Curious Leadership with Dominic Monkhouse

Today’s guest on The Melting Pot is Dutch-born Sander Arts. His list of titles is as long as your arm—Consultant, Strategic Advisor, Board Member, Author, Fractional CMO, Business Development, Strategic Alliances, Lecturer. Sander is a global award-winning CMO, strategic advisor, entrepreneur, and lecturer who has extensive experience increasing revenue and meaningfully reaching technical audiences that have been historically considered not to care about marketing—mainly hardware and software engineers. As the founder of his own strategic marketing consultancy, Orange Tulip, LLC, in Silicon Valley, Sander is renowned for his Dutch directness and his “no-bullsht” approach, as well as his ability to build global high-performing teams and generate results that matter. This dynamic, creative senior executive is clearly the ideal person to write a book called Cut the Bullsht Marketing. On today’s podcast: Why he wrote Cut the Bullsh*t Marketing Key nuggets from the book, including “Everything needs to be people-to-people” Why he focuses on ROI in marketing, rather than branding and awareness The main challenge for businesses doing work in China Interesting developments in the IoT space out of Silicon Valley Lessons from the Microchip acquisition Links: Cut the Bullsh*t Marketing - Sander Arts Scaling Up - Verne Harnish

This week’s guest on The Melting Pot is Gareth Chick, a former CFO, CEO and chairman of both public and private companies. An executive coach for FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 CEOs, and now founder and managing partner of Collaborative Equity. After 40 years in the corporate world, Gareth has poured his extensive knowledge into two books and carved out his dream career at Collaborative Equity, as he is an acknowledged expert on corporate cultures and corporate psychology. Today Gareth shares with us how he got into business at the tender age of 12, because it was his dream to be out the front of a grocer’s shop serving customers. At 16, psychometric testing told him he should go into accounting, so he did, and never looked back. A CFO at 24 and CFO for a PLC subsidiary at 28, Gareth is the first to admit he was incredibly successful, very driven, but also controlling and arrogant. It took a leadership course he didn’t want to attend to make him change his ways. It didn’t just change his attitude towards work—it changed his life entirely. On today’s podcast: How a leadership course 34 years ago changed his life Our unconscious controlling habits (OUCH) Why most managers need a deeper level of emotional intelligence The three prime unconscious controlling habits of managers Why managerial behaviours typically come about by learned experience What we should learn from three-year-olds Links: And the Leader is…: Transforming Cultures with CEQ Corporate, Emotional Intelligence: Being Human in a Corporate World DRIVE by Daniel Pink - animation

Today’s guest is Daniel Marcos, co-founder and CEO of Gazelles Growth Institute, based in Austin, Texas. Daniel is a lifelong entrepreneur and has run his company for the past 20 years. For the last 10 of those years he’s focused his energies coaching other CEOs, showing them how to change their mindset in order to take their companies to the next level. According to Daniel, the majority of scaling a company is all in the mind—you need to have the right mindset in order to grow your business. As well as running Gazelles Growth Institute, the leading online executive education company for C-level executives at fast-growing firms, Daniel also co-founded Inflection (Gazelles Mexico), a management coaching company that helps business executives and entrepreneurs grow their companies faster and with less “drama”. Today, however, Daniel is keen to discuss his latest project “How to be a better CEO”. Daniel has witnessed, time and again, CEOs keen to scale their companies, but without first setting a system in place of how to do it and how they are going to get the support they need from their team. On today’s podcast: Why Daniel became an entrepreneur His struggles at being a CEO at age 26 Why running a company changes every time the company grows Why the founder isn’t always the best person to lead the company The four stages of growing a company The Growth Institute Links: https://www.danielmarcos.co/ How to Navigate the 4 Stages of Growth All Successful Businesses Go Through PDF

On today’s episode of The Melting Pot we talk to Nicole Yershon, founder and CEO of the NY Collective, a leverage-model business that was created to disrupt the traditional practices of consulting and marketing agencies, and to get to the heart of a business’ problem, whether operational or strategic, as quickly as possible. Nicole is the original rough diamond: she wasn’t a yes-girl, she asked the awkward questions, she queried the processes and she side-stepped authority and the chain of command to get things done. Her measure of success wasn’t financial, it was in her ability to move people from an analogue world to a digital world. On today’s podcast: Why being disruptive isn’t a bad thing Why you can’t affect change without the right people How she was so successful at Gold Greenlees and Trott The Fearless Breakfast (and the problem with fear) How she wrote her book What’s in her Fearless Manifesto Links: Dave Trott Rough Diamond Day One

Today’s guest is the founder and Managing Director of creative brand agency, MadeBrave® and Executive Chairman of content production agency, Campfire®, Andrew Dobbie. A designer and photographer originally, Andrew is on a mission to inspire creativity in everyone, believing that branding and marketing don’t need to be confusing and has set up two agencies to help businesses bring their best ideas to life. MadeBrave® was founded seven years ago and now sees an annual turnover of £4m. Starting with just him, it quickly grew and saw him handing over design responsibility to a better designer very early on. The agency then grew faster and within a year he had six employers. As MadeBrave® entered their second year they were bringing in one new employee a month, and within two years he had 16 employees. So how did Andrew go from freelance design to being the CEO of two agencies? On today’s podcast: Andrew’s motivation to branch out on his own How he got so busy, quickly Why he took a step back from designing to focus on the business How he grew and cultivated his brand How Andrew’s companies use their brand values to attract top employees His advice on thinking positively How to grow and scale a creative business Links: MadeBrave® - www.madebrave.com Campfire® - www.campfire.agency

Today’s guest is CEO and co-founder of Bare Conductive, Matt Johnson. Bare Conductive is a company inventing radical new ways to interact with and place electronics in our environment. With key customers such as Ikea and Dupont, this relatively new London-based technology startup is developing a platform of sensing technologies based around its electrically conductive paint and capacitive hardware. Since launching its first product in 2011, Bare Conductive has sold over 220,000 units in more than 120 countries, as well as winning a number of competitions including Innovate UK’s Digital Disruptive Solutions £100k award, been nominated for Design of the Year Award by the Design Museum, and received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica, this self-funded company is going from strength to strength. On today’s podcast: Why the company is about more than just ink Why they’re still figuring out how to get the most from their product How they’ve whittled their applications down to 3, from 53 Why they struggle with identifying who the customer is Why sticking with the original plan is so tough How they’ve managed to run a lean start up Links: Jeffrey Moore - Crossing the Chasm Ikea Dupont

On today’s podcast we talk with Jenny Kitchen, MD of Yoyo Design, a company specialising in designing digital solutions so that every brand can tell its own story and create a genuine user engagement. Jenny was crowned Young Business Person of the Year for 2016 at the RTW Business Awards, as one of the top 30 under 30 women in Digital by The Drum, young business leader of the year and recognized by BIMA as one of the Hot 100 in digital for the past 3 years—all for her incredible achievement growing Yoyo. But since winning, she hasn’t sat back on her laurels, instead she has channeled her energy into growing the business further, making sure all Yoyo clients are happy, but more importantly, making sure that the team she has created and molded are motivated, inspired, driven and delivering work that is considered and beautifully presented. On today’s podcast: How Yoyo Design has grown so quickly to become one of the UK’s leading digital agencies. Why she became MD out of all three business partners. How to measure being a great place to work. How to find and attract new employees. How to come back from maternity or paternity leave. How to be a better business owner by embracing flexible working. Why the myth of having it all, is just that, a myth. Links: https://yoyodesign.com/ The Drum 30 under 30 #30: Jenny Kitchen Officevibe

Today’s guest is executive change mentor Sally Henderson. With 20 years of experience in leadership development, Sally works with high performing senior leaders keen to reach ambition faster by enabling powerful change from the inside out. Sally cut her teeth in recruitment, setting up her own coaching-based recruitment company, The Career Company, before embarking on a successful career in Executive Search. It took having her first child to realise that whilst she was helping so many people get to where they want to go in their careers, she was not happy in hers. Ironically The Career Company motto was “You have a right to be happy and effective at work,” and as the founder of such a successful company, she simply wasn’t. Knowing that her real interests and motivators lay far outside recruitment, she took the brave decision to walk away from her company and now works with C-Suite execs, Founders and senior leaders and MDs to influence and bring about transformational change through her innovative coaching and mentoring methods. On today’s podcast: How do you know if you’re not living a rich life? Why imposter syndrome in senior leaders is such a common trait How she creates change that other people say isn’t possible Why we choose to stay where we are rather than change to what we really want The 3Cs to Create Successful Change Links: https://www.sallyhenderson.co.uk/

Today’s guest is Nic Marks, CEO and Founder of Friday, the company Nic set up to track employee happiness, in order to help businesses build a more positive, productive work culture. A statistician by trade but with a background as a therapist, Nic has a slightly weird speciality—happiness—having used it spending the last three decades creating a measure of people’s quality of life. Nic firmly believes that measuring happiness kick-starts a process which ultimately builds happiness. In just over 6 years, Nic and the team at Friday have worked with more than 9,000 teams across 1,000 organisations, measuring and improving happiness at work. Happiness is a great proxy for quickly judging how things are in a team at a moment in time—if you’re happy at work things are likely to be going well, if you’re not happy, they’re not. On today’s podcast: Why Nic measures happiness How happiness is an indicator of how content people are The benefits of increasing happiness among the population of the UK The link between happiness and political affiliation Why Friday is the best day of the week to conduct a happiness survey 5 ways to increase happiness at work Links: Friday Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Today’s guest is Kevin Lawrence, author, speaker, strategic advisor and coach to entrepreneurial CEOs and business leaders around the world. With his deep knowledge of the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up, combined with his own methodology developed over the last 25 years, Kevin has helped countless leaders to build high-performance leadership teams, expand into new markets, attract profitable customers, and increase productivity and profits. More recently Kevin has written a book, Your Oxygen Mask First, which features 17 practical steps for leaders and CEOs to follow, to achieve success whilst maintaining balance in the rest of their lives. It’s this book as well as Kevin’s other observations of CEOs that we discuss, so join us on today’s podcast: Learn how Kevin ended up becoming a coach Why founder CEOs all suffer with similar problems Why things in business are counterintuitive Mental health issues are non-discriminatory What to look out for in someone who is about to have a breakdown How Kevin masters his own mental health issues and the resilience rituals and tools he uses to overcome them The lessons he’s learned along the way to be a successful leader Why you should learn like your life depends on it Links: Your Oxygen Mask First Brad Smart - Topgrading Scaling up Your Oxygen Mask First Self-Assessment