155: Andy Nairn - "The Luck Seeker"

Andy Nairn of Lucky Generals

Why luck should be part of your company’s strategy.

"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT

Episode 155: Andy Nairn

Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative businesses. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact and grow their business. To help them succeed where leadership lives - at the intersection of strategy and humanity.

This is Season 3 - “Leading The Future.” How should leaders lead as we meet a world of new expectations and possibilities?

This episode’s guest is Andy Nairn, co-founder of Lucky Generals, who describe themselves as a creative company for people on a mission. Andy has been named the top brand strategist in the UK for the last three years and has also been named one of the top 5 creative people in world advertising.

Andy has just written a book called Go Luck Yourself, which discusses the role luck can and should play in unlocking creative thinking and innovation. During our conversation, he tells a story about Quincy Jones.

Quincy Jones has won 28 Grammys during his career and been nominated for 58 more.

He believes that luck is an essential element of the creative process.

In fact, so deep and omnipresent is his commitment to luck that inscribed on his studio wall is this - “Let God walk through the room.”

You may or may not be religious - I’m not - but this sense of making space for some other force during the creative process resonates with me. It is reminiscent of Elizabeth Gilbert’s reminder in Eat, Pray, Love that the ancient Greeks and Romans believed that creativity was a divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source. And it is familiar to me in that my best work comes when I am willing to be less in control. And then, it is not just inspiration that comes, but a force that takes over to such an extent that sometimes I don’t remember the act of creating. Maybe you’ve experienced something similar yourself?

The art of fearlessly leading creative thinking and innovation has many components. But this idea of allowing luck into the equation doesn’t come up very often. And never by design.

And yet, by its very definition, creating time for the unpredictable, light for the unseen, and opportunity for the accidental, must be part of any business that depends for its success on the ability to discover the new.

So if you find yourself running from meeting to meeting, brief to brief, financial statement to financial statement, maybe stop for a moment and ask yourself whether you’ve left any room for luck. And if not, why not?

Here’s Andy Nairn.

Charles: (02:56)

Andy, welcome to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Andy Nairn: (02:59)

Thank you for inviting me. I'm really glad to be here.

Charles: (03:02)

How has 2020 changed you, do you think?

Andy Nairn: (03:05)

Oh, wow. It's been like it has been for everybody. It's taught us that there are highs and lows, and you got to roll with the punches, I guess. It's probably a bit of a cliché, but it reminds you of the important things, both work-wise and home-wise. Home and health. There's never been a time when it's been more to the forefront, has it? You'd be quite odd, I think, to come out of this without having a greater appreciation for all those things.

But then you also realize how much you love ... Certainly in my case, I love the people I work with, and I miss them. That's a different sort of home. I'm certainly in the camp of, while there are certain advantages to working from home, getting things done, to some degree, I also want to be back in the office, and meeting my mates, and doing work with them.

Charles: (04:02)

Do you think coming out of this you'll have a competitive advantage or disadvantage?

Andy Nairn: (04:07)

I would say that it'd be a terrible interview if I said, "Actually we're doomed. We're probably not going to make it." No, surprisingly, I feel that we are going to have an advantage.

I think the serious reason for that is we were already ... I think what these occasions do is, the people who were thriving in the first place probably pull out and thrive a little bit more. The people that were already suffering, just, it accelerates their decline. It is a bit Darwinian, I'm afraid. I think because we were already built for this kind of world where ... We're not a legacy agency. We're only a few years old, really. We don't have big structures, or divisions, or departments. We don't have a separate digital division, for instance. We're all digital. We're all social media. We don't have those false demarcations. That makes us very quick and agile, which of course is something that you've got to be in this very volatile environment.

I do think we've got an advantage. We're not the only ones that have got that advantage, though. It's a very competitive world in both the main markets we're in. Our main office is in London, but we're also in New York as well. They're both incredibly tough markets.

Charles: (05:24)

Were you built for speed and agility? Were those things specifically important to you when you put the agency together?

Andy Nairn: (05:29)

Yeah. Very much so. Again, I'd probably like to think that we would have done that deliberately, because all three of us, we very much got a bias to action. We like making stuff and doing stuff. Again, as I say, pontificating.

We wanted to do stuff very quickly and get out of the blocks very quickly. I think that informed it.

Then our first client was a betting company called Paddy Power, who you might know are, in the UK, very famous for wild, outrageous guerrilla marketing. I think you're created in the likeness of your first client, and that made us even more, that was the pace that we had to run that informed everything else, really.

Charles: (06:15)

You've written a book and published a book. We should put the two pieces together, because it's one thing to write one, and it's another thing to get it published. It's about luck, which I think is a fascinating topic. Tell me, why that subject?

Andy Nairn: (06:30)

I thought, over the course of the last year ... Obviously the easy answer is that I've got an agency called Lucky General. I would be lying if I said that that had not crossed my mind. But I think to some degree I wrote it despite that, because I realized halfway through last year that I didn't really know what luck was. We had liked the name because it sounded like a cool name when we set it up. We didn't interrogate it. All of a sudden I just realized that I didn't know much about luck.

That seemed odd because all the big stories of last year, the pandemic being a case of horrendous bad luck that none of us, really ... We didn't do anything to deserve the situation we were all thrust into. But then all the other big issues, like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, they had a different kind of luck. Because, for somebody like me, who's a classic, older, white, straight guy, you're increasingly and quite rightly conscious of my privilege. That was a different kind of luck.

I just realized luck is something I find myself thinking an awful lot about. I don't understand it, despite the name. When I did research, I found that nobody talks about it. It's a taboo subject. Yeah, I thought I'd explore it, and find out why that was the case.

Charles: (07:43)

What have you learned?

Andy Nairn: (07:45)

I've learned that partly it's a cultural thing. Obviously if you've worked in other parts of the world, you'll realize that huge swathes of the rest of the world find it quite easy to talk about luck as a perfectly natural part of business conversation, but we've got a hang-up about it.

Apparently what I learned is that it's a historical reason why, in the West you had the the Industrial Revolution in Victorian times, and they really turned on the idea of luck because they believed it undermined the Protestant work ethic. Really, they believed that, if you were rich and successful, that must mean that you'd worked really hard, and, if you were poor, then you just hadn't tried hard enough, frankly.

I think that dichotomy really infiltrated a lot of Western business culture. We're just encouraged to ... We're always told, "There's no such thing as luck. You should just work harder, and harder, and harder. The harder you work, the luckier you get. Try harder." Of course I do believe in hard work, but I feel like that's too simplistic.

You can't just tell someone who's born in different circumstances than you to just work harder, because we're all given different sets of cards when we start out. It's about how you play your cards, I think. That's what you can do. You can't really do much about the hand that you were given in the first place, but you can try your best with the cards that you've been given. That's really what the book is about, principally, as organizations and as brand custodians, how can we stack the odds in our favor?

Charles: (09:28)

Is there a resentment about luck, do you think? Do we resent people who are lucky?

Andy Nairn: (09:31)

Yeah. It's an insult. Even I, and I've written a book about it, but if you started the interview by saying, "You've been very lucky," I might somewhat have to calm myself a little bit. But, yeah, we do, I think because of, as I say, this Victorian belief that they're opposites, that luck is the enemy of hard work.

I don't think it is at all. I think you might encounter an opportunity, and then it requires hard work, and talent, and creativity to seize the opportunity and make the most of it. I think they can be quite natural bedfellows. It's not that the one negates the other. We've come to believe that, if someone says you're lucky, then that's something of an insult and that you're saying that you didn't do anything to achieve it.

What I found interesting as I did my research was that not all spheres of life do that. Science, we're quite familiar with all these stories, Alexander Fleming and all those other greats, who made accidental discoveries. People in the scientific community don't say, "Alexander Fleming, he was just lucky." They appreciate that he had to then use his skill and intelligence to apply the accident that he stumbled over, the old Petri dish. There are countless examples of that in science.

It's a perfectly respected way of working. People don't say, "They didn't work hard enough," or, "They didn’t…." I think if, the more you ... It's like a lot of things in life. If you're mindful of something and you appreciate it, then you're probably more likely to be able to influence it.

Charles: (11:09)

That's an interesting point, because, actually, aren't many of the great scientific discoveries as a result of luck in some fairly significant way?

Andy Nairn: (11:15)

Huge numbers. Quite a few of the different coronavirus vaccine breakthroughs were made by somebody, perhaps, experimenting in a different sphere. They perhaps found an arthritis drug that could have an effect, or .…

The other famous one, the funny one, is Viagra, which I think was a heart treatment or blood pressure treatment. Then, of course, some of the researchers realized that some of the male respondents had a very unusual side effect. Of course they weren't looking for it at all, but then once they'd noticed it, they had the skill to think, "Hold on a second. This could be applied in an interesting way elsewhere."

I think that's the point. In our world we would look down on that, because we would say, "That's post-rationalization," which is one of the worst crimes that strategists can be accused of. It's, "You just stumbled on the answer, and then you worked your way backwards to the strategy." Whereas, in so many other spheres of life, that's perfectly normal.

You still have to do the work. It's not like Alexander Fleming didn't then do all the hard work afterwards, or that the COVID people didn't do all the maths after. You've got to put all the rigor in place afterwards. But discoveries don't always happen in that linear way, is what I've discovered over the last couple of decades.

Charles: (12:33)

If we remove the stigma that comes with it, can we then add it to the conversation of, is it nature? Is it nurture? Is it luck? Should that be the third part of that triangle, now?

Andy Nairn: (12:46)

Yeah. I think it is a really helpful thing to bear in mind. Because, as I say, organizations ... I feel it's helpful to go into work every day and either be appreciative of the things your organization has. So many companies are oblivious to the wealth of the assets that they have sitting right under their nose, and perhaps need to be more mindful of them.

It works both ways. If you're an incredibly successful company, I think you should be mindful of that, and not be complacent. That is the death of so many big, successful companies, isn't it? They forget how lucky, frankly, that they are, and they think that they're untouchable.

Charles: (13:30)

What's the role of luck in creativity, and creative thinking and innovation?

Andy Nairn: (13:34)

I think it just loosens things up. I think great creatives know that a little bit of luck is needed along the way. Actually they encourage it. A lot of the greats, if I look at music ... I love what Bowie used to do. He used to cut up newspapers and throw the sections of the newspaper in the air and see where the pages landed, and whether they would create new patterns of words. That was deliberately looking for luck.

Tom Waits is one. I quite like Tom Waits. He listens to two radios at the same time on different stations, and then watches out for little clashes of unusual genres, or harmonies, or lyrics that don't go together. I think if you deliberately pursue luck, as I say, if you're mindful of it, and you don't just wait for it to happen but you look out for it, then it becomes really powerful because you're baking it into your creative practice.

I think a lot of the time we, in our industry, perhaps, because there's a lot of money at stake, I suppose, in our branch of the creative arts, if you like, we try to keep luck out of the equation. The only time we ever mention it is to say things like, "Let's leave nothing to chance," or, "Let's not leave this down to luck." I think actually luck is usually often a really good thing that we should have more of in our lives. Why would we try and keep out of the process?

Charles: (15:05)

Yeah. I think it's a really important point, because there is so much focus, as you well know, around creating frameworks, and processes, and practices. I think, to your point, clients are looking for, brands are looking for, a degree of certainty within a process that doesn't really allow for that at its best. You can't predict creativity. Hopefully you can't predict ... If you can predict it, it probably isn't very creative.

Andy Nairn: (15:30)

That's exactly it. That's it. Predictability is a terrible thing in our line of work, isn't it? I always feel that, if I create a brief, and the work comes back and it's what I predicted, I feel a bit ... My heart sinks. It's not the worst crime in the world, that it's on your brief. But I also want it to surprise me and make me think, "That is kind of in the direction of my brief, but you've also taken it on in a completely unexpected way." That's where I think the real magic happens.

Charles: (15:58)

How do you create the conditions within an organization that maximize the chances of luck playing the kind of role that we're talking about?

Andy Nairn: (16:07)

I think it's who you hire. A lot of this ... We're a people business, aren't we? Having people who are curious and don't have a set way of doing things. We've got no proprietary processes, or anything like that. We shy away from anything like that, because every problem's different. We like to borrow and be influenced by all sorts of things across culture.

I think having people that are interested in all sorts of things beyond our tiny little bit of the world. We've got a humility about people who are not interested in ads, really, or brands. We want people who are interested in music, and sport, and religion, politics, and all those other things that people are interested in. Then you can bring them to your life and to your work. I think that counts for an awful lot.

Then it's, again, encouraging people to work in quite a fluid way. We're very un-hierarchical. Some of our best ideas have come from quite random interactions between people who were either not working on the brief or who were not the creative team on the brief, but we take collective responsibility for it.

Charles: (17:22)

I'm really fascinated by this whole idea that you've raised in the book, because I think the tension between the human need to be in control. We're all struggling to get control of our lives and control of our destiny, and doing that within an industry, and a world, and discipline that is all about unknown possibility, and uncertainty, and exploration. I'd always been fascinated by that conflict and that tension point.

Then to add this element, which I think, as you rightfully say, has been a pariah, that you're not allowed to accept the fact that you might be lucky or you might be working for a company that's lucky. As you raise that issue, I started thinking about, "Why would you not want to be around people that are lucky? Wouldn't you rather be around lucky people than unlucky people?"

Andy Nairn: (18:10)

This is the crazy thing. It seems mad that we would try and deny that. One of my other favorite quotes is from Quincy Jones, the great record producer, the greatest of all time. He's very methodological. In some ways he's very rigorous and scientific, and knows his stuff and his craft. But, amongst all that hard work, he then says, "Yeah, but I need to leave 20% of the time for the Lord to walk through the room." He's got that written on his studio wall. "Let the Lord walk through the room." Which I just think is the best ever mantra for all of us.

As I say, it's not about us all going crazy for the whole process, and we were all completely gonzo, free-forming, spit-balling stuff all the time. There come points where you need to be very rigorous, but you do need to let the Lord in as well. A lot of the time we're bolting the doors and keeping Him well and truly locked out, aren't we?

Charles: (19:07)

Have you consciously, therefore, re-engineered any part of the way that you guys are working as a group, as a company?

Andy Nairn: (19:13)

Yeah. We are, as I said, trying to be more mindful of it. Because I feel like, like a lot of these things, it's what we have done our best, on a good day, almost intuitively. But, again, we don't like very formal processes. But once you realize, and sit there and think, "Actually we often do that, and that turns out to be very successful," in the loosest terms, we're starting to just be a bit more thoughtful as we do.

For instance, one of the forms of luck that I think is ... We didn't invent this at all. It's a very well-trodden path amongst great advertising agencies. Has been to take misfortune and turn it into good fortune. It's the classic Bill Bernbach trick of taking a flaw, and then turning it on its head and making that the product's strength. Or it could be taking a taboo, and really running towards a taboo and embracing it. Or taking the fact that you don't have much money and turning that into an advantage, or you don't have much time and turning it into an advantage.

The more I look to our work, the more I can see that that is something that we have often successfully done. We don't particularly do it in a formal way, but in the last few briefs, I've just found myself making a point at the beginning of the process of noting down all the negatives, because I think we're ...

Obviously our first inclination, because, like all agency people, we're intrinsic optimists, we run off and find out what the benefits are, and what the great strengths and the cool things about your brand are. But I'm increasingly interested in finding out what the snarky, mean things that people are saying on Twitter, or on Reddit, or something like that. There's often a certain truth in that, in comedy, isn't there? I think it was David Ogilvy, actually, who said that a lot of the best ideas start as jokes. To find out what people ... What are the mean jokes that people are saying about your brand when you're not in the room? It can, I think, be quite an interesting starting point.

Charles: (21:25)

What do you think the world looks like a year from now?

Andy Nairn: (21:30)

Who the heck knows? I think, if there was a greater appreciation of some of the things we've just been talking about, certainly in our industry. But, more broadly, generally, I feel like we're moving in an era where we've all experienced the power of cooperation and collaboration. Perhaps that might accelerate a world where ... Obviously competition's still going to be the cornerstone of all capitalist endeavor.

But, we're also, I feel like, realizing that companies and brands have got to work with each other to solve some of these enormous problems that we're all facing. No sooner we're out of this pandemic than we remind ourselves, "Hold on a second." There's a climate crisis about to incinerate all of us, as well. It's not like the problems of the world stop once we've all been vaccinated.

I think what's been interesting is that, even before the pandemic, there were beginnings of some of those tropes. A lot of the big tech brands obviously operate as ecosystems, and they realize ... Obviously there's still hierarchy within them. There's top dogs and there's feeders of those ecosystems. But that's interesting, that brands working together, companies working together ...

We work with a company called The CoOp, which is the world's first and perhaps even biggest, I think, cooperative society. Does everything from food to funerals, and so on. They've been really interesting. They have been one of the great success stories, if that's not too unfortunate term, during the crisis, because they haven't sought to profit from it. Their profits are turned back into community funds.

What they've tried to do is make things better for the whole community by working together, including with their arch rivals, to try and address the community's needs. Then the knock-on effect has been that they actually have done very well commercially out of it, but that wasn't the purpose of their actions. I think they've got a really interesting model. It's 175 years old, but it suddenly actually might be of the moment.

Charles: (23:44)

Yeah. It's interesting how the pandemic has both accelerated in some areas, but I think also made us pause and take stock of what's actually really important, and so therefore has brought other things back into being relevant in a way that they probably weren't before.

What do you think the office looks like over the next 12 months?

Andy Nairn: (24:04)

Next 12 months I think it's going to be a very voluntary basis. Everybody's got mixed-up feelings about this, certainly in both London and New York. For all sorts of personal reasons, people will have all sorts of issues going on.

We're about talent and helping get the best out of people. We trust people. If you've hired the right people in the first place, you're not going to have ... I think bad companies mistrust their people. Perhaps that, if you let them work from home, they're going to not work hard enough. I think probably the opposite is true. A lot of us, over the last year, have been working harder than ever at home.

I think it's just having honest conversations with people to see, "When do you want to come in? How do you want to work?" Then you try and aggregate all of that information. You probably have lots of different people working in lots of different ways in the same company. We all just trust each other to ... We're all doing it. You don't have to come and show me that your jacket's on the chair for me to trust that you're doing your work.

Charles: (25:06)

As you look back over the last year, do you have any regrets?

Andy Nairn: (25:09)

These are hard questions. Very good questions. My goodness. I try not to have regrets as a principle, if I'm honest. I feel like they're not helpful. I really don't ever ... Maybe I should. Maybe that's a fault. There are things that … I think we have to all cut ourselves a bit of slack over the last year.

You want to be looking after your people and keeping the business going in the same way, despite all the crap that's going on. I think we've done a pretty good job of that. There's probably the odd campaign or brand that might have stalled somewhat along the way because inevitably things were difficult, but I just feel like it's not helpful to focus too much on that stuff.

Charles: (25:59)

Last question for you. What have you learned about yourself over the last 12, 15 months?

Andy Nairn: (26:06)

I have learned that, I really, I do need other people around me. I adore my family. I think I certainly will change my working habits when I come out the other side of this, because I've found that there's some types of work that I find much easier to do at home. Also just the work-life balance, and not commuting, and spending time doing things with them, I'm definitely going to commit to doing that.

Then, on the other side, I do need people. I have renewed appreciation for my business partners. You've got to really hang together in a moment like this. That's when your friends ... You realize, "Have I got into bed with the right people?" sort of things. They've been magnificent.

Then, yeah, we're a smallish agency, so all the people ... I've got so much love for the people that work with us. I will hopefully bounce back and be Mr. Jolly and Happy when I get to see them, and not be ... I hope I'm not Mr. Scrooge normally, but I will certainly not be, the next time I see everybody.

Charles: (27:12)

Andy, thanks so much for coming on today. Thank you, too, for raising this topic of luck. I think it's an absolutely fascinating one, one I'd certainly never really considered. But I think you really, really have added a lot to the conversation about, how do you unlock creativity and innovation within organizations? I think it's a very important component, actually. Thank you for that.

Andy Nairn: (27:30)

Thank you. Hopefully we'll all enjoy lots of good luck this year, and beyond.

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