DJ Jackson of EA Sports
How much of your real self are you showing?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 236: DJ Jackson
Here’s a question. How much of your real self are you showing?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I’m asked to coach and advise their leaders and their leadership teams to help them succeed where leadership has its greatest impact. The intersection of strategy and humanity.
This week’s guest is DJ Jackson. He’s the Vice President of Brand at EA Sports. They’re a division of Electronic Arts and one of the world’s largest developers and publishers of sports video games. Their slogan, “If it’s in the game, it’s in the game” has become a reference point for judging the authenticity of their games.
Leading a business that exists in the digital world means straddling artificiality and reality. Information and emotion.
Which is a lot like leadership.
“I would imagine that certain elements of my team think that my confidence comes from some vulnerability. I think you can be confident without being arrogant, and I think an inability to be able to show that you have feeling and that you are emotionally guided is just inhuman.”
Leadership has gone through a generational shift in the least three years.
Leadership as a performance, which worked for more than half a century, has been made extinct overnight.
Human leadership is the complicated, contradictory path to success - both professionally and personally.
That creates a challenge for most of us. How much of ourselves do we want to show the world? And how much do we want to keep behind the curtain?
But even that has become complex. Because today’s world class talent aren’t willing to accept whatever you’re willing to give. They have their own needs and expectations, too.
First among which is they want to work for fully formed human beings. People with feelings, who don’t always have all the answers.
There’s a fine line balancing the confidence that all leaders need to project, with the vulnerability that comes from being a self-aware human.
Where are you on that continuum? How much of your real self are you showing?
Here’s DJ Jackson.
Charles (02:31):
DJ, welcome to Fearless. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
DJ Jackson (02:34):
It's very, very good of you to have me, Charles. I'm a long time listener. First time caller.
Charles (02:40):
Thank you. That's kind of you. When did creativity first show up in your life? When are you first conscious of creativity being a thing in your life?
DJ Jackson (02:46):
I think it's always been there. I was really lucky to grow up in a very loving, very warm household. There was always music and conversation. There was always football, actually, which I'm sure we’ll come on to, but I was thinking about this question, I knew you'd ask it and I actually can probably give a lot of credit to LEGO. I played with LEGO for as long as I could remember as a kid, and it definitely spoke to me in terms of the simplicity of building blocks and shapes and colors and being able to construct things in my head that maybe weren't yet written down. And that creative pursuit of being able to put the pieces together. And have you told stories as much as you build a model to yourself as you did that, was something that I really loved and has shaped my consideration, my comprehension of what it means to be creative and how the lines very often need to match. And very often you can create something out of nothing that was there previously. So maybe a slightly strange way.
Charles (03:49):
No, actually, I have to ask you this. I had the same experience. I mean, almost verbatim, you've just described my childhood, as well, and the thing I've been wrestling with is, LEGOs become so sophisticated and the models are so perfect and I'm not sure that I like that as much because it takes away the imagination of what you could build out of this stuff. I don’t know, what do you think?
DJ Jackson (04:11):
I think that's right. I think probably what LEGOs had to do is to compete in the digital space, the space that I operate in now. And there is a sophistication to that. There's also, within the digital world, an ability to be able to go back and start again more readily, more easily than maybe you can. If you get one brick wrong in a thousand brick model, you've got a challenge to go back. So I think they've had to keep pace with that. But I will say the constituent element, the atomic unit of what makes LEGO amazing, it's still the same. You can still make a dinosaur that isn't really a dinosaur and a pirate ship can become a fighter plane as much as it can become a medieval castle. And I love that and I love the ability to be able to, as they say, tell stories as you were building.
Charles (04:58):
I saw somewhere, maybe on LinkedIn, they launched or dropped a video the other day showing that they have now made a working tiny vending machine which can actually drop bottles of miniature Coca-Cola out at you. Certainly there's no limit to their imagination. It's extraordinary. How did you express growing up, other than LEGO?
DJ Jackson (05:20):
Arguably either badly or exactly as everybody else did. I grew up in sort of a very small northern English town and there wasn't really very much there to be able to express yourself through other than kind of the constants, at least in my life. Music was one of them, but football was certainly the other. I kind of defined myself through school as being a footballer and was lucky enough to play at a relatively good level. And that kind of became the way that you would carry yourself, introduce yourself. You became known in the rest of the school or in the rest of your club or whatever as being particularly good at one thing and maybe potentially particularly bad at others. I was always a little bit of a luxury player, so I wasn't necessarily all that good at tackling back, but I could pick a pass and I could move the ball up the field.
So I kind of define myself as that. And interestingly, we moved to that northern English town from just outside London, just ahead of secondary school, and I kind of got this sense that I was a bit of a foreigner, and I quite like that and I think I define myself as being slightly different. Even now. We've traveled the world as a family and I quite like being a point of difference in a community and I think you can offer a point of difference as a result of your experience. And it was kind of that I was kind of the foreign footballer, which is a trope that my imagination goes wild with sometimes.
Charles (06:46):
How far did you go in the game? What level did you reach?
DJ Jackson (06:50):
Yeah, really not as far as maybe I'd have liked or if I'd have put a little bit more focus into, I could have. I played, I had a YTSS contract with Carlisle United, so a relatively average at the time, third division team. But the training was exceptional and actually the catchment area for that club, the way it works in youth football is you get an area you have to live within. I think it was two miles or six miles, two hours or whatever of the club. So that became my club and I loved it. And the ability to be able to play football at high level and work as a team and know your teammates from other parts of either the county or schools that you didn't really interact with was incredible. So I played until I was about 16. And then for me and so many other kids, it kind of just didn't really work out. So I thought I could be a third rate footballer, which I still am by the way, or a first rate something else. And that was always going to be the choice I wanted to explore what else I might be able to become, still taking some of the lessons that I'd learned from that experience, but being able to maybe investigate what else that was out there.
Charles (07:53):
How did you make that shift? Was that a hard thing to do? I mean, was that an emotional departure for you to leave that behind?
DJ Jackson (08:00):
Yeah, absolutely. It is incredibly painful. You kind of have this vision in your head of what you think your life might be and what it might become. And I was going to be a footballer my entire life and that was the thing that was going to define me. And then when you realize it isn't going to be that either you look around and you realize there are people accelerating far beyond you or just you're not getting the playing time or you're playing out a position or whatever it might be. I think as a kid growing up, you see that all as net negative and I think hindsight's a wonderful thing. But going back now, I see that as just an opportunity to learn something different and play out position and take some education from that. But at the time it was really, really challenging, but you kind of find other things.
I went back to school and got the A levels I needed to go to university and did the only thing that I thought I was any good at at the time, which was writing. And you express yourself through a different means of creativity. And for me it was words. And I think that it's really interesting and I'm really lucky in the fact that I've been able to now combine both of those things, kind of a love of creative arts and expression and football in this privileged job at EA Sports. So I mean, we are all kind of the output of our collective experiences, but mine is pretty direct from creative pursuits and football ending up at a video games company that builds the biggest football platform in the world.
Charles (09:25):
Did you always want to lead? When did that show up for you?
DJ Jackson (09:29):
Yeah, I think so. I don't think I really ever knew, and maybe I'm not even sure today exactly what leadership means. I think it means different things to different people and it probably should. But I always wanted to be responsible. I always wanted to be the front of house and the back of house. I wanted to carry the team. I wanted to lead at least visibly, at least vocally. I like encouragement, I like bringing people along and telling them stories and having them follow me. But I think football has been interesting for me in that it helps me organize my thoughts. I've said previously, I think football is this cultural constant through which I interpret and understand the world. And I think in formations, I think in four, four, two or four three three design. And I think it's helped me understand what I think my interpretation of leadership might be.
I'm a very restless person and I think more often than not, I think there's always got to be a better idea. I'm very rarely satisfied with an output or very rarely willing to accept that there may not be a better way. And I think that comes from the fluid nature of the game and how you can maybe build something from nothing and that the collective relies on the individual as much as the other way around. So if management is kind of organizing complexity, I think that leadership might be taking that complexity, making it simple and getting to an output from it. So if I have a style of leadership at all, I think it's trying to distill everything down to a formation, a structure, a readily simplified understanding, and then generating real value from that for people. And then ultimately for the organization as a whole.
Charles (11:12):
What gets in the way of that for you?
DJ Jackson (11:15):
It really is complexity. We live in an increasingly complex world, not least in my role in my company. We live at the intersection of football, sport, entertainment, technology. There are sort of cultural adjacencies like fashion and music as well. And none of these industries are known particularly for being slow or being simple, but I think you can't fight that complexity with more complication. And I think in modern businesses, we have a bias towards complicating previously simple constructs. We love talking about strategy and as if every single thing needs to have its own one, and that they're all discreet and disclosed from each other, which just isn't true. So complexity is the thing that often gets in the way. I think my approach is always to take those constituent pieces, pull them apart, and then rearrange them in a way that feels simpler and feels more easy to understand for my team or for our players, for our fans, and then offer that back in a way that adds real value. It's not always easy though, and I think more often than not I revel in the failure of that now and try seven or eight different ways of getting it to be more simple and getting more value from it versus being frustrated of what actually just is. And complexity in the modern world just is.
Charles (12:36):
How do you know an attempt has failed? What does failure look like that allows you to reset? Because I think a lot of leaders struggle with the ability to acknowledge that something has failed fast enough. And to your point, you're working in such a high speed environment, what does failure look like and how do you respond to it?
DJ Jackson (12:53):
Yeah, I think we get really clear signals. There's not a lot of noise in our telemetry and the data that we hear back from consumers or partners, even internally, there's so many metrics now that we measure and so many ways in which we can track the output that we've delivered and whether or not it had impact, but we get those signals really quickly and we can fail fast here and we can pick that up and we can reconstitute the pieces and go again. So I think that's helpful. I think failure is a collective sense of negative energy, and I think that's very, very hard to quantify. But I think you know it when it's there, I think success is that collective feeling that something went well and something happened that whether it was very hard, like a metric that you measured against and that you exceeded or met, or whether it was just more of a feeling that you'd crossed a line that previously hadn't been crossed.
So I think that you'll know when you failed, when success doesn't exist in the energy of an environment. And I think again, sometimes that's very hard to quantify, especially in a live service environment where yeah, you failed, but there's always, tomorrow. I think momentum is a very, very undervalued and very, very hard to quantify metric. But at the moment, certainly within EA Sports, we feel like we have a positive upward trajectory. We feel that we have momentum. So there's a collective sense of success right now, but it's not always going to be that way. And I think you can treat failure and success as just two different types of energy that you have to contend with in any environment. So I think failure can be learning, failure can just be something that's on the other side of the coin, around the corner, success tomorrow.
Charles (14:39):
So failure is the absence of a feeling for you.
DJ Jackson (14:43):
Yeah, I mean the podcast's called Fearless, and I think fear is certainly the absence of joy or the absence of an understanding that something's going well. And I think if failure is the absence of success, that's okay. Success is definitely there. You've just got to go find it. That feels maybe ever a slightly verging on spiritual. It's not really meant to. We have hard metrics here and we certainly judge ourselves against them and within those numbers and within those signals whether or not you're being successful, but I don't think you should see failure as a negative. It's just the other side of the coin.
Charles (15:18):
Do you think leadership, I've never asked anybody this, but it's a really interesting question. I know, I don’t know if it's interesting, but I've never asked anybody this. Do you think leadership is spiritual at its core?
DJ Jackson (15:29):
Yeah, absolutely. I think it has to be. How do you inspire followership without having some sense of offering more of yourself than maybe you ordinarily would? I don't think you can lead through action alone or word alone. I think it has to be something a bit more cultural and there has to be an energetic vibration to whether or not people feel inspired to come with you on a journey. Again, that's a quality that's really hard to quantify. It's a little bit like a coach I once had said, if I could only bottle confidence, we'd win every game. And I think that's true, but you can't and you can only sort of gradually get closer to having a confident organization, a confident unit, a confident team if you inspire leadership and you inspire followership through your leadership, I should say. And I think that can verge on the spiritual, it doesn't have to feel religious in any sense, and probably not should it. But yeah, there has to be a bigger sense of self in anything that you're trying to achieve collectively. So if that's spiritual, then yeah, I feel it does exist that way.
Charles (16:35):
Yeah, and I think to your point, I think increasingly it's important that we separate spirituality from religion for a thousand reasons that this podcast is probably not well equipped to get into.
DJ Jackson (16:47):
I didn't think it would go this way, Charles, but I'm happy that it is.
Charles (16:50):
Yeah, but I mean I think it's something that I've become more aware of in the last few, maybe even months, that the element of spirituality in really meaningful effective leadership in the sense of being connected to something that's bigger than just the moment and bigger than just the immediate business problem. Leadership is a really privileged position, right? Because we have the ability to influence people's lives in ways that we often don't really fully understand. And I think if you don't bring a level of spirituality or an element of spirituality to that, you're probably missing an opportunity to make a really big difference.
DJ Jackson (17:22):
You can lead through action, you can lead through the way you behave and what you put out there into the world in terms of energy. I have people here in my organization who inspire me every day at arguably very, very junior levels, but just through the way that they approach and interpret the world and the way that they drive output from the input that they provide to the company or to our players is really inspiring. And they're leaders, they have to be. But I love the framing that you put around that, and I think religion increasingly is a reason for people to feel divided, and spirituality could be a very real reason why people could feel connected.
Charles (17:58):
Yeah, I think that's really well said. And actually football is a really interesting example. I'd never thought about this either, but football is a really interesting example of leadership not requiring title. I mean, you can watch a game and if you know a team well, I followed Chelsea since 1969, so you can watch a game and you can see who's leading on this pitch and who isn't and what's the impact they're having. And it doesn't matter whether they're the captain or not, it really is about attitude, behavior. I mean, there's so many different subtle elements I think, but I think football is a really good reference point for leadership.
DJ Jackson (18:32):
Yeah, I think it is. And that's what I mean about it being one of the ways in which I interpret and understand the world. Football is the antithesis of that kind of plan and repeat model. It kind of glorifies decision and execution in the moment, but in parallel, it demands that the individual understands both the higher order system and plays with freedom within it. I mean, I love it in my head at least it's symphony and poetry and story and all those things in one. tragedy. As an Everton fan, certainly tragedy.
Charles (19:04):
Oh, so sorry. One of my very best friends is a lifelong Everton fan as well. I'll have to connect the two of you, but he has almost given the game up. I think he's in such despair at this point.
DJ Jackson (19:16):
Yeah, well, in the 38 years of my existence, it's been utterly miserable.
Charles (19:23):
Jon's older than you, so he had some of the joy of the seventies and eighties. But yeah, it's going to be a pretty tough year for you guys I think this year. I'm sorry to say.
DJ Jackson (19:31):
Say. I think so too. That's all right.
Charles (19:33):
So flipping that around, how do you define success on a personal level and professional level?
DJ Jackson (19:38):
Yeah, I think for me success is definitely, I do set myself specific goals. I don't think they're goals that maybe would be recognizable to a management consultant or a corporate strategist. There are certain goals that I see as being related to people and culture that we're trying to build. There are goals that I see that are obviously a little bit harder than that and a little bit more measurable in terms of the metrics that we follow. But my goals are around a personal philosophy, which candidly is really simple, verging on simplistic, which is it's the pursuit of happiness at the expense of no one else's. And that's really hard because more often than not, if you move energy to one place, it leaves another. So happiness moving to one place often leaves other people slowly less happy than before, but it doesn't have to, it's not a zero sum game.
I said the word simplicity there, and I think that's formed a really, really important part of how I operate in life. I kind of have this endless search for the simplicity. We mentioned complexity previously, and it's how I tend to combat it sort of comes from your upbringing. And even my early career, I was at Saatchi in London and they had a theory around brutal simplicity, which really spoke to me. It was one of the major reasons why I wanted to be there. And I think it's increasingly important in the modern world. There's so much stuff, it's tough to filter the signal from the noise there, or at least the quality in the quantity that's now available to people. I actually think simplicity is really hard, obviously. And success for me is measuring myself about how much simplicity I can bring to a very, very complex organization.
Charles (21:21):
You guys are going through a massive rebranding. I mean, I think you've been quoted as saying one of the biggest in the history of marketing. I think it'd be hard to argue with that. You've talked a lot about the values of the organization and at moments like this, you have to be able to lean on the values of an organization to guide you, right? Because there's so much when you blow something up, but it has that much history behind it to replace it with something else, it has to be guided by something more than purely metrics. You've talked about authenticity being really critical to the company. How do you make sure that the thing you are trying to promote externally is also meaningful and real internally, how does authenticity for you translate from outside to inside?
DJ Jackson (22:09):
I mean, I go back to the central DNA of EA Sports for as long as it's existed. We've always said if it's in the game, it's in the game. And it's not just a line, although it is a nice line, it is a truth that exists at the heart of our company. And we always said our job was to kind of blur the line between the virtual and the real in sport. That was very, very hard 30 years ago with a few pixels on a 16 bit screen. It's much easier now, or I probably shouldn't say easier. I think it's more available to us now. And there's obviously an immense amount of effort that goes in every year to making the game feel more and more real. But I think authenticity is not only the output that we offer to the world, but it's an input, it's a truth at the heart of the company that we know what real feels like and we know what real can stimulate in an organization.
And at the start of the decision-making process as to whether or not we were going to take this monumental step, we did kind of look at ourselves very hard in the mirror and say, do we mean it? There are no half measures in this step. It's a 30 year old IP that's loved by, as I said, many millions, hundreds of millions of people all over the world. We had some research recently that I think we'll publish shortly that says 62 million football fans around the world are football fans solely and only because of our video game. That's an incredible responsibility, an amazing opportunity too, but you have to be authentic in the pursuit of offering that experience to people. I think if you flip flop on your ideals or what you hold to be true in terms of values, it's very easy to see through that.
And it's very, very difficult to build a brand on shaky foundations. And I don't think we have those. I think we know what authenticity means. I think we've been born in authenticity, and I said previously our job is to authentically, even if sometimes maybe fantastically put fans into an environment that immerses them in the culture, the story and the truth of a sport. And if we break that immersion, that experience value diminishes exponentially. So our job is to force the lines between the virtual and the real to blur and hopefully to the extent that a fan doesn't really see the join and can live out a meaningful virtual maybe version of a sports experience that might be beyond 99% of a population. It was beyond me. And as I say, that's real power, that's real responsibility. If you hold sway over someone's experience, especially a young person's experience in something as powerful as global football, then you better make damn sure you're doing a great job of it.
And that's what led us to make a pretty significant change in stepping away from FIFA and the FIFA license because we couldn't do as good a job as we wanted to under some of the limitations that naming rights partner imposed, and candidly, rightly so, their limitations because they have a business to run. I think sometimes I have a frustration that it is such a commercial organization that also has this credible responsibility to run the operations and the rules of the game, the soul of the game. And I think that's a conflict that we certainly struggled with. And as a result, we made this decision that it was right and it was the right moment after 30 years to strike out on our own and build something that we felt our fans and our partners could be really proud of. And we're certainly proud of the job we've done so far, but it's going to be an immense effort to carry this new flame into a future that we think that fans will love.
Charles (25:36):
I mean, I'm really struck by the complexity of the world that you must live in and the nuance of that world because, “If it's in the game, it's in the game,” which is a saying I must have quoted to myself a thousand times over, I'm sure like a lot of football followers. But there's things in the game that are obviously unpleasant, more than unpleasant, what's going on in Spain who've managed somehow to turn one of the great moments in their football's nation history into one of the worst in about an hour or less, finding the right reference point in the world that is that complicated where you go from celebrating heroes to staring down villains in moments. How do you keep a reference point on that? How do you make sure that the thing that's in the game are positive and providing the right kind of inspiration to your audiences?
DJ Jackson (26:26):
I think it genuinely does come back to that authenticity. You need to have certain values that you uphold, and they can't just be written on the walls of the building or inside of a brand book. They need to be lived and felt by the organization every day. We use kind of those values that we constructed as a guidebook for how we operate in the world, and it is complex. We have over 300 licensed IP partners in the game. Everything from organizations as big and inherently themselves as UEFA or the Premier League all the way through other leagues, partner clubs, and then down to individual retired athletes. All of that complexity lives within our ecosystem, but we followed some fairly basic rules. To be honest, I think we follow football wherever we possibly can. We try not to be a political organization, although we have very, very hard lines when it comes to racism, when it comes to the acceleration and elevation of women's football.
And I couldn't agree more. I think what's happened in Spain has taken something that should have been this incredible, powerful, positive and energetic moment for women's football and in fact, if anything should have been the parallel opposite of that moment, but unfortunately it still happens in our game. I think what we did, certainly when it comes to women's football, it's one of the more invigorating pieces of work that I've been involved in in my career. We took two years to work out how to introduce women's club football into our experience. We knew that you couldn't take muscular skeletal data from men's avatars and put a female head on it and hope for the best. We had to go and create volumetric capture from video, which allowed us to understand and interpret the women's game in a much more meaningful way.
We then understood the cultural context, the business context, how women's football is different technically, how it operates on the field and off the field. And only then when we'd helped educate and make aware 1200 developers and 500 support staff that makes this product, only then did we feel like we'd done enough to be able to introduce women's football to the game because it is an immense part of football's future and it shouldn't be in any way denigrated in the way that I think we've seen in the last couple of days. And if anything, we need to do more and go further to elevate it. You'll see that in the products that we build in the future.
Charles (28:45):
All of that complexity can make some people very fearful of getting it wrong. What's your relationship with fear?
DJ Jackson (28:53):
I was thinking about this last night, and honestly, the only thing that scared me before having kids, and I think the moment that you have kids, you weirdly become immediately more fearful. The only thing that scared me previously was like a blank piece of paper, starting with something that had no context and nothing really existed around. I think my management style is taking complexity and organizing it, and my leadership style, as I said, is restless, but I'm a really good editor. I think if I could distill my skill for what it's worth down to something meaningful, I think I edit others’ work well. And again, that's a responsibility and a power you have to wield very carefully because you can overstep and it can become more your idea than theirs or you can lose sight of what the original idea was.
But I have this immense respect for people who can incept an idea, who can start with nothing. And that's hard for me. It was hard at school and university. It's hard in my job now to go from nothing to something, but I think when there's something there and it's contextual and it's interesting and there's kind of a bright spark there, I can take those million points of light and I can organize them really well. And I'm really lucky that we have some brilliant people here who can incept ideas from nothing. So that's the only thing I wouldn't say I'm fearful of, but I'm wary of. And then, yeah, the moment that you have kids, I think you become very, very fearful for what the world might be like for them. And you kind of focus your attention elsewhere and try and make it a better world for them in the limited way that you can. You are also terribly scared the first time they go to school or they cross a road or they eat something and they start choking.
There's just endless, endless fear that comes from that. But you have to learn to deal with it because you don't own them, they're not yours. They are themselves, and your job is just to try and create the conditions where they can start to deal with their own fears really well. So I don't know that I'm scared of anything. Maybe that's a very big headed thing to say, but I deal with fear really well. Again, maybe it goes back to what we were talking about previously about it just being the opposite side of the coin of ambition. And I think one of your previous guests said something which I loved, which was creativity is a really optimistic act and I think I verge on the side of optimism, and as a result, fear is just a way of getting there.
Charles (31:22):
What triggers you?
DJ Jackson (31:26):
I think negative behavior in any sense. I have very, very limited patience for whether that's somebody being overtly just negative in general or operating and behaving in a way that intentionally creates tension in an organization that doesn't have a potentially positive outcome. I think tension can be really powerful and that friction can create sparks. Certainly at the outset of building this hopefully globally relevant and resonant brand, there was some tension, but it created this incredible outcome that we feel very, very proud of today. But tension without output or tension for the sake of it, I have very, very limited patience for and I like to eliminate within my organization. I don't think it offers anything of any meaning in the world where there's so many more things we could be spending our time on, so many better things for us to focus on.
Charles (32:20):
How long are you willing to work with the person who's creating that negative tension before you decide enough, we have to move on?
DJ Jackson (32:28):
It depends on their context. So if they're coming into the conversation or they're trying to engineer an outcome that actually has meaning, but they go about it in the wrong way, I'll work with them endlessly to try and craft that into something that's a little more positive. If the intent I feel is without purpose and is there for effect, the performative nature of negativity, I have absolutely zero patience for, and the tolerances is very, very short, but I have to go and at least investigate that. I think I have a responsibility to understand their motivations and whether or not, or actually there's something inherent in there or there's something hidden in there that we need to encourage to come out and be positive. But yeah, there have been moments certainly in my career where maybe I could have acted differently and I maybe could have had slightly more patience for that individual. But I think overall I've been guided by my belief system and my belief system is that if you're not trying to add something, then you are by effect trying to take something away. And I don't have time necessarily for that.
Charles (33:32):
Yeah, it's an area that I think a lot of leaders really struggle with, which is the willingness to fire somebody who is just damaging the organization. And the deeply human aspect of that obviously is important, but I find often it kicks in to a large extent and overwhelms actually what's right and helpful for the organization at this moment. Do you struggle with that at all on a human level?
DJ Jackson (33:55):
Yeah, absolutely. I think you always should and always have to care about the person, and you have to distinguish and separate the person from maybe their processes or the way in which they've acted in order to try and engineer an outcome. So you have endless empathy there, and you should because it's someone's life, it's someone's partner, it's someone's kids, mortgage, future potential. All of those kinds of things revolve around in your head when you have to have those conversations. But in trying to separate the way in which they've acted and the person that they are, I think you can get to hopefully an outcome that gives that individual something to grasp onto and something to maybe learn in and of themselves. And I think selfishly, you take something from it as well. It's a necessary part of evolving an organization to try and create a future that you feel is relevant.
And as a leader, you obviously take immense responsibility in trying to craft that because organizations are a reflection of the people that lead 'em. They have to be. We go back to that kind of spiritual aspect of leadership. If you're not leaving something of yourself behind and that's something that you leave behind isn't positive, then maybe this isn't the right organization for you and maybe you would be better off pushing your energy elsewhere. So yeah, I think empathy is a very, very important trait in any kind of conversation with another individual, but you have to be able to separate that from the way in which they went about their role or the behaviors that they exhibited in doing it. And if you can do that, I think you can create really logical rationale as to why this isn't potentially very positive on either side.
Charles (35:30):
And picking up on that, how willing are you to share with your team when you are struggling? I mean, I think the definition of leadership, which - we're different age, but we've both grown up in a world in which the view of especially male leadership is supposed to be confident forward facing classic, top down, hierarchical leadership. Don't show your feelings, just provide a reference point. How vulnerable are you willing to be these days with the people around you?
DJ Jackson (35:58):
I mean, I would imagine that certain elements of my team think that my confidence comes from some vulnerability. I think you can be confident without being arrogant, and I think an inability to be able to show that you have feeling and that you are emotionally guided is just inhuman. Gut feel is a very real thing. And I think being guided by the collection of the experiences that you'd had previously is just a very human trait. And some of those experiences aren't always positive. And being able to share that and show that actually is a very endearing way of galvanizing followership. So I don't think confidence should always be that you always have the answer and confidence certainly shouldn't verge on just a blunt, very forward focused drive for the next thing and not acknowledge the fact that the current thing has been difficult. So I would like to think that my team and my company understand when I have an emotional reaction to something, but I don't mean emotional at all to be negative.
I think it's just a sensory response to a set of circumstances that you learn from. So have I previously let my frustrations be seen? Absolutely. And I would like to think that they've been seen positively, and I know that that's not actually always the case, but an emotional response in a vulnerable response is equally, if not more important than a very rational logical one when confronted by passionate circumstances like football, like video games, like technology, like the wider world that we operate in. You can be really annoyed at times. You could be really happy at times. The highs and lows of winning and losing are very evident in what I do every single day. And I think in not showing that you sort of dehumanize yourself to an extent where you can't lead.
Charles (37:50):
When that happens, when that frustration shows up, do you acknowledge that to the people around you and kind of reset it for them or engage with them? I'm just curious because I think a lot of people over the years have had that situation happen and then try to brush it under the carpet as though it never existed. We were in, my wife and I were in a restaurant six or seven months ago, and we walked in and there was just tension. You could just tell there was tension in the restaurant. And I turned to her and I said, something's going on here. And the waiters were all walking around sort of on pins and needles and the whole environment was very strange. And five minutes later we heard the owner's wife who was front of house screaming at the top of her lungs at the chef who was in the kitchen. And the whole place fell into this hush. And then we all tried to pretend like we hadn't heard it, and the waiters tried to pretend that they hadn't heard it. 20 minutes later, the wife came out and things kind of returned to normal, but we were all left with a slightly uneasy feeling over the rest of dinner. And so I just wonder when that happens for you, are you able to acknowledge it? Do you find acknowledging it helps the people around you, what's your experience with that?
DJ Jackson (39:06):
I love that story. It reminds me of another one. We recently had an event in Amsterdam to kind of announce the new brand and launch it in a place where we felt it was relevant and culturally resonant to do so, kind of the home of total football, football and everything else. But the story is on the way to the hotel from the airport. I got in a taxi, and the taxi driver was a very friendly Dutch chap, and he was talking to me about the fact that once he’d been struck by lightning, and he told the story and he said, “I knew it was going to happen for about 30 seconds beforehand, there was this genuine electricity in the air and you could feel an overwhelming sense of something about to explode.” And he's telling me this. And as you mentioned the story in the restaurant, then I think you always feel the tension.
I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it's a human ability to be able to galvanize multiple different sensory inputs or whatever and have an experiential sense of something that's about to happen. But that electricity, I think does exist in the tension between individuals. And unless you have an output for it, like a screaming match from a maitre’d or a bolt of lightning, then it's going to exist and you're going to live in that discomfort. And that sort of electric sense of something that may or may not happen makes people feel very uneasy. So I do think I have a very ready sense of wanting to have the output and have the conversation and the difficult discussion. We mentioned, again at the inception of the rebrand and in finding a creative agency that would really help us and guide us and hold us to account and we could hold them to account for building something as important to millions of people, hundreds of millions of people as this net new brand.
And it started with a fight. It started with an argument with Nils Leonard at Uncommon where they pitched and they were the kind of new hotness, the hot shop in town, and we were expecting great things. And the pitch was okay, it was kind of like seven out of 10 and they’re not a seven out of 10 agency. And I'd heard about this guy, Nils, and the fact that we shouldn't worry because everything would go through Nils and Nils would see everything before it left the shop and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, well, I should probably have a conversation with this guy because I don't know how he wants to operate an organization, but that seems unreasonable to me, and frankly, the output right now isn't good enough. So we sat down over Zoom and we had this conversation. I just said, listen, I don't know if you understand how important this is. I don't know if you want this enough, and I'm certainly not feeling that from you. And we'd heard these great things, and frankly it was disappointing and not good enough. And I said, so do you want it? The simple question is, do you mean it? And do you want this? Do you this brief and do you want this work? And his response was sort of, well, how f*cking dare you?
Charles (42:03):
It doesn't sound like Nils at all.
DJ Jackson (42:05):
No, it doesn't, does it? But do you know, it was exactly the response I wanted to hear because had it been, oh, well, we're terribly sorry about that and let us go again, we'll fly over there and we'll have this, he was like, I don't know. I don't know who you think you are. I know exactly how important this is. And frankly, we poured heart and soul into that work. And if it didn't land, that's one thing, but don't you dare question our intent. And from that very, very honest, very real conversation, I think we've created something that certainly I feel very proud of. I believe Neil's and the team do as well. It's reference point work on both sides that genuinely came from a moment of real friction that electricity that existed before the lightning hit. But I think had we not allowed for the lightning to hit, we'd still be operating in this sense of unease as to whether we did it well or not. And that wasn't going to be acceptable. Certainly not to me, and I don't think to him either.
Charles (42:59):
What do you not know about yourself yet that you want to find out?
DJ Jackson (43:06):
I think my career is probably going to be slightly winding. I grew up in an ad agency. I then went to work for an investment bank, and I found myself at a video game company in Canada. I don't think that's a particularly logical path. I actually don't know that it's all that unusual either. In the modern world, you kind of tend to follow your nose a little bit. There's no set path. But what I probably haven't found out about myself yet is where I'm genuinely most useful. And if I think of myself as sort of a restless editor, where best do you put that skillset? Where do you particularly place that in the world to offer the maximum amount of value it can either to the individuals around you or the company that you work either for in or you build? So I think I'm in this incredibly privileged moment to be part of this incredible company doing a very brave thing and leading based on its values and having a real set of an understanding and a comprehension of itself at the heart of the decision-making that it executes. And I couldn't be happier with that right now, but that restless sense inside me will no doubt guide me to want to offer more value. And at EA I think there's endless opportunity to do that. Within football, there is certainly endless opportunity to do that. So I just haven't found out yet maybe how best to deploy what I think is my skillset, and that editing is likely to guide me to lots of interesting places.
Charles (44:38):
And last question for you. What are you afraid of, as you look at the future?
DJ Jackson (44:44):
I don't think I've ever been more optimistic within my work life. I don't think I've ever been more appreciative of my personal life than I'm, and the only thing that I think concerns me is sort of things out of my control, the way the world is in terms of division. So now the professionalization of division and seemingly now that people think that I disagree with you means that I hate you is something that's really, really hard to overcome. It's as predictable as the weather sometimes. And I think that plus some of the major, major challenges that we face as a society around global warming, the destruction of the natural world is something that how the hell do you solve that when you can't even decide whether or not we should have a three or four or five day week? It's a really, really complex set of circumstances that I think requires real collaboration, positive intent, ambition to resolve.
And we're kind of scratching around in the margins right now and squabbling with each other over very trivial things when the woods are burning to completely steal Nil's perspective on the world. That incredible quote that I think drives a lot of his ambition and I think really spoke to me at the inset of our relationship is more relevant than it's ever been because they are literally burning. So I think as much as I can feel very satisfied with myself in terms of where I currently am in career and where I think my team is headed and my family life is everything that I could have ever wished for, I do feel like there is a sense of foreboding in society and in the world right now, which I think at some point I'll probably point a little bit more energy towards, but I don't look at that. Again, we go back to fear. I'm not fearful of it. I just see it as something that needs to be overcome and something that needs to be challenged. But yeah, that's probably about it.
Charles (46:44):
A couple of months ago, I asked Nils if he would introduce me to the leaders that he thought were the most compelling, impactful, and human that he knew for the podcast. And he didn't reply directly. And the next day there was an email introducing you and I. Sometimes, actions speak louder than words. So I want to thank you so much for coming on and I wish you nothing but luck for the future.
DJ Jackson (47:07):
Charles, an incredible privilege and a wonderful conversation. And I’ll be listening.
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