What Are You Willing To Compromise?

Lina Polimeni is the Chief Corporate Brand Officer at Eli Lilly and Company. This is a business whose work is often the difference between life and death, where they are trying to cure cancer, and where the outcome is very personal.

No one can lead effectively without compromise. 

But what we choose to compromise has a huge part to play in whether we’re successful.

Are You Centered?

Kerry Sulkowicz is the Past-President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the Founder and Managing Principal of Boswell Group. They provide leadership advice to boards and CEOs.

Leadership is sometimes about taking action and it is sometimes not.

But it is always about being centered.

What Is Your Pain For?

Taban Shoresh is the Founder of The Lotus Flower, a UK-based charity that supports women and girls that have been displaced by conflict, and helps them to build sustainable futures. Since 2016, the charity's projects have impacted more than 60,000 women, girls, and community members. 

She has experienced staggering trauma, she has known realities that I'm sure I would not have survived, and she has taken all of that pain and turned it into creative leadership of the most consequential kind. As you'll hear, for reasons both global and personal, she's in a hurry. 

Is That Good?

Heather Freeland is the Chief Brand Officer at Adobe, a business that, as Heather describes, is undergoing significant change to prepare itself for the future to come, and the one that is already here.

If human beings are to create a dividing line that AI can not cross, the question, “Is that good?” may be the beating heart on which that barrier depends.

Why Are You Doing What You’re Doing?

Gabriel Schmitt has just celebrated his one year anniversary as the Global CCO of Grey.

He has learned over his career one of the most important leadership lessons that I think often gets overlooked.

The importance of context.

How Well Do You Know Yourself?

Lisa Smith is the Global Executive Creative Director at JKR.

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.

What 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 about 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?

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.

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.

Where Does Ideation End And Production Begin?

David Rolfe is the Global Head of Production at WPP. Dave 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.

Does Your AI Do What You Need It To Do?

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.

Are You Willing to Dare?

Sir John Hegarty is the Co-Founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty and one of the most original thinkers of the last 40 plus years. 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.

What Is It?

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.

What Do The Artists Think?

Jamie Gutfreund is the Founder of Creator Vision, a company that she describes as helping brands bridge the gap between the practice and the promise of the creator economy.

 Is it conceivable that AI itself might give us the clues to how AI is going to change the world as we know it? Jamie thinks it's possible, if we look at it through the right lens. The artists' lens.

What Are You Fed By?

Nils Leonard is the Co-founder of Uncommon, a global creative studio based in New York, London, and Stockholm. I invited Nils into the series because I suspected he would have a strong point of view about what AI is, and isn't, when it comes to creativity.

Are You Aiming High Enough?

Yasu Sasaki is the Global Chief Creative Officer of Dentsu. His company has a presence in over 145 countries and regions, and they've been working with artificial intelligence, in one form or another, since 2011.

One of the main questions facing the creative industries is which companies will see AI as an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of human creativity.

In theory and in practice, we can both raise the bar and lower cost.

But we must be careful how we do it.

Are You Seizing What Is Starting?

Asmita Dubey is the Chief Digital and Marketing Officer of L’Oréal.

If your company believes in seizing what is starting, if you operate from a foot forward perspective, if you are relentlessly curious and consistently committed to the belief that creativity and innovation are all that separates you from your competitors, then the size of your company does not matter.

Big or small. Old or new. You can seize what is starting and define the future on your terms.

Can You Imagine?

PJ Pereira is the Founder and Creative Chairman at Pereira O’Dell.

The enormity of the gap between the normal as we understand it today and what we will demand as normal tomorrow is usually beyond our imagination to see or to predict or to project.

PJ brings those limitations of our imagination to life through a vivid and unforgettable example.

Are You Leading, Following Or Getting Out Of The Way?

For the next five weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re going to focus our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.

We start with a conversation with Nick Law, who is Creative Chairperson at Accenture Song.

On his Cannes speaker profile, Nick says that he believes all technology needs creativity to make it human, and all creativity needs technology to make it real.

Which Two Things Are True At Once?

Robbie Kaplan is a lawyer and the founding partner at Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP. She is best known for successfully challenging a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act. Today, gay marriage is legal in America because Robbie Kaplan stood in front of the Supreme Court and argued for it.

Recently, she was E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer in both of her successful lawsuits against Donald Trump.

And among Robbie's many awards is one from The Financial Times naming her the “Most Innovative Lawyer of the Year”.