What are you willing to compromise? Lina Polimeni is the Chief Corporate Brand Officer at Eli Lilly and Company. This is a business whose work is often the difference between life and death, where they are trying to cure cancer, and where the outcome is very personal. In the middle of that reality, your own leadership journey is fueled by a lot of food for thought. No one can lead effectively without compromise.  But what we choose to compromise has a huge part to play in whether we’re successful. If what we end up sacrificing is a pathway to discovering that we are already enough… I ..read more

Are you centered? Kerry Sulkowicz is the Past-President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the Founder and Managing Principal of Boswell Group. They provide leadership advice to boards and CEOs. Kerry and I have been friends for a long time, and he has taught me much about the psychodynamic aspects of leadership. Whenever we talk, his advice strikes me as clear and straightforward, and always very human. Being centered doesn’t happen through accident, chance, or hope. It happens by intent.  And that intent is driven by recognizing two obvious truths.  Leadership is ..read more

What is your pain for?  Taban Shoresh is the Founder of The Lotus Flower, a UK-based charity that supports women and girls that have been displaced by conflict, and helps them to build sustainable futures. Since 2016, the charity's projects have impacted more than 60,000 women, girls, and community members.  Every now and then, you meet someone whose story stops you in your tracks. Taban’s story starts with her being arrested in Iraq at the age of four. Three weeks later, she's ordered onto a bus that will take her to the place where she and other members of her family will be b ..read more

Is that good? Heather Freeland is the Chief Brand Officer at Adobe, a business that, as Heather describes, is undergoing significant change to prepare itself for the future to come, and the one that is already here. In a company long known for providing powerful tools to creative people, the advent of Generative AI is both a threat and an opportunity. How human beings maintain our relevance sits at the very heart of that tension. Is that good? In the quest to become leaders that make a difference, there are many powerful questions to ask ourselves. What do I want to find out about myself ..read more

Why are you doing what you’re doing? Gabriel Schmitt has just celebrated his one year anniversary as the Global CCO of Grey. Grey’s proposition is that they have been coming up with famously effective ideas since 1917. Gabriel is somewhat younger than that, but over his career, has learned one of the most important leadership lessons that I think often gets overlooked. The importance of context. A few years ago, I wrote an article for Fast Company called The Four Weapons of Exceptional Creative Leaders. I got some pushback on using the word “weapons” in the context of creativity. My respo ..read more

How well do you know yourself? Lisa Smith is the Global Executive Creative Director at JKR. Fast Company have called her a visionary designer, citing in particular her work for Burger King, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Chobani and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They described her work as unique because “it has consistently changed the visual landscape, disrupted popular aesthetics, and started trends of its own.” When you meet Lisa, her energy is infectious. As you’ll hear in our conversation, she wants to make a difference. She also knows herself well enough to have learned th ..read more

Nils Leonard, one of the co-founders of Uncommon - the award winning global creative studio - has been a regular guest on this show since I started Fearless seven years ago. In all of that time, I’ve wondered abut his partnership with his two co-founders, Natalie Graeme and Lucy Jameson. Why did they decide to go into business together? How does it work and what might get in the way? And what makes the Uncommon partnership particularly worth understanding is the extraordinary consistency between what they said mattered to them when they started, and how they show up today. This conversation, o ..read more

What lessons have you learned? This episode features the return visit of Jon Cook, the Global CEO of VML. I interviewed Jon for the first time a year ago, eight months after he had died while going for a run in his neighborhood. Today, he is the CEO of the world's largest advertising agency. We covered a lot of topics during our latest conversation, from the qualities that he brings as a leader, to navigating mergers, to the impact of AI. We also talked about a simple but powerful truth that I think a lot of leaders have a hard time remembering when they're facing stressful situations - that w ..read more

What will be the impact of AI on the creative industries, and how can we meet this moment? This is the final episode of my series of interviews over the last few weeks leading up to and through the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. It offers a map for the future based on those conversations, and observations of the speed of change. If you haven’t seen it, look up the Volvo ad that was just published on social media. It took one person, 24 hours to create. This ad could not have been made in May, when I started this series of interviews. Creativity and innovation are oxygen for the world's b ..read more

Where does ideation end and production begin? This episode is part of a series of conversations I've been having in partnership with the Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity. Over the last few weeks, I've been focusing my study of leadership through a single lens, the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries. This final interview is with David Rolfe, the Global Head of Production at WPP. Dave and I have known each other for more years than we care to acknowledge, and he is the most provocative and disruptive thinker about production that I know. As the week at Cannes unfolded ..read more