624: Chris Beresford-Hill - Writing Excellent Cold-Emails, Taking Responsibility of Your Career, Pushing Your Edges, Becoming Dave Matthews' Pen Pal, Building Culture, & Leading a Creative Agency

Go to www. LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global http://www.insightglobal.com/learningleader. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. www. InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader https://www. InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader Chris Beresford-Hill is the Worldwide Chief Creative Officer at BBDO. Previously he spent 2 years as North America President and CCO of Ogilvy, where he helped bring the agency and its clients a new level of relevance. He brought Workday to the Super Bowl, led the team that brought in the Verizon account, and one of the biggest Super Bowl campaigns ever, "Can't B Broken," featuring Beyonce, and created the most celebrated Super Bowl campaign of 2024, the social & influencer lead "Michael CeraVe," for CeraVe. Chris and his teams have won every award for creativity and effectiveness many times over. He has been included in ADWEEK Best Creatives, the ADWEEK 100, and Business Insider's Most Creative People in Advertising. Notes: Cold Emails: Be specific in your praise and specific in your ask. The lame "Can I pick your brain" type emails get deleted and ignored because they aren't specific. You never need permission to take responsibility. Chris learned this from Ed Catmull's book Creativity Inc.… And he's embodied this his entire career. The people who build huge careers take ownership of their own and regularly solve problems and improve their clients' and colleagues' lives. Chris has done this since his early days as an intern. At any level taking on responsibility yourself, unasked, makes you stand out. Competence combined with insane follow-through. For some clients, it takes 50 ideas to get to the one that will work. Creating a culture where the team can share all of their bad ideas safely to get to the one great one. The creative process: Brain dump everything. Purge your brain of everything it has. When you think you're done, you're not. There's more. You have to get it all out. "A lot of creative people aren't fully aware of the process or the structure, they just feel it (Rick Rubin). "When you can see it lift off the page, you feel a sense of mastery over it." Chris's first Super Bowl commercial -- Emerald Nuts. He won it because he was both funny and added the fact that the product provided energy. Most people only covered one part, Chris did both. Push your edges - Chris is like Lionel Messi. He's always walking around in the office, asking questions, looking for ideas, being curious. Then he sees an opportunity and goes for it 100%. Chris has a standing reservation every week at the same restaurant where he meets with a mentor, mentee, or peer to deepen the important relationships in his life. That would be a good idea for us all to do. Chris was pen-pals with Dave Matthews for 8 years. Chris saw that they recorded at Bearsville studios and wrote a letter to Dave there. He also said, "Show up with gifts." He gave Dave a Beatles Bootlegged album. A leader takes what comes and then turns it into an opportunity. The formula is Competence + Insane Follow-Through. How to build relationships: Meet with people in person. Get drunk with them. Do hard work with them. Go through something bad with them. Laugh with them. I got hired from my internship by cold calling Mark Cuban to get him to approve of using his name in an ad. The best ideas are often bad in their first moments, or massively wrong, and then someone flips it or unlocks it. You have to stay on things and play around. I made my first ad by going through a garbage can to learn how to write a script and sending a bunch of Budweiser scripts to my boss. The art of finding an idea on the edge of possible, and the value of going over your skis when on the cusp of greatness - having a stomach for it. I've told a lie to keep things moving on every great campaign I was part of. I learned the best lesson in leadership when we lost our biggest account (Accenture). I put Danny Meyer's mentality into practice, and we took that moment to put the business and clients second and play for each other. Culture carried us. Culture is built by the stories we tell and the behaviors we highlight.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  You've got to have a mindset for long shots. And if you want to be really successful, you've got to build a culture where people are constantly solving every single peripheral problem around the idea, rather than putting an idea on the table and waiting for someone to say yes or no.

• 0:20Ryan Hawk?

  This episode is brought to you by Insight Global. Hiring the perfect culture, skill, and team fit isn't magic, it's expertise. As a true talent and professional services partner, Insight Global offers customized solutions to help you build teams, improve retention, and drive better business results. Go beyond staffing with Insight Global. If you'd like to learn more, go to insightglobal.com/learningleader. That's insightglobal.com/learningleader.

• 0:55Ryan Hawk?

  Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Text HAWK to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text HAWK to 66866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. So good. Chris Beresford-Hill is the Worldwide Chief Creative Officer at BBDO.

• 1:39Ryan Hawk?

  Previously, he spent two years as North America President and CCO of Ogilvy, where he helped bring the agency and its clients a new level of relevance. He brought Workday to the Super Bowl, led the team that brought in the Verizon account in one of the biggest Super Bowl campaigns ever, Can't Be Broken, featuring Beyonce, and created the most celebrated Super Bowl campaign of 2024, the social and influencer-led Michael Saravi.

• 2:10Ryan Hawk?

  Chris and his teams have won every award for creativity and effectiveness many times over. He's been included in Adweek Best Creatives, the Adweek 100, and Business Insider's Most Creative People in Advertising. During our conversation, we discuss the art of the cold email, how to write them so that people want to respond, and we go deep on the cold email that Chris wrote to me to come on the show. It's one of the best, maybe the best I've ever received. Then he shares how he earned his first Super Bowl ad. Love that story. And Chris tells the story of how he and

• 2:48Ryan Hawk?

  the team bounced back after losing a client that was worth one-third of their entire firm's revenue, which would put some out of business, not them. And then he shares why he has a set reservation once a week at the same restaurant to meet with people who are important to him in his life. We talk about that and much, much more. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Chris Beresford Hill.

• 3:19Ryan Hawk?

  It is so cool to have you here on the Learning Leader Show. Welcome, man.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me. As I mentioned off air, I'm a very big fan, very longtime listener.

• 3:29Ryan Hawk?

  I do appreciate that, and it was really cool to get your cold email. And that is actually what I want to talk about first, because I think this is a lost art, at least a lost art of being good at it. But writing a really good cold email that generates a response, I feel like is one of your superpowers, or at least you've developed this skill. Can you go into your mindset when it comes to writing a good cold email? What does it consist of? What are you thinking of? And how has it helped you throughout your career?

• 4:04Speaker 00

  It's definitely helped me tremendously. It's got us talking. It got Tim Ferriss and I talking. It got me talking to a lot of people, a lot of other people I admire and even some celebrities and artists that meant something to me. It brought me into a lot of conversations. I don't have as much of a formula. Maybe that even inherently is the problem. I don't think I would ever email someone without a real connection or a real thing to talk about. If you send a cold email and there is that distance between sender and receiver, it'll probably feel like a lot of things I'm sure your inbox and certainly mine populate with. If you're able to reach out to someone with specificity, with understanding of who they are and what they do, that is received so

• 4:49Speaker 00

  differently. And I know the difference between someone who's maybe looking for a gig or looking to direct something for my agency, the difference between someone who's hitting me with, as we say, the cut and paste, or someone who knows the work that I've been part of and knows why they'd be a good match, the difference between those two things are night and day. That's the first huge difference.

• 5:09Ryan Hawk?

  The word you use that I love is specificity. When you wrote to me, Ryan, longtime listener, big fan, I think I listened to both Daniel Coyle's episodes five times and have gifted Culture Code at least 100 times. It changed my life for sure. That was the opening. So I immediately was like, oh, interesting. Is this real? Like, yes, this looks real to me. And you followed up with some of the things that you've done that are super impressive in your career, and then some things that we could potentially talk about. And to me, that specificity, you proved it immediately and it grabbed my attention to then read on further, which then I saw, oh, yeah, I think I've heard of this guy. You've done some huge, huge things with commercials and

• 5:52Ryan Hawk?

  Super Bowls and crazy people that you've gotten to work with. And I feel like that's a huge part that is missed, especially in the copy and paste world.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, think about all the messages we're bombarded with. I think you smell it a second away. You could see what's authentic. But it's also, by the way, it's also puts a little bit of an onus on the person reaching out. I did an email Malcolm Gladwell because I don't listen to his podcast and I don't know. I'm sure it's a great podcast. That's fascinating. Great people listen to it, but I can't talk to him the way I could talk to you or Ferris or any of those other people. And I think that's also the difference is don't reach out to someone if you don't have a compelling connection to make. Do the work or be authentic. I think the authenticity and inauthenticity is you sense it in the second.

• 6:36Ryan Hawk?

  The two parts that need to be really specific, the specific praise and the specific ask. Sometimes those things are too broad as in like, I think you're awesome. I'm inspired. Can I pick your brain? None of that is specific. None of it is specific versus the specificity around the praise as well as saying, I would love to talk to you about this. And it's a specific topic or it's a question about leadership or something like that. How has it helped you in your career, especially early on in your career, maybe trying to earn an internship or get a brief, or how has your cold emailing skills that you've, even if that might be the wrong phrase, but how have those skills helped you as you've built a career?

• 7:18Speaker 00

  I think I'm not afraid to reach out to anyone because I'm not afraid to be ignored. I'm not afraid to fail. I'm not afraid to lose. But I do think that is a, I'll call it a superpower. There's Tom Brady and there's Bill Belichick. And I understand that, that they, when they lose, go to a very dark place. They can't handle it. I'm not that, but there's plenty of people who win that just are not afraid of the hurt. So there's a whole other world of being, of being not afraid to put yourself out there. I suppose I've been cold emailing my whole life. Advertising today, the reason I'm putting myself out there so much is I think we've got to work harder to attract and retain the big talent because there's so many jobs for creative people. But 20 years ago, you could be a screenwriter

• 8:03Speaker 00

  or you could work in advertising. Those are two ways to make films that would get in front of people. I think I emailed a creative director of a company and then Of course, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with that agency and why I wanted to be there and why I had the skills. But I think getting into the industry without a neighbor or a parent or a friend of the family that was in it. I felt like I had to learn everything I could about it and then put it to use and be excited and proud of what I've learned and go and reach out to people. So a story I've shared a couple of times, but I was an unpaid intern at a wonderful, small creative boutique agency in Boston called Modernista. And at the time, if you remember when the Hummer H2 truck came out, so this would have been about 2002.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  That beautiful yellow giant vehicle, we would, we would write print ads back when there was magazines everywhere. There used to be 100 magazines where there's 100 protein bars in the airport. And there were these kind of throwaway assignments where we would just write a different line on the ad. And so I was an intern and I was vying for a job and it was very competitive. It was very hard to get hired at that time in the biz. And so I had the assignment of the Dallas Mavericks 2002 season program back cover with just a picture of the truck. And so at that time, Mark Cuban, then owner, was constantly getting fined by the league for criticizing the officiating. And so I just wrote the line, even Mark Cuban has nothing bad to say about it with the picture of the truck.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  And then I heard this myth that if you found his email address and you wrote him, he would always write you back. So I made a PDF and I wrote him, I forget what my cold subject line was, but I reached out to him and maybe I said, lowly intern looking for help. And I sent him the ad and I asked if I could have his permission. And so when I went to my boss and I brought him the ad, he laughed at it. He was a sports fan. And then he said, there's no way we can do this. And then he turned the next page and I had the email printed out. And I think later he told me that's, that's when you got hired. Because you didn't just have an idea, you took the responsibility, bringing the idea to life. And that, I suppose, I, I learned something when he shared that with me too. So I owe, I owe Mark Cuban writing back to that for, for me getting my start.

• 10:13Ryan Hawk?

  Just this idea, man, of being proactive. There's one thing to have the idea. There's another thing to actually get it done. The execution element is huge and you did it before your boss asked you to, right? You had it all done. I can't imagine how impressed that dude was at that time when he turns the page and you'd already done the really hard work of getting a famous billionaire to reply and give his okay to run the ad. Were you thinking about that at the time where you were just like, oh, this is just what I gotta do to get it done? I'm just curious if your mindset at such a young age to know and then to execute and to be so proactive.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  It was not calculated. It wasn't that. It was, I think today, I think there was, I was reading that great book, Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. And he said, one of the things I underlined five times is he said at Pixar, you never need permission to take responsibility. But that is such a profoundly important point. And I imagine in any organization, the employees that the leaders rely on the most and believe the most in are the ones that take more responsibility and don't just do the one thing they're assigned, but feel a responsibility for the total success. But I think at that time, I honestly, I just thought, fuck it. It was a creative idea. I knew that there was going to probably be a problem with getting this ad made. And I remember that legend that if you could find his email and creative advertising is just putting two things together, making surprising

• 11:33Speaker 00

  connections constantly. So I think I was mostly just excited that I had written something and I connected with that with a bit of lore and then I just, so I think I was just kind of just doing stuff when I was doing it.

• 11:44Ryan Hawk?

  Well, I gotta ask, because I think we are mutual fans of the Dave Matthews Band. And I heard for, was it an eight-year period that you and Dave were pen pals? Like, how did this happen?

• 11:55Speaker 00

  I think caring a little bit more, paying a little bit more attention around things you're passionate about, and then utilizing that knowledge that lies on the excess. Like, I think, I don't know if this is how I first got to him, or I either watched Saturday Night Live through to the end, and they told you who the hotel sponsor was. And I figured, well, that's probably where they put the guests up. So I think I might have called that hotel and gotten him or something like that.

• 12:22Ryan Hawk?

  Seriously?

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Or, or the other way was for the over 40s, they'll remember the liner notes in your compact disc. I think I spent so much time poring over that. I know, I think this was it. They recorded their first album or first studio album, Under the Table and Dreaming, at Bearsville Studios. I'll never forget that, upstate New York. So pre-Google, I don't know how, I think I might have gotten a phone book or something. I found the address to that studio and then I wrote a letter and it was, this whole thing could probably be about cold calling. I wrote a letter to him and I didn't say, I'm a big fan, can I have your autograph? I didn't say, whatever the 1990 equivalent is of, can you hop on an informative call for 20 minutes? And I actually asked some questions about what was going to be on the album.

• 13:08Ryan Hawk?

  Oh.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  And I received back, like a month or two later, I remember coming home from school and there was this package and I opened it and I just was not thinking. And then there, and I still have it, he, on like some kind of a big round piece of paper, almost like a giant like napkin, he had written me a huge circular letter with like a drawing on the inside. And he told me what songs were going to be on the album and blah, blah, blah. And then I've also realized that if you're going to reach out to someone, ask them a specific question. Obviously, you don't like to answer general questions. You don't want to explain yourself, Ryan Hawk, to someone. But if someone asks you a pointy question about leadership, well, okay, let's talk about it. The other thing is show up

• 13:50Speaker 00

  with gifts. And so I had also known that he was a big Beatles fan. And so my father had found some sort of a Beatles bootleg, like an audio tape that he had a copy of that was like some, some, the Beatles gave a tape to Peter Sellers of some outtakes and I'd found that or he'd found that. And so then I sent Dave a Beatles tape and then he wrote me back about that. And so I didn't overdo it for a couple of years and then I would go backstage, I'd get the backstage passes and, and so, and he was fucking awesome to me. You meet someone and, and you, you know, that was my first brush with a magical person. And to have that be, to be a wonderful and rewarding experience, obviously that, that can lead to a lot of things going right in your world. And I think the opposite could probably change your course. But yeah, it started with maybe a little bit like the

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Mark Cuban thing. I think I'm always, if I'm curious about something, I'm deeply curious. And I think the most interesting tidbits are on the periphery and that's the stuff you leverage. Bearsville Studios. Preferred hotel of SNL, Mark Cuban's email, Lord.

• 14:48Ryan Hawk?

  I love that. Well, you just gotta have, you gotta go do the extra. Like, most people who do excellent work are creative thinkers. They do extra. They're willing to do what it takes. And you have the willingness to get ignored for a long time, in some cases, or forever. Yeah, Dave has been number one on my kind of dream list for 10 years now. And I've recently gotten in contact with people who are close to him. It's the first person ever in the history of the show that I've offered to make a large donation to their charity to come on. Like, I'm trying everything. We still aren't even close to it, yes, but I will try forever. Number two, and a close second is Doris Kearns Good One, which I'm really doing the same types of things and haven't made it work yet.

• 15:31Ryan Hawk?

  But I think you've got to be willing to do the extra. You've got to be willing to be patient. You've got to be willing to be consistent and continually get after it. I think those skills, then, Chris, are portable to other parts of your life, to other parts of your career. So, like, we're harping on this one thing, but I think that has probably played a massive role in the building of your career. Can you go deeper into the skills you developed to look at the CD on the inside and look at where they recorded the album? Or wait till the end of Saturday Night Live to see the hotel where their guests stay for free? And the cold call, that hotel, those skills, can you share more about how that has helped you build such an amazing career?

• 16:16Ryan Hawk?

  And you're still right in the middle of it.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  I think today, maybe at the, wherever I am on the spectrum of starting with a nine-year-old cold calls. By the way, the other, the other thing is, is my parents knew what I was doing and they didn't stop me. So, that really, really helped. They didn't, I don't know if they fully encouraged it. They probably thought it was a little weird that their, their son was constantly hitting the phone book. But that was a tremendous help, because that could have been probably thwarted. But I think today... I do believe a definition of a leader is someone who takes whatever comes at them and figures out how to turn it into an opportunity for everybody. My parents moved around a bunch when I was a kid and I was very shy. I was really like a very quiet mediocre student at school. Then I had this alter ego when I went home where I was conversing with these people that

• 17:03Speaker 00

  my classmates would. I got in with the New York Knicks and I got in with Dave Matthews and I got in with Rob Liefeld who created Deadpool. But I didn't talk about it at school. At school, everyone was talking about the comic books and at home, I was figuring out how I could hang out with them. So I think the, I just think that mindset of we all want success and we all want to, we all want to do well. And if you work in advertising, you want to do something wonderful and creative. I think the willingness to, to find a way to, to pull it off against all odds is, is probably as valuable as the core talent. When I think a lot of us, we overstate the importance of the competence, but, but competence

• 17:44Speaker 00

  without insane follow through or insane problem solving, but it stagnates. In this industry, our batting average, even with, with one of our favorite clients is probably bringing five to 10 ideas per one approved. And our batting average on a more challenging piece of business is 50 to one. So you've got to have a mindset for long shots. And if you want to be really successful, you've got to build a culture where people are constantly solving every single peripheral problem around the idea, rather than putting an idea on the table and waiting for someone to say yes or no. So I think that mindset has gotten me probably more ideas made, which put me in a good position.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  But then when you're leading the team to try to get everyone thinking that way and to highlight that, reward that, encourage that, that's how you can start to scale in our industry.

• 18:39Ryan Hawk?

  I want to dig into your career and your arc and what it means to, to work in advertising and to lead creative people and to come up with ideas and to get Super Bowl ads. And I want to posit that right now, but I want to pause as well because I heard something else and I'm curious if you still do it because this is something, I hope you do, as I'd love this. I read that after COVID, you started going out. I think it might've been to breakfast. But but not only was the breakfast important in the place where you went, but even more important to me was the fact of, and tell me if you still do this, or if maybe you've tweaked it by now, since I think it's been years. You take a mentor, you take a mentee, and you take a peer,

• 19:22Ryan Hawk?

  and you go out to eat once a week and gather with that grouping of four. This is an idea that I absolutely love. Do you still do this? And if so, I'd love just to hear your mindset and your process and philosophy behind it.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Well, I think as we, as we both know today, the accelerated pace and anxiety in business means, means you're emailing, you're on Zoom, you're in meetings, you're texting, you're slacking. And if you're really lucky, you find 10 minutes to think. So to have a meal outside of the office and have a standing reservation, I think is just one of the few things where I can't control so much of how my day unfolds. So it's every Friday because everyone's in a good mood on a Friday. And I've loosened up a little and sometimes I've found it sometimes best to have, have breakfast with, with a mentor or a mentee or a old friend. It's harder to get everyone's schedules right. But that is, it's one of these things where a hard decision

• 20:23Speaker 00

  stuck to has paid off and it's probably in ways I don't even know. Whether or not, I'd like to think that some of the people from the company that I go to breakfast with, that it means something. And I do, it is a ask me anything. And if I can't tell you something, I will tell you why I can't tell you, and I'll tell you everything I possibly can. And so I do it like, not like a boss, but like a friend, like someone in your corner. And then to see an old friend or someone who inspires me, it's just like nourishment. It's just so, I'm probably more productive on a Friday than any other day because I start out by either giving or being around those people where I feel like I'm receiving.

• 21:00Ryan Hawk?

  I just love the idea of the standing reservation. This is like you just. Auto set this up in your life that you're gonna have the meal at this place on this day? And you have this kind of design intentionally in your life to build out those relationships? Because you're right, sharing a meal with a person, or even regularly sharing meals with people, completely changes the dynamic of the relationship than if you just text or just see them on Zoom from time to time.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  It makes the case, I often think about this, that you're on a Zoom and you're on Hollywood Squares and it's, it's easy to disassociate with someone and be a little judgmental. I think when you sit at a table, when you talk, when you ease into the conversation the way you do in life, you start with personal things, that changes everything. Then you go out and get drunk with them, then you really like that too. Then that person that used to be like annoying in the Hollywood Squares, now you love that guy, don't want to be a cliche, but the height of it is going through some shit together. If you want to get all the way to the end of really loving someone and really appreciating every single thing about them, then go under extreme duress together. And I know back in the day, people used to do Outward Bound. I don't think I'd be, I don't think I'd be that person to do that.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  But then you think of the other extreme of when something really bad happens at work, and that's probably the better than any breakfast you can have.

• 22:22Ryan Hawk?

  You just brought up the part about getting drunk with people, and this seems like a lost art as well. I'm not, I'm not a proponent of telling people to go out and get hammered, but it feels like that's going away some too. Like, I don't know, do you keep that in your life? Like, how, how big of a role is that for you?

• 22:37Speaker 00

  Minimal. I'm Irish, so I definitely like to have a few beers, but Seinfeld has a bit about morning guy and night guy, and one of them will kill the other one. Morning guy will win or night guy will win. And I think maybe 15 years ago, morning guy won. So I feel like I would go out and get loose with people, but I'd have to do it before 8pm, and I don't think that's the preferred time for most people. But I think generationally, things have changed. I think people are work out with a bunch of younger guys. And when I was their age, I was too hungover to even form a sentence, and then these guys are doing wind sprints. So I do think culturally wellness has, has become something for, for young people, and I think it definitely what, definitely wasn't for us in the 90s, for sure.

• 23:19Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, I want to go through some of the stories, some of the things that you sent me that I think would be fun to pull on the string a little bit. Your first ad, I gotta hear more about this. You're going through a garbage can to write a script and then I think it had something to do with Budweiser. What was this all about?

• 23:34Speaker 00

  It's funny that I didn't intend to thread everything this way, but I think it's probably at the core of everything. And I worked at a really tiny ad agency and it was because of that it was not hierarchical. And so as an intern, I was given the opportunity to write these little headlines like the Mark Cuban one I told you about. And I was also given a giant binder with automotive specifications and I was writing website and brochure copy for General Motors. So that was the work, but Budweiser came in as a new client and I knew that they wouldn't. My boss at that time, a guy named Lance Jensen, who's phenomenal, he's still in the biz. He'd said to anyone, if anyone can help out in this, and so I saw this as a chance as the junior.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  I guess I'd been hired and so I was making $22,000 a year as a junior copywriter. Couldn't have been happier and I wanted to take a whack at some Budweiser scripts, but I'd never written a script and no one taught me how. So they gave everyone a key to the office. So I always stayed late and just tried to work, work on my craft, as it were. And I wanted to write a Budweiser script or two, and so I had to go around and fish through the recycling. And I found some old Aquafina or Very Fine Juices scripts and I uncrumpled them just to look at how you write a description of a visual. And then you write the character name and indent because I didn't know what a script looked like. So I kind of put a bunch of those out, figured out how to write one, and then I had, I had a few ideas. And so I wrote a bunch and I just left, left them on his desk.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  And in the morning he called me in and he liked a couple of them or he liked, he was being generous. He liked a thing or two and then he sat and we wrote with me and gave me a real show of generosity in return for my chutzpah. So I probably would overstate the kernel I had, but I got to sit and write with him. And so that was kind of how I endeared myself or gave enough in order to get a better seat at the table, so to speak.

• 25:26Ryan Hawk?

  Again, though, right? Proactive, taking action, doing something that you didn't even know like what a script looked like, but that didn't stop you or say, wait a second, I need to read a full book or I need to take a class or I need to, not, not that there's anything wrong with that, but instead of that, you learned by doing it and then getting one-on-one coaching from someone who sounds like a master at it. What was that like? What was that moment when you sat down? You could, when you, when I hear I got to write with them, I'm immediately thinking like, wait, what does that even look like? What does that mean? Take me inside the room. What's it like inside the room when you get to write side by side with someone who's really good at it?

• 26:03Speaker 00

  So Lance Jensen would do this with me and some of the creatives. And then later, when I worked at another agency called Goodby Silverstein and Partners, which is a very American classic ad agency, they did Got Milk among a million other things. And the creative director there named Jamie Barrett would also do the same thing. It was, it's kind of a pull up a chair. Okay. And then they, they crack the knuckles and they sort of say, all right, like I like this part. So let's start here. Okay. So we, you know, I like the idea of a forgetful guy in a Budweiser commercial. That's easy to make fun of. I think what it would be is they'd almost let you shadow them kind of writing off of your kernel, leaving enough space for you to interject. And if you threw out something good enough, it kind of made its way on there or if not.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  But it's kind of a very gentle and it's very nice and you get the benefit of it. I didn't think, oh my God, if I'm sitting next to him, there's probably a good chance this thing will get made. I think I, I realized I was getting a chance to see how he thought and what that process was like. I was much more excited not to be showing anything of myself to him or thinking about converting. I think I was saying, okay, this is someone I admire. I'm going to watch them do what they do and I'm going to immediately figure out how much of that I should be doing myself or what's the same or what's different or what have you.

• 27:18Ryan Hawk?

  Speaking of the writing process and now in your position as both a creative person, but also leading a company. I've found writing to be one of the ultimate tools for learning. It forces clarity of thought and I push hard, every leader that I work with, to have some sort of a writing practice, whether they want to publish it for others to read and judge or not, doesn't matter to me. What does matter is that they get the thoughts out of their head onto the page because that's when you truly get a feel if you know what you're talking about. And so now that you, and then writing ad copy and all that fascinates me because I always want to do it better for my own business, like selfishly, like how do I get better at this

• 28:03Ryan Hawk?

  skill that it's not one I've developed yet. So there's a lot there, but I'm curious, Chris, from your perspective, starting when you were quite young, all the way up to this point in your career where you're still writing a lot and your writing is what earns you work, your writing earns a response to a cold meal, your writing helps you lead people effectively. Can you go deeper into writing and thinking and communication and how that helps you from a leadership perspective?

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Talking about the process, I think advertising is probably a very broad, some people think almost web banners and direct response. Other people think Gillette, the best man can get. Writing that enduring brand tagline and writing a functional kind of conversion asset, those are highly different things. And I think probably where, where the best creative flex is, is when you're creating a new campaign. So for example, my friend here at BBDO who's been here some 20 years, Peter Kane, 15 years ago, wrote the line, "You're not you when you're hungry for Snickers." When I talk about coming up with advertising, it's Snickers has this strategy.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  They need to, they satisfy this purpose in people's lives and, and this is the audience. Now, tell me what the story is. What is the, how does the brand show up? What does the brand look like, sound like? Who are they? That is the one where you take all that in. And my youngest self, I'll tell you what I would do 20 years ago and what I do today. I would brain dump everything, everything I could possibly. You've got to purge it out of your system. So write every idea, bad ones, good ones, ones that make no sense. And when you think you're done, and I'm sorry if this is like a gross, but you've got to almost stick your finger down your throat and find and actually trick yourself into doing more.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  And my friend, Jason Bagley, who runs an advertising school, has made a list of questions of prompts that you should ask yourself. I was doing a version of this on my own, but his thing is, once you've gotten every idea out of your system, you should say, what is the worst ad I could possibly make? What would I do if I wanted to make fun of this strategy? What would I write if the laws of gravity no longer existed? So almost prompts that force you to make something up to satisfy them. I would go through this exercise for 20% of the time I had. If I had a week, I would do this for a day. No matter what happened the rest of that week or two weeks, I would always return to that. I would take an idea out, I'd write it. I wouldn't go off and think of something new.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  I would return to that and I'd find another. You find it all in there. That to me is probably the most common process. Everyone does it differently. Obviously, there may be some psychopath who's so good that they just, they quietly write out one perfect idea from the beginning. But for most of my colleagues, that was what it was. It was about getting everything out. Today, I think over time, when you've done it so many times over and over, now I can do it very quickly in my head, meaning I don't need to have a one day brain dump and sift it for a week. I can immediately start rolling through things and I can stop on something that's good. And I've developed the skill now that if I'm looking at someone else's work, I just know when it clicks.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  I just know when it clicks relative to the problem. So it's just been the same as I'm sure dropping back and throwing a certain route. It's just the more you do it, the more you do it, you kind of get into a zone or you get into a strong muscle memory and you just know exactly. What it feels like when you hit it.

• 31:36Ryan Hawk?

  Interesting you brought that up. One of the things that happens for a quarterback, the more reps you get is, and you've heard people say this, is everything around you slows down. When you're young and you're playing or you're new, like first, starting out as a freshman in high school or a freshman in college, or even first reps as a pro, it's like, oh my God, this is so fast. There's no way. I don't know how I'm going to be able to do this. And then you just seem like you just got to complete one of those deep balls or just get a completion or get, okay, let me settle in. And then each rep there forward, it gets a little bit slower, a little bit slower, a little bit slower. So eventually you feel like I'm faster than everybody out here. This is,

• 32:15Ryan Hawk?

  it's not easy, but it's easier. What's the version in your world of the game slowing down around you?

• 32:24Speaker 00

  You, the, so let, let's say I'm at a point where someone else has five ideas. I often believe creativity is deconstructed usually by non-creative people and it becomes very academic. And the truth is, it's not academic at all for the people that are participating in the creative act. I actually think oftentimes creative people aren't even aware of all the structural things their ideas do. They just feel it and other people, whatever. And I think the version today for me and of any strong creative leader at an ad agency is when you see that idea, it lifts off the page, but furthermore, it's not enough just for you to anoint it and say, this is the one.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  You can grab that idea within two seconds of seeing it and you can flip it around and you can manipulate it and you can understand the power and potential of it, develop a sense of mastery around the idea. And that is what gives obviously the people in your company confidence. But a creative has just spent their whole cannon. They've used all their gunpowder on these ideas. You get to pick it up and say, I can protect this every which way to Sunday because I understand this even better than you do because I've just seen it. You've taken it to the end of the marathon and now I see how much farther it can go. And so I think that ability and then the way it manifests, you can talk to a marketer and they can challenge it. They can probe it. They can ask if it can thread

• 33:50Speaker 00

  a certain line and your ability to firmly hold the idea without compromising the integrity, but manipulate it, change it. That's what it feels like on a really good day.

• 34:01Ryan Hawk?

  The name that popped in my head as you were describing the intuitive element of that, they might not even be able to describe it, but they can feel it and it lifts it up was Rick Rubin. It feels like because Rick isn't the guy who actually plays any instruments, but he's produced some of the greatest music ever over the last, I don't know, few decades in multiple genres and different styles of music, but it's almost like he just has this sense. He's developed this skill to know what sounds pleasant to our ears. How much of like Rick's work do you study? Oh, it's right there. Okay. We did not set this up. Yeah. How much of this is like a part of, a part of your life?

• 34:42Speaker 00

  You know what? It, okay, this is very interesting. I read this and then I listened to it, which is even better because his voice is incredible. If you've never heard Rick Rubin himself speak about creativity, I would even skip the hard book and listen to it because he's got, he kind of sounds like what he's talking about, the whole thing. Rick Rubin, if I was feeling really low, really empty, I could pick this up and I would feel re-inspired. I don't feel like I really need this on most days. I feel like I need the Learning Leader podcast because I feel like all I've got is creativity. I need confidence. So anyway, but I think if you are in a creative

• 35:23Speaker 00

  industry or creative adjacent, I think it is, it is a wonderful look into the mindset. I think if you live in that mindset, funny, I like, I was saying to my partner Nancy here at BBDO. She was shocked because I read, I read business books nonstop. Every time I've read a business book, and I'm not talking about like serious textbooks. I'm talking about the airport business books, usually written by semi ghostwriters and things like that. And I always get one thing out of it that helps me with this business, with dealing with marketers, with dealing with creative ideas, but all the peripheral forces.

• 35:56Ryan Hawk?

  The people.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  But it's funny, but it's like business people read books about Da Vinci and then creative people read, read books about the CEO of GE. It's very funny. My escapism is not reading about creativity. It's reading about leadership and pragmatists.

• 36:12Ryan Hawk?

  You said that in your email. I'm obsessed with this. I'm reading leadership management books all the time, listening to your podcasts all the time. You said at the beginning of that answer, I need confidence. I don't sense that in you. What do you mean by that?

• 36:25Speaker 00

  Well, how about this? I actually think my creative industry is one that it's in the frontline. AI is probably going to disrupt the accounting industry faster than it's going to disrupt the creative advertising industry. Yet there's all these looming fears of what was this going to take away creative people's jobs or the nature of business or clients willingness to invest in high funnel advertising, which we specialize in. And I think beyond creative directing work, our responsibility at all the big creative agencies is writing the business and advocacy for the value of creativity and how it changes the fate of brands and impacts consumers.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  And so I think leading a company well, because at BBG, we have an incredible global CEO named Nancy Reyes, who's my partner, and she does the business. But a lot of the vision and a lot of the looking at headwinds and opportunities and how we position ourselves in the market, I want to learn everything I can about successes in leadership in order to do the best job there, because I am a nerdy writer by trade. So the leadership is a late skill and that's kind of why it's the new thing that I'm learning.

• 37:32Ryan Hawk?

  I'd love to hear like the breakdown of how you spend your time. What percentage of it is being an ad man, being a creative who's writing and thinking and coming up with ideas? And what percentage of your time is spent leading people and working with others and doing like one-on-ones and hiring and trying to develop teams and building culture? I know I'm sure it's not a perfect breakdown, but I am just curious how you allocate your time.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  You've got to do it all. There's definitely roles where you can say, I've got to ruthlessly prioritize. I think if you sit over the whole thing, you've got to do everything. And I would say 20, 20, 20. But the 20% on creative is like 80% of my soul and energy. So the biggest impact I can make with our clients and with the company is to champion, unlock, shepherd, deliver a giant idea. But at the end of the day, we could have the most motivated group. We could have the most balanced departments. We could have a great agency positioning. Have no HR problems. We can, all those things could be solved, but without magnetic ideas and the actual product,

• 38:39Speaker 00

  there's, there's nothing, there's no there there. So I do everything and it's, and by the way, the casting is instrumental. And, and so going around our global network, traveling, meeting everybody, learning about the strengths in every office, trying to capitalize on those strengths, trying to bring the network together. It's very inspiring, but it's very operational. And it definitely is much more about bringing a community together, giving to that community and that being really the primary influence. But then Pepsi is one of our new clients in New York and I, I just came over to talk to you right after sitting on the couch with my creative leads on Pepsi, kicking around how the hell we're going to, we're going to pull off a crazy stunt that, that's going to get filmed in a couple of weeks. So

• 39:23Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm always there. I'm always going to find the good work or I'm going to find the problem works and get it unstuck. And then the rest of it is like, the privilege of having this job is like, everything else, just do it. You gotta do it.

• 39:36Ryan Hawk?

  I'm fascinated.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Terrible thing to talk about. Let's unpack this because you probably can't do all of it. It's a bad mindset, but.

• 39:42Ryan Hawk?

  Well, no, I mean, it's part of the role when you're a senior leader and you're in a creative position and you got to that position. Part of the reason was because you're so good at that thing. And that leads me to want to talk about that specific thing as far as when I look at your history of your career, one of the things you're known for is going to a place that maybe is doing okay, or in some cases not great. And then within a couple of years, they are doing great and you've increased revenues and you've gotten amazing briefs and projects and big, big time clients. What is the process like for you to earn a new client? Someone like Pepsi or somebody else? Like what, what happens? What goes into it? Other than?

• 40:24Ryan Hawk?

  I hate to say, other than the fact that they've just seen your history of work and you're like, "Let's just get that guy. He's the best." That takes decades to get to that point. I'm curious more, maybe earlier in your career, what's the process to earn a new client?

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Well, it's not given to you. And the ultimate compliment, and by the way, I think one of the best things you can do with an ad agency is if you want the absolute most out of your team, be a marketer, be a brand that knows what they want and is willing to meet a few agencies and then say, "You're the ones," and not create some arduous, unending pitch process. I would say that you've got to go through a competitive creative pitch, which would be traditionally between three and five agencies would take a briefing from a client about their product, about their consumer, about what their challenges are. And you'd bring back after two weeks, a strategy, and probably about two weeks later, you'd bring sample campaigns. That is the traditional process.

• 41:23Speaker 00

  But if Nike comes up for review tomorrow, I'll just call that Nike because it would be probably the most world-class advertising creative account you could ever imagine. The real game is being in those three to five agencies, and that is only work you've done and reputation. When you win an account, you're competing in a group, and that's much more about playing your own game, thinking about what the best thing possible to do is something you're going to be passionate about because you've got to show up to the client with a lot of conviction and a lot of energy. But the truth is, you can have the best team in the world, but if you don't have the work underneath your feet, you will never get the phone call. And there's no cold email I could write to Nike if we didn't have the work to back it up that would get us in the game. I think your audition is the creative work you do,

• 42:08Speaker 00

  and then you get the chance to compete, and that's a fair ground. And that really is chemistry, strategy, but if they see a great idea, that's it.

• 42:18Ryan Hawk?

  What about your first Super Bowl ad? You said you sold it by trying to solve more than the brief, which made my ad the only one in contention. What do you mean by that?

• 42:27Speaker 00

  There was probably about 10 creative people invited to pitch a bit of a internal jump ball. It was for a peanut company called Emerald Nuts. The brief was, we want to win the Super Bowl. We want to have the most popular, most viewed, funniest ad. And I wanted a better chance at winning. I like to read the liner notes. I like to watch through to the end of the program. I like to hang out, just see if there's any more there for me to work with in life and in business. And so I grabbed ahold of the strategist, who had written the brand strategy, and his name is Matt Herman. I asked him, is there anything else they want to talk about? And he said, they just want to win the Super Bowl, but we are talking to them about maybe positioning nuts as a form of

• 43:10Speaker 00

  energy. So instead of trying to write the funniest Super Bowl ad ever, I just wrote funny ads that were about the peanuts providing energy. They probably had funnier ads than me, but they were doing one thing. And my ads were doing two things, because I was selling a benefit. It was about the peanuts giving you energy, plus a funny Super Bowl ad. And so by doing that, by solving more of the problem, by bringing more value to the table than was asked, it was the simplest way to clear out the field.

• 43:41Ryan Hawk?

  What happened then? How did the commercial go? How did it air?

• 43:44Speaker 00

  It was an ad called Robert Goulet. Do you remember him, the old crooner? He sang the impossible dream. He's like a magnificent handsome, old timey singer. And I don't know why I was obsessed with him, but at that time, I just, I found him very funny, from this kind of man from a pastime. And so I wrote a sentence that said, at three in the afternoon, when your blood sugar and your energy are low, Robert Goulet shows up and messes with your stuff. And then the whole commercial was someone nodding off at their desk, and then this lounge singer lowering through the ceiling, and behaving as a poltergeist, taping people's desk chairs, and fucking with people's stuff, and throwing

• 44:26Speaker 00

  their papers around. I think if you watched it, you'd say it was batshit crazy, but it was probably one of the most strategic things I've ever been part of, because it basically just is problem solution. We just invented. A completely made up memorable problem. And it did really well. Ad Age the next day called it the the number one Super Bowl ad. There was an ad reviewer at the time named Bob Garfield and he gave it the the top rank. This was early in the days of YouTube where not every video on earth was on YouTube. And for a couple of days, it was the number one or number two comedy video on all of YouTube. Which probably meant it only had like 500,000 views because I don't think we were all on YouTube 24/7. But I wish I got a screen grab of that.

• 45:05Ryan Hawk?

  How did that feel?

• 45:08Speaker 00

  It felt great. Well, what it felt really good about it was I think solving the problem. A bit of success, getting something under my belt that that would mean something. But I also felt like I expressed myself because it did good things for I'm well done, but it was deeply my own sense of humor. It was the kind of thing that makes me laugh and I would think makes my friends laugh. So I think that became like, okay, like maybe my sense of humor is not just for me. Maybe I can entertain people with things that I didn't I didn't know would.

• 45:36Ryan Hawk?

  How did it change the arc of your career?

• 45:39Speaker 00

  I think every time I would equate a Super Bowl to solving a big famous brand platform, having a big commercial or a big statement piece. I think anytime you can be part of one of those. It becomes a little bit of foundation, a little bit of bedrock under you. And I think if you, anyone can get lucky once, I think if can get lucky three times. You become a pretty good bet for people. So I think you you kind of look at, you know, as as someone told me once that baseball is the only sport where your individual stats being the best for you always equate to the most success for the team. Whereas in basketball, you could have the most insane stats and be hemorrhaging points on defense.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  I think as you come up as a creative, the the points for you are also the points for your clients in the agency. But I think you need to get a few things under you to make it to the next level to have someone see the track record and have confidence in you. So you've got to harness your body of work.

• 46:36Ryan Hawk?

  I like this idea of.

• 46:40Ryan Hawk?

  Being at the edge of finding an idea on the edge of possible that you sent some notes to me about and this value of potentially going over your skis. Like I literally went skiing recently. I'm not a great skier, but good enough to kind of hold my own. But then sometimes you push it and you fall, you crash. And that's when you know that you're probably pushing it enough is you crash every once in a while. And I think part of striving for excellence is that that willingness to be over your skis from time to time. And you even wrote that sometimes like you gotta lie. Now, I want to put that in proper context. What do you mean by that? How do you push your edges? How do you get over your skis? And why have you lied maybe a little bit in the past to help do something great?

• 47:22Speaker 00

  It's a little, not to go too heavy into sports metaphors, but someone once described Messi's soccer style. And they paid me, my friend Guillermo Vega, who's the head of creative for Coca-Cola these days, but he's had a really illustrious career. He told me for a while, he kept telling me I was messy and I thought he was insulting my thinking process. And then he's like, no, like Lionel Messi. And I literally for a day, I thought he was just insulting me with a nice big smile. But I think sometimes if someone tells you what they perceive, it helps you understand things. I think when Messi walks around, he's feeling out the pitch. He's on this corner, he's on that corner, he's going up near this player, that player. And it just seems like you don't really know what he's doing. And the next thing you know, he slices

• 48:05Speaker 00

  to the goal. I think I would equate that to walking around the agency every day. How's this idea going? How's that idea going? How's this client going? How's that client going? And then you see something where you go, okay, let's take this and let's stick this in the goal fast. And let's do it with conviction. And so doing that is, it's got to be an idea that that feels a little scary, a little dangerous, like it could be a mammoth success or a colossal failure. That's, that's where the excitement is. That's where the tingles are. That's what you've got to find as a creative leader. But then when you do it, it becomes

• 48:47Speaker 00

  A little bit of an EQ game and a little bit of a willingness to fail. And as I think I mentioned to you offline, how to go all the way without electrocuting yourself. If you're going to do something truly brilliant, you've got to really put it out there. And if it's brilliant, it is going to be a perceived risk and you're going to need to grease the wheel. You're going to need to de-risk it in some way. And sometimes that means putting your own ass on the line. So I think enough time has passed that I'm probably safe for saying, I was part of the Michael Sarah, Sarah V campaign that many people saw in the Super Bowl last year. And we had a client that really liked it. And I knew if we got to do this thing, it could be a hit.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  It could be great. And the client just said, I just need to know if I say yes to you, if I say yes to this, if we can get Michael. And so I said, yeah, we've already spoken with his agent and he's really, really interested. And that was not an entire truth. I wanted his agent to be excited about it. But this is what your role is as a leader. You've got to be very careful of the example you set, but there are just moments where you've got to take a risk and then figure out how to get the universe to make it work. And so that gave the client confidence to say, I want to go with this team. I want to go with this idea. We had ideas for days. We were going to solve the problem beautifully.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  It required a little bit of a risk. It wasn't lost on me when we got on a Zoom call with Michael and his wonderful agent Willie, that all the marbles were riding on this because if he didn't like it, then I was going to have a really tough conversation in front of me. But as long as the risk doesn't jeopardize your business, your team, or alienate a person, or a people, or a community, or anything like that. If it's a risk that can fall squarely on your shoulders, there just come times where you say, I believe this is going to work more than I'm afraid of the blowback. And every time I talk to my friends about this that have done incredible work, there's just always a moment of that.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  And that is a sort of EQ thing.

• 51:06Ryan Hawk?

  How did you sell him on that idea when you got on that Zoom?

• 51:10Speaker 00

  He went anything you've got to match energy. And so we popped on a Zoom and Michael's very, he's a lot like he is in his characters, very small, reserved. So I, so I didn't go New York ad professional. I think, I think I opened with, with the self-effacing joke that felt appropriate. I said, this is going to be really weird for both of us because I'm going to show you a deck of work that has your face all over it, but we've never met. And I'm, I'm really sorry if that makes it weird. And he kind of chuckled or whatever. And I popped it up and it was just the TV script. We didn't want to overwhelm him with the, a giant campaign that was going to take

• 51:50Speaker 00

  a lot. And he thankfully, he's the right casting and it was the right idea because he's a bit of a prankster. He liked the idea of tricking the internet. I don't know whether he loved the jokes or the writing, but I think to do a Super Bowl ad and use his name in it, I think for, for him to pull one over was interesting to the kind of alt comic world that he lives in. So it was definitely lucky.

• 52:12Ryan Hawk?

  I want to learn about a time when you failed, specifically the learning lesson in that moment. I believe this is when you lost a huge client or the biggest client. What, what happened and what did you learn?

• 52:26Speaker 00

  This is a good one. I think we're talking about creativity and obviously that's a great subject, but this actually I think goes right into not creative leadership, but just what a moment of leadership feels like. So Nancy, my business partner today, we were together at the same agency called TBWA. And I think I can actually share the specifics, the specifics of it because our biggest client that probably accounted for a third of our revenue was Accenture. Accenture tapped us for their advertising and we sort of knew, but maybe we're in a little bit of denial. When Accenture started buying ad agencies, that one day someone at Accenture is going to say, hey, we should have the ad agencies we own do our stuff, not these folks. So thankfully,

• 53:09Speaker 00

  it was more of a story about a crisis than a screw up, but. What was going to happen is that we had six months on the contract and we had to part with some people immediately because they reduced the scope of the business. All of a sudden, the mission for the year, which was to have a big, fantastic, glossy, creative year, it very much turned into how do we, how do we stave off shrinking and how do, how do we protect our team? I'm a big fan of Danny Meyer's leadership style. One of my favorite things I read in Setting the Table, which was around this time, probably had read this a few months earlier, anecdotally, he talked about how he was sitting with, no, you know what? Maybe this was in Daniel Coyle's book, but it was also, he also talks about it in his own book.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Effectively, he's sitting there with Daniel in Coyle's book, but the anecdote is repeated in a different way in his own book. A server drops a tray and Daniel Coyle looks at Danny Meyer and Danny Meyer quietly just kind of leans back and looks over his shoulder and Danny says, what happened? It's the plates breaking isn't the thing. I'm really looking at what happens afterwards. And he watched and all of a sudden that one waiter standing there, another waiter shows up with a broom and another waiter shows up and clears and brings a new tray. What makes the culture that Danny Meyer created, and I think the best kind of cultures is ones where, to an extent, like a team, you're playing for each other. And so the idea is in our business, sometimes you think about, how am I going to service

• 54:39Speaker 00

  the client? But really, what you want to be is the kind of team that is completely in it for each other. And so if you're, let's say, a client at a restaurant, if you watch that, that tray thing happen, you, you like the way that team operates. You want to be part of it. That is an environment you want to be part of. You just, you want to be close to that. So as this thing happened, Nancy and I made the choice not to be scared, not to talk to everyone about the bad things that could come, but instead we had two pitches in the pipeline and we said, all right, everybody, this is one of these moments, this is a bad thing that happened, let's band together, let's not be fear-based, let's approach both of these things with what is the best possible thing we can do and, and work that way.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  And a truly magical thing happened and we started feeling. In a way I hadn't before at the company, if there was an art director at 9pm at her desk, working on a comp, putting together a visual, if there was another art director that was about to leave, they'd stop and say, "Do you need help with that?" There was something happening where it wasn't a team pitching this to try to win. It was, "Can this company do it?" And it changed everything. And we started in new business presentations afterwards, saying to clients, "You don't come first. This team here, taking care of each other comes first. And as a result of that, you're going to have the best possible team." But that moment, it was just a real make or break moment. Instead of people worrying about their own jobs,

• 56:06Speaker 00

  people started taking care of each other and everything got better. And there felt like there was more purpose behind everything everyone was doing, more energy, and it just felt like everything came together.

• 56:17Ryan Hawk?

  I love that example. Dan Coyle's stuff is so good. I was at a basketball game last night, and I like to watch how the team responds when it doesn't go their way. I think that really shows a lot about the culture of the team, especially if like a guy gets called for a foul, whether it's a good call or a bad foul or whatever happens. And the team I was watching, the four other guys, if one of the guy either got a foul or missed a shot or had a turnover, they would all go and touch him on the butt or touch him on the back or smack his hand. And like to see them all get a touch, it happened every single time throughout the whole game. I was fascinated watching, not only they celebrate when it goes well and they had fun, and during timeouts, they're going crazy for each other and they have celebrations on the bench

• 57:00Ryan Hawk?

  when they get a big dunk or something, but even more so when a guy makes a mistake or makes a bad play, every other guy gets a touch. And I think that's, those little things are huge. Those are massive. And that's like, I was thinking about that last night when I saw that happening as I was preparing for our conversation, because I had an inkling about this story from reading your notes. And I thought like, "Ah, that's like the little stuff that's the big stuff." But how do you get that? Like, how do you have that happen? What do you do? Because you can be like, "Hey, guys, get a touch." Like, but what did you do that made everybody want to come together and say, "Hey, we come first. It's us. We're taking care of each other first." And then the outcome of that will be that we'll take care of our clients, but it's all about us.

• 57:45Ryan Hawk?

  Like, how do you get people to want to do that?

• 57:48Speaker 00

  If I'm taking myself back to it, there's a philosophy, it probably came from a learning leader podcast, but management by walking around.

• 57:56Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Nancy and I spent a lot of time, whether by accident or not, my office, in between my office and the restroom, was the entire creative department and I drink a lot of water. Every time I go by a task, I had, I had to know what everyone was working on. So I think we were, this was pre-COVID, so this is everyone in the office at all times. I think it was a matter of a hundred small interactions. And then as culture is built by the stories, the stories you tell, and I think as soon as we started seeing some of these different behaviors, people, again, banding together rather than thinking of themselves, we complimented it, we highlighted it, we talked about it ourselves, but it was, you can't announce it to the company.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  I think you've got to talk to people one-on-one about it. You've got to nudge people, maybe, can you help out on this or we do that, but just appeal to everyone's good nature. Everyone believes that they're a team player. Everyone knows that deep down they have good nature. I think if you make a few spot appeals and you watch the connections happen, I, I, I think it's probably one of those things with a number of us in leadership going around and doing that, and then packaging it, talking about it, telling everyone about all the great things everyone's doing. But it was, it was organic. It was a organic campaign for sure. And then afterwards, we talked about it all the time, that a lot of companies will put a mission or a purpose on the wall. We felt like we did this, we owe, like, that's not, this is not recent history. This is not elongated history.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  You just did this, you just came together, took care of each other, and then we succeeded and won because of it. And so it became very easy to talk about it going forward.

• 59:35Ryan Hawk?

  That matters so much. What is the leader focused on? What does he or she say to the team? Are you just putting up the stack rankings of the sales organization and just mentioning the people who sell a lot? Or are you using and telling real stories, real stories of people living up to the core values of the company, or real stories of people helping others? I think that's critical.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I think it was, it was, I think we talked about the whole group, but then everyone was just, again, it was the best thing you can do for someone is to say something kind about them behind their back. Like the, it's easy to compliment someone to their face. It's also easy to be pronounced, but to go around and show, show what we're valuing, show where the energy is, show what everyone's seeing, making sure you see people helping each other, rewarding it in that way. But it was, it was a bunch of lifeboats kind of connected more than pulling a ship up from, from underwater.

• 1:00:29Ryan Hawk?

  Love it, man. One more, I know we gotta run, but you're speaking to a newer person, whether it's in your industry or somebody else's college graduate, and they want to leave a dent in the world. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to them?

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  I knew it was coming. I'll talk to anyone who wants to pursue a career and leadership in a creative industry. And the advice that was baked into me, I think through maybe some of my early resilience or whatever, is do not give up. You can have a hundred ideas that get shot down, but if idea 101 is the State Street fearless girl, or Snickers, you're not you when you're hungry. You will very quickly forget about those hundred ideas, and you'll probably realize those hundred ideas were never as good as number one. But I think the field of play in creative industries is harder and harder, but we're all competing in the same way. And just be someone who has the, the heart and spirit of an artist,

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  but tons and tons of resilience and love that fortitude that it takes to continue being creative while the world keeps killing your ideas. Because that's, that mindset, you will get ideas into the world.

• 1:01:42Ryan Hawk?

  As the great Jimmy Dugan said, in A League of Their Own, "The heart is what makes it good, man. It makes it more rewarding. It makes it feel better when you do get the 101st idea out there after the first 100 gets shot down or ignored, man." Chris, I love this. Thank you so much for reaching out.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:01:59Ryan Hawk?

  I would love to continue our dialogue. I'd love next time even to meet in person. It'd be great. If I'm in New York, we could go to your breakfast spot or go to dinner or drink some beer.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  We'll go to Balthazar or dinner any Friday or Wednesday. Come visit us. It's always good to see Peter, who wrote You're Not You When You're Hungry. We have some cool people around here.

• 1:02:15Ryan Hawk?

  Love it. All right, man. Thank you so much.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:02:19Ryan Hawk?

  It is the end of the Podcast Club. Thank you for being a member of the End of the Podcast Club. If you are, send me a note, [email protected]. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Chris Beresford-Hill. A few takeaways from my notes. You never need permission to take responsibility. Chris learned this from Ed Catmull's book, Creativity, Inc., and he's embodied it his entire career. The people who build huge careers take ownership of their own and regularly solve problems and improve their clients' and colleagues'

• 1:02:58Ryan Hawk?

  life, and they do it proactively. They don't wait for somebody to tell them. They do it. That's what Chris has done since his very early days to earn his first internship. And then competence combined with insane follow-through. For some clients, it takes upwards of 50-plus ideas to get to the one good one that will work. And Chris has done a really good job of creating a culture where the team can all share their bad ideas safely in order to find the one great one. I think all of our businesses, all of our teams, would be better suited if we created a place where that can happen. And I love that Chris has

• 1:03:42Ryan Hawk?

  a standing reservation every week at the same restaurant where he meets with a mentor, mentee, or a peer to deepen the important relationships in his life. I feel like that would be something we all should do. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, "Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Chris Beresford-Hill." I think it will help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that, and you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, you subscribe to the show, you rate it, hopefully five stars, and you write a thoughtful review by doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis, and for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.