What Is Your Leadership For?
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is the Junior Senator from the State of New York.
Running for public office places you in a spotlight that is white hot. Being clear why you’ve made the choice to run in the first place is table stakes for creating the life you want to live and the legacy you want to leave behind.
What Do You Think And Why?
Tom O’Keefe and Jeff King are two of the four partners who have just merged their respective businesses, OKRP and Barkley.
When we are clear about why we think what we think, when we are free of insecurity or hubris or ego, then we can assess an alternative path with an open mind.
Mergers provoke the need to lead through this lens.
How Vulnerable Is Too Vulnerable?
Anselmo Ramos is the Co-Founder and Creative Chairman of GUT, a global independent creative agency that’s headquartered in Miami, and with six other offices around the world.
How vulnerable is too vulnerable?
The answer, of course, depends on the culture that you have created. If your culture is based on deep and enduring emotional trust, you give people the ability to show up as complex, multifaceted humans, to show up as whole beings.
Are You Conscious Of Your Choices?
Kara Swisher is the most effective and successful tech journalist of our lifetimes.
In a world of white men with giant bank accounts and even bigger egos, how did this 5 feet 2 inch, self-described, liberal lesbian mother of four, end up as the most influential and insightful reporter of the technology age?
As you’ll hear, Kara puts it down to curiosity, confidence, and understanding the choices available to her.
This week’s guest is Avery Baker. She’s the former President and Chief Brand Officer of Tommy Hilfiger.
Six months after she stepped down from her position at Tommy, we talk about her desire to empower others and why it's an essential skill to demonstrate as a leader.
We also discuss the new leadership paradigm that we have developed together for creative and innovative businesses. We call it 'Partnership Leadership'.
How Do You Find The Right People?
Nick Law is the Global Lead for Design and Creative Tech at Accenture Song. He has led and unlocked creativity across thousands of people. He’s seen what works. And what doesn’t.
In my experience, the very best leaders understand three things. Their business, their people and themselves.
But not in that order.
Has Leadership Changed You? Or The People Around You?
Philippe Krakowsky is the CEO of IPG. He runs a company of 58,000 people across more than 100 businesses.
Too often, leaders over-complicate. Sometimes, the situation. Sometimes, themselves. That’s not surprising. Leadership is complicated at the best of times. And it’s easy to lose perspective.
But, even more challenging is what often happens to those around you when your new role suddenly changes the org chart relationship to them. When you now hold the power.
That’s when your ability to overcome your own uncertainty becomes critical so that you can evaluate their behavior towards you objectively.
Why Do People Follow You?
Life is filled with agency. The ability to write our own story. To decide who we want to be and then to act on that basis.
And once we do decide, then comes the really hard part.
To declare it.
To say out loud to people who we know will judge us, this is what matters to me, These are the expectations I have of myself and the standards to which I want to be held.
Who Do You Want To Be?
I say all the time on this podcast and in my work, we do not have to be defined by the past or the expectations of others. We can all decide who we want to be and act with intention to be that person.
Our future selves are waiting to be written, to be lived and be loved.
Don’t wait too long.
How Much Do You Know About What’s Happening At Your Company?
Mark Read is the CEO of WPP. At last month’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, WPP was named the most creative company of the year.
He took over the role in 2018, in one of the most publicized and dramatic changes in leadership the advertising and marketing industries have ever seen.
Taking the company from those turbulent times to one of relative stability and success has required a realistic, pragmatic approach.
How Have You Been Changed By The Last Two Years?
Simon Cook is the CEO of Cannes Lions.
Cannes is an institution. One built on in-person contact. Like many organizations dependent on human contact, it has struggled in the face of a two year long, global pandemic.
Creativity is fueled by confidence. The willingness to boldly go where no one has gone before.
But is is shaped and guided by humility.
What Questions Are You Asking?
Gareth Kay is the SVP of Brand at Happily Health. Before that, he’s been the Head of Strategy at Goodby Silverstein, and the Founding Partner at Chapter Creative Studios.
Gareth is a relentlessly curious soul.
When all the answers are out of date, or from a different reality, the only choice we have is to start asking more and better questions.
What Kind Of Company Are You Building?
Karl Lieberman and Neal Arthur are respectively the Global Chief Creative Officer and Global Chief Operating Officer of Wieden + Kennedy.
Neal and Karl stepped into their global roles seven months after the beginning of the pandemic. How do you lead a culture opposed to rules through a time when there are no rules?
Creativity is the world’s most powerful force. It’s time to build flexible businesses that unleash it. It’s time for leaders to let creativity loose.
Are You Taking Care Of Yourself?
Antonio Lucio was the first Global Marketing and Communication Officer at Visa. The first Global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at HP. He was Facebook’s first Chief Marketing Officer. And left there to become the Founder and Principal of 5S Diversity.
He is known as an incredibly empathetic leader.
As you’ll hear, that may be his greatest accomplishment.
Where Does Your Impact End?
Laurie Howell and Toby Treyer-Evans are Executive Creative Directors at Droga5 New York and have been partners for a very long time. They have also been responsible for important and extremely impactful work, including the New York Times campaign called The Truth Is Worth It.
But as their careers evolve and the world changes, it is their impact on people in the immediate vicinity that has their attention.
How Does Your Company Fit Into Your Story?
Rishad Tobaccowala is a thought leader, author and one of the great provocative thinkers. His insights are drawn from his many years spent as the Global Strategist and Chief Growth Officer of Publicis Groupe and now from his work as an independent advisor to businesses across the world.
The tsunami of change brought about by a global pandemic will slowly recede, and the companies left standing will be those who stayed true to their stories and know the kind of people that can help write the next chapter.
How Do You See Yourself?
Daniella Pierson is the Founder and CEO of The Newsette. And the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Wondermind. And she and her story are extraordinary.
It is a story of hope built on the determination of one remarkable woman to define herself and her life on her terms.
How Do You Greet Change?
Evin Shutt is the Chief Executive Officer of 72andSunny, a role she took on in March of 2020.
Taking on the senior leadership position of one of the world’s most creative and innovative companies at the very moment the world is shutting down will instantly reveal your relationship with change. Do you look for it and high five it?
Are You Really Here, In This Moment?
Lisa Kline is the Vice President of Communications for BreastCancer.org.
As a new definition of leadership rises from the disruption of the last two years, it’s worth pointing out that it contains one expectation that will accelerate the gap between the alright and the great leaders.
The expectation that you are present.
What Do You Want More Of In Your Life?
This week’s guest is Greg Hahn. He’s the Co-Founder & CCO of Mischief USA.
Life comes at us fast and in unexpected ways.
What we do with every day that we get is a choice between hoping for a better version of yesterday or acting to create a better tomorrow.
And the key to that is making sure we know what a better version of tomorrow will look like.
Where Does Work End And Life Begin?
Tiffany Rolfe is the Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA.
Tiffany’s email signature reads, Mom and Global Chief Creative Officer.
The day is not only for work. The day is for living.
What that means is entirely for you to decide.
Who Takes Care Of You?
Colleen DeCourcy has been named creative leader of the decade. She led Wieden and Kennedy to three consecutive Agency of the Year wins and her contribution to creativity has just been recognized by Cannes Lions with the Lion of St Mark Lifetime Achievement Award.
Today, three months into her version of retirement, her impact is everywhere.
How Many Ways Are You Looking At The Future?
Lori Bradley is the Vice President for Talent at Chewy.
Lori used the word experiment three times in about ten seconds.
Can you remember the last time that word was used in any leadership team meeting you’ve been part of in the last few months?
The future is waiting to be invented - by those who are brave enough to experiment.
Success Is Built On Hope. And The Determination To Do It On Your Terms.
This week’s episode is a re-run of one of my very earliest episodes. It’s a conversation I had with Nils Leonard in the summer of 2017.
Nils was on the show only a few weeks ago. But I’m airing this episode again now for a simple reason.
It’s a case study.
Are You Leading A Team Or A Group Of Individuals?
Joanna Coles is the CEO of Northern Star Acquisition Company, the former Chief Content Officer for Hearst Magazines, and former Editor-in-Chief of Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan.
Creative businesses win or lose based on how successfully they take disparate, talented individuals and combine them together to produce extraordinary outcomes. Whether that’s ads or code or clothes or cars or content or ideas.
As Joanna says, we’re moving into an era of heightened individualism.
