recorded, analyzed and critiqued in real time, requires a range of rare skills and temperament.

Unlocking the potential of others while taking responsibility for the outcome is at the heart of the attributes required for the job.

Andrew and I met in London a few days ago, and as you'll hear, our conversation covered a lot of ground, both professional and the deeply personal.

From his achievements to the loss of his wife.

By the time Andrew Strauss turned 33, he'd achieved what every cricket fan in England grows up dreaming of. Captaining your country to victory in Australia. In my lifetime, it has only happened three times.

Seven years later, he lost his wife to cancer.

Most of us do not achieve so much so young. Nor lose so much so early.

For Andrew, the combination has encouraged him to ask questions of himself earlier in his life than most people do.

Unlocking creativity in others means building trust with those around us. They want to know who we are and what matters to us.

Fulfilling our own potential means answering those same questions. And in my experience, that happens when we ask ourselves this. What else do I want to know about myself?

Most leaders strive for success relentlessly, head down, and only later do we take stock of the choices we've made.

How will you judge if you've lived a good life or not? What else do you want to know about yourself?

How vulnerable is too vulnerable?

Anselmo Ramos is the Co-Founder and Creative Chairman of GUT, a global independent creative agency that’s headquartered in Miami, and with six other offices around the world.

Months after being named the Independent Agency Network of the Year at last year’s Cannes Lions, GUT announced it was being acquired by the tech company Globant. GUT was recently named one of the most innovative companies in the world by Fast Company.

For a company that is barely six years old, its story and success are remarkable. It’s also built on a very specific ethos.

Businesses measure success by many metrics, and as a leader, you live with most of them every day.

In most companies, seeing the leaders cry in public would be a strong indicator that things were heading in the wrong direction. Or worse. For many staff members, it would be traumatic to witness such a public display of human emotion from their leaders.

This conversation with Anselmo has made me think hard about the humanity side of the leadership equation.

How vulnerable is too vulnerable?

The answer, of course, depends on the culture that you have created. If your culture is based on deep and enduring emotional trust, you give people the ability to show up as complex, multifaceted humans, to show up as whole beings.

In a world in which Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to mimic — or more — much of what passes for ‘creative’ in inverted commas, our ability as a species to separate ourselves from the servers, will depend on whether we can unleash ‘human creativity’, that capacity which no technology can replace.

Human creativity comes from the soul. And souls have feelings.

How do you measure those?

A five minute edited highlight of our full conversation. 

'The Buddhist'.

Mark is the CEO of COMMON - a company that accelerates the launch and growth of businesses that take care of the planet and all the creatures on it.

He has grown up with and lived with tension in multiple forms and has been on a journey to discover his through line.

My conversation with Mark made me think about my own through line. 

I hope it does the same for you.

I talked to Mark about becoming a Buddhist, about leading from behind and about his fear of what’s possible.

Are you selfish?

Kerry Sulkowicz is the President of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He’s also a leadership advisor in his own right. It’s a role that requires the ability to look beyond the public-facing image that most leaders feel they need to present, so that we can see the person within.

Leaders often have a difficult time making themselves a priority.

It’s not hard to understand why, given the pressure that leaders face on an hour-by-hour basis.

There’s the pressure from above. Because, as Marc Pritchard, the CMO of P&G, said to me on an earlier episode, leadership is a weight-bearing position and demands that you help lift the people that work for you.

There’s the pressure from all the people in front of you, those in the many audiences you face, who expect you to show up as a thoughtful, confident leader - perhaps even as a thought leader.

And there’s the pressure from the people behind you, the board and the shareholders, who expect you to drive business performance forward, regardless of the circumstances.

And that’s without mentioning the pressure that you place on yourself. The pressure to succeed. To not fail. To overcome the imposter syndrome and the self-doubts.

In the middle of all that, it’s easy to convince yourself that it would be selfish to take care of yourself first.

Except, as Kerry explains, it’s not.

Taking care of yourself first is a requirement. A necessity if you are to become a leader capable not only of withstanding the pressure, but using it as a catalyst to drive the business upwards, into the future.

Only once you have taken care of yourself can you then, confidently and at scale, take care of everyone else.

In the movie of your life, which part do you want to play?

During award-winning costume designer Ellen Mirojnick's career, she’s worked with directing greats, from Steven Soderbergh, to Ridley and Tony Scott, to Oliver Stone.

She’s the reason the name Gordon Gekko immediately conjures an image in our mind, and why Bridgerton swept millions of viewers off their feet.

Ellen turns costumes into characters. How she does that is worth thinking about for every leader.

Over the last few months on this podcast, we’ve been talking a lot about empathetic, sensitive leadership. About building trust and displaying vulnerability.

Not any of which are words to attach to Gordon Gekko.

Gordon Gekko was greedy, immoral, self-obsessed. Labels that fit some of today’s leaders but are probably not descriptions that you aspire to, if you’re listening to this podcast.

Which brings up the all important question. How do you want to be described?

Each of us play multiple roles in our lives. In every relationship, we have to decide which parts of ourselves we bring center stage and which we move into the wings.

Which personality traits, which characteristics, which areas of expertise should be prominent, and which should take a back seat in that moment.

In our private lives, there’s - usually - more forgiveness and more latitude. But in our leadership roles, when we are confused or inconsistent about how we show up, we run the risk of being misunderstood or, worse, misrepresented. And the consequence of that inconsistency is an erosion of trust and confidence from everyone around you.

The best leaders are clear about the attributes they want to be known for, and then turn them into a character that shows up, consistently, every day.

Strategic, empathetic, ambitious, risk-taking, disruptive, loyal, creative, sensitive, rule-breaking. The choices are yours.

And as long as they are true to who you really are, you’ll have the foundations of a leadership character that can draw people with you on the journey, and will have people remember the impact that you made long after the final credits have rolled.

"The Generous Leader".   

Susan Credle is the global chief creative office of FCB. She is original, open-minded and generous.

As the global CCO of a multinational agency, her job is to inspire, teach and hold to account a network of talented individuals, most of whom work in different cities than the one she calls home - New York.

Providing creative leadership to a large network brings different challenges. Building trust with people you see only intermittently is one of the most important.

Knowing yourself - your strengths, your weaknesses, your tendencies and, perhaps most importantly, your own heart - is a competitive advantage in any leadership situation. In a complex, organizational structure, it’s even more valuable.

This week’s theme is self-awareness.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Jan Jacobs and Leo Premutico are the Founders of Johannes Leonardo. They describe themselves as a creative and effectiveness agency who exist to create a world of courageous brands.

However you define the company, they’ve demonstrated exceptional courage and produced relentless creativity for 14 years.

Their starting point for both comes not from leaning in but stepping back.

In years to come, historians will write about this period as one of unprecedented change. An epoch that separated what came before from what is still to be defined.

Today, we live with two new realities. 

Yesterday was an unreliable indicator of what today became.

And tomorrow, anything is possible.

Leading a business that thrives in that kind of environment has become exponentially more challenging than it was even six months ago. 

‘Everyone stay home.’ That created a level playing field that is now officially over.

Now comes the hard part, redesigning your company so that it can win when there are no rules, no norms, no references, no comps and no best practices.

Now, leaders are really going to have to lead.

Which makes Leo’s recognition of listening as a creative act, an invaluable building block in the road to the future.

If you’re listening to this podcast, I’m willing to bet that your company is filled with brilliant minds.

Listening to them to get help with the answers is a good place to start.

Listening to them to get help with the questions is even better.

And makes whatever you come up with, not only original, but a competitive advantage.

Greg Lyons is the Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo, North America. Greg and I spoke during the CMO spotlight series on Cannes Lions live back in October and I was struck by his willingness to share his own journey.

Greg lost his wife, Andrea in December of 2016. Before she died, she gave him and their two children three pieces of advice. There is nothing more important than family and friends. Your health is critical. And spend time doing what you love.

We are shaped by what we live through.

And what all of us have lived through for the last 14 months will change us forever. There is no going back. And how we go forward will depend on how we see ourselves and how we are seen.

Leadership, particularly in companies that depend on creative thinking and innovation, requires that we look forward, relentlessly and urgently. The status quo is poison. Where are we going, is oxygen.

If we are to convince people to take that journey with us, we will need to understand that they arrive in front of us different than when we last saw them in person.

They will be closer to their family and friends. Their health will matter more to them. And they will care more about doing what they love.

Some have been close to illness, perhaps death. Others will wish that parts of the last year could become permanent. Some will be thrilled to be back out in society. Others terrified.

Leading the future will ask that we know and care about the people that work for us on a deeper level than we did before this pandemic. The question, how are you, will need to wait for an answer and that answer will need to matter to us.

We must make progress while we are rewriting the rules. And the winners will be those businesses that are led by people who are empathetic. Genuinely, truly empathetic.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Can you hear yourself think?

DeEtta Jones is the founder of one of the world’s leading EDI training and strategy consultancies.

She’s seen leadership and leaders through many lenses. And she’s learned that the best of them are not necessarily the ones making the most noise.

Leadership is changing in real time. I see evidence everywhere, every day.

The beliefs we have grown up with about leadership - that it starts with standing in front of a group and selling them on a vision, that your success depends on your ability to put everyone else first and yourself second, that your confidence and certainty is the fuel on which the race to the future is run.

There is still some truth in these. You still need to be a reference point, a compass, a constant.

But if you try to do those things and be those things before you have done the quiet work of understanding who you are, before you are clear about what matters to you, before you can be honest about when (and why) you get in your own way, then you are building your leadership on quicksand.

Knowing who you are and who you want to be are foundations strong enough to support not just your future, but that of anyone that matters to you.

'The Math and Magic Man'.

Bob Pittman has lived several lives in the course of this one. 

At 27 he gave birth to MTV. Then turned Nickelodeon into a lasting success and launched VH-1 and Nick at Night.

He was at the center of the creation of Time Warner, ran Six Flags theme parks and then Century 21 real estate before becoming CEO of AOL. He did all of that before the Millennium.

In this century he has been the COO of AOL-Time Warner and co-founded, Pilot, LLC an investment group with a remarkably diverse portfolio, before joining Clear Channel Media and Entertainment.

From 2011-14 he was named the most powerful man in radio.

In 2014, the company was re-named and Bob became Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.

He has also been the chairman of the Robin Hood Foundation, fighting poverty in NYC, the Chairman of New York Public Theater, and served on the boards of an extraordinary number of companies and not for profits.

Along the way, he’s found time to spend 6,000 hours behind the controls of a plane, and learned to fly helicopters too.

He is a human being of diverse interests. He is a man of intention and intense action.

We talked about the science and showmanship of leading creativity, about tortured geniuses and what he thinks about his failures and his legacy.

This an action packed thirty minutes. A reflection of the man.

I hope you enjoy it.

"The More-Than-Me Leader". 

Alex Goat is the CEO of Livity, a self-described, "youth-led creative network”. Their purpose is to create a more positive life for young people by partnering with marketing, talent and policy clients. Their goal is to make youth culture that creates change.

Alex is on a mission to make the world better. It gets her up in the morning and it keeps her up at night. 

A five minuted edited highlight of our full-length conversation.

"The People Leader." 

A 15 minute edited highlight of our full-length conversation.

Emmanuel Andre is the Chief Talent Officer of Publicis Groupe. They own iconic companies such as Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Fallon, and Leo Burnett.

Collectively, Publicis employs 80,000 people and are working to change themselves from being a traditional holding company to a unifying platform.

Emmanuel is pragmatic, philosophical and an artist. His decisions affect the lives of many people every day.

This episode is called, “The People Leader."

"The New Leaders."  

To be a successful creative leader, you need to be able to celebrate an environment that revels in the chaos of original thinking and behavior, and from that produce the reliable performance required of any business.  

And sometimes, it requires doing that when your only experience of leading an actual business is none at all. When your success has been based on your capacity to break all the rules and change the expectations.  

One day you’re throwing tea into the Harbour. The next you’re sitting on a throne with a crown on your head. At that point, the fact that it’s heavy is not your greatest  problem. Your greatest problem is the fact that everyone is staring at you expectantly.  

Jason Bagley and Eric Baldwin, are the ECD’s of Wieden + Kennedy, Portland. As creative partners, they were responsible for one of the most iconic advertising campaigns of the last decade - Old Spice’s, "the man your man could smell like. Between them, they have almost 25 years of experience at the agency.  

I spoke to them about what makes Wieden + Kennedy a relentless creative force, about how they're leading the Portland office through its own transformation and about the adjustments they have had to make now that they have become the leaders.

For more information:

Wieden+Kennedy

www.FearlessCreativeLeadership.com

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Stephanie Mehta is the Editor-in-Chief of Fast Company. They study, explore, analyze and report on innovation like no other media brand.

Stephanie has been a writer almost since birth. Like the rest of us, she’s learned how to lead through trial and error and experience and asking and listening.

Leadership used to be a two dimensional, top down, hierarchical practice. I say. You do.

Today, it is a three dimensional role, powered by a leader's ability to use influence and in which they are the visionary, guide, architect, storyteller, as well as the supporter of multiple constituencies.

Today, the leader is expected to have a point of view or to be clear - and credible - about why they don’t.

The best way and, in fact, the only way, for leaders to navigate this complexity, is to establish a set of principles that guide them in moments of crisis and consternation.

If you take the time to define your principles now - when things are quiet and the microphone isn’t being pushed in your face - you will dramatically increase the chances that what you come up with when the heat is on, will be clear, consistent and compelling.

Three words by which to measure anyone’s leadership.

And which increase the chances that whatever you say, you can live with the consequences of having said it.

What triggers you?

Kate Rouch is the Chief Marketing Officer at Coinbase.

October was Mental Health Month.

But the truth is, every month should be.

And when you’re the leader, every month is.

Leadership, at its best, is a selfless act. A desire to help others reach a future that is better than the present.

Many, many things can get in the way. Most of them we know about before we start. A few others show up along the way.

But the one that we all carry with us, often unrecognized or worse, ignored, is our mental health.

We focus on the challenges and outcomes, the trials and the tasks, believing what we’ve been told, that anything is possible. If you want it badly enough, and work for it hard enough, you can will that future into existence, so the story goes.

Except the story leaves out a crucial part - our neurobiology. The completely, utterly, entirely unique programming that makes us who we are.

Why does that music make you cry? Why do these words make you angry? Why does that response scare you, intrigue you, excite you? What is making you afraid?

The programming might come from this lifetime. A father that left, a sister that died, a dog that never left your side.

Or, as the evidence increasingly suggests, it might have been passed down to you from generations before, hard-wired into your DNA before birth, created by events you did not experience and pain you did not know firsthand.

And yet, we drive ourselves forward, determined to succeed, carrying baggage and burdens that would stun a herd of bison. Ignoring the fact that our programming controls us, causing our body to react and our mind to contract. During those few moments when we are triggered, we are out of control of our feelings. That’s not a lack of discipline or determination. It’s biology.

So, try this instead. Acknowledge your feelings. Find comfort in the absolute truth that you are not broken or inadequate or alone. Find confidence in the knowledge that with the right help, we have the ability to rewire our brains, if we want to.

So start to pay attention to what you feel and when.

It’s the beginning of the journey that matters most. Self discovery.

And from there, all things are possible.

Raja Rajamannar is the Chief Marketing & Communications Officer for Mastercard and is also President of the company’s healthcare business.

His list of accomplishments is long and significant. He was recognized as the Global Marketer of the Year by the World Federation of Advertisers, was named one of the Top 5 “World’s Most Influential CMOs” by Forbes, and one of the Top 10 “World’s Most Innovative CMOs” by Business Insider. He has been inducted into The CMO Club Hall of Fame. He has also been recognized as one of AdWeek’s most tech-savvy CMOs.

So what matters to him today?

How do you live your life well?

That question is at the very heart of the upheaval of the employer - employee relationship. Whether we come to call it ‘The Great Resignation’ or ‘The Great Self-Reflection’ or anything else.

For the first time in the history of our society, the people who do the bulk of the work are discovering they don’t have to do it on someone else’s terms. They can decide what a ‘life well lived’ looks like on their terms.

They’re discovering that they have agency in their own lives.

The pressure this puts on leaders is almost more than we can understand. It changes everything.

And if you thought ‘it’s lonely at the top’ was true before, it’s going to become an even more meaningful cliché as we stumble into 2022.

Leaders are going to have to adapt and evolve to these dramatic societal shifts. Leadership is going to have to change at its very heart and soul.

But as you personally confront these challenges, my hope is that you will place at the center of your thinking that very same question. How do you live your life well?

Empathy, vulnerability, care and compassion are going to have to be building blocks on which your leadership is built. I don’t see a way in which you can succeed from now on without those as the foundations from which you lead.

But you can’t fake these qualities. They’re not sustainable unless they reflect the life that you want to lead.

What do you want to do with your life? What do you want to spend your time on while you are alive?

These are questions that scare us. Questions that can feel judgmental or too filled with consequence if we really confront them.

But when we are willing to confront them, the answers unleash such reservoirs of possibility, that soon we cannot imagine why we lived for so long without the clarity and the confidence they provide.

And they come with the added benefit that they will make you a world-class leader for as long as you choose to lead.

What’s your big goal?

Carl Johnson is the Executive Chairman and one of the founding partners at Anomaly.

If you go to the company’s website, it says, in block capitals, “A DEVIATION OR DEPARTURE FROM THE NORMAL OR COMMON ORDER, FORM OR RULE.”

In Anomaly’s case, this is not hyperbole. The company pushes boundaries and defies norms all the time.

It’s one of the reasons that yesterday Adweek named Anomaly the US Agency of the Year.

Carl Johnson is an iconoclast. Meet him once and you’ll remember him. This is actually the third time he’s been on this podcast. His first appearance was in my second episode and that conversation set the tone for the kinds of insights I wanted listeners to benefit from. He was candid. Honest. And human.

This conversation breaks new ground. It’s a case study on building a world-class, creativity driven business.

So where does Anomaly go now?

There are two parts to the Anomaly leadership story that are worth paying attention to.

The obvious one is the boldness of their ambition. They set big goals. And they are unrelenting in pursuing them.

But the second and, I think, equally influential component of their story is one that doesn’t get talked about very often - their consistency.

If you go back and listen to my previous conversations with Carl - the first of which was almost six years ago - you’ll hear him talking about many of the same things in the same ways.

That consistency engenders trust - from employees and clients and from prospective members of both those groups.

Trust gets people to invest emotionally and take risks. Trust produces better questions and better answers.

Trust builds foundations that give you the confidence to define goals that are so audacious it will make even you gasp.

And that attracts world-class talent and makes them want to stick around.

So set big goals. But then behave with consistency so that people want to take the risks necessary to achieve them.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

How do you find the right people?

Nick Law is the Global Lead for Design and Creative Tech at Accenture Song.

Nick has had a storied career. He was Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA. Chief Creative Officer of Publicis Groupe. And the VP, Marcom Integration at Apple, before joining Accenture Song in early 2022.

He has led and unlocked creativity across thousands of people. He’s seen what works. And what doesn’t.

In my experience, the very best leaders understand three things. Their business, their people and themselves.

But not in that order.

Most leaders prioritize their understanding of the business. After all, it's the reference point that most people use when measuring the success or otherwise of an individual leader.

So, leaders rightly worry about the vision, the strategy, the execution and the performance of the organization. They pour themselves into KPIs and P&Ls.

But getting those numbers to sing, to really sing, is the consequences of two things.

How well you understand your people. And how well you understand yourself.

The creative thinking and innovation that every modern business depends on is amplified a thousand fold when its people trust and believe in the leaders of that business.

Better visions, better strategies, better systems will move the needle a bit by themselves. But only a bit. And nothing like as far as when your people believe in you.

And what drives that belief? Your courage, your confidence, your consistency. And your humanity.

And all of those depend on how well you understand yourself.

So if you’re struggling to find the right people, start by finding yourself and deciding what really matters to you.

And then say it out loud so that your people can find you.

Is that good?

Heather Freeland is the Chief Brand Officer at Adobe, a business that, as Heather describes, is undergoing significant change to prepare itself for the future to come, and the one that is already here.

In a company long known for providing powerful tools to creative people, the advent of Generative AI is both a threat and an opportunity. How human beings maintain our relevance sits at the very heart of that tension.

Is that good?

In the quest to become leaders that make a difference, there are many powerful questions to ask ourselves.

What do I want to find out about myself?

What is success?

Both of these are intensely personal, and can be answered, albeit with some serious and honest reflection, from within.

But, “Is that good?” usually stretches us out into the world. We are inclined to ask, through what lens? Against what criteria? Measured by what result? Based on whose experience?

But at the end of that journey of data collection, consultation, and analysis, the answer to, “Is that good?” is still waiting for someone to decide.

Michelangelo, when asked how he had created such perfection from a piece of rock said, “I simply removed everything that wasn’t the David.”

If human beings are to create a dividing line that AI can not cross, the question, “Is that good?” may be the beating heart on which that barrier depends.

“Is that good?” is heavy lifting. It requires clarity and confidence.

Muscles we should probably start building today.

This episode is being published within a couple of days of the very sad news that Sir Ken Robinson has died.  He was perhaps the world’s leading thinker and expert on creativity and innovation. His original TED talk, do schools kill creativity, is the most watched in the history of TED. If you haven’t seen it, take 18 minutes and watch it. It’s extraordinary.

Ken believed in the potential of every child. At its core, his message was profound and simple. Every human being is remarkable.

I was fortunate to spend a fair amount of time with Ken between 2006 and 2008. Everywhere he went, people stopped him to say that watching his talk had changed their life.

My sense from watching people’s response to Ken was they thought he believed in them more than they believed in themselves.

He was 70 when he died, much too young. But his legacy is extraordinary.

If you haven’t watched his TED talks, I encourage you to take a few minutes and do that.

They might just change your life.

This episode is a conversation with Stephanie Nadi Olson - founder and CEO of We Are Rosie.

They are a very modern business, built to match marketing talent with opportunity in dynamic and flexible ways. If you were going to design a business to confront the challenges of these two viruses, WeAreRosie would be a pretty good blueprint to follow. 

They are built to unlock the potential of people.

I suspect Sir Ken would have approved.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

How fast are you going?

Andréa Mallard is the Chief Marketing & Communications Officer of Pinterest.

I interviewed Andréa at Cannes, in the lobby of the Majestic Hotel. Her energy struck me, the moment she arrived. Her perspectives about her life and her leadership have stayed with me, long after we said goodbye.

Leadership is a forcing function for the forces of physics. Which direction are you going and how fast are you moving are determined entirely by the leader.

Those two factors are affected directly and acutely by the leaders’ willingness to challenge the status quo. To take off the handbrake that the unasked question leaves in place.

There are some leaders for whom disruption is the fuel that gets them up in the morning.

But for many, the fear of confrontation provides a natural suppression of the instinct to ask the difficult questions. That fear helps them ignore the rising temperature of the water that they and their company are sitting in.

And when the future suddenly arrives, and stares us in the face, we find that all those unasked questions, all those moments when we avoided the hard conversation, suddenly come with a heavy cost. Or worse.

Leadership asks that we overcome our fears in order to help others with theirs. It asks us to be status quo shakers and rule breakers. It asks us to search for the invisible anchors on our businesses and release them so we can meet the future - on our terms.

I heard - or perhaps dreamt - a quote the other day. In any case, I can’t find it on Google so maybe this is an original thought. Either way, it strikes me as true.

You may not be interested in the future. But the future is interested in you.

Ask the questions you didn’t ask yesterday. Feel the temperature of the water around you. Meet the future on your terms. As fast as you can.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Nancy Reyes is the CEO of TBWA\Chiat\Day New York and Chris Beresford-Hill is the agency’s Chief Creative Officer.

None us succeed alone. And the bigger the ambition, the more we need other people to reach it. The age of the iconic, solo, white male leader are almost behind us. Not a moment too soon.

Welcome to the age of leadership partnership. And if you think what came before was challenging, well, as the song goes, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

As humans, we want so badly to belong, that we’re attracted - almost compulsively - by the idea of partnership. It is a light calling us home. Or to the flame.

There are many, many kinds of partnerships. Strategic. Impulsive. Circumstantial. Convenient. And those that are deeply, deeply personal.

Successful and satisfying partnerships are rare. So rare, that when we find them we should take some time to understand why they work.

As you will hear, their relationship embodies two of the most critical elements of any successful and sustainable partnership.

First, you’ve got to like each other. Because you’re going to spend a lot of time having difficult conversations and making hard decisions.

And second, once the decision is made - whether you agreed or not - you’ve got to develop the ability to support each other.

Love and the ability to disagree well.

Sometimes it’s just that simple.

And that complicated.

How well does your partnership work?

”The Path Finder”.  

A 15 minute edited highlight of our full length conversation 

Skyler Mattson is the President of Wongdoody - a small creative agency that’s been  successful for 25 years.

She’s also the cofounder of June Cleaver is Dead, the agency’s consultancy whose expertise is in brand experiences for moms. 

Skyler is caring, determined and not a surfer. Which, metaphorically, is surprising because she rides the waves of a rapidly changing set of creative industries with great skill and grace.

This week’s theme is intention. 

If you don’t know what you don’t know, how certain should you be about what you do know?

Parts of this conversation with Kerry Sulkowicz, the leadership confidant and psychiatrist, were featured in last week’s Look Ahead at 2022 episode. If you haven’t heard that yet - I spoke to nine different leaders about how society has changed as a result of the last two years, and what that means for leadership.

The episode was featured in Fast Company and the link is in the show notes and on the Fearless website.

Kerry works with leaders across the world and is also President-elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He knows a thing or two about the psychology of leadership.

The human condition is attracted to certainty. To be fed and safe and healthy. To belong. To matter.

It’s hard to get away from these instincts and the impulses that come with them.

Which makes us more inclined to look for evidence that fits our desired view of the world and to overlook questions and possibilities and gaps in our knowledge that might contradict that view.

Which, in turn, makes what we do know more risky and what we don't know more valuable.

In most organizations, leaders sit or are placed on a pedestal. There is a structural hierarchy that directly affects the flow of information.

When we allow ourselves to believe that the structure itself provides us with all the information that we need, we run the risk of never knowing what we don't know.

If your goal is to be someone who leads empathetically and impactfully, a question to add to your leadership portfolio is the one that Howard Schultz reportedly asked himself and his leadership team at Starbucks every week.

What do I not know that would make this decision wrong?

And then follow it up with this one.

Why am I afraid to find out?

I met Alain Sylvain only once. We recorded a podcast at the very end of October in 2018. 

I remembered it long after, and looking back, was conscious that my own thinking evolved as a result of our conversation.

The news of his tragic death last month has had a profound impact on many people I know.

I debated whether it was helpful or not to reload this conversation. 

After listening to it again, I hope that it will let those of you that knew him well, add to your memory of him.

And for those of us that didn’t, I hope it will help know him a little better.

Life is short. I have come to believe that at the end, we can hope for three things. To be remembered. To have made a difference. And to be loved.

I am grateful to have met him even briefly.

I am sorry beyond words for the sorrow and the loss that his departure leaves behind for his family and those that knew him and loved him.

How do you find the right people?

Nick Law is the Global Lead for Design and Creative Tech at Accenture Song.

Nick has had a storied career. He was Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA. Chief Creative Officer of Publicis Groupe. And the VP, Marcom Integration at Apple, before joining Accenture Song in early 2022.

He has led and unlocked creativity across thousands of people. He’s seen what works. And what doesn’t.

In my experience, the very best leaders understand three things. Their business, their people and themselves.

But not in that order.

Most leaders prioritize their understanding of the business. After all, it's the reference point that most people use when measuring the success or otherwise of an individual leader.

So, leaders rightly worry about the vision, the strategy, the execution and the performance of the organization. They pour themselves into KPIs and P&Ls.

But getting those numbers to sing, to really sing, is the consequences of two things.

How well you understand your people. And how well you understand yourself.

The creative thinking and innovation that every modern business depends on is amplified a thousand fold when its people trust and believe in the leaders of that business.

Better visions, better strategies, better systems will move the needle a bit by themselves. But only a bit. And nothing like as far as when your people believe in you.

And what drives that belief? Your courage, your confidence, your consistency. And your humanity.

And all of those depend on how well you understand yourself.

So if you’re struggling to find the right people, start by finding yourself and deciding what really matters to you.

And then say it out loud so that your people can find you.

"The Questioning Leader".

15 minute edited highlight of our full conversation.

I recorded this episode just over 2 week ago. Before the world changed. It’s a conversation with Madeleine Grynsztejn - the Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Over the last few days, I’ve thought a lot about whether to publish this episode because so much of what we talked about seems at first glance to be from a different reality. 

But I think, it’s an important interview for a couple of critical reasons. 

Madeleine talks about the role of art and the role of museums in both reflecting and shaping society.  About the importance of constantly looking for the things that we don’t know, for breaking our own assumptions of what happens next.

Suddenly, that feels like the most important question for us to start raising as leaders.

A five minute edited highlight of our full conversation.

"The Successor". 

It’s hard to follow a legend. Sometimes because they’re unique. Sometimes because history is written by the winners and they write themselves that way.

John Hegarty - Sir John Hegarty - is the former. A true original thinker and the creative head of what - for a number of years - was one of the most creative companies of all time.

Following a legend is a challenge. Following a legend who is still a powerful presence in your industry requires a strong sense of self. You also need an understanding of what you can bring to the table.

Pelle Sjoenell has both. As the worldwide chief creative officer of Bartle Bogle Hegarty his job is to replace a legend. 

Doing that, he has learned, is not about taking credit, but about taking responsibility.

How do your people know you’re here for them?

Yves Briantais is the VP of Marketing Asia-Pacific for Colgate-Palmolive.

We recorded this interview at the end of a long week at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

There are a number of areas that I could have focused on for this introduction.

But the one I want to highlight is an issue that I hear about from so many leaders today.

Where they lead from.

For businesses that depend on unlocking creativity and innovation, the era of top down leadership is ending. And faster than many companies - most companies - realize.

Servant leadership is the popular replacement. Popular in that many people talk about it, very few have fully understood it, and almost no one actually practices it. Quarterly financial targets have a habit of getting in the way of good intentions.

Leading from behind is a thoughtful and honorable desire to get away from command and control leadership, and instead create a different kind of relationship with your team. One in which they know you’re there for them, while giving them room to grow.

But it doesn’t quite go far enough - in my opinion.

The challenge for leaders is that today, leadership requires so many different styles of relationship with your teams, depending on the situation. Collaboration. Subordination. Integration. Provocation. Expectation. And, when the heat is on, Protection.

A friend and I are working on a new leadership paradigm, one designed from vast experience both inside and outside complex, highly creative and innovative businesses. One built for the reality of the world and society in which we live and for the people that we want to be.

We’ll have much more on this over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, this conversation is invaluable for Yves’ insights on empathy, intention, and co-creation.

Edited highlights of our full length conversation.

Which direction are you going?

Nils Leonard, one of the co-founders of Uncommon - the award winning global creative studio - has been a regular guest on this show since I started Fearless seven years ago.

In all of that time, I’ve wondered abut his partnership with his two co-founders, Natalie Graeme and Lucy Jameson.

Why did they decide to go into business together? How does it work and what might get in the way?

And what makes the Uncommon partnership particularly worth understanding is the extraordinary consistency between what they said mattered to them when they started, and how they show up today.

This conversation, on a wet, rainy Thursday morning, at an outdoor restaurant in Cannes, shows why this partnership has worked so successfully so far and raises some questions about how it will need to evolve to guide the company’s next stage of evolution.

How fast are you going?

Andréa Mallard is the Chief Marketing & Communications Officer of Pinterest.

I interviewed Andréa at Cannes, in the lobby of the Majestic Hotel. Her energy struck me, the moment she arrived. Her perspectives about her life and her leadership have stayed with me, long after we said goodbye.

Leadership is a forcing function for the forces of physics. Which direction are you going and how fast are you moving are determined entirely by the leader.

Those two factors are affected directly and acutely by the leaders’ willingness to challenge the status quo. To take off the handbrake that the unasked question leaves in place.

There are some leaders for whom disruption is the fuel that gets them up in the morning.

But for many, the fear of confrontation provides a natural suppression of the instinct to ask the difficult questions. That fear helps them ignore the rising temperature of the water that they and their company are sitting in.

And when the future suddenly arrives, and stares us in the face, we find that all those unasked questions, all those moments when we avoided the hard conversation, suddenly come with a heavy cost. Or worse.

Leadership asks that we overcome our fears in order to help others with theirs. It asks us to be status quo shakers and rule breakers. It asks us to search for the invisible anchors on our businesses and release them so we can meet the future - on our terms.

I heard - or perhaps dreamt - a quote the other day. In any case, I can’t find it on Google so maybe this is an original thought. Either way, it strikes me as true.

You may not be interested in the future. But the future is interested in you.

Ask the questions you didn’t ask yesterday. Feel the temperature of the water around you. Meet the future on your terms. As fast as you can.

Lisa Mehling is the owner of Chelsea Pictures, who last month were named the winner of the Palme D’Or as the Production Company of the Year at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Lisa doesn’t like to talk about herself. But her journey is an important one to understand as we struggle to build a society that supports all people.

The single biggest decision we make in our lives is this. How will we use the time we get while we are here? How will we spend this moment? And this one? And this?

Are we reacting or acting? Waiting or moving? Hoping or choosing?

Time has moved differently over the last 18 months. We have learned new rhythms - some faster, some slower. But very little about the way we have spent our time has felt familiar.

Until we got used to it, and it did. Sometimes in good ways. Sometimes in bad.

And then the vaccines came. And now we have to figure out how we spend our time all over again.

Which makes this moment a gift.

I’m fortunate to see across and inside a wide range of industries and businesses. And what I’m increasingly certain of is that what came before 2020 will have increasingly little to do with what comes after.

We have been living for a long time with norms and expectations that were designed and implemented during the Industrial Age. The 40 hour work week for instance, despite all the data that shows working fewer hours dramatically increases both performance and personal well-being. The Industrial Age started in about 1760 and ended sometime in the mid 20th century. Conservatively, that means we left the Industrial Age about 70 years ago. And yet we’re still tied to its apron strings.

Human beings are creatures of habit, genetically and biologically built on rhythms. The rising of the sun, the speed of our breathing, the gestation period of creating new life. There are so many fundamental aspects of our existence that we can't control.

But if you’re listening to this podcast, there are many, many things about your life that you can control. You have agency. To decide and to act. To test the boundaries of what is possible and to discover who you are in the process.

The power to unlock creative thinking and innovation depends on challenging assumptions and breaking down norms.

Or, as Lisa said, of not waiting for permission that you don’t need.

These moments are fleeting. New structures and practices and expectations and processes will be here before we know it.

So you can wait until someone tells you what’s allowed.

Or you can save yourself ten years and decide yourself.

Edited highlights of our full length conversation.

Can you imagine?

This episode is the second in a series of conversations I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

For the weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re focusing our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.

Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries? Do we follow the puck or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.

PJ Pereira is the Founder and Creative Chairman at Pereira O’Dell.

PJ is also a published author and an artist in his own right. We talk about a piece of animation that he recently created for his latest novel in which he used AI, and and we’ve included a link in the show notes for this episode.

One of the themes that’s emerging from the conversations and background research I’ve been doing, is one of those realizations that is both surprising while striking me immediately as unquestionably true.

As a species, human beings are particularly bad at recognizing the speed, scale and impact of exponential growth.

Let me share an example I heard on a New York Times podcast recently, that uses cases of COVID to illustrate this.

If you start with a single case, and cases double every three days, then after 30 days, you have about a thousand cases. We can all wrap our heads around that.

But then go 30 days longer.

Now, you have a million. Wait another 30 days? Now, you have a billion.

AI is moving with the speed of a virus, and we are struggling to recognize the implications in ways that we can relate to.

We don’t have to go back too far to see how quickly our understanding of “normal” can change.

On March 1st, 2020, society was operating pretty normally. Chris and I actually took a plane to Chicago on the 2nd, and we flew back to New York on the 5th.

Five days later, five days, that idea was unimaginable, and it remained that way for a year.

But speed of change is not the only measurement that we should be conscious of.

The enormity of the gap between the normal, as we understand it today, and what we will demand as normal tomorrow, is usually beyond our imagination to see or to predict or to project.

PJ brings those limitations of our imagination to life through a vivid and unforgettable example.

At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.

In the meantime, thanks for joining us.

This week’s guest is Malcolm Poynton, the Global Chief Creative Officer of Cheil Worldwide. 

In the early weeks of the pandemic, Malcolm got stuck in New Zealand while his family were in London. He experienced first hand one of the very best governmental responses and learned some leadership lessons that I suspect will prove timeless for all of us.

What’s your intention and what is the greatest obstacle to that?

Leadership means knowing the answer to both. And then getting your ego out of the way.

"The Removal Men".   

If you’re interested in unlocking creativity in the people around you then Wieden + Kennedy is a real-time case study. Like all great creative companies, it is three-dimensional, and no two sides look the same. Understanding how and why it works means looking at it from several angles.  

In earlier episodes, I’ve talked to Colleen DeCourcy, who has a global perspective; Eric Baldwin and Jason Bagley, who had just taken over the leadership of Wieden in Portland; and Jesse Johnson and George Felix, about how the agency/client relationship works when Wieden is at its best.  This episode is a conversation with Neal Arthur and Karl Lieberman, who run W+K New York.  

They came together just over three years ago, following a long period of uncertainty in the leadership of that office. Since joining forces, they have provided focus, consistency, care and hope. They also have clear expectations of themselves and those around them.

Are you conscious of your choices?

Kara Swisher is the most effective and successful tech journalist of our lifetimes. She’s the host of the podcast ‘On with Kara Swisher’ and the cohost of the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway. Over the last thirty years, she has interviewed everyone who matters in tech, multiple times. And she’s just written her third book, titled Burn Book: A Tech Love Story.

In a world of white men with giant bank accounts and even bigger egos, how did this 5 feet 2 inch, self-described, liberal lesbian mother of four, end up as the most influential and insightful reporter of the technology age?

As you’ll hear, Kara puts it down to curiosity, confidence, and understanding the choices available to her.

Leadership is the art of unlocking the potential of others. But our success at doing that, first depends on our ability to unlock the potential in ourselves.

If you’re listening to this podcast, you have choices. Given its reach around the world, some of you have more than others. But all of us, all of us, have more choices than we think.

Too many times we doubt ourselves, see only the obstacles, respond only to the fear, the one that makes us believe that we don’t have the ability, the experience, the confidence, or the right to choose a different path.

We let others decide our future. We wait for approval, or acceptance, or acknowledgement that we have passed some undefined, moving line test.

But when we choose to take a different path - one that recognizes that life is a journey; that what we do with it depends on the decisions we make, not those that we let others make for us. When we make that choice to take a different path, then we show up differently.

We start to discover that our future is waiting for us to create it. That the choices we make will determine the impact that we make and the one we leave behind.

To be a leader is a choice. To make a difference is a choice. To define our own journey is a choice.

So choose your future. And then create it. In Kara’s words, “be defined by that the choices you have.”

It is the human equivalent of lighting the blue touch paper. And the results will light up the sky.

'The Power Couple'. 

Carter Murray and Susan Credle are one of the advertising industry’s power couples. Smart, brave and generous, they successfully marry art and commerce on a daily basis. In this episode of Fearless, they talk about their partnership, their disagreements and how they help each other keep their eyes on the stars and their feet on the ground.

For more information:

 FearlessCreativeLeadership.com 

"The 'I Don't Know' Leader".

Rick Brim is the Chief Creative Officer of Adam&Eve/DDB - one of the world’s most creative companies.  

Rick is down to earth, self reflective, supportive and passionate. He cares a lot.

Adam&Eve/DDB are perhaps most famous for the annual John Lewis Christmas campaign that produces one of the standout commercials of the year. For this and for many other reasons, they generate high praise and enormous attention. 

Which brings with it the other side of success. Expectation.

That’s when the pressure of leadership really shows up.

———

Charles also announces the launch of UCx - a unique organizational diagnostic tool that measures any company’s creativity. UCx identifies where creativity is being blocked or lost and why. Visit www.unlockcreativity.com 

"The Fear Seeker". 

15 minute edited highlight of our full conversation.

Brad Hiranaga is a disruptor and a change agent. Working inside one of the world’s most storied and established companies, he is bringing about systemic change to the way General Mills shows up in the world. 

Unlocking creative and innovative thinking at scale requires not just an ability to take risks but a willingness to search for them.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

When you’re the leader, where does your impact end?

Laurie Howell and Toby Treyer-Evans are Executive Creative Directors at Droga5 in New York and have been partners for a very long time. They have also been responsible for important and extremely impactful work, including the New York Times campaign called The Truth Is Worth It. 

But as their careers evolve and the world changes, it is their impact on people in the immediate vicinity that has their attention.

It is a truism of the creative industries that the people who get recognized for coming up with the best ideas are eventually put into positions in which they are suddenly responsible for the professional well-being of others.

Not everyone navigates that evolution successfully.

And to add to the challenge, the bar has just been raised.

Today, it’s not enough to plan only for the professional development of the people that work for you. You have to worry about how their work is affecting their personal lives too.

To use Laurie’s language, how you lead affects the rhythms of the people that you lead. From how they feel to how they sleep.

Today, when you take on a leadership role, the need to adapt the job to the person falls on you.

So if the question of what’s keeping your employees up at night isn’t keeping you up at night, perhaps it should - at least until you know the answer.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Raja Rajamannar is the Chief Marketing & Communications Officer for Mastercard and is also President of the company’s healthcare business.

His list of accomplishments is long and significant. He was recognized as the Global Marketer of the Year by the World Federation of Advertisers, was named one of the Top 5 “World’s Most Influential CMOs” by Forbes, and one of the Top 10 “World’s Most Innovative CMOs” by Business Insider. He has been inducted into The CMO Club Hall of Fame. He has also been recognized as one of AdWeek’s most tech-savvy CMOs.

So what matters to him today?

How do you live your life well?

That question is at the very heart of the upheaval of the employer - employee relationship. Whether we come to call it ‘The Great Resignation’ or ‘The Great Self-Reflection’ or anything else.

For the first time in the history of our society, the people who do the bulk of the work are discovering they don’t have to do it on someone else’s terms. They can decide what a ‘life well lived’ looks like on their terms.

They’re discovering that they have agency in their own lives.

The pressure this puts on leaders is almost more than we can understand. It changes everything.

And if you thought ‘it’s lonely at the top’ was true before, it’s going to become an even more meaningful cliché as we stumble into 2022.

Leaders are going to have to adapt and evolve to these dramatic societal shifts. Leadership is going to have to change at its very heart and soul.

But as you personally confront these challenges, my hope is that you will place at the center of your thinking that very same question. How do you live your life well?

Empathy, vulnerability, care and compassion are going to have to be building blocks on which your leadership is built. I don’t see a way in which you can succeed from now on without those as the foundations from which you lead.

But you can’t fake these qualities. They’re not sustainable unless they reflect the life that you want to lead.

What do you want to do with your life? What do you want to spend your time on while you are alive?

These are questions that scare us. Questions that can feel judgmental or too filled with consequence if we really confront them.

But when we are willing to confront them, the answers unleash such reservoirs of possibility, that soon we cannot imagine why we lived for so long without the clarity and the confidence they provide.

And they come with the added benefit that they will make you a world-class leader for as long as you choose to lead.

"The People Leader."

Emmanuel Andre is the Chief Talent Officer of Publicis Groupe. They own iconic companies such as Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Fallon, and Leo Burnett.

Collectively, Publicis employs 80,000 people and are working to change themselves from being a traditional holding company to a unifying platform.

Emmanuel is pragmatic, philosophical and an artist. His decisions affect the lives of many people every day.

This episode is called, “The People Leader."

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

If you died today, what would you regret?

Jon Cook is the Global Chief Executive Officer of VML, the world's largest advertising agency.

Jon died last October. As you’ll hear, the fact he is still here to have this conversation required a set of circumstances so improbable that they would have strained the credibility of your favorite episodic drama.

But the fact he is still here, gives him, and those that meet him, a living and breathing teacher of what will really matter to us, when we reach our end.

As we age, our priorities and the emphasis of our life changes. We define success in more personal, more human ways.

And yet, when we become leaders we are judged - and we judge ourselves - against metrics that have limited shelf lives.

That will not change any time soon. If you do not deliver economic performance in a for-profit business, you will not be a leader for long.

But, and this is a big but, ask yourself now, what would you would regret if today was your last day on the planet? And then live a life that makes room for the behaviors that would change that answer.

Life and leadership are about choices. Don’t wait until you’re dead to make better ones.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Charlie Cole is the CEO of FTD. As you’re about to hear, Charlie is a high energy leader. Relentlessly positive, endlessly optimistic. He took over a bankrupt company in the early days of a pandemic. He put together an executive team that only now, a year later can he spend any time with in person.

Charlie discovered something brand new about himself in the middle of all of that. That he has a breaking point.

Every leader does. And thinking of yourself as a servant will shorten the time it takes for you to discover yours.

Are you in service? Yes. To the change you want to create in the world, and to providing the business with what it needs to reach that goal.

But you are not a servant. You have agency and free will.

Oh, and you have one other thing. Access to the levers of power. When a servant pulls the levers of power, it’s called a revolution. When a leader pulls them, it’s called a decision.

"Owned By No One - Part 1".

I’m just back from the Cannes Lions festival of creativity and recorded some podcasts while I was there. This is the first of them.

The topic is the idea of Nils Leonard - founder of Uncommon and a guest on "Fearless” a couple of years ago.

Creativity requires risk and uncertainty. Two attributes that the business world has developed powerful resistance to. Want to try something new? In a publicly traded company, you’ve got to convince the c-suite, the board, the analysts and the shareholders. That’s a lot of institutional antibodies.

What then of the flip side of ownership? When you own the company yourself? Does that more easily produce the conditions in which creativity and innovation can thrive?

In this conversation I’m joined in the Vice Penthouse overlooking the Croisette in Cannes by three people who have previously been guests on ˜Fearless’ - Nils Leonard of Uncommon, Alex Goat of Livityand Mohan Ramaswamy of Work & Co. And by Spencer Baim, who is the Chief Brand Officer of  Vice Media.

"The Legacy Builder." 

Josh Wyatt is the CEO of Neuehouse.

I’ve been producing this podcast for over two years and have interviewed almost a hundred leaders. In my role as a confidant and advisor to some of the most creative leaders in the world, I’ve gotten to know many more. 

This conversation with Josh Wyatt has stayed with me in the days since we recorded it, as much as any of them.

Josh wants to make a difference, for his family, his friends, his partners and his talent - his description for the people that work for him.

Josh’s desire and determination to make a difference are not unique.

The circumstances of his life, the environment that created that desire and determination, are.

His is an extraordinary story. Of Leadership. Of legacy. And of life.

This episode is our ninth of Season 2 - which we’ve sub-titled, “Leading In The Time Of Virus”.

In these conversations we discover how some of the world’s most innovative and creative leaders are adapting their leadership to our new reality.

These people are among the world’s best problem solvers. 

This episode is a conversation with Emma Cookson, a partner at You & Mr Jones which describes itself as the 'world's first Brandtech group' working to disrupt the world of traditional marketing and advertising.

Before that, Emma was the chairman of BBH New York.

She’s one of the clearest thinkers that I know.

Emma talked about the need to focus on the important, not just the urgent, about assigning different groups to look at distinctive time horizons, and about the opportunity to forge more respectful relationships.

How do you see yourself?

Daniella Pierson is the Founder and CEO of The Newsette. And the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Wondermind.

She and her story are extraordinary.

Daniella started The Newsette seven years ago, at the age of 19. Last year, the company generated $40 million in revenue. She and her mother are the only shareholders.

She has done this in the face of being told, in so many ways, that she could not. That she was incapable. That she was inadequate. That she was dumb.

She has done this by refusing to accept the criticism or the labels or the extreme self doubt.

She has done this by building an organization so filled with the best parts of herself, courage, intelligence, kindness, that in the end the organization became capable of taking care of her.

I hope you’ll find the time to listen to her whole story.

It is a story of hope built on the determination of one remarkable woman to define herself and her life on her terms.

When do you stop and take a breath?

If you've listened to Luther Vandross or Tina Turner, or Sting, or Chaka Khan, or Teddy Pendergrass, or Roberta Flack, then you've heard Lisa Fischer sing. If you went to a Rolling Stones concert between 1989 and 2015, you saw Lisa as the band's lead female singer join Mick Jagger on stage.

If you've seen her in person, as I've been fortunate to have done so twice, or if you've seen her on YouTube, take over the stage from Tina Turner during It’s Only Rock and Roll, or the clips of her on stage with Mick Jagger, you already understand the extraordinary talent that she is linked to. Both of those are in the show notes.

And if you've watched 20 Feet from Stardom, then you already know that Lisa is one of the greatest background singers that the world has ever heard. For most of us, those 20 feet might as well be the length of a trip to Mars. For Lisa, who won a Grammy in 1991 and then decided not to take center stage, those 20 feet were a choice. A choice that brings her joy.

Lisa is a rare spirit who's had enormous influence and impact. If you see her perform, you're left with a belief that she has a direct connection with your soul. In those moments, she is alive in ways that stretch our understanding of what the word means.

Leadership at its heart is the ability to unlock the potential of others, to make them feel more connected. The very best leaders do that by helping us to understand ourselves better, by helping us feel what we had never felt before.

Lisa is proof that you don't have to stand center stage to do that. You just have to be honest with yourself about where you get your energy from, and then let that energy flow.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Has leadership changed you? Or the people around you?

Philippe Krakowsky is the CEO of IPG. He runs a company of 58,000 people across more than 100 businesses.

He worked at IPG for almost two decades before taking on the role in January 2021. He was known as the corporate shrink and the plumber. Deutsch New York even made a bumper sticker once with his photograph on it that read, “1-800-CALL-KRAKOWSKY. Got a problem? Call Philippe.”

Despite all this, despite knowing and being known by almost everyone, when he took the job of CEO, he noticed that some people suddenly changed around him.

Philippe, as you’ll hear, is human and a realist. His mantra, ‘Hey, show up with reality and we’ll figure it out,” struck a chord with me.

Too often, leaders over-complicate. Sometimes, the situation. Sometimes, themselves. That’s not surprising. Leadership is complicated at the best of times. And it’s really easy to lose perspective.

Step into a highly visible leadership role, and you are rare indeed if you are can hold on to a clear understanding of your strengths during the first few months. Typically, you become hyper aware of your perceived weaknesses, and it can take a long time to regain your self awareness and confidence that got you the job in the first place.

But, even more challenging is what often happens to those around you when your new role suddenly changes your org chart relationship to them. When you now hold the power.

That’s when your ability to overcome your own uncertainty becomes critical so that you can evaluate their behavior towards you objectively.

Only then can you hold them to account. Only then will you have the confidence to ensure that they speak their truth to your power.

How do you do that? How do you make sure you’re focused on their performance and not yours?

Well, having a leadership philosophy goes a long way.

Looking for an example? “Hey, show up with reality and we’ll figure it out,” is a pretty good place to start.

"The Inner Voice".

David Lee is the CCO of Squarespace.  

He is thoughtful, self-aware and restless. As you’ll hear, he’s allergic to the status quo. 

Which makes David and Squarespace a good fit.

In many ways, Squarespace have been at the heart of the democratization of the internet. Unleashing creativity for millions of people who suddenly found they could be the designer of their own web presence. 

As a species, human beings crave control.  With control, we can take care of the bottom two layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Without it, everything else that we aspire to and yearn for is hopelessly out of reach with the emphasis on the hopeless.

This week’s theme is listening.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

How are you creating your company’s culture?

Melissa Waters is the Chief Marketing Officer at Upwork. They describe themselves as the world’s work marketplace. 

For any business, if your success depends on unlocking creative thinking and innovation, you have to be competitive in the talent wars. The leadership rules for that used to be simple. Create a compelling culture built around in-person experiences. 

But how do you lead when a company’s culture is no longer built around physical space?

Tens of millions, probably billions, of the currency of your choice have been spent by business owners to build offices conducive to collaboration, creativity, and innovation.

I’ve owned some of those businesses and spent some of that money.

We did it to create a culture. To provide an environment that would help unleash the creativity of the people that worked for us and convert that into economic return.

Physical space wasn’t the only element to building a culture. Beliefs and behaviors mattered as well. But all of them were connected by the fact that, day in and day out, human beings came together and shared ideas and experiences, and learned from each other.

But without the physical structure of an office to provide the day-to-day container in which culture incubates, the responsibility to create those connections falls squarely on the leader. 

Who are your people? What do they think, care about, love, loathe? Are they happy or not? Fulfilled or not? Interested, enthused, excited or not?

Do they feel connected to what matters to the company or not?

And if your answer to any of those questions is “I don’t know,” then it might be time to ask yourself whether your leadership is adapting to the needs of today’s talent. Or not.

A five minute edited highlight of our full length conversation

Are you leading, following or getting out of the way?

This episode is the first in a series of conversations that I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

For the next five weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re going to focus our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.

Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries, or should we adjust and iterate, slowly and carefully? Do we follow the puck, or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.

We start with a conversation with Nick Law, who is Creative Chairperson at Accenture Song.

Nick has seen the creative industries from an array of extraordinary perspectives. He was Vice Chairman, Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA, he served as Chief Creative Officer at Publicis Groupe, and was Vice President of Marcom Integration at Apple, where he co-led the global design and marketing group.

On his Cannes speaker profile, Nick says that he believes all technology needs creativity to make it human, and all creativity needs technology to make it real.

At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.

It promises to be an eye opening and thought provoking journey.

Thanks for joining us.

"The Honest CEO".

A 15 minute edited highlight of our full-length conversation.

Joanne McKinney is the CEO of Burns Group- an advertising brand consultancy and innovation company.

She’s worked on the agency and client side. She’s lived and worked in the US and in Europe. She’s started her own company, been named one of 24 global agency innovators by The Internationalist, and has succeeded at every step of her career. And while doing all that she’s been a wife and a mother to two children.

She’s a year into being a CEO. She’s smart, self aware and honest.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Keesha Jean-Baptiste is the Senior Vice President, Chief Talent Officer at Hearst Magazines.

During her career, she’s also been the Senior Vice President of Talent, Engagement and Inclusion at the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the Director of Talent and Human Resources at Wieden and Kennedy.

Keesha is brilliant. She is brave. And she is black. And all three of those attributes make her an extraordinarily insightful and powerful advocate for the work that companies need to undertake if their workforces are truly going to reflect society.

Today, that work falls under the heading of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or DEI - and there are many businesses that are filled with good intentions and meaningful efforts to improve their DEI performance.

In some cases these efforts lead to tangible and lasting results. In others the work has little impact on the hiring practices or culture of the business.

The difference in whether the work works, frequently comes down to one variable. The leader.

I don’t think it’s ever been harder to be a leader. Less is certain and more is expected. There is less to rely on and more to invent. There are fewer shadows to disappear into and many more bright lights to bring the truth into sharp relief.

One of the truths is that it’s still disproportionately harder to be a minority in America.

And if that fact is going to change, actually change, we need leaders who are willing to step forward and who know what to do when they find themselves standing in that light.

My conversation with Keesha covers a lot of ground. She talks openly about her own upbringing, about childhood events that shaped her, and about how she sees the challenges and opportunities that leaders face today, as they struggle to come to terms with what’s needed in DEI committed companies.

It’s a conversation that’s filled with practical advice about a sensitive and complex topic.

It’s a conversation that will make you a better leader.

What are you responsible for?

Emma Armstrong is the CEO of FCB New York. Most recently, the office was named Agency of the Year at the Clio Awards. Both as an office and as a company, the last few years have been stellar by anyone’s standards.

There are always many reasons for a company’s success, particularly when that success is sustained - the hardest kind to achieve. In my conversation with Emma, she described client relationships in a way that stayed with me long after we had said goodbye.

Unlocking creative thinking and innovation is hard to do when you are in a vendor-supplier relationship. Because, while creativity is the most powerful business problem solver we have, it requires conditions and an environment not always present when one side is telling the other what to do.

Creativity and innovation are fueled by trust. And trust happens when you believe that the person on the other side of the table, or the screen, cares - genuinely cares - about your well-being.

The creative industries have many people who do not engender trust. They demand more for less - more output for less money. More commitment for less respect.

But the true and full power of creativity is unleashed when all parties take seriously the responsibility that each of us has to the person across the table.

Brand, agency, employer, employee. Parent, child, friend. When both of us can put the other person’s interests first, well, that’s when the world is changed.

"The Courageous Conversationalist". 

Pam Kaufman is the President of Viacom Nickelodeon Consumer Products. Her job is to lead worldwide licensing and merchandising for Viacom Media Networks and Paramount Pictures.

Pam’s job is to expand the relationships that Viacom and Nickelodeon have with their audiences. And she does that by building personal relationships in every part of her work. She also believes in telling the people that work for her what they need to know to get better - and doing that in real time. From a leadership perspective, that makes her rare.

This episode is called, “The Courageous Conversationalist”.

'The Non-Linear Person'.

The most meaningful and actionable definitions of success are your own. The ones that you are self-aware, intentioned and brave enough to establish for yourself. 

These personal KPI’s are the ones that drive Fearless leaders when the rubber hits the road. For those leaders, the ability to look themselves in the eye and know that they held themselves to their own standards is the most meaningful definition of success.

For those leaders, the future is built on two words that begin with i. Intention and integrity. They also happen to be two of the conditions in which profitable creativity flourishes.

That’s what’s known as a win-win. 

Colleen DeCourcy is the co-Chief Creative officer of Wieden & Kennedy. During her career she has been at the heart of some of the most original and disruptive thinking of any of the creative industries. She has experienced life as an employee of a holding company, an employee of her own company and of an independent company. She has been described by Dan Wieden as “the real deal.”

As she approaches the end of her fifth year at Wieden, I talked to her about discovering that months don’t always start on Mondays, about her role as a change agent, and about the one thing she wishes she had more of. 

'The Optimist'.

Technology is increasingly the platform on which fearless creative leadership sits. The challenge of this is twofold.
First, we need the capability to get the answers to the questions that we know. How do I solve these known problems, and what role does technology play in that?
And second, we need the courage to ask questions that until now have been unimaginable or inconceivable. Today, like never before, real-world technology can take us to places that used to be the stuff of fantasy - ideas that existed only in the recesses of our imagination and were never allowed past our office building’s security guard once we got to work in the morning.
Today, leaving those ideas at the door can be the difference between success and failure.
Rewiring ourselves to expand our own curiosity and understanding of what might be possible is a fundamental requirement of successful modern leadership. It's no longer enough to think that a linear progression based on what we know today is anything like enough to figure out what will be needed tomorrow. The best leaders are constantly provoking conversations and exploration about what the future could look like - and should look like - so that they can light the trails and take the leaps required of companies as they reach the top of their current S-curve, and stare into what comes next.
Those conversations and that exploration is literally impossible without exposing ourselves to the outer limits of what technology will be capable of in 5-10 years. If, as leaders, we don't stretch our own imagination, we cannot hope to make decisions in the short-term that will maximize the possibility that this company will still be relevant in the long-term.
The day-to-day demands of leadership require we place one eye firmly on the ground directly in front of us. But the speed with which the future is coming at us, requires that we train our mind’s eye to see beyond the unlikely, and instead help us imagine a world in which the impossible becomes the inevitable.
As the Global Design Practice Director at IBM, Elizabeth Kiehner applies some of the world’s most powerful technology to solve the problems of today and tomorrow.
I talked to Elizabeth about the expansion of natural language technology in our daily lives, about a machine’s ability to edit tennis highlights without human involvement and about how to design solutions for problems that will exist 5 years from now.

Hashem Bajwa describes himself as a creative leader that uses imagination, intuition and inclusivity to create experiences that bring people together. He’s done that at Goodby Silverstein, at Droga5, and for the last six years at Apple, where he was Director of Strategy, working with Angela Ahrendts to reimagine Apple retail, including the Apple Store.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few episodes talking with my guests about the personal and human challenges of leadership in a COVID, climate change, DEI driven world.

Hashem and I discussed that too.

But this episode is a case study in managing change at enormous scale, to the highest standards and under the brightest of lights. It is filled with practical explanations that have helped create one of the most creative, innovative, visible and valuable businesses of any lifetime.

Leading what’s right in front of you is challenging. Leading people who are miles and time zones and cultures apart is exponentially harder. Force of personality quickly get diluted over time and space, and out of sight, out of mind willingly steps in to fill the gaps.

Before you know it, you’re not leading an organization, you’re managing siloed problems armed with a ‘not invented here’ resistance to change.

I’ve seen this up close in big businesses and small. In complex corporations and founder-led partnerships and in all cases, the leaders who were successful planted ‘experience principles’ into the fabric of their organization and then used those to guide, support and ultimately determine decision making across issues both small and business-changing.

When you’re the leader, there’s never enough of you to go around. And as we learn to work across hybrid work weeks and sometimes physical, sometimes virtual offices, the chances that you will find yourself in the right place at the right time all the time, has become essentially zero.

Leadership has a lot to do with giving people clarity and vision while encouraging them to bring their own unique thinking to the decision-making moments.

Today, that means finding ways to both guide and inspire their thinking even when you’re not in the room.

Have you defined experience principles for your organization?

Justin Gignac is the co-founder of Working Not Working - a curated community of 80,000 of the best creatives in the world.

Most businesses today are led and staffed by predominantly white people. Very, very few companies reflect society.

Leaders are suddenly galvanized to fix this problem, publishing staffing numbers and pledging to hire diverse talent. 

I believe them when they say it. I believe them when they say they’re going to work to create environments that support and embrace the emotional and cultural safety of every person.

But the question that too few leaders are addressing is where will we find these people?

If you're really going to fix this problem, you’re going to have look for talent in different places, define a successful candidate in different terms and hire in different ways.

"The Alchemist".

A 15 minute edited highlight of our full-length conversation.

Today's conversation is with Andrew Essex. He's the co-founder of Plan_A- a self described marketing services company. He's best known for his time as the CEO of Droga 5, and before that as the Chief Executive Officer of Tribeca Enterprises, the parent company of the Tribeca Film Festival.

Andrew is sharp witted, a quick thinker and has a relentless curiosity for what's next.

Umber Ahmad is the Founder of the rapidly growing bakery, Mah Ze Dahr.

Her journey from banker to baker has been told before by everyone from Martha Stewart to BuzzFeed to TIME Magazine. Umber was a guest in the early days of this podcast in June of 2017.

Over the last few years, I’ve come to know Umber well and in full disclosure I’ve worked with her both formally and informally as she launched and began to grow her business.

When the pandemic hit us all like a tidal wave in March of 2020, I wondered how Umber would keep Mah Ze Dahr afloat.

A business that depended hugely on a single brick and mortar location in Greenwich Village didn’t seem to have much future as her customers fled New York and the city turned into a post apocalyptic landscape of deserted streets and shuttered storefronts.

Twenty months later, Mah Ze Dahr hasn’t just survived, it has thrived. That single location has turned into four, and her online business has doubled.

The leadership instincts on which the business is growing were honed in Umber at an early age.

It is too easy to think of leadership as an abstract, intellectual, and even academic construct.

It is not.

Leadership is the most powerful change agent on the planet - this one or any of the others that we attempt to occupy in years and generations to come.

Leadership is most visible when we are confronted by the twists and turns that life brings us.

Coronavirus has been a series of hair-pin bends on the side of a mountain, and many so-called leaders have climbed into the back seat and clung on for dear life.

When faced with these moments, we quickly discover whether we are a leader in name only, or whether we are willing to confront the challenges of whatever lies ahead.

Whether we hit the brakes and stop, or whether we accelerate through the curve and head for the future.

A five minute highlight from our full conversation.

"The Alchemist".

Today’s conversation is with Andrew Essex. He’s the co-founder of Plan_A - a self described marketing services company. He’s best known for his time as the CEO of Droga 5, and before that as the Chief Executive Officer of Tribeca Enterprises, the parent company of the Tribeca Film Festival.

He’s sharp witted, a quick thinker and has a relentless curiosity for what’s next.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Are you looking backwards or forwards?

Keith Cartwright is the Founder and CCO of CARTWRIGHT, an agency built on the principle of Creative Audacity. He is also Co-Founder of SATURDAY MORNING, an organization built on using creativity to shift negative perceptions in the African American community. Keith was named one the 50 Top Creatives in the Business by Adweek Magazine, and by Campaign Magazine as Top 10 Most Influential People in Advertising.

The world is complicated. Perhaps more today than ever before. The journey to the future is not clear. What will be true when we get there? When our children get there?

And who will we be when the future arrives?

We are complex beings. Drawn to look forward. Built to dream. But influenced by our past more than we sometimes care to admit. And much more than we know.

Leadership provides the light to the future for all of us. Creativity the fuel. The combination offers limitless potential.

Unlocking that potential, unleashing our full impact during the time we are here, either in this job or in this life, happens when we can bring ourself - our whole self - to every moment.

When we understand the journey and the influences that have brought us to this moment, when we know where we want to go, and we are clear and conscious about the obstacles and limitations and beliefs that we place in our own way, then we become a rare and powerful force.

We become a Whole Leader.

Where are you on that journey?

"The 'How Do I Spend My Time' Leader". 

15 minute edited highlight of our full conversation.

Anne Devereux-Mills is the founder of Parlay House, which describes itself as a modern salon for women. Their mission is to provide a safe and supportive environment in which women can have authentic conversations and build meaningful relationships.

Anne has been the CEO of multiple companies. She’s also a wife, a mother and a four-time cancer survivor.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

President Emma Armstrong, co-CCO's Gabriel Schmitt and Michael Aimette, and their Chief Strategy Officer, Todd Sussman, are the leadership team of FCB New York.

This summer, the Cannes Lions named FCB The Network of the Year. The agency’s journey over the last eight years has seen it transformed from a company that most people didn’t care about to one that now stands as a reference point for how to unlock creative thinking on a global scale.

FCB is a case study for growing a business by first defining and then living through a strategy.

But, when I meet the company’s leaders - whether at the global level or those responsible for running offices - I’m always struck by the human connection between them.

According to a recent McKinsey report, 15 million US workers - and counting - have left their jobs since April of this year. The “Great Resignation” as it’s now being called has become one of the most disruptive forces in business since the 2008 financial crash, with potentially deeper and longer lasting consequences.

People no longer want to work at jobs they’re not interested by. Which seems like an obvious statement except that for decades, and maybe forever, that hasn’t been the case.

In fact the company - employee contract has long been built around the understanding that many aspects of many jobs would be intellectually and emotionally unsatisfying but would come with the promise of something better in the future.

That equation doesn’t work in the same way any more.

As a leader, how you rewrite that equation depends on how you see the world yourself.

Are you, as Emma describes, curious about the power of creativity and where the world is going next? And are you taking people on that journey of discovery and possibility?

Or are you working to meet the expectations of someone’s else’s over-promise? And then you have to ask yourself, is that really leading at all?

Curiouser and curiouser.

"The Trust Maker".

15 minute edited highlight of our full conversation.

Marc Maltz is an organizational clinician, and he’s brilliant at getting the CEOs of tech companies and their senior teams to work together more effectively.

I have huge respect for his work and I thought it would be invaluable to hear his thinking on some of the issues I see every day in my own work.

Whether you’re writing code or ads, whether you’re building platforms or teams, the need to unlock creative and innovative thinking sits at the heart of the world’s most valuable businesses.

And what makes that heart beat is trust.

Gail Gallie is the Co-Founder of Project Everyone where she works alongside the writer and director, Richard Curtis.

Project Everyone is a not-for-profit communications agency that creates campaigns and supports partners to raise awareness, inspire action and drive accountability for the Global Goals of the United Nations.

Their mission is to accelerate progress towards a fairer world by 2030, where extreme poverty has been eradicated, climate change is properly addressed, and injustice and inequality are unacceptable.

Gail’s own energy is infectious. Even across a Zoom from three thousand miles away, she lifted my sense of possibility.

As you’ll hear, there have been phases in her career where that hasn’t been the case. And, like many leaders, she’s had times where she’s found herself out of sync with the organization she was running.

But through her journey, she has created a life in which her leadership both reflects and empowers her as a human being.

In my experience, that is all too rare. Most leaders relentlessly prioritize solving their company’s problems over their own personal development.

Leadership is a moving target. And if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you’ll know that great leadership requires that more than one thing be true at once.

You have to care about others. And you have to care about yourself.

And sometimes, not in that order.

What do you have a responsibility to?

Marty Baron is the former editor of the Boston Globe, and the former executive editor of the Washington Post. The newsrooms under his leadership won 17 Pulitzer Prizes. At the Globe, he instigated the investigation into the sexual abuse conducted by the Catholic Church in Boston, and which was turned into the Academy Award winning movie, Spotlight. 

The list of seminal stories that were reported under his watch would fill an entire podcast episode by themselves, from Elián Gonzalez, to the Snowden files, to the 2000 Supreme Court decided election to name but a few.

His new book, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, describes his 8 year leadership journey during one of the most tumultuous times in the paper’s history. 

Along the way, he has learned a staggering amount about leadership.

Leadership, done well, is all about responsibility. 

The trouble is that often, the definitions of leadership responsibility are too narrow and shallow. Too quickly defined and too quickly redefined when things get bumpy.

When you meet a leader who sees their responsibility as clear, for whom that responsibility is deeply held, whose commitment to it is pressure tested, and for whom their definition of responsibility has withstood the fury of time, it often feels as though they are fearless.

You ask them about being afraid and they shake their head. Not brashly, or boldly. But quizzically, almost as though they don’t understand the question.

And when you are asked to describe that person’s leadership qualities, the words that come to the fore are integrity, self awareness, and courage.

They are not words they ascribe to themselves. These are words that the rest of us use to help explain what sets them apart.

But what sets them apart is not, as I have come to learn, their integrity, their self awareness, or their courage. 

What sets them apart is the absolute certainty that they will do the right thing, because their leadership is not about them. 

Their leadership is about something that they believe is more important than they are.

Which might be the purest definition of leadership that I’ve heard so far.

Judge for yourself.

'The Reputation Builder'.

Kerrie Finch is the Founder & CEO of FinchFactor - one of the most successful reputation management companies within the creative, tech innovator and startup sectors, with offices in Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles and New York. 

Kerrie is the founder of SheSays Amsterdam and an ADCN board member.

She's also incredibly warm and genuine.

I talked to Kerrie at Eurobest in London.

Edited highlights of our full length conversation.

Are you seizing what is starting?

This episode is the third in a series of conversations I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

For the weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re focusing our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.

Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries, or should we adjust and iterate, slowly and carefully? Do we follow the puck or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.

Asmita Dubey is the Chief Digital and Marketing Officer of L’Oréal.

Her company is the fourth largest advertiser in the world. They are a 115-year old business that owns 37 brands.

It’s easy to see the world presumptively. To presume that big companies always move more cautiously, that they are slower to see, to adopt, and to adapt to disruptions in the eco system around them.

But if your company believes, as Asmita frames it, in seizing what is starting, if you operate from a foot forward perspective, if you are relentlessly curious and consistently committed to the belief that creativity and innovation are all that separates you from your competitors, then the size of your company does not matter.

Big or small. Old or new. You can seize what is starting, and define the future on your terms.

At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.

In the meantime, thanks for joining us.

"The Listening Leader". 

Carter Murray is the global CEO of FCB. He is 6’7” and shows up larger than that. In his own words, he lives on the front foot, charging forward. 

But the truth is more complex.

When he took the job 7 years ago, the agency was named DraftFCB and was seen by most observers as a turnaround. Others wondered if the world needed FCB anymore.

But some people had a different view. The people that still worked there.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Are you taking care of yourself?

Antonio Lucio's bio is extraordinary. He was the first Global Marketing and Communication Officer at Visa. The first Global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at HP. He was Facebook’s first Chief Marketing Officer. And he left there to become the Founder and Principal of 5S Diversity. They describe their mission as accelerating the leadership journey of diverse talent and increasing its representation in senior marketing roles in the industry. He is a member of the Executive Fellows Program at Yale University and earlier this month was inducted into The Marketing Hall of Fame.

His reputation is that he is an incredibly empathetic leader.

And as you’ll hear, that may be his greatest accomplishment.

According to romantic lore, leaders step in where angels fear to tread. They throw themselves, head first, into the fray, and generally, they’re willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of others.

But, here’s a simple truth. It’s hard to lead anyone, anywhere meaningful, if you don’t care about yourself.

The pandemic has extracted a much deeper cost from leaders than most are willing to acknowledge. I see so many who are in denial of the personal price they have paid, and continue to pay, for keeping the company together and the business going.

But the trauma of the last two plus years is real. And it has been replaced by a world in which there are no rules, and everyone’s normal is new.

If you think that you can tough your way through that, then I hope you’ll listen to all of this conversation.

It’s the story of how a leader who has achieved everything, had to first learn the very hard way what really mattered.

Welcome to Season 3, which we’re calling, “Leading The Future”.

We’re living in an unprecedented time. An epoch in which the collision of science, technology and humanity is changing everything we thought we knew.

How do leaders lead when none of us have ever been here before?

This week’s guest is Joanna Coles. She has been an observer and shaper of society and culture for most of her professional life.

She has worked for some of the world’s most iconic publications. The Spectator, The Guardian, The Times of London, she has been the editor of Marie Claire and of Cosmo. And the Chief Content Officer for Hearst Magazines.

Today, she is the Chairman and CEO of Northern Star, an investment vehicle that has just agreed to acquire Bark Box, a subscription service for dog lovers, in a deal that values the startup at $1.6 billion.

She sees the world through multiple lenses and that is a skill every successful leader is going to have to develop in the months and years to come.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Deirdre Findlay is the Global CMO of Condé Nast. In that position, she’s responsible for all of the company’s consumer-driven revenue.

She took the job in January of 2020, and faced by an industry in transition and a world in chaos, has dramatically grown the company’s subscriber base, as well as the affiliate and commerce revenue. More than that, the company has held onto its new-found audiences, even as we start to leave our homes and reconnect with each other in person.

Like every leader, she’s responsible for producing business results at a time when the employer-employee relationship is being entirely rewritten.

If you’re leading a business that depends on unlocking the power of creative thinking and innovation for your success, you know that talent acquisition and talent retention have always been critical.

Most people think that’s true for one reason. Hire the best talent and win the game.

For many companies, their strategy for finding and keeping the best talent came down to this: Pay them, praise them, promote them, and prioritize them - especially when it came to handing out the best opportunities.

If that’s still the cornerstone of your thinking, you’re already falling behind in the race for game-changing talent.

Today, as a leader, it’s not just the job you’re selling, it’s the journey.

The journey you’re taking the business on.

And the journey you’re offering everyone who works for you. One of self exploration and personal development. A journey to discover what they can do and who they can be.

You’ll still need business plans and financial performance metrics to determine who you need to hire and what you can afford.

You’ll still need visions and missions, job descriptions and benefits packages to open the door to the right people.

But if you want to close the deal and ensure the best of them stick around long enough to make a difference, you’ll need two things that most leaders don’t know how to measure.

Empathy and interest. Which means, as Deidre said, getting comfortable with balancing the work and balancing the people.

Who takes care of you?

Colleen DeCourcy has been named Creative Leader of the Decade. She led Wieden and Kennedy to three consecutive Agency of the Year wins and her contribution to creativity has just been recognized by Cannes Lions with the Lion of St Mark Lifetime Achievement Award.

I met Colleen in April of 2015. And as I got to know her, I learned that she was humble, that she was generous, that she was vulnerable. That she was going to make it happen, even though, as you’ll hear, she was filled with self-doubt.

Today, three months into her version of retirement, her impact is everywhere.

And her sense of self has found a permanent home.

At its heart, leadership is an act of generosity.

It asks so much of us that to do it well, to have lasting impact, requires that we give much more of ourselves than we get back. At least in the short term.

It’s one of the reasons why leadership is so lonely.

But the longer that I do this, the more that I talk to leaders and try to understand them, the more I realize that there is a truth that shows up over and over again.

That the generosity that the best leaders bring, generosity that exists even in the face of their own fears and doubts, generosity that exists even in the furnace of modern business, lifts the people around them to heights they never thought possible.

And in the process of doing that for others, what these leaders end up creating, is themselves.

"The Honest CEO".

A 15 minute edited highlight of our full-length conversation.

Joanne McKinney is the CEO of Burns Group- an advertising brand consultancy and innovation company.

She's worked on the agency and client side. She's lived and worked in the US and in Europe. She's started her own company, been named one of 24 global agency innovators by The Internationalist, and has succeeded at every step of her career. And while doing all that she's been a wife and a mother to two children.

She's a year into being a CEO. She's smart, self aware and honest.

Pamela Culpepper; Erin Gallagher and Caroline Dettman are the three founders of Have Her Back Consulting. They describe themselves as a culture consultancy working with companies to tackle equity for all.

When I interviewed Caroline in January - in what now seems like an almost unimaginably different world - we talked extensively about the steps that businesses and society needed to take to create gender equity.

With George Floyd’s murder, conversation - and in some cases - action has now shifted. 

As leaders struggle to come to terms with simultaneously fighting these two viruses - corona and racism - what happens to the efforts to create gender equity, how do we design companies and society for the future and who risks getting left behind?

A five minute highlight of our full conversation

Jesse Joeckel is the Founder, Owner and Designer at Whalebone Creative. Based in Montauk, New York, Whalebone describes itself as a lifestyle brand that’s built around art, design, and surf culture. They sell super soft t-shirts, hoodies, hats and more, and they’ve been doing so since 2010. And they have become the definition of a very, very cool brand.

Over the eleven years since he started Whalebone, Jesse has never strayed far from his definition of success. And happiness.

Over the last few months, many, many people - maybe most people - have spent time thinking about what they want from life.

Based on the number of people who are leaving their jobs during what has come to be known as the ‘Great Resignation’, the answer is ‘not this.’ Indeed, in some industries, a third of the people resigning have no clear idea about what they will do next or where.

By the millions, people are challenging their own definitions of success. And even more fundamentally, their definitions of what it means to be happy.

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

Are you waiting for someone else to give you permission?

Greg Hahn is the Co-Founder & CCO of Mischief USA.

This is Greg’s third appearance on the show. His first was two weeks after being fired by BBDO. His second was two years ago, a few days after Mischief were named Agency of the year by the Ad Age A List Awards.

Last year, they were named Adweek’s Agency of the year.

Towards the end of this conversation, I asked him what the experience of being fired by BBDO and the subsequent success of Mischief had allowed him to see about his life that he perhaps hadn't been aware of before.

In my work, I see potential everywhere. And what I’ve come to understand is that the potential that’s hardest to see, and hardest to unlock, is in ourselves.

As human beings we want to belong, to be accepted, to be loved. Recent research has suggested that it is more important to us to find our tribes than to be part of a family. You know that old saying, you can choose your friends but not your family. Apparently, that’s more important than we knew.

The desire, sometimes the need to fit in can change our self perception and comes at a price. A hesitation, a reluctance, sometimes, often times, a fear of fully expressing ourselves.

We find a place in the world that lets us do a lot of good things, and let’s us be a pretty good version of ourselves, and then we subtly constrain ourselves - in ways that we’re not aware of, until someone else points out that we’ve been living in a bowl of water the entire time.

Sometimes, we’re able to let go of those constraints, find our voice and unlock that potential.

Sometimes, it takes a dramatic, even traumatic event, like being fired, for us to look at ourselves through different eyes and start saying, “What if?”.

What if we didn’t wait for someone else’s permission to uncover our own potential?

What if we stopped fitting in and looked for ways to stand out?

What if we expressed ourselves, fully and openly? Who might follow us and where might we lead them?

Faith Popcorn is a futurist. To many of us she is the original and still the best.

She told Kodak about digital imagery, Ford about electric cars and Coke about bottled water before any of them existed. In the 1980s she told P&G that everything would be home delivered. In every case they either laughed or threw her out of the room. That’s the price of forecasting change.

The ability to see the future is, by definition an uncertain science. No matter how often you are right, you will be wrong far more often.

And yet it is the what-ifs that we get remembered for. The what-ifs that change lives.

Life is short. And unpredictable. And we have much less control over it than we think.

Leadership is an opportunity to make a difference while we’re here.  

Developing your appetite for the unlikely and redefining your view of the impossible make you an infinitely better leader of any business that depends on creative thinking and innovation.

What do you think will definitely not happen over the next five years?

And are you sure?

Are you happy?

Nils Leonard is the co-founder of Uncommon London. Nils has been on the podcast before.

I ask him back pretty regularly because every one of our conversations expands my understanding of leadership.

I think he keeps saying, “Yes,” because each time he learns something about himself.

In this week’s episode, we covered a lot of new ground. In truth, I could have highlighted a number of areas as worthy of close attention.

But this is the one that really stands out for me.

Life is short. Careers are shorter.

I find myself saying this quite often these days as a reminder that within the maelstrom of running a business, we are also, and more importantly, living a life.

Leadership comes at you hard and fast. It is demanding and unrelenting and it is easy - very easy - to get swept along in the expectations that are placed on us.

Managing those expectations are hard when they come from other people. But the more important and consequential challenge is to manage the expectations we have of ourselves.

The first and critical step is to define what you mean by success. In all its forms and attributes.

Personally, I believe that one of those definitions should include the word ‘happy’.

Too many people think doing that makes them selfish.

But in my experience, the people that are clear that they want to be happy are also the ones who have given the most thought to what that means to them.

Often, most often, it includes the desire to help others unlock their potential.

So, are you doing something that makes you happy? And how do you know?