Fearless Creative Leadership

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.

This week’s guest is Mae Karwowski, the founder and CEO of Obviously. They describe themselves as a team of best in class marketers and technologists who are obsessed with pushing the cutting edge of influencer marketing. When your company’s success depends on creating and maintaining virtual connections, how do you keep your own company physically connected when the world is pushing us apart? Effectively solving that problem has been behind the success of almost every business that has increased its value and reputation in 2020.

This week’s guest is Rich Bressler, the President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of iHeartMedia and iHeartCommunications. iHeart is both a highly creative and a highly complicated business. The company has 13,000 employees in the United States, spread over 150 offices for 850 radio stations.  Add to all of that the realities of a global pandemic and a historic civil rights moment and you create a multi-layered leadership test. In an environment crying out for certainty, how do you encourage experimentation and individuality? How do you produce original thinking and innovation? And how do you create room for listening in a world filled with sound?

This week’s guest is Justin Spooner, the co-founder of the London-based consultancy, Unthinkable Digital. Justin knows more and thinks more than anyone I know about how people learn and how they connect. In a world that has moved mostly online, that understanding has become essential not only for our business success but for our humanity - and increasingly for our sanity. Like all great conversations, I learned a lot from this one. And have applied some of the revelations to the problems faced by my own clients. So, what do you need your people to understand and what problems do you need them to solve? And, how are you teaching them that?

This week’s guest is Frank Spotnitz, the Founder and CEO of Big Light Productions. They’re a London and Paris-based production company. Under Frank’s leadership, Big Light has produced a number of high-end drama productions including Amazon’s Emmy award-winning The Man in the High Castle, Ransom, The Indian Detective and three seasons of Medici for Netflix. He has also co-created the new drama series Leonardo, which he talks about during our conversation. Frank was also executive producer of The X Files. Writing or co-writing more than 40 episodes, he shares three Golden Globes for Best Dramatic Series and a Peabody Award and was Emmy-nominated both for writing and Outstanding Drama Series. I’m fascinated by the role that stories play in shaping society. They affect our personal lives, our politics and our businesses. And I’ve never met an impactful leader who couldn’t tell a compelling story - about their vision for the future and why it matters. What’s your story? And how do you tell it?

Nicki Sprinz is the Managing Director of B-corp digital product studio ustwo. In the six years that she has been with the company, she has eradicated the company’s gender pay gap .  In her past, she’s been a journalist for the Sunday Times and The Guardian, before going on to work in the NHS. She also co-founded Ada’s List in 2013, a supportive global community of more than 3,000 women working in tech.  That is an extraordinary list of achievements. What makes her story even more compelling is what she has overcome in her personal life long before her professional life began. As a teenager she overcome viral encephalitis- a life threatening illnesses that forced her to literally learn how to walk and talk again. And then she overcame Graves disease. As a leader, she has brought gender pay equity to her business. A challenge at which most businesses are absurdly still failing. And she brings relentlessly positive and upbeat energy with her.  As Anne Richards once famously said, “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.” She left out, with a smile.  In an era in which we are faced with enormous challenges, challenges that some days seem insurmountable, Nicki’s story serves to me to as a reminder of what human beings are capable of. And what women leaders are capable of. 

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.

Marcel Marcondes is the U.S. Chief Marketing Officer for Anheuser-Busch. We talked about what he’s learned about leading a culture that embraces minorities after experiencing racism in his own life. And about the need to show up as a human being first and a leader second.  We also talked about why he’s listening now, more than ever. And then turning what he hears into action. That last point is especially important, I think. Listening has become a new metric for leaders. But if listening is all you do, you’re hoping someone else will make the tough calls. In this extraordinary time in which we’re living, some leaders are stepping forward and it’s remarkable to see. Others are sliding back, behind the cover of chaos, their communications and digital body language filled with excuses and justifications for decisions that they hope no one will notice or they hope will soon be forgotten.  Hope is necessary for all of us. But it has never been a strategy and it is not a substitute for making hard decisions. So, as you look at the people you’re responsible for, maybe ask yourself this. Are you leading? Or just hoping?

This conversation is with the film and television producer Stephen Garrett.  During his career, Stephen’s been responsible for an extraordinary range of content - from The Night Manager, to the long-running series Spooks (MI-5 here in the U.S.), to Life on Mars to Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. He brings stories to life. And he has a rare gift for observing humanity. As almost everything about our world seems to be changing by the minute, I talked to Stephen about the stories that will be told going forward, about who are today’s heroes and who are the enemies and about how and when production will come back.

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?