Ep 212: Carl Johnson - In 15

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

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.