Nick Law of Accenture Song
How do you find the right people?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 211: Nick Law
Here’s a question. How do you find the right people?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach their leaders to help them succeed where leadership has its greatest impact. The intersection of strategy and humanity.
This week’s guest is Nick Law. He’s the Global Lead for Design and Creative Tech at Accenture Song.
Nick has had a storied career. He was Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA. Chief Creative Officer of Publicis Groupe. And the VP, Marcom Integration at Apple, before joining Accenture Song in early 2022.
He has led and unlocked creativity across thousands of people. He’s seen what works. And what doesn’t.
“There's people that lead because they have a deep empathy and recognition of other creatives, and know how to nourish them. I'm really a big believer in the carrot rather than the stick. I don't like this sort of unrelenting controlling leader. I think your job is to find the right people, and when you find the right people, then lead them with the carrot. I think if you're not leading them like that it might be because you haven't found the right people. And so you're trying to mold the wrong people towards your will, which is just miserable for everyone.”
In my experience, the very best leaders understand three things. Their business, their people and themselves.
But not in that order.
Most leaders prioritize their understanding of the business. After all, it's the reference point that most people use when measuring the success or otherwise of an individual leader.
So, leaders rightly worry about the vision, the strategy, the execution and the performance of the organization. They pour themselves into KPIs and P&Ls.
But getting those numbers to sing, to really sing, is the consequences of two things.
How well you understand your people. And how well you understand yourself.
The creative thinking and innovation that every modern business depends on is amplified a thousand fold when its people trust and believe in the leaders of that business.
Better visions, better strategies, better systems will move the needle a bit by themselves. But only a bit. And nothing like as far as when your people believe in you.
And what drives that belief? Your courage, your confidence, your consistency. And your humanity.
And all of those depend on how well you understand yourself.
So if you’re struggling to find the right people, start by finding yourself and deciding what really matters to you.
And then say it out loud so that your people can find you.
Here’s Nick Law.
Charles: (03:00)
Nick, welcome to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Nick Law: (03:04)
It's great to be here. Thank you, Charles.
Charles: (03:06)
When did creativity first show up your life? When are you first conscious of creativity being a thing in your life?
Nick Law: (03:13)
Oh, in the most practical sense, it was because I just love drawing. You know, there were two things that I had a talent in when I was young. One was sports, specifically rugby, and drawing, you know? And I chose drawing as a career.
Charles: (03:32)
(laughs)
Nick Law: (03:32)
As opposed to getting beaten to a pulp by big, hairy men.
Charles: (03:38)
Where did you grow up?
Nick Law: (03:39)
In Sydney. In Sydney, Northern Beaches of Sydney.
Charles: (03:43)
How long did you pursue rugby?
Nick Law: (03:46)
Oh, I kept playing, I moved to London in the late '80s and I kept playing there, for a club in North London. So, you know, up until my body told me to stop. You know, rugby's like that, it's a very— it's a community game, and you keep playing as long as you can strap on a boot. So...
Charles: (04:05)
It's probably the strongest community game actually. I mean, I was never an avid rugby (laughs) player for lots of reasons. But I was very vividly conscious of the community that formed around the sport, and particularly after the games.
Nick Law: (04:18)
Yeah. I mean, it has a good and bad reputation for that. I mean, it's associated in England, with the public schools or—
Charles: (04:26)
Hmm.
Nick Law: (04:27)
...the private schools, as I would say in this country. Although that's not true in some parts of Britain, like Wales and stuff. But, yeah, but for me at least, when I was younger, because I had such a feral childhood without much supervision, rugby was a structure for me. That was it. So, it was not just a community, but it was a discipline. It was lots of things that I wasn't getting from my own life, so it was useful in that respect.
Charles: (04:51)
What did you draw?
Nick Law: (04:54)
Oh, everything. You know, like young boys draw, you know, (laughs) I drew monsters, and army men, and football players and, you know, all that stuff. Yeah.
Charles: (05:05)
Do you still?
Nick Law: (05:05)
Less so now. Yeah. It's a shame. It's one of those things that you think about as you get older, like, be lovely to find some time and to regain the discipline. What's interesting, of course, is that in our world, the sort of manual crafts have disappeared. At least, they've been transferred to a sort of a cursor, as opposed to a pencil, and I don't think that's a degradation. In some ways, it's actually a benefit because they're sort of mediating technology between an idea, and the thing, has collapsed so much that you can actually express more ideas, and be more creative, I think.
When I first arrived in London in 1988, when I went there as a young creative, there were still typesetters, you know, and to realize an idea, you needed weeks. And you could really only realize a few ideas. And you had to be— you had to have the skill of pre-visualizing and sketching and doing… and there were all sorts of limitations on what you could actually end up with.
And so, the sort of advent of creative software and all these things, I think it's been a glorious thing for creativity. It's democratized it, but it's also made it hyper-charged. I expect we're going to have something similar when more AI-human sort of partnerships accelerate it yet again. From a creative perspective, I find that very interesting.
Charles: (06:27)
So, you think anything that reduces the friction between the idea and the expression of the idea, the execution of the idea is a good thing?
Nick Law: (06:34)
Yeah, I do. Yeah. And that's not always how it's perceived. I mean, I remember, again, when I first got to London, when the Mac was just emerging as a creative tool, and for a lot of design companies that I was familiar with, they wouldn't let the designers on the computers.
They would have technicians. And the designers would sort of crane over their shoulder, and say, "Oh, move it to the left, open up the kerning", you know? Somehow there was this idea that the technology would sully the creativity, which is a common cause of alarm throughout creative history, but I think it's actually the opposite.
I actually don't think you can have a creative idea without pre-visualizing it, execute it in a medium, in a specific medium. That's why I've sort of railed against the big idea in the advertising world because it's clearly based on formulating ideas in the last medium that the industry was comfortable in, and that was TV. And so, it's sort of curious how these primal ideas that are supposed to represent something higher than an execution are always presented as anthem scripts, you know?
So I think we're being very disingenuous, thinking that there is… to me, like, an idea that floats above execution strategy. A creative idea actually has to go through the exercise of imagining it being executed. Otherwise there's no create in the creative. We imagine that somehow creativity is separate from technology. If you don't have the medium, you don't have creativity. And even something as crude as drawing something in sand, if you're a creative person, before your finger touches the sand you've already calculated what that medium can carry, you know? And the limitations and the opportunities in that medium. So you're not going to do a flying crosshatched illustration in sand because it won't support it.
So I think we need to get back to this, especially our industry. But creativity as I see it is an applied art, it's not a theoretical art. Especially when it's commercial. And I think your sort of mastery of a medium is the first step, you know, before you can transfer an idea, you know, into the world. So I think the industry lost its way a little bit when they took media away from creativity in the late '80—or the creative agencies in late '80s. And that proximity to the medium was lost a little bit.
Charles: (09:15)
It's a really interesting observation because if you take that to its natural conclusion, it seems to me that at some point, the pencil was technology to the person who invented it. And pen and paper and paint, I mean, any way of expressing yourself, to your point, it was actually originally technology, per se. We're simply—
Nick Law: (09:32)
Yes.
Charles: (09:33)
...advancing that by leaps and bounds—
Nick Law: (09:35)
Yeah, of course.
That's why I find, I mean, people call technology the thing that happened after they actually mastered the previous technology. Previous technology is not technology, right? It's some other thing.
Charles: (09:47)
(laughs). That's right, yes. Yes.
Nick Law: (09:48)
Yeah, I mean, you see those... imagine trying to, you know, write a novel with a quill and how arduous that would be. But even the alphabet is technology, you know? Rearranging these Latin characters is an amazing technology. And your mastery of it is dependent on practice, and fluency, and, you know, all those sort of really boring things, you know, like just sticking to it and getting used to it and understanding it and manipulating it.
Charles: (10:19)
Well, and to your point, the quill was a dramatic improvement over carving your idea into a piece of rock, right? (laughs)
Nick Law: (10:25)
Uniform, yeah, (laughs) you're exactly right. Yeah.
And yeah, I mean, there is always sort of moral panic around the next technology and the idea that somehow it's going to make us less creative. I think what happens is that these technologies emerge, the people that use the technologies to begin with are technicians, right? And so, you needed to be a chemist to be a photographer, you know, in the early days of photography, because you need to figure out how to fix that image onto a glass plate.
And so, you weren't spending a lot of time composing the image, you're spending a lot of time figuring out the sort of chemical reactions and getting all the science right. And I think that's true with any new technology. At the beginning of the internet, most designers in the beginning of the internet wrote, you know, they could do a bit of HTML, they could design a little bit, they wrote a little bit, because there was a small club of people that were close enough to the technology that they had to be generalists. And by the time you get specialization in technology, it sort of changes it. It's like, there's a difference between Kodak and Scorsese, right? At the end.
And I think that right now, we're seeing the sort of awkward beginnings of this new thing we're calling the Metaverse. And it looks strangely like another medium, which is gaming. But its potential, once creative people get involved, and not just engineers at Meta or engineers of these different gaming companies, is the potential is going to be very different. We're gonna express ourselves very differently in this medium, but it's gonna be dependent on creative people using a technology that has become, a little less cumbersome, a little bit more invisible so that they can explore.
And you know, so that to me, but you see this over and over again. You know, the first film looked a lot like theater. Just walked off, there was no editing, you know. And then they figured out a whole grammar around film, which is very abstract and very specific and very stylized. And the same thing is true of anything. And this is why it's very counterproductive for creative people to be frightened of new technology, because a new technology is waiting for them to do something with it. Because the technicians will take it only so far, you know? It's the artists need to come in and have a bit of fun.
Charles: (12:54)
It's such an interesting construct because what it's challenging me to think about is that I've always assumed that technology, by definition, was plugged into a power source of some kind, that I've always just—
Nick Law: (13:09)
Yeah.
Charles: (13:09)
...gone naturally to that. But in fact, that's not true. It doesn't have—
Nick Law: (13:12)
No.
Charles: (13:12)
...to be powered by anything other than you, in fact, in some cases. And I think when you create that liberation of thought, when you liberate the idea that technology does not have to be plugged in, in fact, it can be any vehicle, medium, means, then suddenly the opportunity for a creative person to reimagine, to you earlier point, the idea itself and not worry about, how do I use this technology to express that, but in fact, what is the right technology—
Nick Law: (13:40)
Yeah.
Charles: (13:40)
...by which to express this idea? That becomes liberating in and of itself, as well.
Nick Law: (13:44)
Well, you can work the other way. You can go from the technology to create… by regarding a technology and realizing what the limitations and opportunities are, and then exploiting them, you know? And this is another thing that's wrong with the sort of creative tribe of advertising that thinks that there's an idea that floats above medium is that you then end up having to extrude your idea into all these different contexts, some of which it doesn't do very well.
And so, I think it's quite reasonable to actually start with the technology and figure out what you can do with it. I don't think that that's being not creative. In fact, I think it's being very creative. So, you know, I think that we need to have creative people that are not scared of technology, that are brave and interesting, but still have craft. Because that's the other thing, often the new practitioners in a new technology haven't developed a craft, because they're young and because they're curious and everything.
For example, in social media, you know, industry, I'm exhausted with young practitioners in social media, claiming that the only way to do something in it is to adhere to best practices of the platform. Say now, we should be bending the platforms towards us, not bending towards the platforms, you know? So you need a certain maturity, a certain courage and a curiosity, I think too, to be a creative now.
Charles: (15:21)
So does that only come with experience? I mean, do you find that in younger people? Or do you have to have people who—
Nick Law: (15:26)
No, you find it in younger people, obviously. But younger people do often need leadership and focus from, you know, and that's where the gap, you know? And we know that there is actually a gradation between advertising and software and design and all of these things are connected in the way they weren't before the internet connected everything.
So there are definitely agencies that do things that look like advertising but are very sophisticated in the medium. But there are also agencies where the people that are the creative leaders have legacy skill sets. And then they hire young interesting people in, and they nest them under art director, copywriter teams, which is the sort of Bernbach construct which worked very well and still does, but not in all contexts.
And if I'm a young, experienced designer and I'm being told what to do with an idea that's being come up with by an art director and copywriter, then I'm only going to stay for six months before I go and join a software. You know, go to the tech side or find a more modern agency, because it’s… I'm not represented in the leadership. So I think that there's a big challenge for the agency world right now is having leader that are sympathetic to the skill sets that are needed, not just hiring things that they think are interesting skill sets that they don't quite understand and nesting them underneath an old leadership structure.
Charles: (16:55)
When you're building a group, a creative group, a creative organization, what are the characteristics that you're looking for? What are the criteria that you're looking for in people?
Nick Law: (17:04)
So this just goes to the heart of what I spent 17 years of R/GA doing, right? Which is sort of acknowledging that if you have decided to be very close to the medium, which we did, because we embrace the internet as our medium, then you needed to build teams that could take advantage of that medium. And in the case of the internet, because of the nature of it being connected and it being open, it changed so rapidly that we had to wrestle with something that I think agencies hadn't wrestled with, that weren't as close to their medium, which is, you need to keep reconstituting your team. There's a difference between designing a hyperlink brochure and an e-commerce site. Or a site which all of a sudden the pipe was big enough for lots of video.
So you've got this medium that's sort of rushing ahead and you can do more and more, it's just basically eating everything. And the opportunities just keep growing. So you need to go from having a team, which is really an interaction designer, a copywriter, a technologist, you know? It's just a core creative team. To something that's more flexible than that. Because there might be times when you are doing something which is purely narrative and filmic, and then there might be other times when you might be doing something which is about utility. And there might be other times when you are trying to create something that lives on these connected platforms called social media.
And so you all of a sudden have this sort of hydra of opportunities that can't be solved by one team. So the thing that I worked on at R/GA was, how do you create an atomic team, like the Bernbach team of Art and Copy? But make it flexible enough that it can solve for all these different contexts. And what I came up with was that, well, you've got to have a different leadership team. It goes back to what I was just saying. And the principle that I had was that you have two-headed leadership teams, that two people were broad enough, from a sort of creative literacy point of view, to encompass all those opportunities and that so to me, it was… we called it Stories and Systems.
But it's basically a design lead, typically an experienced designer or systematic visual designer from the, sort of, digital. But a designer and a storyteller. Who most of the time was a writer, but not always, from more classic advertising. But that was a leadership team. And underneath that team you could curate anything you needed. So they might get a brief that requires some data visualization and some editorial copy and some short-form film. And that's, "Okay, well let's curate a team based on that."
But that leadership team is capable of doing that because you've got the sort of subtracted brand thinking on one side and the more additive, systematic thinking on the other side. And, I mean, the most simple way of think about it is that the narrative creative is a sort of temporal thinker, and the design creative is a spacial thinker. So instead of Art and Copy, it was time and space. And what was most important was that leadership team worked so closely together that you’ve got to have the same sort of symbiotic benefit that you would get from Art and Copy, you know, that kicked off the creative revolution, which is that the good work you couldn't tell the difference between word and image because they were so reliant on each other. That was true also from this leadership team. The difference is that the leadership team could curate any team underneath.
So in a more classic agency, a brief might be received by an art director, copywriter team, and then they would figure out the ideas and then extrude those ideas into different mediums. Here, you have the Stories and Systems leadership team that curates a team based on the opportunities of the brief. And so it's just a better fit and it's less of a square peg in a round hole, in some cases that you get. So there's a long winded way to say that that's what I think you need as for creative teams now. You need leadership teams that are broad enough that they can curate anything.
Charles: (21:13)
And underneath that you need an organizational structure that's flexible and fluid enough to be able to cast opportunities against that, which traditional agency models have really struggled with. I mean, it's interesting, it feels to me that in many ways, client companies, brands have become more confident, in fact, about how they put teams together around opportunities. And they're not structured, they're not worried about FTEs and meeting financial plans. And then you also have companies like the one you're with now, Accenture, who've got more fluidity around the ability to cast. In fact, consultancies, I think, have always done a pretty good job of casting against opportunities. It's one of the things they do well.
If you're advising the agency world, how would you tell them now, moving forward, this is how you need to put an organizational structure together that has that kind of flexibility and fluidity?
Nick Law: (21:59)
Well I think you need to recognize that, first of all, the first creative act of a creative company is to design yourself.
Charles: (22:06)
Yeah, that's so true.
Nick Law: (22:08)
And part of the issue, I think, with the more traditional, again, this is not everyone, there are plenty of agencies that are doing—
Charles: (22:14)
Yeah.
Nick Law: (22:14)
But the more traditional agencies is that they… the thing that makes them good is also the thing that makes them weak. Is that they’re narrative cultures, purely narrative cultures. And change is a design problem. And so how they have tended to deal with these changes is with a great story, a few extra slides in the back of the deck. You know, some press releases around some new hires and stuff. But it's a deep design problem. And doesn't mean that then telling the story of how you've made those changes isn't important, but the first order is to design yourself.
And the other thing is that a lot of these agencies, not only their narrative cultures, but they're very account led. And so they often they outsource their model to their clients. And there's this unhealthy loop, because often a client will hire one of these agencies because they're good at more traditional media. And it doesn't… and so they… what you need to build for that client's needs is a more traditional team. And so they're always in this sort of… they're always trying to do this rear guard action of, you know, sneaking ideas into the client that the client isn't expecting from a more traditional agency and trying to convince them they can do it.
And that was sort of ruinous for a while there because it meant that a lot of them were doing these sort of digital stunts which were loss leaders, because they weren't paid for, really. And they hadn't figured out how to make money from them. And they were loss leaders that didn't lead anywhere. And one of the things I think we were very good at, at R/GA back in the day, and I think this is true of R/GA today, and a lot of other agencies, is that I don't think you progress your company by creating labs. You progress your company by figuring out how to get clients to pay for the innovative stuff.
Charles: (24:08)
Hmm.
Nick Law: (24:09)
Innovation shouldn't be this sort of little side gig.
Charles: (24:12)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Law: (24:12)
Like, if you believe in it enough and it's gonna really change your client's business, then it's a business unit, it's not a lab. And you might have to build skill sets that are really difficult to get right. And where it takes a few generations to get them right. But you've got to commit strategically to some of these things. I mean, the other big difference in the agency business is that you’re going from the sort of monster medium called TV with a few other mass mediums that were sort of connected to it, and now I think you need a portfolio of investments as an agency. I don't think there's a symmetrical shift from TV to one other medium because it's just broad and complicated and multi contextual.
So I think you should have, for example, as an agency, have 10 really distinct but connected capabilities. And any one time, two of them being sunset and two of them are being built, right? And so you'll even out your exposure, but it's also just representative of all the opportunities in the world. So I think it's really difficult time, and especially if you hadn't, if you didn't reckon with the first big upheaval from the internet, you know? Which is just understanding that interfaces are just as important as stories.
Charles: (25:35)
I'm also struck, to add to that, by the number of times you walk into an organization and find that in no way have they created the conditions for innovation. The environment for innovation doesn't exist. I mean, not only is the financial structure—
Nick Law: (25:46)
Yeah.
Charles: (25:47)
...a challenge, but they're not really conscious of, these are the various factors, many of which frankly are emotional in nature, right? The whole foundation I find of unleashing creative thinking in a business is, do you create the environment where people are actually emotionally willing to trust you and this place in order to take the emotional risk of putting an outrageous idea on the table without fear of being minimized or condemned or looked down on or held back because you won't play the game by the rules?
Nick Law: (26:16)
You know, I had this sort of thing I would say when I was at Apple, which is, let's be loose with ideas but tight with execution.
Charles: (26:25)
Yes, yes.
Nick Law: (26:26)
And typically you find companies go one way or the other. They're either very horizontal and connected but they’re not very good at the sort of vertical execution piece, because they're not organized with experts and the experts, because they're too broad, and they create good decks but not great execution. Or they're very vertically organized but they have a problem innovating because they can't... because innovation in the end is existing ideas that haven't been connected, kind of been connected.
And so, organizationally that means you need strong connections horizontally, not just vertically. So getting that matrix right, you know? So for me, as you say, it's like at the beginning it's you’ve got to be loose with ideas, within the context of a brief and all that sort of stuff. And then the big challenge for a lot of software innovation companies, is that because they're led by systematic thinkers who, as I was explaining before, are more architectural, their ability is to see connections, and they tend to process things all at once, as opposed to storytellers that process things one at a time. That's because that's how stories are.
And so what you find is that there's this moment in these innovations where people transfer the complexity of the environment onto the user. So a problem becomes more known but more complex the more you answer questions and the more connections you see. It becomes more palatable and easier to understand when you make decisions and sacrifices. So you’ve got this sort of complexity curve at the beginning of an innovation project, which is asking questions and doing lots of exploring, but at some point the people that are good at that need to surrender to the people that are good at sharpening something and making decisions, and they tend to be narrative thinkers, right?
And so this is where the sort of cultural divide between the sort of tech systematic world and the sort of high fiving storytelling, you know, Hollywood-like brand narrative world, is a problem. Because that orchestration between seeing the possibilities but then delivering simplicity, you need both. And if all you see is possibilities, you end up producing something that's dizzyingly complex to the average person. And if all you have is great storytelling then you have this sort of superficial simplicity at the end that's not informed by all the opportunities that you have.
So getting back to the, you know, the theme of your podcast, to me, leadership is a lot about recognizing people's, you know, the way that they solve a problem creatively. And then not just curating the right team, but choreographing. And incidentally, and this might be, you know, a little bit controversial, most creative people are not very honest about their creative capabilities, you know? Every designer thinks that they can design furniture, and every writer thinks they can write a film.
You know, let's have a look at the 10,000 hours that you've applied, see what you've mastered. Doesn't mean you can't stretch. But let's be honest about your capabilities and then pair you with people that extend your cross stroke, you know, in that classic T shaped person. Because there's no person that has a long cross stroke and a deep down stroke. And so what you end up designing is teams that look like paper dolls, where the cross stroke is this elegant collaboration. Where people know what they're doing and when they're doing it.
Charles: (30:12)
And again, the industry challenges that by rewarding authorship and ownership of ideas to the nth degree. I mean, the only kind of guaranteed currency in the industry is, do an award-winning piece of work and be celebrated on stage for having won the award and then get called by the head hunters the next week to come and do that somewhere else, right? I mean that's literally how the industry works.
Nick Law: (30:35)
And we have these tables that rank creative people. You know? I think this—they're just dreadful.
Charles: (30:43)
Yeah, I [inaudible].
Nick Law: (30:45)
And the… I just, you know… early on when R/GA sort of did become more of the creative powerhouse where we were doing advertising not just software and and design and stuff, we were doing— and we were sort of starting to get recognized at Cannes and we started to win things at Cannes. It was very difficult for us to fill in the form of who was involved.
Charles: (31:07)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Law: (31:08)
Right? Like something like the fuel band, you know, way back, you know, we had hundreds of people in our Buenos Aires office working on that. And there's always this argument about, oh, where's the idea from? It's like, well, typically something like that, the idea is this sort of aggregation of thinking as opposed to a thunderbolt in the shower. It tends to be this sort of steering of something and this adding stuff, subtracting stuff, it's very complicated and there's lots of people involved, and the triumph is one of collaboration, not of an inspiration of a single person.
So yeah, you're right. The award show… they're better now, by the way. I think they understand this now, but there was a time when it was very difficult to sort of format our company to the awards shows, because we just didn't work like that.
Charles: (32:11)
One of the areas I wanted to talk to you about is this - I think that in general, talented people are much too willing to be patient or understanding or forgiving of the environment in which they work. And I think Covid has changed that to some extent for the better, I think people are less willing to put up with bad organizations and poor leadership.
Nick Law: (32:36)
Yeah.
Charles: (32:36)
I say this positively. You had a long run at R/GA and you've had relatively short runs since then—
Nick Law: (32:44)
Yeah.
Charles: (32:44)
...which struck me as the sign of somebody who had a stronger sense of what was important to them and wasn't really all that willing to put up with organizational, either, I don't know about dysfunction, but certainly an organization that, let's say, just didn't bring out the best in you. Is that a fair assessment? And if so, can you just talk to that a little bit?
Nick Law: (33:01)
A little bit. It's also my curiosity. Like, before I was at R/GA, which was 17 years, my career was actually more shifting. I didn't even spend any more than two years at any company before R/GA. And I had worked at places like Pentagram and DMB&B and, you know, internet startups, in the early dot com years. So I had sort of bounced around a lot. And I attribute it to my curiosity. In the same way that I traveled the world, you know, with a backpack and went to a lot of countries because I'm curious. And it took me a long time to settle into, to stay in a city. New York has become the closest thing to home, but took a long time for me to decide that.
And similarly, that was my creative experience. Now before the internet, what was interesting about that journey, was that the creative triads were very different. Because there wasn't this sort of connective tissue of the internet. And so working at a place like Pentagram, and what constituted an idea and how your work lived in the world, was very separate to when I went to DMB&B, which is an advertising agency. What they thought an idea was was very different than what Pentagram thought, and how their ideas lived in the world were very different. They weren't connected.
And so the internet was interesting to me because it brought it all together. And I think one of the reasons I stayed at R/GA for so long is because, as I said, we changed constantly. Because we were very honest about our medium, which was the internet, and our medium kept changing so we kept changing. And my journey since then has been a sort of reigniting of the explorations of creative tribes. So being at Publicis was a view of the sort of holding company advertising model, which was really instructive to me. I think I learned a lot about that and, you know, what it could achieve and the limitations of it.
And going to Silicon Valley and being in big tech and being a client was also very different, and I could see the opportunities and the limitations of that. I'm Accenture now, because it was… it's really… there's a few reasons. One is that it is a completely different sort of company. Different culture, different way of interacting with clients, different sorts of clients, different problems it's solving. So I was interested just for that. I knew that I'd learn something and that's definitely true.
But the other reason I found it very appealing, you know, when I was back at Publicis, one of my sort of my platforms when I would go speaking was that creative people should be running creative companies. Not every creative person can do that, but there is a certain type of creative person who is the product person, and can run a company. And you know, the Weiden’s of the world and, you know, I would put Steve Jobs into that category. He's a product person. You know, that was one of his great criticisms of Scully, is that he wasn't a product person.
And, you know, and I think there's some truth there and it's surprising to me how quickly creatives surrendered leadership in the advertising industry. and the only ones that were sort of left standing were the independents, which was Wieden and for a while there, Droga. And so my big thing was that, you know, creative people need to take up the challenge and operational people need to step, you know, give them space to lead. Because you need risk takers and visionaries and people who understand the product. Balanced with the rigor of operations and finance, of course.
But it seemed to me that the agency world had lost that. And partly it was surrendered by creative people, by the way, because they were chasing trinkets. And so it was too richly ironic to me that the company that everyone thought was the least creative would put David Droga in as CEO, right? I mean, I thought well, that's a good sign.
I think David's great. And that seems to me like a good reason, in addition to the one I was saying before, which is, it's just a different world. And that's interesting to me. And so, I would say that my, you know, hopping around since R/GA was me sort of exploring again. But I will say that I'm at that point where I do think that going deep again has benefits. Yeah. Not that I didn't go deep with the other companies but, you learn, you learn, you learn, then you go deep. And then you learn, learn, and then you go deep.
Charles: (37:36)
So if a senior creative leader came to you for advice and said "What should my next move be?", given the way the world works now, what would you say to them?
Nick Law: (37:44)
Well, curiously, I get a lot of people asking me that. You know, because they see that I've tasted a lot of these different places. And it depends sometimes where you are in your career, how much you have to learn, what you find interesting. I would say that when you're on the client side, there isn't one type of client. You know, even though there are different sorts of agencies, there is a uniformity about the structure and the product of agencies.
When you're on the client side, the first question you should ask is, what's your relationship between that company and creativity? Do they have a design team? Do they make something that shows their sophistication in design, or marketing? It's very different working for a company like a Nike or an Apple, that clearly has some excellence around their marketing and their design, than working for a company that doesn't have that, you know? And joining a company with the promise of bringing that in, I think, is more difficult than joining an agency and changing it. Because agencies are service industries and they're flexible.
You know, it's unlikely that you're gonna change a big corporation, especially if you don't represent the product in that instance. You're a service. So you need to be, I think, much more careful when you go client side. But if you find the right client, it's pretty amazing. It can be a bit narrow. The great thing about the agency world is that you get this sort of breadth of experience. You could be working with a packaged goods company one day, technology company the next day, you know. It's dizzyingly interesting if you're engaged and working on different clients.
And I actually had, you know, I underestimated how much I liked being on the service side too. You know, being on the client side I enjoyed, because the relationship with the agencies was fun and great. But I didn't feel like, coming back to the service side, I was losing control. Everyone has a client. Everyone has a client. Everyone, even if it's a customer. It's a client, you know?
Charles: (39:59)
The most demanding in many ways.
Nick Law: (40:01)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Charles: (40:04)
What do you look for in emerging leaders? What are the characteristics that draw you to somebody from a leadership standpoint?
Nick Law: (40:12)
There's people that lead because they have a deep empathy and recognition of other creatives, and know how to nourish them. I'm really a big believer in the carrot rather than the stick. I don't like this sort of unrelenting controlling leader. I think your job is to find the right people, and when you find the right people then lead them with the carrot. I think if you're not leading them like that it might be because you haven't found the right people, right? (laughs) And so you're trying to mold the wrong people towards your will which is just miserable for everyone.
So, I think that that's what… being a manager is one way of leading. I also think under appreciated is being a leader through being a great practitioner. You know, there are certain people that actually, their influence is not scaled by being a manager. Their influence is scaled by producing amazing work and being the example of that great work. And typically those people have acolytes that follow them, so they have their own version of mentorship and leadership. It's just not management. I think both are really important. Most organizations reward the first version of a leader. There aren't a lot of organizations that recognize the second type that I was just talking about. But both are important.
And I do think creatives respect knowledge in the craft. Whatever it is you're leading, you should have a knowledge of the craft. It's not enough to be inspirational. You've got to be instructive. And to be instructive, you need to understand the mediums that these people are working in. And you’ve got to be able to contribute, not just direct. And I think that that's how you get people, especially now I think. I think maybe in the past it was a lot easier to have that sort of more dictatorial approach. You've got to really engage. It's about engagement, not compliance now.
Charles: (42:14)
And how does that manifest for you? How do you lead today?
Nick Law: (42:18)
I'm still figuring it out, because Accenture's such a huge and matrixed organization. And so, you know, at Apple, I would say there was a very specific way of leading, which was, their structure is experts leading experts. So you led mostly through direction of work. You’re always in the work at Apple. And every now and again you put your hand up and you say "Oh, we might want to go there, let's think about this.” But mostly you're in this vertical organization that's executing brilliantly.
A place like Accenture, the context of leadership changes a lot, actually. There might be times when you work with a team you've never met before. And there might be other times where you reconnect with a team and steer them in a different direction, or something like that. But I do think that the design team at Accenture has this great value statement. Which is, “Generosity and courage.” And I think it's a wonderful, like all good ideas, there's this tension between those two things because they seem to be at odds but they're actually not.
Charles: (43:22)
Yeah.
Nick Law: (43:23)
And I think as a leader, those two things are really important. You need to have the courage to be honest with people, but in a generous way. And so I think leadership is a lot about that. It's about being honest, transparent, which takes a certain amount of courage. But also being generous with that, you know, and expecting the best from the people that you're leading.
Charles: (43:47)
It takes real character to provide that, I think. I mean, the idea of being generous when the pressure is on is a wonderful construct, but hard for people to do in real life, real terms.
Nick Law: (43:59)
You know, people talk about "Oh, maybe we should… maybe this is a stretch goal", you know, when they talk about someone they’re not sure…
To me that's what leadership is all about. Stretch goals.
Charles: (44:08)
Yes. So well said. So well said. Yes
Nick Law: (44:10)
And if there's a risk in that, but there's also, you're taking part in that risk when you want to stretch someone further than they've gone. Because it's dependent on your support as much as their engagement. And so it's a symmetrical relationship. And you're both on the hook.
Charles: (44:30)
Well, it is a classic definition, because if you're not willing to lean in and, I hate that phrase, sorry. If you're not willing to stretch yourself and help somebody else stretch, then I think we could absolutely argue that then you're just managing people. Or you're just working within known constraints and known capabilities and just trying to put people in the right holes. And I agree with you entirely, I think leadership is a great way of thinking about it actually, that leadership is about being willing to help somebody stretch, as well as yourself, actually.
Nick Law: (44:57)
Yeah. You also want to be careful that you don't, you know… I think a lot of big companies have a managerial class.
Charles: (45:04)
Yeah.
Nick Law: (45:07)
And I think that you've got to sort of break out of that layer.
You've either got to have a vision and go up, or you've got to help direct and go down. And hopefully you're doing a little bit of both. But if the only thing you're doing is sitting in the sort of middle layer, the big companies have structures, you know, where that happens. It's just the tax of being big. I actually think that that's... you really get tested as a leader in big companies because of that. It means that your influence can be scaled more, that's a great thing. But it also means you need to sort of figure out how not to get caught up in the middle.
Charles: (45:47)
Your career's clearly a long way from over, but as you look back at how far you've come so far, do you have any regrets?
Nick Law: (45:53)
No, none whatsoever… I mean, I did come from pretty modest… you know my mom's a nurse, single mother and you know, none of my two other brothers, none of us have got degrees. So we're perfectly uneducated. (laughs)
Charles: (46:11)
(laughs)
Nick Law: (46:12)
And all grew up playing violent sport, which helped a lot too.
Charles: (46:15)
(laughs)
Nick Law: (46:17)
No, I think it's been wonderful. I mean, I'm one of those… I am, I tend to be optimistic. And I genuinely believe that at every juncture in your life you can take a bunch of different paths. And the success of those paths isn't dependent on whether you chose the right one, it's whether you make the most of the one that you chose. And I feel like I've made the most to of the paths that I've chosen, so I'm pretty happy. No regrets.
Charles: (46:46)
What are you afraid of?
Nick Law: (46:50)
Wow. I mean, the things that I'm afraid of, like most people, feel a little bit out of my control right now, you know? I think geopolitically we're at a pretty difficult place, you know? It seems that like most of our lives, because I imagine you and I are similar ages, we probably—
Charles: (47:11)
37, right? Both, I think we're both 37. That's right. Yeah.
Nick Law: (47:15)
That's right, yeah, that's how old my socks are.
Charles: (47:18)
(laughs)
Nick Law: (47:19)
(laughs) And, I think that we probably saw mostly progress, mostly—
Charles: (47:24)
Yeah.
Nick Law: (47:24)
...you know, like progress as in advancement of people's ambitions and, you know—
Charles: (47:32)
And their rights.
Nick Law: (47:33)
Yeah. And it feels like that things may not all be going in that direction right now. So that worries me. And I'm not a worrier. But, you know, I was just on call with some people and I was talking about how, you know, I spent last week at the beach, trying to relax, but I just found myself on Twitter trying to catch up with everything that's going on. And it just doesn't make you feel good. It turns you into a misanthrope, which I'm not (laughs).
Charles: (48:06)
And when, to your point, when we've lived our lives where the trend line generally and specifically has been up and to the right, and suddenly we're confronted by the reality that that might not be true. Not only might we be sliding down but going backwards, that is a jarring, jarring experience for all of us to live through. And obviously the question is, what are we gonna do about it? And—
Nick Law: (48:26)
Yeah.
Charles: (48:26)
...to the theme of the podcast, who is going to lead and who's going to step forward and up in this moment? Because we certainly need leaders now like never before.
Nick Law: (48:34)
That's for sure. Yeah, yeah. And just like in a company, I think a country needs to have the right incentives.
Charles: (48:43)
Yeah, yeah.
Nick Law: (48:45)
And it seems like some of the incentives are being perverted right now.
Charles: (48:49)
Yes, through pure self interest.
Nick Law: (48:52)
Yeah.
Charles: (48:52)
Nick, thank you so much for coming on today. It's hard to imagine that we've never met before, given how many people we have in common, but I hugely appreciate the humanity and the candor and the insight and the wisdom. And I hope we get a chance to meet in person before too long.
Nick Law: (49:06)
I'm sure we will since you're just up the road, just up the Hudson.
Charles: (49:10)
Just up the Hudson, indeed.
Nick Law: (49:11)
I look forward to it. It'll be fun.
Charles: (49:12)
Likewise. Thanks again.
Nick Law: (49:14)
Okay, Charles. Bye.
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