Fearless Creative Leadership

Edited highlights of our full length conversation. How well do you know yourself? Lisa Smith is the Global Executive Creative Director at JKR. Fast Company have called her a visionary designer, citing in particular her work for Burger King, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Chobani and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They described her work as unique because “it has consistently changed the visual landscape, disrupted popular aesthetics, and started trends of its own.” When you meet Lisa, her energy is infectious. As you’ll hear in our conversation, she wants to make a difference. She also knows herself well enough to have learned that her energy sometimes needs an adapter. We are driven by instincts, starting with the genetic code that we must survive.  Against that context, self awareness comes second and is usually filtered and diluted by other impulses.  The ability to stand back and accurately reflect on the impact we are having in real time, is a lifelong quest for most of us. But when you meet someone who has learned to understand themselves multi-dimensionally, who sees themselves in mirrors that reflect all angles, the good and the works in progress, our trust in that person rises like the proverbial tide - predictably and visibly.  That remains true even if, especially if, they show up as less than their best selves but can acknowledge or forewarn us that they can see, and feel and acknowledge that - sometimes preemptively. Lisa is not alone in her ambition sometimes turning her into a bulldozer. She is rare in her ability to see it happening before it happens and to warn those around her that her form of leadership encompasses all the elements of “lead, follow or get out of the way.” 

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.

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.

What lessons have you learned? This episode features the return visit of Jon Cook, the Global CEO of VML. I interviewed Jon for the first time a year ago, eight months after he had died while going for a run in his neighborhood. Today, he is the CEO of the world's largest advertising agency. We covered a lot of topics during our latest conversation, from the qualities that he brings as a leader, to navigating mergers, to the impact of AI. We also talked about a simple but powerful truth that I think a lot of leaders have a hard time remembering when they're facing stressful situations - that we are already better than we think. Leadership is lonely. It's a cliche because it's true. Those feelings of isolation usually leave our doubts and insecurities to wander through the garden of our minds, unchaperoned. Given enough time and enough space, those insecurities can become a permanent part of our self-image and self-beliefs. Talking to someone who can help us to fully see ourselves is always helpful. Of course, I'd say that. I'm a leadership coach. But we have ways to help ourselves that can be powerful, too. One of the simplest is to look back and to see our past achievements for what they are. Achievements, experiences, skills, and wisdom. And if you take a few moments and you write that list of achievements down, you'll be better prepared, not only to meet this moment, but you'll also be able to quiet the part of you that thinks that nothing you do is ever good enough. Self-awareness is the most powerful asset that any leader can develop. So, make that list right now.

What will be the impact of AI on the creative industries, and how can we meet this moment? This is the final episode of my series of interviews over the last few weeks leading up to and through the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. It offers a map for the future based on those conversations, and observations of the speed of change. If you haven’t seen it, look up the Volvo ad that was just published on social media. It took one person, 24 hours to create. This ad could not have been made in May, when I started this series of interviews. Creativity and innovation are oxygen for the world's best businesses. Increase the flow and they soar. Limit the supply and they wither and ultimately die. That has been true for longer than anyone reading this has been alive. What is also true is that until now, that creativity, that ability to come up with original ideas that solve problems has been limited to human beings. With the arrival and advances in AI, will that still be true five years from now? Two? Tomorrow? Over the last few weeks, I've interviewed ten different leaders from across the creative industries. Brand leaders, agency founders, global agency heads, global client leads, production experts, creator community experts, consultants, and an advertising industry legend. And while I was at Cannes, I talked to two dozen more about where the creative industries are headed and what they need to do to ensure their future. These industries are a complex eco system of competing and contradictory forces built on what I believe is the worst business model in the world: selling original ideas based on how long it took to conceive and deliver them, and then giving up the ownership and the economic benefit of those ideas forever. It is the equivalent of pricing a Picasso based on how long it took him to paint it. It is selling every patentable idea based on the cost of the labor, while ignoring the impact on people's lives. According to some reports it takes 24 hours to build an iPhone. Imagine if Apple broke that down into a scope of work and then sold each iPhone for the cost of that scope and, with it, the ownership of the IP. For how long would they remain the most valuable business in the world? The daily advances of AI challenge every aspect of the creative industries. From defining and articulating the problem, to conceiving, creating and delivering solutions. Every part of the process is being radically changed. And the extent of that change is limitless. So what should we do about that?

Where does ideation end and production begin? This episode is part of a series of conversations I've been having in partnership with the Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity. Over the last few weeks, I've been focusing my study of leadership through a single lens, the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries. This final interview is with David Rolfe, the Global Head of Production at WPP. Dave and I have known each other for more years than we care to acknowledge, and he is the most provocative and disruptive thinker about production that I know. As the week at Cannes unfolded, it became clear that this series wouldn't be complete without a conversation about production. So I asked Dave late in the week if he would sit down with me and talk about the impact of AI on production. As you may have heard in my interview with Adam Tucker, WPP has made a large investment in AI. That wasn't the reason I wanted to include Dave in this series, but it does, again, add a dimension to the conversation that helps to establish reference points as the industry navigates the disruption that AI is already bringing. I started the conversation with Dave from a simple premise. Is production dead? As you'll hear, it is most definitely not, but it will look very, very different in a very short space of time, and that change has already begun. So if any part of your future thinking about production is based on how production looked and worked a year ago, you probably need to challenge that perspective to make sure that it stands the test of time, which in today's world, we can probably define as somewhere between 12 and 24 months, I suspect. In the next episode, I'll sum up everything I've heard and seen since we started this series. In the meantime, thank you for listening.

Does your AI do what you need it to do? This episode is part of a series of conversations I've been having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Over the last few weeks, I've been focusing my study of leadership through a single lens, the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries. I'd planned on ending the series with my interview of Sir John Hegarty, but I recorded two bonus episodes during Cannes that I felt were an important part of the conversation. Adam Tucker is the Global Account Lead at WPP for Mondelez, and he reached out to me after listening to the first few episodes in this series. He pointed out that while we were focusing on how AI will impact the process of how the creative industries work, we hadn't talked about how it is already changing the work itself. WPP has made a significant investment in AI. The press reports that it's spending about $318 million annually in WPP Open, a set of AI capabilities that are now available to its 35,000 employees around the world. Adam explained why from his perspective, this investment creates a competitive advantage. I'm not an AI expert, nor have I seen WPP Open firsthand, to pass any judgment on its capabilities, and whether it is in fact superior to other forms of AI that are publicly available. This conversation is not intended to convince you whether WPP has created a competitive advantage or not. What it does establish is one clearly differentiated benchmark in the ecosystem of AI that are now springing up across the creative industries, and therefore, it provides one measurement against which to evaluate your own relationship with artificial intelligence. I'll wrap this series this week with one more bonus episode and then a recap. In the meantime, thanks for listening.

Are you willing to dare?  This episode is the last 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 and during Cannes, we focused 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? There are opportunities and risks around every corner. This episode's guest is Sir John Hegarty. He's the Co-Founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty and one of the most original thinkers of the last 40 plus years. Sir John is a reference point for an industry that has changed a lot, and also not very much over those four plus decades. The through lines that mattered, then still matter today. Confident, disruptive thinking. At a time when the future is waiting to be invented, like never before, Sir John's description of the atmosphere that leaders need to create is time tested. Only time will tell whether it is timeless. Next week, we'll have a couple of bonus episodes before I wrap up the series, and give you my thoughts on the impact of AI on the creative industries, based on the conversations that I've been having. In the meantime, thanks for listening.

Edited highlights of our full length conversation. Are you willing to dare?  This episode is the last 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 and during Cannes, we focused 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? There are opportunities and risks around every corner. This episode's guest is Sir John Hegarty. He's the Co-Founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty and one of the most original thinkers of the last 40 plus years. Sir John is a reference point for an industry that has changed a lot, and also not very much over those four plus decades. The through lines that mattered, then still matter today. Confident, disruptive thinking. At a time when the future is waiting to be invented, like never before, Sir John's description of the atmosphere that leaders need to create is time tested. Only time will tell whether it is timeless. Next week, we'll have a couple of bonus episodes before I wrap up the series, and give you my thoughts on the impact of AI on the creative industries, based on the conversations that I've been having. In the meantime, thanks for listening.

What is it? This episode is the seventh 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 do 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. Before we jump into this conversation, a couple of programming notes. I had originally intended to finish this series of conversations with this episode, and then to do a wrap up episode on my takeaways from the series. But I've got a chance to interview an industry legend at Cannes, and so I'm going to extend the series by one more. You'll hear that conversation at the end of Cannes next week. And then, the week after, we'll wrap up the series. Tiffany Rolfe is a mother, as well as the Global Chair and Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA. I asked Tiffany to come back on the show because she is, as you'll hear, a self described tech optimist. She's also one of the most original thinkers that I know. Her professional journey has taken her from Executive Creative Director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, to Chief Content Officer and Partner at one of the first agency consultancy hybrids, Co:Collective, to her role at R/GA. If you haven't heard our earlier episode in which she talks about the challenges of combining a demanding career with being a mother, it's a really powerful listen. In this conversation, one of the first questions that came up was, how should we think about AI? Stay tuned next week for our final conversation in the series. And in the meantime, thanks for joining us.