"The Dancer"
“I think the first thing is that agencies and most creative companies love living in possibility, it's their favorite thing to do. Clients tend to live in feasibility. It's like okay that's all great but how the hell are we going to make this happen. So I used to verbally out loud say, "This is a conversation about possibility, so let's just have that conversation first and then this is a conversation for feasibility. We're not talking about what's possible anymore, we have to stop ideating and start working out how we can move things forward.”
Of the many challenges of creative leadership, high on the list is the ability to manage ambiguity and uncertainty. To move with equal comfort across the spectrum between the known and the unknown.
Exploring what is possible, what could be, is a pre-requisite for Fearless Creative Leaders.
But those dreams, those otherwise unimaginable futures, mean nothing if you can’t marry them to a way to get things done. To turn creativity into commerce. To produce what I have come to describe as Profitable Creativity.
Doing that, as scale and over-time has four components.
A clear definition of the future that you and your business want to create and what that matters t any one.
An organizational design and operating practices that support the vision.
An eco-system of talent-centric resources that fill the organization with both thinkers and doers. Some work for you. Some work with you. But knowing the skills and mindset your business needs needs has never been more critical or complex.
And lastly a clear set of metrics - some financial, of course but many not - that allow you to measure where you are on the journey.
All of this has to be supported by a relentless willingness to circle back to the beginning of the process and check that your vision of the future is still meaningful and relevant.
These elements, properly designed and implemented, work together like dance partners, sometimes driving the rhythm of the accompanying soundtrack, sometimes flowing with it. But fluid, connected and supportive.
The result is magical. As all creative businesses should be.
Rosemarie Ryan has been leading creativity almost of her life. She has helped to build some of the most famous and effective creative companies of their time, leaving behind her a wake of improved businesses and more thoughtful people.
Today, she is the CO founder of CO Collective, a strategy and innovation company based in New York.
I talked to Rose about the role her family played in unlocking her leadership at a very early age, about the importance of hard conversations when you’re the leader, and about the role of generosity in her leadership philosophy.
Three Takeaways
Always work towards a vision or a plan, a definition of what comes next. It provides guidance, and determination to get to something specific. It minimizes the instinct to react in the moment.
A willingness to be true to who you are and what matters to you during that journey. People know what they're going to get and that's reassuring - even when the standards are high.
A genuine interest in other people and how they are doing. Compassion for how you bring the best out of others and help them to contribute to the journey.
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 26: "The Dancer" Rosemarie Ryan
Charles:
Rosemarie, welcome to Fearless, thanks for being here.
Rosemarie Ryan:
My pleasure, good to be here.
Charles:
My first question for you is one that I ask all my guests, what's your first memory of something being creative to you. What's your first memory of creativity showing up in your life?
Rosemarie Ryan:
God that's a very good question, I'm not sure that I know exactly how to answer that. But I guess I would say that going to concerts, dancing, I was always going out listening to music, dancing, going to concerts, that's really where creativity came to life for me and watching ... I was a very serious dancer when I was 16, 17, 18 I was in the center of London going to where all the folks were who loved to dance and hang out, so it was really about the clothes we were wearing, about the people we were hanging out with, the conversations we were having and the kind of dancing that we were doing. I guess that for me was where I really saw a lot of different people expressing their creativity in a way that was true to who they were.
Charles:
What kinds of music?
Rosemarie Ryan:
All kinds of music. At that time punk was on the rise. I was more on the kind of soul kind of things, but most of my friends were into both so I was naturally into both although the both didn't always mix very well which was kind of interesting too, that had its own kind of energy. But yeah, I used to hang out with the Star Council or the Jam at the time. I was lucky enough to hang out with a lot of those people, and then making...
Charles:
With the actual bands?
Rosemarie Ryan:
With the actual people yes that were making all of that music.
Charles:
How did you get to meet them?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Just through parties, being in the right placing dancing. We were all interested in the same stuff so it was fantastic, it was fabulous and they were just normal, average people like us just having a good time in London.
Charles:
Where did you go to school?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I went to a school called Bishop Thomas Grant, a Catholic comprehensive in South London as they would say. It was a huge school, they had I think there were like nine classes in each year. For London that's a very big school. It was a pretty good school I think, I'm glad I went there but it was very regimented, very Catholic so it was like one one to one nine you kind of knew where you stood from the moment you walked in the door and you pretty much stayed in that track, it was very hard to move out of it. But that was also really interesting for me as well because it was so Catholic they were very clear about what you were supposed to think and feel, and say. For me that wasn't who I was, never had been really that way.
My family were very kind like you need to be who you are, that's a critical thing in life. My mother would say, "It's better that someone loves you or hates you than feel indifferent to you." So anyway, at school I remember that we had to watch all the girls, it was a mixed school, all the girls had to watch this anti-abortion film when we were 13 but the boys didn't have to watch it because they didn't really think it was their problem, because it was the girls that got pregnant, not the boys. When I came out one of the teachers said to me, "What do you think about that?" And I said, "Well when you show me the pro-abortion film I'll let you know how I feel about that." I was just furious.
Charles:
What a great answer. You were how old were when you said this?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I was about 13 it think, 13 or 14.
Charles:
That's a phenomenal answer.
Rosemarie Ryan:
But yeah, it was a great school. I actually got a decent education so for that I'm very grateful.
Charles:
So was dancing, being around the music scene the contrast of the discipline and the structure of your day to day life?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Oh yeah, completely. Again, I was lucky because my parents were very trusting so on the weekends I would be out until four or five in the morning when I was 16, 17, probably places where I shouldn't be when I was 16 or 17 but I didn't actually drink, or smoke, or do anything else I just loved to dance. And as long as they knew where I was and when I was coming home they were fine with that. This is way before cell phones.
Charles:
Wow, that's a lot of trust.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah, yeah it is.
Charles:
And you deserve that.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah and I was always honest with them about where I was and what I was doing. I also didn't really live at home from the age of 11, I lived with my mother's aunt which sounds bizarre but was very normal because there really wasn't enough room at home, she had this house, it was like 10 minutes away so that's kind of what I did.
Charles:
There literally wasn't enough room?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Literally wasn't enough room, yeah. Well there were two bedrooms but there was my mother and my father, and my brother, and my sister, and myself. So my mom and dad had a room...
Charles:
Were you the youngest?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I was the oldest.
Charles:
Oh.
Rosemarie Ryan:
I was the oldest. I'm the oldest of 110 first cousins. I have a very large family.
Charles:
110?
Rosemarie Ryan:
So there's a lot of creativity that went on there as well managing that number of cousins.
Charles:
What was that experience like, 110 first cousins what...
Rosemarie Ryan:
So...
Charles:
How often did you ever all get together?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah frequently. Probably weddings and funerals, the only usually places where you get together. My mom lived in flat, mom and dad lived in a flat above a shop and then there were four other flats and all of the flats were her brothers and sisters, so all of their kids lived there too. Most of my mum's brothers and sisters lived in London, half of my dad's lived in Ireland so I'd go back and forth to Ireland every year. But I guess what it was like was I was an adult from an early age, I was in charge of the kids. So at eight I was taking them to school on a bus and bringing them back, which made me feel like I never wanted kids because I couldn't stand the kind of responsibility of it and they wouldn't do as I told them at the age of eight. But yeah, that's when I learned to do all creative people I think. Yeah so it was great but I was an adult at an early age.
Charles:
It sounds like leader from an early age.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah I think that's probably where I learned a lot of my leadership skills. I realized from an early age you just couldn't tell people what to do you had to inspire them, show them a way and hope that they came along with you. So wrangling a lot of young people from an early age was I guess where I learned a lot of my leadership skills.
Charles:
It became second nature. University, where was that?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I went to Middlesex Polytechnic, it wasn't even really a university, studying literature and philosophy. Actually the story goes when I was 16 I had one of the teachers come to me at school and say you know Rosemary I feel like you should think about Oxford or Cambridge which of course I had never thought of. They said, "You need to take the Oxbridge test," and I remember looking at the Oxbridge test and not really understanding half of the questions they were asking because I hadn't really been brought up in an environment where culturally I had been exposed to a lot of that stuff. A lot of it was very cultural. I also, to be fair, I was doing a lot of dancing on the weekends so I probably wasn't studying as hard as I should. I was always the person who was cramming in at the last minute.
So I didn't bother applying to Oxford or Cambridge but I did apply to a couple of ... I was the first kid to go to university out of my entire family as well. So I applied to Middlesex. My father was delighted when I got in, my mother was not really sure why I was bothering. She was like, "Why don't you go and get a job?" Because I'd already spent 2 extra years at school, you could leave school at 16. Well I'm glad I didn't take that advice, and I studied literature and philosophy, which I'm not really sure what that equips you for in life. But it was fun.
Charles:
Quite a lot of things I suspect. Academia was always a struggle for me too, that story of yours resonates with me. I took English literature A level and we were given a set book, remember back in the days you were given a set curriculum, the whole country was, here are the two books your class which is...
Rosemarie Ryan:
Thomas Hardy and whatever yeah.
Charles:
Yeah, thank you, actually clearly we're the same age because it was the fact that...
Rosemarie Ryan:
"Tess of the d’Urbervilles".
Charles:
"Tess of the d’Urbervilles" and the "Mayor of Casterbridge".
Rosemarie Ryan:
Right.
Charles:
So I was in a class that chose to read "Tess of the d’Urbervilles". So everybody else, I hadn't read the book and we got to the point of the mark exam and I sat down in front of the questions, which was set for both books, and you answer the ones on the books your class had chosen. So we had picked one. I looked at the choices for both, hadn't read either book and I thought the questions for the "Mayor of Casterbridge" looked easier. So I answered those, failed.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah. I remember "Tess of the d’Urbervilles" well but I remember when I took...
Charles:
I hear it's a very good book I still haven't read it.
Rosemarie Ryan:
It is actually a very good book, it is a very good book. It's one that I remember well. But my whole skill, I think my other form of creativity was taking exams so I was very good at looking at a question and turning that question into the answer that I wanted it to be. So I always did incredibly well on exams only because that was my skill set. Today I think a lot of your exam results are based on how well you do during the school year which would not have been good for me.
Charles:
Yeah, I would have done a lot better under that scenario.
Rosemarie Ryan:
I was better on the exams area.
Charles:
Coming out of Middlesex Poly what were you drawn to?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I know I wanted to get into the media PR world. I always loved advertising. I enjoyed it, I can probably recite most ads to you now even from those kind of days, I can sing them, but I'm not going to do that on this podcast so don't ask. But I loved advertising, I was really interested in PR, I was very social, I like people. I got a job, my first job was at Border Television helping them schedule advertising into their commercial breaks. So I learned a lot about audiences and all of those important things. I also learned how terribly boring that job was.
I did that for about a year and a half and then Tyne Tees Television who tended to have more people than sheep, which was a good thing, they hired me to do a similar role. I just felt like I was dying, it was rote, there was absolutely no creativity, didn't really involve a lot of thinking. I decided to look into advertising and one of my friends was a secretary in one of the advertising companies and she worked for this account planning group. She said, "I think you'd be really good at this account planning thing Rosemary. It's about people and working at what makes them tick, you're naturally curious about that you should look into it." So I did. I read a couple of books, and then I wrote 10 letters, and I'm ashamed to tell you that I got the yellow pages and looked at A through B, found the 10 agencies.
So I started with with Abbott Mead Vickers down to BBDO. Wrote 10 letters and the letter basically described, and I realized it was going to be a tough entry for me. So the letter talked about this guy called Chris Wattle who was a very famous English football player. He was I think playing for England in the world cup, he grew up in Newcastle, he spent about two years in a sausage making factory before he actually started to play football professionally. So my letter was listen, I'm in a kind of sausage making factory just Chris Wattle was, I feel like I could play for England if I was given he chance, can I come in and talk to you. Every single one of them invited me in just because they thought the letter was hilarious and BBDO offered me a job which was I remember the happiest day of my life. I couldn't believe how fortunate I was. I had one jacket, one skirt. I still have it and actually I kept it because it was such a ... And I never looked back. I was very lucky to find something that I was truly passionate about and I loved. So that's how I got into the advertising business.
Charles:
When you walked in the door what did you think it was going to be like going to work in a place like this, and how was it, what did it turn out to be like?
Rosemarie Ryan:
So I guess first of all I just have to describe where it was because it's simply the nicest I've ever worked. The offices were in Regent's Park in one of the Nash Terrace buildings, beautiful white, stucco buildings so I'd never actually been anywhere like that. My office overlooked the park so I was living in this other world. I imagined it was going to be full of really interesting people and it was. I was in the planning department and I had to learn how to use a Macintosh, I'd never used a computer before in my life so they just gave me a manual basically and said, "Get on with it." It was great. It was never boring I guess. Every day there was a new challenge, I was learning things. I was there probably until 10 o'clock most nights because I had to teach myself pretty much everything from scratch.
One of the things I did was reached out to a couple of the really famous planners who at that point had become focus group moderators, they were big businesses out of that. I would say to them, "Hey, listen, here's what I need you to do. I'm going to write a proposal, you're going to tell me how much it costs but then I'm going to run the focus groups, I'm going to write the report, and you're going to oversee me." So I would do all the work and they would just basically coach me and teach me through it which was why I was there until 10 or 11 o'clock every night but I really learned how to look for and hone insights that way.
Charles:
And they were open to that?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Totally, yeah, completely. So they were some of the best teachers I had actually. They all had run planning departments in other agencies. Then I think without really knowing it I was somebody who wasn't shy or retiring, say what I thought. So I would get often invited into meetings that I was not really qualified to be in. I've never done anything for which I was qualified, I highly recommend it, and that's how I learned. People were willing to actually open doors and give me a chance to express myself.
Charles:
What were the qualifications you thought you needed to have to do that job, when you say you weren't qualified, what did you think you didn't bring?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Well I didn't have all of the skill sets that most people had. Most of the people who were in the planning department that worked for research companies or had some kind of marketing experience I had none. I really had nothing in that regard. I did literature and philosophy as I said it wasn't ... My math wasn't what it needed to be, I don't think it still is but I managed to get through, learned how to do some statistical stuff so that I didn't look completely stupid. I don't think I knew exactly and then I realized it was just about getting to a really smart insight, people able to articulate that in a way that people could hear. It was about working closely with creative people who in the British advertising business they were a tough audience. They never went to the meetings so the suits, the account people, and the planners went to the meetings to sell the work and if they came back without selling that work there was hell to be paid. So you had to really understand what an idea was. You have to really understand how to articulate and sell that idea, you had to understand how to get creative people inspired to get to the right idea that was going to do the work that it needed to do. But it's called fearless and I guess I was fearless without knowing I was fearless.
I remember I wrote this brief, my first ever brief, and I took it into Andrew Nichol was head of creative at BBDO, and he said to me, "Oh just put it on my desk." And I said, "I don't think I should do that." And he's like, "Why not?" I said, "Because I think we should go through it together," because that's what I thought the process was. He's like, "No, no, no, no, put it on the desk." And I said, "No, no, no, why don't you call me when you're ready and we'll sit down and go through it together?" And he did, he called me and said, "Okay, let's sit down and go through it," and he made it better because obviously he'd seen a lot more briefs than I'd ever written, and became actually a real advocate for me as a result of that. I think just finding your voice and telling people what you need in a respectful way most people are open to helping you move on.
Charles:
As you look back was the environment you were working in supportive or resistant do you think to what you brought?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I think on the whole it was pretty supportive. There as some people who I would say ... the environment before I got into the advertising agency I think they found me to be a bit of a handful so I remember people saying things like, "The lady doth protest too much." Clearly I had too much to say and I didn't know my place. In the advertising agency world there really wasn't such a thing as your place as long as you brought something valuable to the table for the most part people were able to hear you and invite you in. I found it to be a very welcoming environment, even as a working class girl, and most of the people who worked at the agency were I'd say from middle to upper class backgrounds, but even as a working class girl they were very, very welcoming.
Charles:
Did you socialize with them?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah totally. I would hang out with them all the time but I guess the whole dancing experience I had before culturally I was very attune to what was going on and that's very important in that world and that had made me fearless of celebrity and all those things, I didn't really even think about it in that regard. I think that helped, that helped.
Charles:
Where did you go after BBDO?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I was working at BBDO for two and a half years and I was going to Bermuda on holiday to see my sister who was babysitting or been nannying there for a year. I'd been saving up for two and half years to go on this holiday, and I got a call from a head hunter about a job at JWT in London and I said, "I'm really happy where I am and I'm going away for two and half weeks so I'm sure by the time I get back this job's no longer going to be around." She said, "Where are you going?" I said, "I'm going to Bermuda but I'm stopping off in New York." She said, "You have to go and see this agency called Chiat Day, they have an amazing account planning department there and I think you'd love it." I hadn't really thought very much about New York, it was like a way lay on my way and I said, "Sure, I'll call them when I get there."
So I arrived in New York, immediately fell in love. New York at that time, this was 1988 was pretty rough around the edges I would say but the energy was intoxicating. Fell in love with it, went to Bermuda for two weeks, called them up when I got back I had three days left in New York and I met with MT Rainey who at the time was head of planning at Chiat Day. We had lunch, she called me up that night, I was watching Metamorphosis actually at the theater and asked me to come back in the next day and I met 35 people.
The interviewing process there was they interviewed you for cultural fit as well as skill sets, and they offered me a job for three times what I was earning in London plus a relocation fee. I said, "I'd think about it," because I had a flat, and a good job, and a boyfriend in London. Then on my way back I guess I decided that I couldn't miss out on that opportunity. So I took that job at Chiat Day which was an amazing time to be there. Chiat Day New York at that time was actually bigger than LA and the work they were doing was tremendous, and the people who worked there were some of the best people in the business, and it was all the things that everybody said it was, Chiat Day and night, you worked every weekend and I learned more there I think in probably four months than I'd learned in the previous three years.
Charles:
What was it like moving to New York and moving to America?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Exciting and kind of terrifying, the simple things were terrifying like going to a supermarket and not really understanding what tin of tomatoes to buy, what the right cleaning ... It sounds like really small stuff but you had to think about everything, everything was brand new. I was a very good planner in large part because I really got culture but it was English culture and English brands, I had a second sense and intuition about those things. In the U.S. most of that was completely foreign to me so I didn't know whether it was just purely my intuition or I really had a kind of skill set. It was amazing. I realized very quickly that New York was like nowhere else in the country maybe other than San Francisco. I spent a lot of my time in the middle of the country doing focus groups for American Express or whatever it was and I learned an awful lot about America. But I learned that New York really wasn't like America at all, that it was very, very different.
Charles:
What most surprised you when you got here? Your story about walking down the super market aisles resonates with me the first time I came to the states, I was stunned and staggered by just the choice, it was overwhelming wasn't it?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah at the television how much television...
Charles:
Television.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah that was another thing.
Charles:
That's really true, what really surprised you?
Rosemarie Ryan:
How rude people were, people were really rude and they would shout at you. I realized after a while that it wasn't personal that that was just kind of a way of being. But when I first got here I was stunned at just ... And then also how open they were about things that I didn't think they should be actually about. So sting in a restaurant or a café and hearing someone talk about their therapy appointment, baring their souls out loud, and just how inquisitive people were, and the questions they would ask you without really know you. It was very familial, and the British just, man I was much more open than a lot of British people but it was kind of stunning and a little shocking, and I didn't know exactly how to respond to it other than just to be open to it in the end. You just have to give yourself over and find out what it looks like on the other side. But yeah, so I think those were things I remember.
I also remember feeling quite lonely actually because there are so many things that you just take for granted, everything is so familiar and then everything is really foreign even though you're purportedly speaking the same language, which by the way, I quickly learned is not the truth. I was working very late one night at Chiat Day and I said, which was most nights, and I said something about feeling shattered which means just tired and the next day I had the HR people in my office thinking I was having some kind of nervous breakdown and it took about 20 minutes for me to understand why they were so concerned. I'm like, "No, I'm just really tired," as opposed to shattered and falling to pieces which is what they thought was going on.
Charles:
How were you received?
Rosemarie Ryan:
So the interesting thing is Chiat Day had a very strong culture and the only thing that mattered to them was that you fit in to their culture and you know within about two or three weeks whether you were going to fit in or not, or they certainly did. So I just happened to fit very well into that culture so I was very well received, and there was a lot of work to do and I was up for doing a lot of work so I think that helped. The agency was on fire and moving at a million miles an hour so it was, I guess that for me was a real blessing because I didn't have time to think about the fact that I'd moved halfway across the world to this new country. I was just totally in it. I remember looking out late at night, our offices were on 5th Avenue, and seeing the Empire State building and reminding myself that actually I was in New York.
My second memory was the third night I think I was there, I hailed a taxi, and I get into the taxi and this guy is dressed in combat gear and he's smoking a refer, and he's driving at million miles an hour, and I'm like what do I do do I just go with this, do I just see where we end up or do I stop him and get out of the cab. I didn't live that far away so I just let him take me home but it was insane.
Charles:
How did you adapt? What did you realize you had to do to make this work for them as much as for you?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I guess I had to really try to understand American culture which is not an easy thing because it's very different depending on where you are in the world. The good news for me at that time is the planners did a lot of the focus groups themselves, so thank God I did all that training back in the UK. So I went all around the country and met people from all walks of life, so I started to acclimate quite quickly. I read a lot, I watched a lot of television, I did all of the things that you do. That was kind of where I learned, then there were things that were really familiar, so an agency is very familiar, everyone has their roles, the creative people are creative people everywhere, planners are planners everywhere. That was very familiar to me so I knew what to do with that it was like all the inputs that went into that that I really had to get my head around.
Charles:
How long were you at Chiat Day?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I was there for about three years maybe, yeah about three years. While I was there they had I think maybe about a year and a half in, they were like Agency of the Decade, of the top 10 ads of the decade they had like 8, it was an amazing place. But they had a bit of two or three pieces of business left all at once so there was a really shake up inside the organization and Jay Chiat came back. So Jay sat next to me because we all lived in an open office, in a cubicle so he sat next to me on the other side of it which was probably one of the most terrifying things I've ever ... Because I would just pop in every now and again and ask me questions. I just hoped to God that I knew the right answers to them. I was there until about 1992...
Charles:
What did you learn from watching him?
Rosemarie Ryan:
So Jay's whole philosophy is that people shouldn't get too comfortable which is why he liked an open space, he liked everything to play out loud. We would all have to move every six months and he wouldn't make you feel very comfortable there was nothing warm or fuzzy about Jay at all he would be pretty direct, ask you questions, challenge you, and the environment was very like that. Everyone's saying, "You're not going to get stabbed in the back here, you're going to get stabbed in the front." So I guess I learned an awful lot from him. I learned about how space impacts culture, so I've taken that with me to every place I've been since. I guess I learned that culture is really critical in having the rules of the road and understanding what's important for you. I learned to be uncomfortable, probably the best lesson like especially in the world that we're living in now where everything changes every three or four days so if you're not comfortable being uncomfortable it's going to be a difficult place for you to be. But I guess that's what I learned most of all, how to be uncomfortable and to use that as a powerful force versus something that's going to hold you back and paralyze you.
Charles:
Interestingly the parallels between that and Dan Widen's philosophy is he built Widen and Kennedy in terms of pushing people, creating an environment in which disruption is the norm where there's underlying tension all the time about open disagreement because that's how you get the best ideas and the best work out of people.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah I absolutely think that's true. The interesting balance right in all of that is how can you create an environment where it's okay to be uncomfortable and challenging that isn't an environment about fear and they're two very different things. I think fear is the most debilitating thing to a creative environment, I think probably to pretty much any environment but if you're in a creative environment and people are fearful they cannot and will not do their best work. They need to feel challenged but that's a whole different way of thinking about things. So try to find that balance in an agency or I think probably any creative company is the kind of thin line that you have to walk.
Charles:
Well and your point about fear I think I agree with you entirely. There's a fascinating piece of research that the British Army I think it was conducted that, demonstrated that fear goes directly to the part of the brain that controls creativity and original thinking and literally shuts it down so you can put very smart, talented officers in one situation and they are brilliant. You put them into combat situations where they think literally their lives are at risk and they can't do even the most basic things because that part of their brain just doesn't function. So I agree. The difference between creating an environment that's about positive, constructive tension versus one that's about fear. I want to pick up on that conversation in a second. Where did you go after Chiat Day?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I went to Kirshenbaum Bond and they call me in and ask me to come in and help with their planning department, I should say planning department, there were 30 people at the agency, they had done some really ballsy work. There were two young guys who were probably only a few years older than I was, had never run anything in their lives, not even an account but managed to do some freelance work for Kenneth Cole and on the back of that began their own company. So they were probably about a year in. At the time I wanted to be part of creating a culture, like I was fascinated and loved what I had experienced at Chiat Day, so that was really why I went there. I guess I learned there that being a planner and having all those incredible skill sets didn't really, or having a process and stuff was not something they were really interested in. They were much more interested in okay let's get to a great answer, let's get to it however we need to get to it like to hell with process.
So I had to ... That was very uncomfortable for me because I was used to being the head of the planner if something doesn't go well no one cared what you were at Kirshenbaum Bond, they only care about what you did and what you contributed. So you also had to fill voids because there was no account management discipline or creative discipline, or planning discipline, it was like teams of people who had tried to write awesome work. Jay had trained me well because it was very uncomfortable but also really exhilarating. I think that's where a lot of my leadership skills came to the fore because I needed to make sense out of chaos. So the age of I think I was 29 I was by far the oldest person there from a maturity perspective, so I was back in that being the head of 110 kids. But it was great. I was there for 10 years. After being a planner there for a couple of years I left to become head of planning somewhere else, and then John and Rich had asked me to come back and be their president.
Charles:
When you came back did you have ... Were there areas of focus that you thought this has to work differently now, what was your emphasis when you came back?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I guess a couple of things. I feel like Richard and John were brilliant in many ways but they needed to be managed a little bit because everybody else around them would always respond to whatever was happening. They were the leaders of the agency so what they thought mattered and how they thought mattered but it had to be put through a filter where everybody, now a 100 person agency knew what to do with that kind of energy. So I guess bringing ... One of the reasons they brought me back actually was because they thought I really understood the culture and how to move things forward. So they were worried that they were growing fast and that culturally that spirit of energy and creativity was going to get lost. So they recognized they needed process but they didn't want process to kill that creativity and so they wanted someone who could help them manage the kind of, and balance that through. I brought that.
I had never run a piece of business either, I was a planner, so I had never run an account. The whole money side of the business was a complete, I wouldn't say a complete mystery because it's not that hard but it wasn't something I was used to managing. So I had to put a lot of energy personally into just kind of understanding and getting that. The good news is I'm very good at looking at trends and looking at what's driving those trends, so that's basically where I focus my energy. We were, I would say, a new business machine. So we needed to work out not just how to bring business in which we were very good at but keep business, which we weren't very good at. The reason for that is because we were chaotic and didn't always understated how to help clients understand what we were doing and why that was important. I had to spend a lot of time really working out not just ... We all know how to hunt but how to became farmers and move that forward. That was a whole new skill set. I worked with a couple of people, brought them in in kind of workshop stuff.
Again, there was two really important things I learned there. I think the first thing is that agencies and most creative companies love living in possibility, it's their favorite thing to do. Clients tend to live in feasibility. It's like okay that's all great but how the hell are we going to make this happen. So I used to verbally out loud say, "This is a conversation about possibility, so let's just have that conversation first and then this is a conversation for feasibility. We're not talking about what's possible anymore, we have to stop ideating and start working out how we can move things forward. That was so helpful, just people calling what things were and then people work ... Getting some people in who actually loved feasibility because we only had people who cared about possibility and making room for both of them was probably the thing that I learned to bring to that environment.
Charles:
What kind of leader did you want to be going back into that job which you said was a big step forward, what kind of leader did you decide you wanted to show up as?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I think somebody that people want to follow. That's sounds like a flippant thing to say but someone who people respect, who has a clear idea and vision of where they want to go, and who's open to help those folks go along ... And I guess somebody who, I always thought of myself as working for the people at the company. My job was to help them be as successful as I knew they could be. We had brilliant people, letting people be brilliant, giving them the space and the room to do that, helping people who are not inside the company understand how to put that brilliance to work for their company and their brand, that was the kind of leader I wanted to be. Creation space for brilliance and room for it to flourish I would say is how I think about what I need to get done every day.
Charles:
What kind of people were you looking to hire?
Rosemarie Ryan:
People who were curious, people who were comfortable being uncomfortable, people who liked working with people who were different than they were. We talk a lot about diversity and I think diversity comes in many forms but I think out of difference comes creativity if it can be respected and understood. People who wanted to listen as much as they want to talk. That's a hard thing. I am very tolerant of I wouldn't say bad behavior, but I'm very tolerant of people being who they are. What I'm not tolerant of are people who make other people feel like and small, and dismissed. So if you're talented and you're an asshole then I'm really not interested in working with you. I'd rather have five good people than one great talented person who's destructive to the rest of the organization.
Charles:
And the business has shifted hasn't it because I think there used to be a real willingness to put up with that kind of persona.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yes.
Charles:
In fact, in many ways organizations used to be built around that and I think one of the interesting things in the last five years for sure is that there's much less interest in that kind of approach and mentality.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah. I think that's true. As I said, bad behavior, there are all different levels of bad behavior but behavior which is deliberately about putting other people down is the kind of behavior I wouldn't tolerate, coming in really late, being drunk, all of those things I can tolerate as long as it's not hurting and damaging other people. But yeah I think it shifted, I think it shifted because we actually do need to be more collaborative, it's not about the individual genius, it's really about the collective mind. Again, that sounds like a cliché but it just happens to be true because you have to bring a lot of different perspectives to bare to solve what is quite a complicated problem usually, not actually less in terms of what you're creating but how that is manifesting itself in the world.
You still need a really powerful idea and people who know what that looks like, and how to craft one of those, and imagine one of those, but then when you think about how you're going to distribute and get that idea into the world there are many, many different ways that you need to do that and you need to have people who are going to work together to stay true to that idea while they create whatever it looks like as it gets out there. So yeah, I think that's true. I think though in some ways what I miss a little bit is some of that I wouldn't say disfunction but I think it's still important to have idiosyncrasy, some deviance in a positive way otherwise I don't know that you're going to get the expansive thinking that you need. I think you have to be tolerant perspectives and points of view that aren't comfortable, going back to the whole comfort thing and that means that ... I think collaboration doesn't mean conformity. I think you do need to be able to express yourself outside of that.
I think we're living in a world where there is just no tolerance for anyone else's point ... Well certainly in the U.S.. There is less and less tolerance for other points of view and I don't know how we work our way back to that. But everyone's become very stuck in their ways. Anyway, that's a side thing. I think in our business you absolutely have to have ideas that make you a little uncomfortable, usually because they're going to truly move you forward. I think just like people have to be a little uncomfortable if they're truly going to move forward. Moving forward in this day is harder and harder for clients, they're just not growing in the way that they're used to growing.
Charles:
I think you're right, it's a great leadership challenge actually this notion of, and I agree with you entirely, we need diversity in every form in order to create the kinds of companies that can solve the kinds of problems that we're facing and how do you promote that and support that kind of range of thinking, and perspectives while maintaining an environment that is respectful of everybody's view because obviously if you feel passionate about what you feel, or what you think, what you believe you want to express that and you want to convince the person across the table that you're right and they're wrong, and that they have they have the same view if you're hiring the right kinds of people. I think it's a real modern leadership challenge actually to navigate all of that.
Coming out of...
Rosemarie Ryan:
Can I just build on that?
Charles:
Yeah.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Because I think that's about being fierce on the one hand and generous on the other. Generosity is a really undervalued virtue. I think generosity, if you can be generous, and by the way generosity starts with your self. I find really talented, driven people tend not to be very generous with themselves and they're always pushing themselves and it's never good enough. That by the way was another thing I learned a Chiat Day, good enough is not enough. But that makes it very hard to be generous with yourself but it also makes it very hard to be generous with other people. So that's the kind of equilibrium I'm looking, how can it be fierce and generous, those two things don't sound like they go together but that's ultimately what I think you need to do. Sorry.
Charles:
No, don't apologize. I think it's a great insight and I think it's true, the more conversations I have whether it's in my work or with this podcast the more I see people who are successfully showing up with versions of both of those characteristics and struggling with both as we all do. Self-doubt I think is pervasive and self-doubt is a hindrance to being generous and open to other people being successful and hearing what they have to say. But I think the most successful leaders are finding ways to be able to reconcile those two and to invest in both of those two characteristics. I think you're absolutely right. So coming out of Kirshenbaum Bond led you to where?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I was there for 10, almost 11 years and I realized that we were about to be acquired by MDC which was great for Richard and John but I didn't know that it was going to be great for us to be perfectly honest moving forward. And the other thing is I'd been doing the same thing for a long time and I felt like I'm somebody who just personally needs new challenges if I'm going to grow and if I'm also going to be good for all the people around me. So I felt like everybody around me actually could do their job without me being there and I needed something new.
So Bob Jeffrey contacted me and at the time he was head of North America and was about to become the global CEO. He also worked at Chiat Day. Chiat Day is linked through all my career moves. He told me that he needed someone to run New York and that had been the first thing that he had done since he had been there. It had to be someone he trusted, he had a clear vision for what he wanted JWT to become. He started to lay some of that groundwork I think in their last four or five years in North America and wanted me to be part of that team. I took three or four months, that was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made actually because I'm not a corporate girl. I tend to be a little maverick in my own way, respectful but maverick. I felt like I was worried that I would get stifled by a big, global bureaucratic organization. I trusted Bob though and I believed in his vision and decided that the business had started to become in a really strange place so I knew that clients, most of JWT's clients had been with them for like 100 plus years and that was not going to be the future, that was very much a part of the past. I felt like the environment was right for them to want change. So I joined and I started in January 2004.
Charles:
What were the big difference managing a corporation, corporate environment versus the entrepreneurial side.
Rosemarie Ryan:
A lot. A lot of differences. I guess I would say that ... So going back to your notion of creating an environment where people can be challenging and uncomfortable that was not the kind of environment that JWT liked to operate in. They liked to basically be comfortable, they liked their clients to be comfortable. They had a structure which they were very comfortable with which tended to be pretty hierarchical, account-led, fairly siloed. Actually a lot of things that I had never experienced even at Chiat Day. Chiat Day was a pretty progressive company for its time and a lot of really talented people, by the way but they were used to working in a completely different structure. We had to turn that entire thing on its head because nothing was going to be comfortable about the kind of work we needed to do moving forward so that was a little shocking.
I remember somebody coming into my office and having an office was a strange phenomenon for me too, but coming into my office and I was asking them about the work, anyway they left and they were crying and I'm like ... And a number of people were crying after they left my office and I could not understand why they were crying because I thought we had a really good conversation and they felt like it wasn't a good conversation I guess because for them it felt quite challenging, and I suppose it was but that's how I was used to operating. I'd always been around people who were used to operating that way so I had to moderate a little bit. I had to learn to be right without making everybody wrong. I couldn't force people to be confrontational. That was a hard thing for me to learn to be really honest because I'd never operated that way before, in fact I've been successful by being quite the opposite.
Then I decided I was just going to find what was great about all those people and what was great about the work they were doing and build on that as opposed to try and just blow the whole thing up and start from scratch. Again, not something that ... I'm a bit of purest, I'd always worked at places that were very purest and I realized that that wasn't going to work, I was going to kill myself and everybody else around me if I'd went down that path. But the one thing I was clear about is that I needed a creative partner because I needed to model the kind of behavior I wanted the agency to adopt so we were going to start working in this siloed batten passing way I had to model that with somebody who was unlike me and unlike the organization. So I persuaded all, Ty would say I conned him into joining me at JWT.
Charles:
Is it Ty Montague?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Ty Montague. Ty and I were at Chiat Day together when we were both babies, he'd gone on to BBH and Wine Kennedy running their New York offices, so his training, his cultural upbringing was very similar to mine. I remember when we were talking about him joining he was ... We could finish each other's sentences then just because culturally we'd grown up in the same kind of environments. So anyway, I conned him into joining me and the most important thing I think we did was before he started we took two days off site where we basically did one of those Meyer-Briggs things so it tells you all the awesome things about you and all the terrible things about you. Then we basically shared those, here's the things I'm great at, here's the things I'm really bad at and we shared those with each other and we talked about what that meant as leaders of this company moving forward.
I think the second thing is we imagined all the possible scenarios that could happen over the next year or so and decided ahead of time how we would deal with them, taking away the politics and the emotion, and all the stuff that happens in the moment, really thinking it through logically and then made a plan for how we were going to move the agency forward and we had different structures. We talked about Hollywood hits, independent films, release to video. So in terms of how we thought about the kind of work that we needed to get out there in the world, the kinds of teams we needed to put together, and basically we laid out a three year plan and then followed that plan through relentlessly and it worked, it was amazing.
Charles:
You were really guided by where you wanted the company to be three years later.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Oh yeah. We knew that it was going to take at least that time for the world to notice. Inside the organization it happened 18 months in, you felt the energy shift, the work was shifting, we were winning really great pieces of business like Jet Blue and Royal Caribbean, very different kind of businesses from the businesses that we had but it took really three years I would say for the outside world to recognize that there was a dramatic change happening at JWT. Then it just continued, the momentum continued to build fortunately for us because we headed into 2008, and even though like for like business was down 20% without losing a piece of business, just because everyone's cutting budgets our business was up like 20% because we were bringing new business in. So it was very fortuitous that we made that plan because it could have been pretty awful on the other side of it. I think I learned so much, celebrating success along the way, small successes because we had a long way to go to get to where we needed to get to ... It was you know ... I think, again, every single experience that I've had has helped me learn, and grow, and become I think a better leader and they've been very different. Chiat, Kirshenbaum, JWT three very, very different kinds of environments and each of them were a gift in their own way.
Charles:
Was there a consistency in any area that you saw across the three?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I'd say the consistency with some of the things we've talked about, having a clear vision for what you want something to become, having a plan for how you're going to get there and being aware of what the obstacles are. So at Kirshenbaum the problem was we just wanted to live in possibility, we didn't know how to live in visibility and bring our clients along with us, that was really the problem. So understanding what that was and then having a plan for addressing that. Whenever we got a new business pitch we would write a contract with our clients, we would also write a contract of expectations, here's what we expect of you, here's what you expect of us, what does that look like. And you learn so much, there were some clients who were saying, "Don't ever surprise me," and other clients who said, "Surprise me all the time," and just knowing those things upfront made for a more successful relationship.
At JWT it was very much about managing, they were managing some very big complex corporate clients and they wanted the clients to be comfortable. We were moving into a world where that wasn't going to actually help them grow their businesses any longer. So working out how to help account people get comfortable with having uncomfortable conversations was critical, and then helping everybody work as teams, [inaudible] people know that they could count on the creative people, the creative people know they could rely on the planners, everybody working together on finding the right kind of solution and actually having hard conversations with each other before they had to have the hard conversations with the client. Having a plan and then working out what's going to get in the way of that being successful and then just consistently working against that is what I think success looks like. And I try to have some fun along the way. I can be guilty of forgetting that, but having moments where people can just relax and get to know each other, enjoy each other without being in heat of the moment, the pitch, or the meeting.
Charles:
How do you go about having hard conversations?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I've always had hard conversations, I've never known that they were hard conversations I guess is how I would ...I grew up in an Irish family where everything was on the table. I've had to learn how to have a hard conversation in a way that doesn't make other people feel terrible because as I said I feel like we've had a great conversation and everyone else like, "Oh my God, my world is falling apart." So...
Charles:
So you've never been afraid of confronting an issue?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I don't know how to operate without. I think the symbol for me, and this is true in business, well I think true in life is well, if you don't confront the elephant on the table you are not going to be able to move forward. Again, because I think if you're avoiding it then you're creating a space of fear. The way I get through fear is I think about what's the worst possible thing that can happen. So I get myself all the way to that place, take a long hard look at that, say okay well I think I can deal with that, and then I come back, and then I'm able to confront or deal with whatever needs to get dealt with so we can move forward. I hate being stuck and I think that you get stuck when you don't have hard conversations, and I think you have other conversations that have got nothing to do with that, they're kind of the real thing that's there. So yeah I think having a hard conversation is the only way to move forward. I think it's ultimately good for everybody. I've had to learn how to have those conversations without people feeling bad about them on the other side and I'm better, probably not great, but I'm better than I was.
Charles:
The interesting thing about fear I find is that if you talk to somebody about what's the worse case scenario, most of us can get from this situation turning out badly to living under a bridge by ourselves in five steps, never more.
Rosemarie Ryan:
It's true.
Charles:
Never more. Now to get there you have to create one massive quantum leap somewhere in that logic path, somewhere in that narrative that ensures that you are unemployable and unlovable by everybody forever to get under the bridge. But we all have that capacity so I think this notion of being willing to confront that and say yeah that's that actually here's the lack of logic, here's the implausibility in that, let me get back to reality. Now what am I going to try and do. I think that that's very powerful.
You reached the decisions, obviously you and Ty reached the decision to leave JWT and to start your own business, what was the catalyst behind that?
Rosemarie Ryan:
So as I said we were having lots of success but I think more and more we found ourselves in meetings with clients having conversations about the challenges they were facing and them looking for advertising to be the solution to that and even when we tried to bring them things that weren't advertising, like objects, their ability to hear and buy that from us because we were an advertising agency, and trust me we tried to kind of ... Because I think there are people in advertising agencies who know how to solve things, big things, and have for many years. But I think they've been used in one very small way right now.
Anyway, we tried to work within the kind of system to help that but we weren't being successful. Both of us want to make a difference in the world, we want to make a difference to our client's businesses, we want to be in a business that makes a difference, we want to work with people who want to make a difference and I thought that we were making less and less of a difference. So we sat down and talked about what that looked like and what that meant. We thought about trying to do that within JWT and frankly that would have been very difficult because there were just a million fires all the time that had to be and needed to be solved.
As I looked into the future of the advertising business, the traditional advertising business, what I saw was a moment where we were going to be about managing decline on some level and personally I know I'm not very good at that. I think there are people that are better at it than others, I'm just not very good at that. I know Ty feels the same way about that so we decided that we should go out in the world and work out what clients needed to grow their businesses again, so that's what we did. I will tell you that we had no clue, well we had some clue, but we didn't know what that looked like exactly. We just knew that it wasn't what we were doing and we made that decision a year before we left because we both had to give a huge amount of notice and that was probably I think one of the hardest years of my life, in my life and in my career, and I think Ty would probably say the same thing. In part because the only people who really knew that we were leaving were Ty and myself, my husband, Ty's wife, and Bob Jeffrey.
Everybody else ... And you know if you're a leader and you're leading new business pitches, and you're leading client meetings, and you're leading people, and you're hiring people and we were because we were still growing it felt dishonest knowing that I was you know because one of my greatest strengths and one of my greatest weaknesses is people know exactly how I'm feeling most of the time by just looking at me. I find it very hard to be anything other than honest about what's going on. I was living in a lie for about nine months.
Charles:
How did you deal with that personally?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Well I just put my head and do what I always do when I don't know how to deal with things, I just work really hard because I'm hoping that it will work its way through. I have to work very hard because there was a lot going on, so that was a relief. But when I left ... So in the two months between me leaving starting the company I almost had a nervous breakdown because I first of all I was kind of institutionalized. Secondly, I'd been living this kind of untruth for a while and I hadn't really, both Ty and I had not really given it a lot of thought to exactly what we were going to do because we were so in what we were doing. The one thing that's true about both of us is when we're in we're 100% in, we don't know how to be half in. It was really hard. Also, it had been seven years of my life and turning JWT around was really hard, it was very gratifying, but very hard. So it was hard. People were angry at me, people who worked at the company were angry at me that I hadn't ... The people that I brought into the company, clients were angry. It was a very difficult time.
Charles:
What got you past that in the end?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Starting the business and getting a client, the things that I'm familiar with and I like solving problems, so working out what this company was going to be, what kind of products we needed to deliver, who we needed to hire. So moving forward, but just the two months of not doing that ... I think three weeks were great, then it was just oh my God.
Charles:
Yeah I can imagine that was a tough period. What was it like being responsible for your own destiny for the first time? You were now setting up your own company, building your own business, you had a partner for the first time, how did that feel by comparison to what had come before? Was it what you thought it was going to be, was it different?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I will tell you that I've always treated the company like it's my own company, maybe not so much at Chiat Day but certainly at Kirshenbaum. I felt responsible for the company, and the people, and the clients, and their businesses. I felt responsible for the company at JWT, I felt more responsible than I think most people, besides some of those organizations do. I never really understood how you couldn't do that. So for me it was actually quite liberating because not only was I responsible but I actually had the ability to decide what I was going to do and not going to do without anyone else trying to manage that.
I guess the other thing I would say is that Ty and I had been in partnership for about seven years before we started our own company so that wasn't new. In some ways we knew the best and the worst of each other which is kind of good and bad. So it was liberating. Once I got through my crisis I felt 10 years younger, energized, all of the things that you should, little terrified, but again, I'm okay with that. When people ask me advice about whether they should take a new job or a new role, or whatever I always say, "Well how do you feel about it?" If they say, "I'm kind of really scared that I'm not going to be successful, but I'm really excited." I'm like, "Then I think you should do it."
Charles:
Do you like being the leader?
Rosemarie Ryan:
yes.
Charles:
Because?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I like being in charge. I like making decisions, I like moving forward. Yeah, I like being in charge, I'm used to being in charge. I don't like my life being in someone else's hands, I never have. I rely on myself.
Charles:
As you look back at your career so far what do you take away from it up to this point?
Rosemarie Ryan:
That I've been incredibly blessed. First of all, I've found something I love and fortunately I'm very good at with people I love working with that's never boring and I get to come back to that. I need to be challenged, I don't want to have to do the same thing day in and day out. I love going to work in the morning, I don't even think about it as work really, it was kind of part of my life. I've been to amazing places, met amazing people, done great things. I am incredibly blessed and I feel like that's what as an industry we need to get back to. I want to create an environment where people get as much joy out of what they do every day as I did.
Charles:
How do you think other people see you?
Rosemarie Ryan:
I don't know, I think you'd probably have to ask other people. I think people see me as being forthright, truthful, smart, I think they think I'm fair. I don't think they think I'm easy. I think that's how they think about me. Honest. I think clients believe that whatever I tell them whether they agree with it or not I totally believe is the answer. Passionate.
Charles:
That's a pretty good list.
Rosemarie Ryan:
I hope that's what they think. That's my list. They may have a completely different list.
Charles:
Well let me tell you what strikes me. I like to wrap each episode with what I describe is three themes, three takeaways. So let me offer you these and you can tell me whether they resonate. The first thing that strikes me is that you always seem to be working towards a vision or a plan, or what comes next and that reference point provides you with a lot of guidance, and a lot of determination to get to something specific, you're not reacting in the moment, you're actually applying your energy and your talent, and bringing people along to get to something. I think that's powerful. I think you bring with that a real sense of self.
You've talked about this quite a lot I think and you're willingness to be true to who you are and what matters to you in that journey, in that quest I think is a very, very powerful component of the most successful leaders that there is a reference point that is constant for people who gravitate around you and so people know what they're going to get and I think that's reassuring even to your point when the standards are high.
Then I think the thrift thing that I've heard a lot is a genuine interest in other people and how they are doing along the process, it's not self-serving, there's a real ... You used the word generosity, I think that's really apt the sort of compassion for how do other people feel about what's going on or how can you bring the best out of them and help them to contribute themselves to the process.
Those three to me together seem to be really important foundation for successful leadership and they're evident to me. Do they resonate with you?
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah they do. Thank you, that's like a therapy session. No, that was great. I really enjoyed it and I think that I guess the other thing people would call me is bossy and what I would say about that is embrace your bossiness, embrace your bossiness, be generous with it but embrace it. I feel like we're blessed, we're lucky to work in the environment that we work in. I think right now I need to make sure that that environment is great for the next generation of leaders who are coming through.
Charles:
Yeah we wish a point that where what happens next becomes really important.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Yeah.
Charles:
Yeah, I feel the same way. Rosemarie thank you so much for being here and for doing this, I've really enjoyed this.
Rosemarie Ryan:
Thank you so much. I always enjoy chatting with you Charles.
