What Is Your Leadership For?
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is the Junior Senator from the State of New York.
Running for public office places you in a spotlight that is white hot. Being clear why you’ve made the choice to run in the first place is table stakes for creating the life you want to live and the legacy you want to leave behind.
What Do You Think And Why?
Tom O’Keefe and Jeff King are two of the four partners who have just merged their respective businesses, OKRP and Barkley.
When we are clear about why we think what we think, when we are free of insecurity or hubris or ego, then we can assess an alternative path with an open mind.
Mergers provoke the need to lead through this lens.
How Vulnerable Is Too Vulnerable?
Anselmo Ramos is the Co-Founder and Creative Chairman of GUT, a global independent creative agency that’s headquartered in Miami, and with six other offices around the world.
How vulnerable is too vulnerable?
The answer, of course, depends on the culture that you have created. If your culture is based on deep and enduring emotional trust, you give people the ability to show up as complex, multifaceted humans, to show up as whole beings.
Are You Conscious Of Your Choices?
Kara Swisher is the most effective and successful tech journalist of our lifetimes.
In a world of white men with giant bank accounts and even bigger egos, how did this 5 feet 2 inch, self-described, liberal lesbian mother of four, end up as the most influential and insightful reporter of the technology age?
As you’ll hear, Kara puts it down to curiosity, confidence, and understanding the choices available to her.
This week’s guest is Avery Baker. She’s the former President and Chief Brand Officer of Tommy Hilfiger.
Six months after she stepped down from her position at Tommy, we talk about her desire to empower others and why it's an essential skill to demonstrate as a leader.
We also discuss the new leadership paradigm that we have developed together for creative and innovative businesses. We call it 'Partnership Leadership'.
How Do You React When People Make Mistakes?
Creativity and innovation are unpredictable. They demand uncertainty and depend on failure. Failure is how we learn and without it, creativity dies.
If you measure the difference you make in terms of how you react when people make mistakes, you will have established the foundations on which their creativity is unlocked.
And that opens the door to ideas that no one has ever thought of before and to businesses that no one has ever seen.
Are You Creating Trust?
David Rolfe is the Head of Production at WPP. When David and I debated last year, whether one person could someday make a Super Bowl ad, it felt like a provocation.
This year, we both agreed it's an inevitability. Which brings with it a bigger question. How will we tell the difference between what's real and what's synthetic? And will it matter?
And that's the moment when trust becomes everything.
How Connected Do Your People Feel?
Phil Thomas is the Chief Creative Officer of Informa Festivals. They're the company that owns Cannes Lions. And Phil has recently been named as Chairman of Comic Relief.
One of the things that I've learned hosting this podcast is that the most powerful leaders rarely get remembered for their titles. They're remembered for how they made people feel.
What’s The ‘This’ In Your Business?
Neil Waller is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Whalar Group. They're a global creator company.
And as you'll hear, it was inspired by a conversation with and an unforgettable provocation from Sir John Hegarty.
But behind their success lies a characteristic that I find is often underappreciated and therefore in short supply, among most creative leaders. Commitment.
What Are You Investing In?
Jill Cress is the Chief Marketing and Experience Officer for H&R Block.
Before H&R Block, Jill spent 20 years at MasterCard. Now, a leader who spends most of their professional life working in financial institutions could easily build their success around the study of data, but the foundations of Jill's leadership are based on the most valuable investments of all.
When Do You Stop And Take A Breath?
If you've listened to Luther Vandross or Tina Turner, or Sting, or Chaka Khan, or Teddy Pendergrass, or Roberta Flack, then you've heard Lisa Fischer sing. If you went to a Rolling Stones concert between 1989 and 2015, you saw Lisa as the band's lead female singer join Mick Jagger on stage.
Leadership at its heart is the ability to unlock the potential of others, to make them feel more connected. The very best leaders do that by helping us to understand ourselves better, by helping us feel what we had never felt before.
Lisa is proof that you don't have to stand center stage to do that. You just have to be honest with yourself about where you get your energy from, and then let that energy flow.
Do You Welcome The Sounds Of Silence?
Shu Hung is the Global Chief Creative Officer of AKQA.
In a complicated world, Shu has learned that knowing who you are is the foundation on which leadership success is built.
Please come as you are. Words to live by.
What Should We Expect From You?
Nicole Parlapiano is the Chief Marketing Officer at Tubi. When she arrived two and a half years ago, Tubi was an eight year old business that had no brand recognition. Today, with the help of their ad agency, Mischief, the streaming service has 97 million active monthly users, up from 20 million in 2019.
Leading a challenger brand works best when you're willing to move fast and break things. And if you want the people that work for you to act with the same confidence, then they have to know who you are.
What Else Do You Want To Know About Yourself?
Sir Andrew Strauss is the former Captain of the England cricket team which he led to become the number one team in the world for the first time in England's history. He then became England's Director of Cricket and he's recognized as the architect of the country's first ever one day World Cup victory.
In 2019, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to charity, sport, and cricket.
Being captain of a cricket team requires the same skills needed to run a business. Amplified.
Who Do You Trust?
Jim Stengel is the former CMO of P&G, and he's now a hugely successful author, speaker, coach, consultant, and advisor. He's also the host of the brilliant CMO Podcast.
In our conversation, Jim and I started to lay the framework for how we think that leadership is going to have to evolve as the confidence in most institutions, including government, continues to deteriorate.
What Does Your Company Reject?
Karl Lieberman is the Global Chief Creative Officer of Wieden + Kennedy.
To unlock creativity and unleash its power to maximum effect, you have to be willing to break the norms, to encourage the irrational and sometimes even the absurd.
You have to reject predictability for possibility.
And when you're yelled at, because no one has ever done it like that before, you have to be willing to shrug.
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.
