Leading In The Time Of Virus
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 134: John S. Couch
Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact.
This episode is part of Season 2 - which we’ve sub-titled, “Leading In The Time Of Virus”.
Today, leadership requires that you meet the challenges of two viruses - COVID-19 and racism.
In this environment, unlocking creative thinking has never been more valuable or essential.
John Couch is the VP of Product Design at Hulu and author of “The Art of Creative Rebellion: How to champion creativity, change culture and save your soul”.
He is also the child of an interracial marriage, at a time when interracial marriages were illegal.
He has suffered from prejudice, from both sides of his ancestry. And he has emerged, thoughtful, philosophical and committed to making a lasting difference.
Here’s John Couch.
Charles: (01:01)
John, welcome to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
John Couch: (01:04)
Well, thank you for having me, Charles.
Charles: (01:06)
Tell us where you are quarantined and who you're with.
John Couch: (01:09)
I'm in Southern California in the Santa Monica mountains just south of Malibu, which means I'm just north of Los Angeles proper. I am basically in a house with my wife, daughter, who's a teenager, and two dogs and also Koi. We have a Koi pond. So I'm one of the lucky ones where I'm actually out into the country and have the ability to spend time walking around, communing a little bit with nature. I'm very full of gratitude for that.
Charles: (01:47)
So tell us how businesses going. What's it like in the world of streaming and how are you adapting your leadership to all that is changing in faster than real time it seems at the moment?
John Couch: (02:01)
The good news/bad news is that streaming has actually done quite well during this period across the board, whether you're Hulu or Netflix or Amazon Prime or any… the new contenders like HBO Max. It's definitely a good fallout in the sense for streamers through very, very terrible, unfortunate circumstances. But the good thing about streaming is, it does allow people to de-stress for a moment from what they're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. I think what's interesting for us in general, or any group of leaders I've spoken to creatively, is that you're dealing with people who are working remotely, but it's not just working remotely; it's working remotely with this incredible stress that was initially caused by the pandemic and then complicated by what's going on currently right now out of Minneapolis, and now the world. So the combination of the constant sense of anxiety and worry that's associated with the state of the world from a pandemic perspective that's been compounded with civil unrest has been a really, really interesting experience to lead through for my team.
For me, I find that it's helpful to essentially fall into some principles that I use when I'm talking to people on my team and I can speak to that. I actually wrote an essay this last week, which talked to this. I write a weekly essay for LinkedIn. And one of the first things I noticed is the most important attribute to me as a leader is the ability to truly listen and understand the needs of the team, which means you have to come to it without your own bias or your own agenda and truly, whether you agree or not with what's being said, you need to be able to listen and take it. Then secondly, I find it's very important that a leader takes that information and then sets a vision based on feedback from the people. So the first one is to intake information.
Second one is to assimilate that information and represent it back to the team and say, "This is what I heard you say and here's what I'm going to put together as a vision for us to collectively go towards." Third thing I wrote about was the under-represented kind of idea of just kindness. And I think what's interesting, especially in modern corporate society and society in general, is that kindness is often associated with weakness of some kind. What's interesting to me is that when you truly win the hearts and minds of people, you win the war. When you are responding to any kind of violence with more violence as a show of strength, that doesn't work. It actually just makes people more entrenched and bitter, and then for the moment, they may listen to you, but then they will continue onwards with their agenda.
I find that this is true not only in companies, but obviously at the world at large. I think the final thing that's important is that a leader makes actual change happen because it's only so much that can be said when you say, "Our hearts and prayers are with you," which is fine and it's good to have that kind of positive energy out there, but really what people want is actual policy change, whether it's within a company or within society. If you don't follow through on making actual change happen, everything that you've just said before that, everything I was just mentioning before that, falls flat.
Charles: (05:53)
How do you go about making actual change in a corporation? Because I think one of the lessons, one of the reference points that I've seen from the Time's Up and Me Too movement, which is, they did a fantastic job of raising greater awareness of the issue. I'm not sure how much has substantively changed. If you talk to women as women leaders, as I do all the time, I still feel and see and hear them struggling with what has actually changed from a behavioral standpoint, from an organizational practices standpoint; how are we different today than we were two years ago before Time's Up and Me Too really started to establish itself? How do you see change coming about in a corporate environment? Because I think you're right. There is clearly... The talking is done, right? We have to be different going forward.
John Couch: (06:40)
Yeah, I agree that the unfortunate situation happened with Me Too and Time's Up is that, and even going further back like Occupy Wall Street, that there's these movements, which gain incredible power initially and incredible outrage. For a moment, there's this feeling that things are going to change and actually happen across the whole world. I think we're in a different time because what I'm seeing that's very different about the situation we're in with the uprising is that it's happening globally. It's not just happening within one country, even though the United States is the epicenter for what actually happened. Obviously in Minneapolis. It has spread to every major city in the United States and across the world; Berlin, London, Tokyo, everywhere. That's something I have not seen before. I'm seeing not only within my own company, but also with my colleagues' companies, my cohort creative directors and leaders in the company is that there's actual dialogue and policy decisions being made quickly in a way that I had not seen before.
I do believe that with Me Too there was a lot of slow moving progress and it's still happening. It's not at the speed that we want it to be, but I do feel that what I'm seeing right now is a lot more change and a lot more listening that's ever happened before. What's interesting to me is having a teenage daughter who is 17 years old. Her generation is so radically different than the one that's in power right now. Her generation is inclusive, has almost remarkable activism to them that they don't buy into the narrative that you have to be defined by your skin color or gender or your religious beliefs. There's this almost radical over-correction, which has been organic that I've seen within my daughter's friends and the way she behaves, which is very natural though. It puts into contrast how unnatural the generation I grew up in is and how the people around me thought and on a personal level, it’s been kind of interesting for me because I grew up with a lot of prejudice around me because I grew up in the south in Texas.
At the time that my parents were married, interracial marriages were actually not legal within the state of Texas. This is the early sixties and my mother's Japanese, from Japan, and she met my father in college and they dated and got married and then I came along. So when I was growing up, there was very little categorization of what it was to be half Asian, half Japanese in my case. It was interesting for me because when I was little, I looked very Japanese. I looked like a very Asian person. As I got older, I kind of transitioned from looking very Asian to looking much more Caucasian because I'm six feet two. I grew... Clearly, my dad's Scottish genes kicked in at one point. But what I found that was really interesting is that when I was in school in Japan, because my father's a scientist and I went to school in Japan and I went to a Japanese speaking school, a school that was over 250 years old that had never had a foreign student in its entire history, much less a person of mixed race show up.
So when I showed up there, I went from being in the United States, the subject of a lot of slander and epitaphs, which were terrible towards a kid and then I switched over to being in Japan where I was then beat up seven times in two months, for the opposite reason, because I was white. What I immediately realize is that people pretty much are prejudiced across the world and I wasn't bitter about it because what my approach to it was I wasn't going to associate with one identity or another. My decision at that time was to learn Japanese, associate with being Japanese equally to being associated with being an American and speaking English. But the interesting thing is that when I was in Japan in that school, my father who is at the time, middle-aged, so I guess he was young at that time, younger, probably in his late thirties, white, heterosexual male had to come visit my school. It was about nine months into my time at my school and I had been mentioning how difficult it was to my dad, but he commiserated, but didn't totally understand.
But when he went to my school to visit my teacher, he came back that evening a completely indignant. He told me that as he was walking into my school, that children were pelting him with garbage and rocks and shouting at him. He was shocked, not so much because the kids did that, but as a person who's always been in the position of never experiencing prejudice, an American white male who's heterosexual, it was a shock to him. I remember seeing the shock in him that this existed and I kind of had to tell him, "This is what I experience on a daily basis both in Japan and in Texas at the time." But it was a good thing because I think the analog to this is I think in a lot of ways, he is in that metaphorically, what the rest of the country and the world is going through, that there's a true understanding for the first time of kind of going from the theoretical understanding of what the pain is, to really commiserating that this pain is so real and it cuts through.
I think seeing the actual demonstrations and the cities, it was so shocking to most people that it's truly a wake up call. When you see the protests, you do see a rainbow of people. It's actually every skin color, every nationality, every gender is actually coming together to do this. So I do think, long story even longer, that what I've seen because I've grown up nothing like the experience of a young African American man, but I have felt my own experience in this of what it would be like to be prejudiced against and have been prejudiced against. I'm seeing a difference here and I hope, I really, really hope and I feel that there's going to be a much bigger change happening.
Charles: (13:32)
Yeah, a remarkable story actually, and personal background. One of the things that I'm struggling... I am as privileged and as white and as male as it comes, so I am hyper conscious of the fact that whether we're talking about racial or gender or any other kind of discrimination, I have no conscious recognition of having ever suffered any of that. I'm also conscious that society and businesses work, society perhaps even more so, but we tend to work on a pendulum basis where an issue swings violently towards one side, goes either far enough or in some cases, too far and then comes back and we pass through kind of a middle on it's way back to another place. I think society and history is littered with evidence that that is generally true.
One of the things I'm conscious of as we go through this moment in time, which I'm certain, I was saying to somebody this morning that I feel that 2020 will end up being the most influential year of any of our lives that we're currently alive, that so much is being challenged and so much change will come from it, whether it is, what is an office, how do we work together, what does racial equality look like, what does Black Lives Matter look like when it comes through exactly what you've just described, this vortex and turns into differences in behavior and structure and institutional recognition of racism and ways to prevent that or minimize that?
One of the things I'm conscious of in this moment, however, is there is enormous attention being paid to what the Black community have gone through for hundreds of years in many cases. We are listening perhaps, as never before, we are listening with greater intention, perhaps than ever before. There is a point in this which, and you just referenced this, where you said, "I was beaten up. I was picked at because in one country I was Asian, another country I was seen as white and Caucasian," but I haven't suffered by comparison to what most Black people have suffered. The fact is that for any of us, all of our pain and all of our trauma is still all of our pain and all of our trauma. Yours should not be minimized because somebody else has had different experiences.
Somebody said on social media this morning, "The white community should be very grateful that all the Black community want are equality, that they don't want revenge."
John Couch: (16:14)
Revenge-
Charles: (16:14)
If they wanted revenge, the society would be in turmoil for centuries. How do we get to the point where we are actually building an environment, whether at an office or in a society that is capable of supporting your pain, the Black community's pain? I'm not even going to say mine because mine is truly trivial by comparison to anybody else's.
John Couch: (16:38)
Essentially, it's a very interesting question. The other day, there was an internal speech given by various luminaries, which I won't go into their names. One of them actually, a Black male reporter spoke about the fact that he said, "I'm not asking to treated differently because I'm a Black man. I'm being asked to be treated equally, which is different." I think across the board, whether you're LGBTQ or if you are a woman, you just want to be treated equally. I've thought about this a little bit, about the fact that we're born, whatever your beliefs are, we're born kind of the way we are. We're born randomly. You're born white and British. I was born mixed race in New Orleans. It's actually where I was born, no control over that. Then the moment that you're born, wherever you're born, and you were in whatever gender you're born to, until you choose whichever way you identify, you are given stories.
You are given a story of the place you were born, the story of the culture that you were born into, the story, perhaps of what your parents' beliefs are, the story of the religion that might be given to you that you either accept or reject and this kind of keeps like Russian nesting doll out and there's a story built on story and built on story. If you’re an American, or in my case, like a Texan, you can say that the story is that, “I'm a Texan, but I'm also an American,” American number one kind of mentality people have, wherever you are. In Japan; Japan number one, whatever the case is. The interesting thing about story is that they define us so heavily. I think what's important over time is you decide what story that you want to associate with and the story can change, but the problem is, I think so many people just inherit narrative and story and say, "Well, my grandfather did it this way. Therefore, I am going to do it this way."
I think the roots of prejudice and the roots of behavior over time, and this is not scientific, but I do believe that from personal experience that I've literally seen people in my family who said on my white side that, "My great-grandfather believed in this. I believe in this," fill in the blank. You can imagine what they believed in. And I thought, "Why? Why do you accept that?" I think that unless we have more of a questioning of like, "Why do we think the way that we think?" which is terrifying for most people because the armature, their reality is usually based upon the things they've inherited from their families and friends over the years and their religion or their political beliefs, and they never questioned them in the same way that someone on the far left never questions, "What would it be like to be on the right?" and vice versa. Until you were able to have a meeting of minds and not look at being different as being a threat.
And going back to my personal story, I think what at core was terrifying for people when they saw someone, and you have to understand it's a long time ago, someone like me, is it destroyed the fabric of their narrative that white people need to be white people. By the way, Japanese people felt like they should be with Japanese people and the crossing over was somehow an abomination. It was a hybridization of a new reality, which no one could quite classify and therefore, it was threatening. Nowadays, it's like dime a dozen. You acclimate very quickly and it's not a big deal. At the time, it was extremely threatening. I think that this story has changed since I was younger that it's not a bad thing to be mixed race anymore. I'm sure there's pockets throughout the world which are still a little bit concerned about that, but in general, it's moved towards the right narrative. So I think in this moment right now where this reset of being at home and being able to contemplate, we can determine a new narrative.
We can determine a new story that we collectively believe in. It doesn't need to be us against them. I think human beings, and maybe this is just a tribal DNA mentality, is that we tend to want to have an enemy to galvanize against. We tend to have tribalism. This, by the way, tying it back into corporations, departments within a company tend to be tribal and that's both good and bad. Like in my team, for example, a lot of pride of being a designer and a creative person. That's wonderful until you exclude another department from collaborating and being with you. You see this all the time and it's a human behavior. Two things I've noticed is that number one, humans tend to be very much suspicious of the other when you're in a different group than that person.
And secondly, they tend to be naturally hierarchical because no matter how much I have tried to flatten teams that I've been on, there's a natural tendency for humans to organize in hierarchical fashions, to look at the person who has, maybe it's a good thing, who's older than them with a little bit more reverence than someone who is younger or someone who has more experience. That's a positive manifestation, perhaps if hierarchical thinking. A negative one would be when you look at somebody and say, "Well, because of your gender or your sexual identification, that I can't respect you the same way I would respect someone in your same position who was a straight white male."
I think what's interesting now is because, going back to my daughter, they're so open to a new story, a new narrative that I think we can start to build off of them and we can start to help guide them almost like enlightened elders to bring their energy into the world and counter what I'm seeing is the last vestiges of the old ways, which you see across the world, whether it's what's happening politically in the United States or even with Brexit. Whatever that is, it’s starting to shake at its foundations. I think this is a good thing because in moments of great stress, things either break or they become galvanized. I think that we're seeing both happening at the same time. The question of identity and what your story is, is important, but I think it should be something that you choose versus something that you just inherit.
Going back to corporate culture, there's always been this mentality, "Well, that's the way that it's always been done. The founder 50 years ago decided that this is the way it's going to be done," and I find that you need to question that because times change and people change and if the company is going to survive, it has to be in harmony with what's happening in the world.
Charles: (23:46)
I think it goes to another level beyond that, right, which is it applies to us individually. The fact that we've always done it that way, the fact that we've always thought that, I think all of those norms, all of those habits need to be challenged right now. We need to be looking hard in the mirror of ourselves. I think it's interesting because from my perspective, from a coaching and advising perspective, the last three or four months, I've discovered and found that some of the people I work with are more self aware and self reflective than I've ever seen them. They want to understand how they're seeing. They want to understand how they're showing up, and they want to challenge themselves in terms of how they want to be going forward. Last question for you, what are you learning about yourself over the last three, four months, from a leadership standpoint?
John Couch: (24:35)
Wow. There's so much in that. I think what I'm really beginning to do is really take in even more the humanity of the people that I'm dealing with because I think in companies, again, the tendency is because you're running fast, you're running from next thing, next thing, next thing and it's just the gears of commerce, that it's important that you really get to know that the person that's working for you is more than their job title or job description. Because we're moving quickly, we tend to look at people as like, "Oh, you're the copywriter," or, "You are the designer," or, "You are the developer," and we do this stereotyping because we have to .
There's so much information going on and we're just trying to get things to happen, but what I've found that if I invest even 15 minutes of one-on-one time with any one of my people and really get to know not just what they're doing, but what's going on in their lives, as far as they're comfortable with telling me, because I don't want to force people to confess what's going on if they don’t want to talk about it, but what I've found that the more that I actually get to know my employees as people, even the name of their dog, even what is their health issues, what's going on in general, the more that I can help to unlock them.
By doing this, you end up getting more engagement from the employee and you get two to 3X the employee's engagement at that point because now, you're actually talking to them as a human being and they're saying, "Well, I can do the thing you're asking for, but I can also do more." So what I've learned to, hopefully put a little more of a neat bow on this, is to learn to listen more carefully and to try to avoid being prescriptive like, "This needs to be done. We need to do it the following way. It has to be done by this time." It's much more important to say, "Here's the problem that we're trying to approach. What do you think? Tell me." Allow them to be empowered even more. I've been doing this as much as I can throughout my whole career, but because we're so far away from each other and because we're working virtually, for me, that's come up even more. It's become the key question. How are you doing, and what can I do for you?
Charles: (27:05)
What are you afraid of?
John Couch: (27:07)
On what level are we talking about? I think about this all the time, and not to be totally morbid, but I'm very much my own brand of Zen stoicism, which kind of again, ties into two sides. The Zen side coming from my Japanese side and the stoicism coming from my European background. I actually believe that stoicism is a good way to look at the worst case scenario in things. In order for me to avoid being paralyzed with what I'm afraid of, I use stoic thinking, which means, what is the worst thing that could happen, and can I survive it? As a way to get through it.
So we today, are in a red flag warning state of affairs, which means that the winds are blowing heavily in the mountains and I'm in a high fire area. And as you know, California has been on fire for the last few years. So one of the things that I wrote about actually in my book, "The Art of Creative Rebellion," and I was writing it as it was happening is, we had to evacuate. My wife and I and our daughter and our dogs, and during that time, you have to very quickly decide what's important? What can I take out of the house? What am I putting in the car? What's the stack rank on this?” As I looked around, I had over a hundred of my own paintings. I'm like, "Okay. I can't take those." What's important are all the photographs that are printed out, interesting enough analog media, papers that we had and we have a go box. We just put everything into the car and we had to take off. I looked at my wife as we were driving away and I said, "If we lose everything, are we okay?" And she said, "Yes, we're okay."
So that's the stoic side that I tend to apply to everything. Worst case scenario in a job, you get fired. You get fired with no money, so keep about two months of money in the bank if you can, just in case. The Zen side of my thinking is, “How can I then stay either in a state of centeredness or flow?” Generally speaking, I think that most people are in a constant state of low grade anxiety. Being in anxiety does not allow for creativity, but if you meditate, and this is one thing I recommend you do, one does, I meditate every morning for at least 15 to 20 minutes. Then that leads to a state of flow, so whatever I'm engaged in, I can focus on. Because modern technology and the constant push of bad news and social media has destroyed our ability to focus, we are in a higher state of anxiety because we don't contemplate and creativity directly comes out of contemplation.
So for me, what I'm afraid of probably is the inability to get the things done that I want to get done before I leave this world because yes, at any moment… if you're lucky, you get old and you die an old person's death. If you're unlucky, you die early. My step son died young, my wife's son, and I saw it firsthand. He was a brilliant musician, truly brilliant and an amazing human being. What it taught me as almost as a memento mori to face on a daily basis, the things that terrify me, work them out by writing them down and then saying, "What can I do to do something about it?" because the best thing to affect anything you're terrified about is to reduce it down to, "What can I do right now? What is one action I can take?" The mind, once you focus on something, tends to blow away fear because suddenly you're doing something active, your mind's occupied and you're doing something that's actually addressing the core issue. So that's how I deal with fear.
Charles: (31:17)
It's a great answer. John, thank you so much for taking the time today. I appreciate the insight and the wisdom and the candor. Great conversation, please stay well.
John Couch: (31:27)
Take care, Charles. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.
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