Fearless Creative Leadership

Edited highlights of our full conversation. What do you want more of in your life? Greg Hahn is the Co-Founder & CCO of Mischief USA. Two years ago he was fired by BBDO. When we spoke, eight days after he had lost his job, he was clear about the kind of future he wanted to create. Mischief, a company that didn't exist 24 months ago, were just named Agency of the Year by the Ad Age A List Awards. As you'll hear in our new conversation, the company has been built on the principles that Greg espoused two years ago. Life comes at us fast and in unexpected ways. What we do with every day that we get, is a choice, between hoping for a better version of yesterday or acting to create a better tomorrow. And the key to that is making sure we know what a better version of tomorrow will look like. So, what do you want more of in your life?

Edited highlights of our full conversation. What do you want more of in your life? Greg Hahn is the Co-Founder & CCO of Mischief USA. Two years ago he was fired by BBDO. When we spoke, eight days after he had lost his job, he was clear about the kind of future he wanted to create. Mischief, a company that didn't exist 24 months ago, were just named Agency of the Year by the Ad Age A List Awards. As you'll hear in our new conversation, the company has been built on the principles that Greg espoused two years ago. Life comes at us fast and in unexpected ways. What we do with every day that we get, is a choice, between hoping for a better version of yesterday or acting to create a better tomorrow. And the key to that is making sure we know what a better version of tomorrow will look like. So, what do you want more of in your life?

Where does work end and life begin? Tiffany Rolfe is the Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA, a job she took on in the early stages of the pandemic as part of a new leadership team. Two years ago, the Ad Age A List recognized R/GA as the Comeback Agency of the Year. This year, they are now ranked second among all agencies. Tiffany's email signature reads, Mom and Global Chief Creative Officer. I speak for myself when I say that before we all withdrew into our homes in early 2020, I was aware only conceptually of how women who are parents juggle that with their careers. But two years of working via Zoom has given many of us insights into people's lives that were previously unimaginable for their candor and vulnerability. This conversation is a living example of the challenges and gifts that have emerged from the last two years. The line between work and home has been blurred beyond any reasonable hope of recognition. No matter how powerful a microscope you apply, it is almost impossible to see the separation any more between leader and human being. The destruction of this separation can be liberating if you're willing to create your own definition of the work-life balance. If you're not, it will be very hard as you try in vain to keep up with a dangerously out of date view of where work ends and life begins. The day is not only for work. The day is for living. What that means is entirely for you to decide.

Edited highlights of our full conversation. Where does work end and life begin? Tiffany Rolfe is the Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA, a job she took on in the early stages of the pandemic as part of a new leadership team. Two years ago, the Ad Age A List recognized R/GA as the Comeback Agency of the Year. This year, they are now ranked second among all agencies. Tiffany's email signature reads, Mom and Global Chief Creative Officer. I speak for myself when I say that before we all withdrew into our homes in early 2020, I was aware only conceptually of how women who are parents juggle that with their careers. But two years of working via Zoom has given many of us insights into people's lives that were previously unimaginable for their candor and vulnerability. This conversation is a living example of the challenges and gifts that have emerged from the last two years. The line between work and home has been blurred beyond any reasonable hope of recognition. No matter how powerful a microscope you apply, it is almost impossible to see the separation any more between leader and human being. The destruction of this separation can be liberating if you're willing to create your own definition of the work-life balance. If you're not, it will be very hard as you try in vain to keep up with a dangerously out of date view of where work ends and life begins. The day is not only for work. The day is for living. What that means is entirely for you to decide.

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.

Edited highlights of our full conversation. 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.

How many ways are you looking at the future? Lori Bradley is the Vice President for Talent at Chewy. Lori sees the management and development of talent through multiple lenses. Academic. Strategic. Intellectual. For sure. But the perspective she brings that sits on top of all of these is the most important of all. The human one. Here's something you already know if you listen to this podcast. People that choose to work in creative business are complicated and unpredictable. Despite which, so many business try so very hard to build single model operations that view all members of a group or a department or a discipline as being the same. No wonder that most businesses leave millions of dollars of untapped creativity and innovation on the table every night. Lori used the word experiment three times in about ten seconds. Can you remember the last time that word was used in any leadership team meeting you've been part of in the last few months? There's no way back. There's no one way forward. And no way of knowing which way is going to work. The future is waiting to be invented - by those who are brave enough to experiment.

If you could look into the future and see the results of what you're doing today, would you want to? Uncommon London was just named Creative Agency of the Year for the second year in a row, and Independent Agency of the Year. It's the first time a company has ever received both awards at the same time. Creative leadership isn't a theory. It's a practice, and it happens in the real world. And the reason this podcast exists is to bring the lessons of the best leaders in the world into the light where they can be learned from and applied. This week's episode is a re-run of one of my very earliest episodes. It's a conversation I had with Nils Leonard in the summer of 2017. Nils was on the show only a few weeks ago. But I'm airing this episode again for a simple reason. It's a case study. When we recorded this conversation, Nils and his partners - Lucy Jameson and Natalie Graeme - had just launched Uncommon. They had big dreams. And, as Nils realized at the end of our conversation - they had something to support them. Hope sits at the heart of any creative endeavor. The willingness to try, the capacity to fail and then try again are all fueled by hope. But if hope is the driving force, then the track that you lay down is held in place by the standards that you hold yourselves to. If you take the time to listen to this conversation, or read the transcript, you'll find evidence that when it comes to leadership, saying what you mean and meaning what you say matter a lot. Maybe more than anything. And less than five years after this conversation, the company that Nils, Lucy and Natalie are building is proof that it is possible to predict the future - by inventing it. What do you want to have built by 2027?

Are you leading a team or a group of individuals? Joanna Coles is the CEO of Northern Star Acquisition. She's the former Chief Content Officer for Hearst Magazines, and the former Editor-in-Chief of Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan. She sits on the boards of Snap and Sonos and she advises some of the world's most influential businesses. She's also brilliant at telling the story of what's going on all around us, in ways that we haven't heard before. It is widely - and I think incorrectly assumed - that for any creative business, the key to winning is to have better talent. Having the best talent helps. But the businesses that win, unlock talent best. I can't tell you how many companies I have been invited into, whose reputation on the street or in the press is that they're struggling or decaying. Or in some cases, the word goes, they're even dying. For years, I'd walk into the businesses and assume that one of the problems would be that they had mediocre talent. It was never the case. The talent was always much better, much better, than the reputation, than the work, than the results. It was the organizations that were failing. Usually because of a failure of leadership sensitivity and imagination. Creative businesses win or lose based on how successfully they take disparate, talented individuals and combine them together to produce extraordinary outcomes. Whether that's ads or code or clothes or cars or content or ideas. As Joanna says, we're moving into an era of heightened individualism. Suddenly the talent has discovered that they have choices and opinions and standards and expectations of their own. Can you adapt fast enough to meet them? Or are you walking around frustrated because people won't do what you want them to any more? Welcome to the age of talent. It's going to be interesting.

Are you re-imagining the future or re-building the past? Justin Spooner is the co-founder of Unthinkable - they describe themselves as a digital strategy and digital transformation company. Transformation is a word that gets used a lot. It also gets practiced little. Mostly because it's hard and expensive and, honestly, in some respects it's frightening. It's why so many companies are so focused on facing the future with policies and practices and initiatives that start with the word 'back.' Back to work. Back to normal. Back to real life. The truth about life is that it doesn't and never has worked backwards. You can't rewind anything. We measure the past, experience the present, and plan the future. So if the future you're planning is based on recreating history, stop for a few moments and think about this. If I could live the past again, which parts would I want to keep - as in really want to keep - and what would I change? Then do that.