“The Less-Is-More Leader”

This podcast has listeners in 84 countries. Most are pretty open, democratic societies where freedom of thought and movement are both expectations and rights.

Born and raised in Russia, Leonid Sudakov had neither in his formative years. His father was not allowed a passport until he was 50. Leonid didn’t meet a foreigner until he was 16, when he moved to Moscow carrying with him a bag of potatoes and his wits.

From these beginnings he has become an exceptionally creative and thoughtful leader, unlocking innovative and creative thinking at every stop, including 3 years as the global CMO for, a $20 billion global business.

We are all heavily influenced by our upbringing. Whether we use those experiences as catalysts or obstacles depends on how we see them.

This episode is called, “The Less-Is-More Leader”.

Three Takeaways

Push open new doors
Step through and explore from the other side
Embrace the tension that comes with solving difficult problems

"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT

Episode 109: "The Less-Is-More Leader" - Leonid Sudakov

I’m Charles Day. I work globally with some of the most creative and innovative companies, helping their leaders maximize their impact and accelerate the growth of their business.

It’s become clear to me, that the most valuable companies in the world are led by people who have something in common. They've learned how to unlock the most powerful business forces in the world - creativity and innovation.

On this podcast, I explore how they do it and I'll help you use their experiences to not only become a better leader, but become that leader faster.

Before this week’s episode I’ve got a question for you. In the past, I’ve offered full length and 15 minute edited versions of each conversation. I haven’t done that so far this year. If you’re still interested in the 15 minute episodes, let me know either by emailing me at charles@fearlesscreativeleadership.com. Or on Twitter.

This podcast has listeners in 84 countries. Most of those are pretty open, democratic societies where freedom of thought and movement are both expectations and rights.

We are all heavily influenced by our upbringing. Whether we use those experiences as catalysts or obstacles depends on how we look at them.

This episode is called, “The Less-Is-More Leader”.

“I find that constraints, in general, spark creativity a lot more than we can even imagine. A constrained environment, whether it's time constrained, when it's space constrained, any kind of tension that's being created is actually very conducive to people thinking differently.”

Scott Galloway describes innovation as the Church of America’s religion.

I think the capacity for creative and innovative thinking is the single biggest competitive advantage available to any business.

I also know that most companies and most leaders instinctively behave in ways that dilutes, diminishes and in some cases destroys creative thinking because they are reluctant to put in place the practices and structures in which creativity and innovation thrive.

An environment that is constrained - by design - thoughtfully, sensitively and strategically - will produce the most extraordinary innovation.

And companies and the leaders that put those in place, don’t need to pray for success. They need to plan for it.

Here’s Leonid Sudakov.

Charles:

Leonid, welcome to Fearless, thank you for joining me today.

Leonid Sudakov:
Thank you, it's great to be here.

Charles:
When did creativity first show up in your life?

Leonid Sudakov:
From the very, very beginning. I come from a very science-oriented family, and in a way, so my grandfather was one of the biggest physicists in the Soviet Union, my mom was teaching physics in the university, and everybody around me were in academia. I must tell you that I found art and science from very early on. I've seen a lot of passion in it, and I believe passion is absolutely essential, and honest passion is absolutely essential for creativity to come about, and that's what I carried from the experience that I have seen in my family.

Charles:
How was that promoted or supported in the environment in which you grew up, both in terms of your family environment, but also in terms of the broader cultural, societal environment in which you grew up?

Leonid Sudakov:
It's quite interesting, in a way that growing up in a society that was not completely free, you had to find ways to approach creativity. Considering the external context, it was quite limiting. What I found is people applied passion into everything they were doing, and in the private space, a lot of difference that you wouldn't have seen if you'd just seen the great crowds marching on the Red Square and the kind of Communists here that you would have seen and felt. But in that private world, a lot of the creativity was nurtured, and even while the society might have seemed as very uniform, you've really seen people expressing themselves in different ways.
It might be not as diverse as what we see today, because obviously of the limitations we had to live with, but at the same time, I found that people applied creativity to everything they touched.

Charles:
Were you conscious of there being risk involved, in terms of how far you pushed an idea or how far you pushed your thinking?

Leonid Sudakov:
Well, you were conscious about things that conformed and didn't conform. At the same time, people found ways to be very, very creative without crossing the set boundaries. That's why if you look at the Soviet art scene, if you look at literature and you look at the cinema, art flourished even within that context. I find that constraints, in general, spark creativity a lot more than we can even imagine. A constrained environment, whether it's time constrained, whether it's space constrained, any kind of tension that's being created is actually very conducive to people thinking differently.
I think you need to get yourself off the natural road of how you approach,, or how anybody else is approaching a specific topic, to really go into this creative space. I've found that having this constraint actually made people a lot smarter, a lot more inspired, a lot more willing to find something that's different, and I think that's one of the secrets of why we see so much creativity coming from the environments in the Eastern Bloc, not just in Russia. If you look at Eastern Europe and you look at Germany as an example, you see a lot of these amazing things, and still that legacy, lives. I think that's why we continue to see a lot of amazing creativity coming from spaces that used to be very uniform, controlled environments.

Charles:
Yeah, I think you're right. Creativity, certainly in the business environment, is best used as a problem solving force, and so the tension, to your point, about understanding what the boundaries are and the limitations, and here are the problems we're trying to solve, is when it really comes to be incredibly valuable. How did creativity show up in your education?

Leonid Sudakov:
I've always wanted to follow science, I wanted to be a chemist. At the time I got to go to university, we were in the middle of one of the first times Russia hit that big economic crisis, and so nobody had any money. In the end, I had to find something else to do that would potentially bring a little bit more money for the family. That's how I ended up doing finance, and moving to Moscow to do the undergrad degree in finance.
For me, this was the time where the environment in Russia was so turbulent, we had a conflict between Yeltsin, who was the president at the time, and the Parliament, who was controlled by the Communists. In '93, you would be in the classroom in the morning and you would be on the barricades, seeing tanks go by in the afternoon.
That frames you, in terms of just what you're experiencing, and the complete shift in terms of the external environment that's happening around you live. The other thing that framed me is my scholarship at the time. My parents, again, as I said, were in academia and in science, and obviously with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had some money to eat, but they had no money to give to me when I moved to Moscow. So, I had to find a way to earn some money, and so the scholarship at the time for Russian students was about $8 a month.

Charles:
Wow.

Leonid Sudakov:
You kind of imagine, you have to find your way to make a living. I arrived to Moscow, I was 16, and I was 2,000 kilometers away from my parents, and you have to completely start building your life. I think that kind of street education is something that frames you in terms of agility, and in terms of reactivity towards the external environment, more than anything else.
You learn to be creative, and again, you learn that flexibility in your thinking, and almost like malleability in the way that you approach things because you have to, you have no choice. I think that for me was a big part of my growing up.

Charles:
Were you a risk taker as a kid?

Leonid Sudakov:
I was very protected until my teenage years. I was mischievous, so I would do pranks, but I was not a massive risk taker, because I had a very, very tight-knit family behind me. When I basically found myself on my own, I think I became a lot more willing to take real risks, but with the weight of decisions that those risks entail. You very early learn what the ups and downs would be, depending on the decision that you're making.I fundamentally believe that luck is very important in life, but luck comes to those that really, really go after it and try things. I really believe in trying and in following conviction, and in that sense, moving forward.
A lot of times, it is, you don't really know where you're going, but there's the sense of forward movement, and that sense of progress and a sense of urgency about this is something that I learned, and that's how I describe risk to myself.

Charles:
Where do you think you got the confidence and the courage to move 2,000 miles at 16 years old with no money, and the requirement that you figure out how to make your way in the world?

Leonid Sudakov:
I had a bucket of potatoes. At the time, we had a dacha in Russia, and we grew a lot of things, like many Soviet families. We grew a lot of vegetables ourselves, and so I still had something to take with me. I had no money. I think you put yourself in the situation where you don't really have anybody else define you. I think in a way, for me it was very exciting, because it's a perfect situation for you to define what you want to learn, and what you want to be as a result of this. So for me, just finding out about the world, and Moscow was the first step, Moscow for me was so far away and so big and so international.
I come from a town where a lot of Russian military industry was evacuated to during the Second World War, and as a result, the town has been entirely closed to foreigners for 40 years. When I was growing up, we'd never, ever seen a live foreigner, because they were just not allowed to visit because of all the military industry, and the secrets around that that we had around there. For me to go to Moscow and to hear somebody speak another language than Russian was completely crazy.
I think curiosity that comes with discovering the world and just discovering the other, whatever the other might mean, something that's other than yourself, something that's other to anything you know around you, is probably the biggest driving force that took me there, and actually helped me, I think, frame my experience in a way that was palatable. I was in this discovery trip around the world, and that just started in Russia.
My dad was not allowed to have a passport until he was 50, so he was never allowed to travel abroad, the same with my grandfather. The ability to then, once I left Russia, to just start seeing what's out there in the world, I think that still stayed with me. I think if you look at my personal history, and having lived in seven different cities and three continents, all this variety of experiences that I've accumulated, a lot of it still goes back to that initial massive curiosity about figuring out what's out there, and once you have an opportunity to go beyond the wall, looking at and continue to be very, very inquisitive about understanding what's this other that exists in this planet alongside us.

Charles:
When did you leave Russia?

Leonid Sudakov:
I graduated, and then started working even before I graduated, PepsiCo in Russia is in the marketing world, and then they transferred me to their global headquarters in New York when I was 22. I was part of this first generation of Russians that were actually leaving Russia professionally and going somewhere in the companies that they were working for. Russia has become a very important market for many consumer companies at the time, with the promise that the opening has created. They'd never had a Russian work in the headquarters before, so they wanted to find somebody who can represent that new emerging consumer economy, and so that's how I ended up at 22 crossing the bridge to get in New York.

Charles:
How long did it take you to make the decision? Did you go to them and ask, or did they come to you and ask you?

Leonid Sudakov:
No, I went to them. I went to them and asked, It was really a continuation of this journey of putting yourself in a situation where you know you will learn, and you'll know that you'll go on a different level of understanding about things that exist in this world. I think landing in New York as the first place to live outside of Russia in the early 20s, I think is the best education that one can wish for in this type of journey, of figuring out what the world was all about.

Charles:
It must've been complete culture shock.

Leonid Sudakov:
It has been. It has been, and I think in a way, on many, many levels, I think not just from obviously, culturally, and from the work culture perspective, from the consumer culture perspective, from interpersonal relationships perspective, and then also just in terms of social life. I didn't realize you can have all this abundance of options for you to build connections with people, go out, have fun. Yeah, I didn't sleep a lot in the first year. It's been very, very exciting.

Charles:
As you moved into an environment that is that open and that permissive and that filled with opportunities, coming from an environment that was not that, how did you adjust to that? What was your own personal exploration of the possibilities that were in that journey of discovery? Because you would've found very few no’s, which must've been surprising, even if you understood it intellectually, emotionally it must have been surprising.

Leonid Sudakov:
It has been, and a lot of it has been confusing. It's interesting, Russians believe in very deep interpersonal relationships, but you don't build them in three seconds. You have to really understand what the other person is all about, and really feel that depth of empathy with others, but we go very deep. This culture of small talk that is very, very entrenched in the business environment and the educational environment in the west, in terms of, "I just want to be nice to you, and show to you my benevolent openness to you, but I'm not here to be your best friend forever," is something that has been very, very foreign to the Russian context.
For me, I still remember it's been quite tough for a while, because people will come up to you and will start talking to you, and start like, "How are you doing?" Then you will start telling them about your life, and after about two minutes they just try to find an escape route, because that's not what this was supposed to be about. For me, understanding the cultural norms of existing in this environment has been fascinating. I still remember, after the first two years coming back to Russia, I remember my mother looking at me and she's saying, "I just don't understand one thing, why do you keep smiling like an idiot all the time?"
Because in Russia, we don't just smile to other people, we don't smile in the street. When somebody smiles at you in the street, it's strange. even the physionomy of how people come across I think is very, very different, so that's one part of it. I found it very confusing, exactly because there are so many options, and you can do so many things because of the freedom that you have. You have to have a very clear core about how you want to spend your time, because I found that it's very easy to drift, and there's just so many offers on your time that it's just incredibly easy to get lost in what's out there, and not really understand what is your take on it, and how do you find yourself in the driving seat of what's happening to you?

Charles:
You have lived at other places as well, right? You lived in Asia.

Leonid Sudakov:
I moved, actually, from the US, I moved to China, and I lived three years in Shanghai.
That was another, you would say, moving to another planet. At the time, it was early 2000s, China has not been as international, as discovered as it is today. Finding myself in that context, a completely different context, just gave another dimension to my work experience as well. I found this to be a culture of opportunity that I've never seen, even in the US. There's just such a very, very one-dimensional focus on the opportunities, and dedicated focus on uncovering opportunities at hand, and very, very much about what can you do in the next three, six, nine months to materialize the massive opportunities that are there.

Charles:
As you've gone through this exploration, you're nothing less than an explorer, in fact, as you've gone through this exploration, what are the consistent characteristics by which unlocking the creativity of an organization becomes more possible? Are there things that you've seen in every cultural environment, in every society that you think are fundamentally true, have to be present?

Leonid Sudakov:
Yes, a big yes. One of the things, when we started building, and we'll get to Kinship, when we started building this latest adventure that we're in, one of the three pillars of the culture we were trying to build, that is all about enabling us to build this creativity and completely turn the industry in which we are in upside down through creativity, and so one of the tenants culturally that we built in it is what we called being purposefully inquisitive. I think the one thing that I've seen across all the experience that I had in the US, in China, and in Europe, but starting with Russia, every culture has, differently expressed, but has this unique opportunity for curiosity to flourish.
I think this idea of being inquisitive about the world, about your consumers, and about your opportunities, I think it's fundamental to creation.I find that this is probably the one thing that I've seen differently expressed, but I've seen in every single culture. You might approach building a culture that has this curiosity at the heart, and this idea of, how do you drive the culture of asking questions in a different way, in Asia, a very smart way to ask questions if you want to get a real experience, because people tend to be very positive, to be polite, to give you face, so that when you ask a stupid question, they still give you a nice answer.
It's very different to Russia, where people might just discount the question if they don’t think it's the right question. Fundamentally, to bring the new into our lives, bring the new behaviors, new products, new standards, new ways of thinking, which is what a lot of the people that were really successful in business have been able to do in the last 20 years. It always starts with that kind of question, and I think that's what I've seen in every single culture that I worked in.

Charles:
Was that more prevalent in any one of them, or do you think that that's just-

Leonid Sudakov:
I think they're different. I think people are asking questions differently, and I think the way that they address answering them is different as well. If you look at it, and I talked about China being the land of opportunity, the speed from an insight to use case and from use case to execution in China is, as you know, like nowhere else in the world.

Charles:
Obviously, one of the great challenges of leading really effective, creative businesses is talent. How do you find them, how do you bring them in, how do you unlock their potential while they're there, and how do you keep them longer than your competitors? If you have that talent equation working for you, you're probably winning.

Leonid Sudakov:
Yes.

Charles:
As you've gone through these different cultures, are there types of people that you can find in all of them that are consistent? Are there characteristics of the kind of people you'd want to hire, or do you have to go into each culture and understand, "In this culture, they look like this. In this culture, they behave like this"?

Leonid Sudakov:
What I find is that a lot of uniformity that we assign to the cultures is actually not represented.

Charles:
That's just an easy façade that we put on.

Leonid Sudakov:
Exactly, it's not representative of the type of diversity you see within its culture. I've dealt with creative or innovative businesses for the larger part of my career, you're absolutely right that talent is the number one and the biggest factor for success, organizing for talent is probably another one.
if you think about two traits that were absolutely essential for creating the type of innovative culture that unlocks the rainbow of solutions that we're trying to go after, one is optimism. It can be expressed differently in different cultures and can be expressed just differently by different people, but this belief that in some shape or form, a better possibility exists or a new possibility exists is absolutely essential for liberating yourself towards creativity. Curiosity, as I said before, is probably the second factor that I found in every culture that's been absolutely essential for the people to have the right mindset.
The combination of optimism and curiosity I've seen create magic. On the other side, entitlement is where I've seen almost like deflate any kind of creative potential in any space. The moment you feel like you have all it takes or you have figured it all out, I think you lose the ability to ask questions, and you lose this ability to be purposefully inquisitive. As a result, I think creativity dissipates. I think there are personal traits that I've been looking for and I've seen, and then, as I said, organizing for talent is incredibly important.
In every team I've built, ensuring that you create enough tension in a way that you build the team - and I think diversity for me has been a big part of how you can create that tension - allows you to spark those solutions that I think will not be created otherwise. People think about diversity as just a perfect picture where the Coca-Cola commercial, everybody lives in harmony, we all love each other. The diversity that I believe in is a diversity that's messy, that's uncomfortable, it's something that pushes you to recognize that there's another way of looking at things that's as good as yours, you might need to change the way that you are approaching something.
That's the diversity that I've seen let the real new things emerge, because that's what's required. All the people that I've seen grow and succeed in the businesses that I've been engaged in, they all shared these core values of optimism and curiosity and openness, but they were never entirely comfortable. They were also put in the environment, they were pushed because there were others around them who shared the same values, but who came from different backgrounds from different carrying different viewpoints, and as a result, something new was created. That's kind of my personal formula.

Charles:
Almost every business culture is a direct reflection of the national culture in which it exists. Not many leaders have had the kind of diverse experience that you've had, and have obtained it from such an eyes wide open perspective from such a young age. It seems to me that every time you've gone into a new environment, you have absorbed like crazy, obviously partially because of who you are, partially because of where you came from, your eyes have been opened at every stage. Given that you have that kind of breadth and depth of understanding, are you more aware of the possibilities of pulling in different kinds of people and bringing different, unique perspectives and talents and skillsets and degrees of humanity together in ways that create a specific culture, or do you end up finding that no matter how wise and insightful and informed you might be, at the end of the day, the local culture is the thing that really ends up dominating the culture of the organization?

Leonid Sudakov:
I find that the context of what you're trying to do is very important. I've seen very successful, very creative businesses being rooted in the national culture. When I was working in France, a lot of advertising agencies in France have shown that you can create stellar creative powerhouses, but that would not work anywhere outside of that culture. I think they found the tension that I'm talking about, the type of diversity and tension that's required for that creativity within that culture. I ended up almost exclusively working for global businesses, or the businesses with global ambitions, and I think in the context of what we are trying to do in creating innovative businesses with real global mindset, I find that this is where you need to be very conscious about the type of environment you create on the inside, and I think in that context, be very clear where you can find that mix.
I moved here to New York a year ago back from Europe, and a big reason why we created our hub here in New York is because we feel there are few places where we can create that mix. For us, having access to the type of talent that's thinking in a very similar way, but then also that is so inherently diverse, that can create enough of that creative tension in the system, I find has been a very strategic move. We actually have found it, so in a way, we're still growing as an organization, but we've found that we are able to construct a very unique environment that serves that purpose.
I consider myself an eternal immigrant because I constantly move around, and I think that's why this permanent immigrant culture of New York is something that resonates and I think allows us to create something, that there's probably not a lot of places around the world that you can do that.

Charles:
What's your relationship with fear?

Leonid Sudakov:
It's a great question. I tend to be quite unperturbed by fear in a work context, I have bigger questions about life. I don't understand, why we have to die at the end of learning all the stuff that we learn? I just find it's completely unfair, and I still don't understand the why of the whole setup, but whilst we are here, we have bigger questions to be afraid and to ask questions about. Day-to-day, you kind of need to make the most out of it, and for me, unfortunately, life is finite and it's short and it's just the only time we have to really express something that makes us happy and make it real, and learn. Those kind of existential questions aside, everything else is actually manageable.

Charles:
Are you afraid of dying?

Leonid Sudakov:
I'm pissed off about it. It's probably, pissed off is the best way to describe it. Yeah, and it's actually an interesting question. I'm not afraid of dying tomorrow, because I think it's just, there's always things that are happening. I think what pisses me off is that I believe in wisdom and learning, and I'll always remember my grandfather, and my grandfather, he saw me move to Moscow when I was 16, he was 82. The last time I saw him, it was just as I was moving, we took a walk. He was just such a massive role model for me in my life, he's just made from nothing and he was a member of the Russian Academy of Scientists, and then I remember he had cancer, he didn't know, and he had two months to live.
We were walking on the street, and he told me, "I kind of want to live so much." He had a few years in him in terms of energy, and I found this for me is what the complicated thing has been, is that you have all that wisdom and all the learning that's accumulated, and you don't have time to really share this out or close the circle. Everything else I think is secondary, it's not the physical death that I'm afraid, but it's really about the wisdom. Because we run around like headless chickens and we worry about things that we shouldn't be worrying about, and I think I really believe in the wisdom you acquire having lived.

Charles:
Tell us about your new venture.

Leonid Sudakov:
Yeah, so it's so much fun. Mars has been in pet care spaces for 80 years. For 70 years, it was quite a traditional manufacturing business, they went global, they built this massive billion dollar brand. In the last decade, they made a very different move that took a lot by surprise.
They started building a portfolio of veterinary hospitals. Today, Mars is the world's biggest employer of veterinarians, and so as a result, suddenly you've taken that manufacturing business, and suddenly you made it a business where 70% of the Mars associates, people employed by Mars, actually work in services, and they work in healthcare. And the last couple of years, we realized that being a global leader in nutrition, a global leader in services gives us a real opportunity to be an essential part of creating what the future of this industry is. We feed 40% of the world's pet population, cats and dogs, there's a billion of them out there, Mars feeds 400 million.
Thanks to Mars, we zeroed on this opportunity to say, "How can we create a venture that's really dedicated to imagining the future for this category, and so we've launched the first dedicated venture fund. We put $100 million venture fund into this industry last March, we launched the first seed stage accelerated program for startups, where we mentor startups. All of that led up to formalizing this business of Kinship that we've established in the spring this year. For us, this is a real vehicle for creating a different type of industry for tomorrow, so this is super exciting.

Charles:
It's very exciting, and particularly as a passionate dog parent and crazy dog person, I think it's fair to say. What do you think the future of pet care is?

Leonid Sudakov:
Quality and value; a lot of people think that Millennials just throw their money left, right and center. This is a generation that is most concerned about value than any other generation of pet parents before them,. It used to be, to find a groomer, you used to have to walk on the street, find one and just kind of hope that that's the one that is a good one. Now, with digital transparency of ratings and reviews, and platforms that provide you access to understanding the quality and value equation, gives you that in general, on average the experience becomes better, because the platforms basically push the better service providers up.
There's another element of what happens with this new generation of consumers, that companies are no longer faceless. It's almost like going back to the origins of entrepreneurship, where Mr. Mars was Mr. Mars, and the Cadbury family were Cadburys.
You have this idea of companies are groups of people that deliver a product or a service, and you don't have an abstract feeling about the company doing their job, you really have a very specific expectation of the people that work for you as a consumer.

Charles:
Yeah, that's absolutely right, and I think really well put. Last question, how do you lead?

Leonid Sudakov:
I lead with passion. I lead with humility, and fundamentally, I lead with imperfection. The biggest thing that I believe that has allowed me to be a leader that anyone can see themselves in is having that imperfection shine through, because that's what makes you interesting, because that's what makes you angular. That's what makes you relatable, and that's what makes you real, and so that for me is fundamental to how I lead.

Charles:
I wrap every episode with three themes that I've heard that I think have contributed to your success as a leader. First is, I think you are clearly an explorer. You are just interested in, well not just interested, you are brave enough to want to walk into a new situation and see what is there, and to assess it on its merits and do something with it. This notion of opening new doors, not only is it not alien to you, but I think you welcome it.
Two, I think you accompany that with a lot of curiosity. The two obviously go hand-in-hand, but a lot of people open doors and then don't do very much with it. I think once you've opened the door, you step fully inside it and see what's there and what you can do with it. Then the third part that I think is interesting, and is perhaps more subtle through this conversation, is your willingness and in some ways, your interest in living with tension. In fact, to some extent, you made a comment earlier on about looking for it, and accepting that it's actually a very necessary part of certainly unlocking creativity, unlocking innovation in the business world, and I think in life as well, but the desire not to try and make everything smooth and perfect and easy and straightforward and consistent, but in fact to look for ways to create the opposite of that, and to put interesting contrarian points of view and positions and possibilities together, and just see what comes from that. Those three together I think are really evident, how do those sound?

Leonid Sudakov:
Yeah, that sounds very true, very true. Thank you so much for the time, it's been very, very good, I've enjoyed it.

Charles:
Thank you for joining us, it’s been a fantastic conversation.

Leonid Sudakov:
Great, thank you.