Jim Prior on Protecting Creativity in Business | Chair at Design Bridge & Partners

20:45Future London Academy:There's so many times I've seen solutions come out where someone says, oh, yeah, that was somebody from finance or that was somebody from the talent team or that was someone from sales that came up with that idea. And so just take that attitude, create a wide collaboration, build broad allyship and, yeah, go from there. Take the skills you have naturally as a creator, but don't get yourself stuck in that siege mentality. Don't suffer from Stockholm syndrome.

21:12Jim Prior:Love this advice. And I would also love to hear, I suppose, from the agency or external perspective or consultant perspective, because I think when you're in the organization, it's a bit easier to do all of this pre-work and get these conversations. We recently had a former CMO of Etsy and Miro and kind of lots of wonderful organizations. and she was saying that when an agency presents, so to her as a CMO, what would help is when an agency doesn't just present the big kind of concepts and everything and the ideas, but also adds a three-slide summary deck that she can then as a CMO take to the boardrooms, to other people that she needs to sell into.

21:53Jim Prior:Do you have any perspective also on what are practical things that, especially if you try, if you are an external person, If you're an agency consultant, anyone coming externally into these leadership conversations, what kind of things can you do to, again, make it more of a success, whatever you're presenting?

22:11Future London Academy:Well, that's one great piece of advice already, right, that your previous conversation had yielded, because that's one thing to remember as an agency, that you go in as an agency and usually imagine, you know, this is the most important thing that everybody is going to be talking about today. It's not. It's probably the 10th most important thing they're going to be talking about. Maybe not 10th most important, but it'll be the 10th thing that they're doing during the day that has a high priority attached to it. Right. So everybody else or everyone you're talking to has a lot of other things they've got to focus on.

22:40Future London Academy:And what you're proposing is just one thing inside of a large organization. So I think understanding context is really important. And it's why that prep work about really understanding what are the drivers for whichever assignment you've been given? What are the drivers for that internally? And are we really sure that what we're proposing as a solution solves that problem or addresses that problem that we've been set? So I think that's important. Understanding that context is really important. I mean, you know, there's so many times I would present things using, oh, that was the most amazing presentation I've ever made.

23:14Future London Academy:How can they not take that idea? and then like weeks would go by and you're like, I haven't heard from them, what's going on? And you'd be calling them saying like, you know, when it wouldn't be that they weren't interested in the idea or that the idea was in any way not right. It would just be that other things overtook them in terms of priority. So I think, yes, being clear about the context in which you're operating, asking your client, how can I help you internally? When you're an agency, very often, you know, you're serving two clients, really. You're serving the organization that has hired you and you're serving the person that has hired you.

23:46Future London Academy:And the person that has hired you, by the way, is often at great risk in that situation. They're spending the company's money on you. They've got no guarantee. They've had to champion internally. They can't be in a situation where it fails or it doesn't work. They've got a lot of management of other people to do internally. So always working with them, asking them, how can I help you? What do you need to make this succeed is going to be an extremely important part of it. But as I say, context is everything. You know, you are not the only thing on the agenda of your client. You're very often, we would find our clients would say to us frequently, they would say, you're not the only thing I'm doing right now, but it's the most fun thing, you know?

24:32Future London Academy:And that's a really nice thing to be able to lean into, You know, like very often, I think it's worth remembering that when you're hired in as an agent, just as another point, just back to your early point. I mean, I spent about, I used to say half my career, but slightly less than half my career. I spent about sort of 15, 16, 17 years client side. And I worked for some great brands. I worked for Levi Strauss. I worked for Converse. So there's some great companies in there. And then I went to the agency side. I always maintain you get listened to much more when you're in the agency because you're being paid for your advice.

25:03Future London Academy:you know when you're in the room and someone's paying you an hourly rate to tell them what you think they listen to you a lot more than when you just turn up in the in the meeting and you say hey i got an idea and they're like oh yeah yeah there he goes again with this like kind of crazy creative thought so there's a lot you can lean into from the agency side you know when someone when someone hires you they want your opinion that's the first thing and so always give it always make sure your opinion is interesting there's nothing worse than an opinion that is that is bland and boring too many agencies make the mistake of just turning up to their clients and giving them an education and things they already know.

25:37Future London Academy:You know, they don't need like a history of creativity in business. They don't need like a thousand case studies of what happened for someone else. You know, what they need is what's going to make a difference to me and my business. And what can you bring? Like agencies hire someone when they can't do it themselves. They don't hire someone if they could do it themselves. So you've got to bring something that they can't do themselves. So be ambitious. and what, you know, be realistic in terms of what you can achieve, but don't come with boring, you know, come with brave, come with different, come with the value add that they need to have.

26:13Future London Academy:And then yes, work with your client to, and the individuals internally to support them on their journey as they go through that. But yeah, don't fall into the trap of just trying to repeat what the organization can do for itself.

26:25Jim Prior:I love that you brought this point, because I do believe right now probably is the most exciting time for creative leaders, creative teams and designers overall, because creativity has these other things that I suppose businesses never considered as important parts, like, as you said, fun, or looking into the future and understanding what the future might hold, or going into different direction and seeing what's out there. There are so many things that, especially in the world that we live right now, that moves very fast, that you cannot just rely on linear solutions and things that worked yesterday.

27:04Jim Prior:I think creativity has the most power and I think businesses expect that from creative teams to bring that instead of kind of more of the same of what worked and what has been happening already. Obviously with a layer of understanding the business and the market and everything else, but still this kind of expanded thinking, something they haven't seen before. and also that will be fun because I do believe we're a bit in a world that is a bit too maybe data-driven and rigid that everyone wants to go to a meeting that is a bit more fun and has something that will spark your own curiosity and just imagination as well.

27:42Future London Academy:Yeah you make such a good point there I mean I think you know if you go back in time right if you I mean when I sort of first came into the agency world it was the early 2000s 2001 I think But if you went back in time to around then, sort of mid-1990s, really, let's go all the way back to there, first of all, you know, in the sort of in the prime era of management consultancies, right, the McKinsey's, the Deloitte's, etc., right? That was a world in which if you were running a business and you wanted to find some advantage versus your competitors, you would go to McKinsey because what McKinsey had was knowledge that nobody else had.

28:21Future London Academy:So McKinsey would say, ah, now we have a forestry and agriculture practice in Asia, and we know there are some learnings from forestry and agriculture in Asia that are directly applicable to your pharmaceutical business in the Americas, right? And that knowledge transference was a value. So you as a CEO would say, oh, that's useful to me. I can buy that. I can rationalize my supply chain on those terms. I can organize my, I can structure my organization on those terms. I can do that. So there was very much an era, and it lasted for quite a long time, where the sort of knowledge economy was very much run by the consultants who were able to own that knowledge and then distribute that knowledge and sell that knowledge.

29:10Future London Academy:That era ended, actually, some five to ten years ago at least, when that knowledge had become fully commoditized. Now, there is no advantage to that because anyone who wants that knowledge has already got it. And now it's available on a large language model anyway, so you don't even need McKinsey. You just type it into an AI and you can get the answer. And the incremental advantage that you can get as a business owner today from just transferring knowledge from somewhere in the world to somewhere else in the world is minuscule. Where the advantage is today is in creativity. it's in those leaps of imagination and thought that machines can't make because famously they can't do that the advantage is in the brains of creative people who can say hey i'm not i'm not thinking about what somebody else did i'm thinking about something that's completely different i've had an idea that i think could work so that's why i'm so enthusiastic and positive about the value of creativity and the need for creativity at that senior level because the knowledge economy is dead and the creative economy is now where the advantage is going to be found.

30:15Future London Academy:And that is only going to increase in this AI era, because even if you went to me, you don't even need to go to McKinsey now and spend like 5 million on a deck. You can just go to, you know, an AI and type your question in with the right prompts and you get the same deck at the end of it. You know, half of which will be no more wrong than it was from the consultants anyway. So, you know, so it's a really, really important move that now more than ever is the creative age where the difference that gets made to businesses, whether those businesses are large or whether those businesses are just starting up to date, is going to come from human ingenuity much more than knowledge.

30:57Jim Prior:This is brilliant news and I love hearing your perspective as well because you've seen the industries through so many different phases as well. And you've seen creativity at its earlier stage when you had to prove kind of what branding even is. And to the point where now I feel like there is so much understanding and education around it, but there are other challenges that arise. So I love that you see the industry from the same lens that it is definitely the best time to be creative and do creative work.

31:28Future London Academy:I would love

31:28Jim Prior:to move into a next area of discussion, which is about the role of a CEO, because I think it's one of the most mysterious roles overall. And there is no one way to become a CEO. There is no one way to be a CEO. So I always feel like it's such a unique opportunity to talk to a CEO about what does it even feel on the inside? What do you do? How do you make decisions? And what do you think? And obviously you teach in our Design Leaders program how to make decisions as a CEO and how to lead organizations. But would love to pick a few points here in this conversation today, starting with a very kind of day-to-day mundane question.

32:09Jim Prior:Are there any maybe habits or mindsets or anything that you've got throughout these years of being a CEO that you felt like gave you an unfair advantage overall through your work? So anything that you maybe purposefully practiced or enabled in yourself, any small habits, any mindsets that actually gave you this unfair advantage.

32:33Future London Academy:God, well, that's so interesting. I mean, I'm white and male and that shouldn't be an advantage, but it probably was at a point in my career, but I can't claim that that was deliberate. So we'll put that one on one side and hopefully we're increasingly moving to a world where that no longer is an advantage for people. But no, look, I think in terms of behaviors, CEO role is very interesting. I mean, you don't meet many CEOs who set out in life saying, I want to be a CEO when I grow up. You know, like everyone as a kid said, I want to be like a, I want to be, you know, whatever it is, you know, I want to do this or that.

33:08Future London Academy:I want to be a designer or I want to be a programmer or I want to be a fighter or whatever. But, you know, very few people, I think, I suspect we now live where there are generations of people entering the workplace now who do have that ambition to be a CEO because we have slightly created a cult out of the idea of CEOs. It's become, you know, it was round about the time, I think, that we stopped calling people managing directors and started calling them CEOs. It became slightly sort of mysterious, as you say, that there was this like role that was, you know, like a managing director was someone who'd sort of risen their way to the top, whereas a CEO felt like it was, you know, actually a job description and something people trained for.

33:48Future London Academy:But as I say, today, few CEOs are CEOs because they wanted to be CEOs. They became CEOs because they rose naturally to that position. I mean, the ability to make decisions and the willingness to make decisions is key. That's absolutely the key to being in the CEO chair because you've got nobody else to do it, really. I mean, everything sort of bubbles up, really, to CEO. And then something has to be decided. And as consensual as one tries to be in a decision-making process, ultimately, if you're the CEO, you have to at least chair that process. And you probably in some way have to be the one at some point that says, I decide this or not.

34:28Future London Academy:And there are so many decisions. You know, those decisions might be huge, big strategic questions, but there aren't so many of those, you know, as a CEO. They happen very rarely, but they'll very often be small things. There'll be things that need to be decided like that. You know, I often tell the story when I'm teaching the program at, you know, at the design leaders group that, you know, I used to have time on my diary back in the days when I was running the partners who you mentioned earlier on to discuss the mice in the basement of the office because there's a terrible problem with mice that would come in the building.

35:00Future London Academy:And somehow as a CEO, that would end up on my desk. It's like, you know, have we got the right firm to try and eliminate the mice? And are we going to deal with them humanely? And it's like not that these questions aren't important because mice in the office is an unpleasant thing and poor mice at the end of the day. But, you know, the range of decisions you have to make is huge and the frequency with which you have to make decisions is huge. So you've got to be prepared to make decisions. If you're somebody that always needs to go to somebody else for a decision, then don't be a CEO. But if you're someone who's comfortable with that, and I think a key to that is not necessarily making a decision and feeling I have to be right, I can't afford to be wrong, because you can never know that.

35:42Future London Academy:So many decisions you made are made in an imperfect situation with imperfect information. But you've got to make a decision because it's better to make a decision and to be wrong very often than not to make a decision and just sort of fall into a sort of state of inactivity. So you've got to be prepared to make decisions and then adapt and adjust as time goes on to sometimes be able to put your hand up and say I was wrong. But hopefully more often than not to be right. So I suppose, you know, hard, I was always comfortable with that. I think in every role I ever had, I never I was always comfortable with making decisions and then and then working through the course, not living with the consequences, it's working with the consequences.

36:20Future London Academy:So I was always comfortable with that. So I suppose that was the, if there was a, you know, a superpower, for want of a better word, I would say, I'd say it was that decisiveness.

36:30Jim Prior:Love it. And you're so right. I feel like the decision making is probably one of the most important skills in any leadership role. And especially when you're a CEO, because so many things depend on that. I wonder, what did you learn about decision making and better decision making? As you said, no one has 100 % right decisions all the time. But I suppose the more you do them, the more you learn how to make the right decisions. And I suppose there are two buckets of challenges with decision making. One is your personal state of mind as a human. If you didn't have enough sleep, your decisions won't be as good.

37:07Jim Prior:If you didn't have time to think about business overall, and you're constantly just in kind of this everyday whatever routine and you just never step back and see the full picture, again, your decisions will be quite limited. So one is on, I suppose, just the human stress level. Another one is on a more strategic level. Again, what pieces of information do you need to have? How do you kind of what mental framework do you have for making decisions or maybe what questions do you ask yourself before making decisions? So let's start with the second part. Before you had to make a decision, especially a big one, I don't know if mice in the basement fall under the big one, but let's say it was a big financial decision that will affect a lot of people in the company or a client or something.

37:56Jim Prior:What kind of mental framework or any questions you would ask yourself before making this decision?

38:02Future London Academy:Well, I think the first question you have to ask yourself is, does this decision have to be made and does it have to be made now, right? Because not all decisions have to be made at all and certainly not all decisions have to be made now. So, you know, one of the tricks is to buy yourself enough time to be able to get more information. A lot of things are presented to you as like, oh, we've got to decide right now. But, you know, you think about it, well, then we don't have to decide now. We can have a placeholder decision and then we can roll with that for a while or we can just have no decision.

38:30Future London Academy:We can open it up for more discussion. I mean, so there are lots of different decision-making styles And some people lead and manage with a much more consensual style. Other people tend to lead much more decisively. You know, owner-operators, founders of companies very often, you know, lead with much more of, and this was the Apple way, you know, the Steve Jobs way was very much, this is the way we're going to do it. And, you know, like it or leave, right? So some people lead that way. If you're that kind of person, I mean, maybe there are implications on the culture of your company, but, you know, there's clarity around there.

39:03Future London Academy:And that's one of the things, this is why decision making is so important, that one thing that organizations people hate is indecisiveness. They hate the lack of clarity. You know, the biggest problem you hear from teams all the time, I heard from teams all the time when I was leading, was where people said, we don't know what's happening or we don't know what the strategy is or we don't know what's expected of us. people would rather know what's expected of them and not like it, but not know what's expected of them and, you know, avoid the possibility that they wouldn't like it. So, but as I say, I think the starting point for a decision has to be, do I need to make that decision right now?

39:42Future London Academy:Or have I got more time on that? If you have a decision that needs to be made at that point in time, then yes, you do have to say, what information have I got that can help me to make that decision? The beauty of being a CEO is that you have got access to everything. I mean, you're the most informed person in the company because all information is feeding up to you. And it's actually much easier to make a lot of decisions than people imagine because you've got that information. If you're sitting in one area of the business, if you're a functional leader, the information you have is limited to everything that filters up to you from inside of your function and a little bit of stuff that comes across to you.

40:22Future London Academy:If you're the CEO, actually, you've got all the information from all of the functions. So everything's feeding in. So you're often much more informed than people imagine. And people will very often come and say, oh, I've got this huge problem. I don't know what to do. I've been wrestling with it for ages. you know I've tried to think the solution myself but I really need your help and you'll simply be able to say well I can actually just connect that to something over here that I know is happening or something that I heard recently or something that I know is on the mind of this other person inside of the organization so so sometimes it's a lot easier than you imagine but the second question has to be you know what what information can I get in order to make that decision quickly and then yeah you make the decision and as I say you know don't make a decision that you can't reverse out of.

41:06Future London Academy:I mean, there are some decisions you can't reverse out of. And there are times when you've got to make horrible decisions. You know, anything connected with people that has a negative effect on people is horrible to make. I mean, I don't think even people that would pretend they are okay with those decisions don't like those decisions. Like nobody likes making a decision that has a negative impact on somebody else's life. But sometimes you have to do that. And sometimes you have to do that for the good of the majority of people inside of the company. When you're inside of a company and it's shrinking and that shrinkage is unsustainable and you have to make redundancies, it's a horrible thing to do.

41:42Future London Academy:But you're not doing that to inconvenience and disrupt the lives of the people that are made redundant. You're doing it to protect the futures of the people who remain inside of the organization and then to be able to regrow and to hire new people and maybe even some of the people back again. You know, there are times when you've got to make some really, really tough decisions. you've got to remain open-minded and adaptable to the future as well don't never lock yourself into something that is you know as it becomes an insolvable problem for yourself but as I say do I have to make the decision what information is available to me right now and then how do I

42:18Jim Prior:make the most of that probably the three things I think there was a famous saying from Obama if I'm not wrong that if I have more than 60 percent information on making decisions too late or something like that but basically there is never the right you never have full information so you have to make a decision based on what you have so if you wait too long to gather all the information

42:40Future London Academy:then probably no i think that's a great one i i always like there was a quote from mario andretti who was a formula run drive formula one driver and then went on to race um in the u.s and he said at one point if you think you've got everything under control you're not going fast enough and I quite like that idea as well. You know, the sort of the endless wait for perfection is endless. I mean, you know, and perfection is relative to a point in time. I mean, like what's great, what's perfect today by tomorrow is imperfect anyway. So you've got to be comfortable dealing with the 60 % and then adapt to it.

43:16Future London Academy:Yeah, there are very few decisions that last forever.

43:19Jim Prior:That's a great point. So going back to the first part of the question, how do you make sure that you as a human make the right decisions? And especially, as you mentioned, the day of a CEO is very hectic. The day of any senior leader is incredibly hectic. And I do believe that there is a special skill in kind of protecting your time, your energy, your deep thinking. So have you done anything to make sure that your day looks like somehow a sane day where you can make the right decisions? or do you batch certain decisions on certain days or certain times of the day? What did you implement maybe from more of a psychological perspective to make sure or you never make decisions on a Friday because everyone wants to go home or anything like that that is a bit more on the kind of our human side?

44:11Future London Academy:It was never that deliberate. I mean, I feel I was always quite good at managing my time. And I think prioritization is key in the role. It's know what you have to deal with and know what you don't have to deal with. And a lot of that, I think, is linked to empowerment of others as well. A leader who wants to involve themselves in everything all of the time and wants to be in the room when every decision is made anywhere in the organization is going to struggle for time and probably is going to struggle for the quality of their decisions. But I think a leader who is prepared to trust others to make their decisions and who understands or can find the appropriate balance between those decisions that are left to other people, but those decisions that you know you want to be involved with.

45:00Future London Academy:I think that's really important. And I feel I was good at protecting my time. And I became very comfortable with situations where I didn't have anything to do. and you know and i think good leaders do that good leaders are available when you need them because they're they're not filling their time with stuff that they don't need to be doing they recognize that what that when they're needed they're needed and when they're not needed they're not and i think i think that's a really important part of leadership and you know not i mean like everybody everybody suffers from some degree of imposter syndrome almost at every level inside of an organization.

45:41Future London Academy:I mean, almost every CEO like looks at himself in the mirror like once a week and says, how did I even get here? And like, like, you know, was that an accident? Like, you know, like everybody's asking themselves that question. It nobody, nobody has such supreme self-confidence. Very few people have such supreme self-confidence that they wouldn't ever ask that question of themselves. But, but I think, yeah, you just have to be, you have to be comfortable with where you are, but yes, protect your time. be there when people need you you know my style was very much dialogue with people you know i i got so much more out of saying i will talk to the key people in in my leadership team and others as well but i will talk to people once a week or more once a day sometimes with some people once every other day and we'll have a conversation even if we've got nothing to talk about we've got no agenda we'll have a chat and we'll see where we are because i think so much gets done through that Like decisions don't have to be set piece moments.

46:41Future London Academy:They can be made incrementally over time. It's back to my thing about never present to a board, you know, where the answer could never ask a question where the answer could possibly be no, right? By the time a decision is due, you should know what you need to do without having to sit down and say, oh my word, I've got to make a decision now. That your goal should be to avoid that situation. When the decision is due, it's naturally fallen into place. It all sounds so simple, but it's just theory, of course.

47:12Jim Prior:I love the feeling that you kind of described that you should have more free time and flexibility. How do you do it on a practical level? So did you have days that are protected with no meetings? Because I think one thing that anyone in the office, I have to say, but especially CEOs and leaders are dangerously sometimes victims of are the meetings. The meetings that you should be part of, the meetings you should attend. any sort of course or how when your day fills with all of that where do you find time for everything else or what did you do to make sure you are not involved I think you already mentioned delegation and kind of making sure that you know and everything which is it's a great way but was there anything else that I don't know you decided Fridays I don't allow anyone to book meetings I'm free for everyone that's when I have conversations or mornings is my coffee time or whatever yeah no

48:03Future London Academy:No, it's a good, it is a good, I mean, you know, there definitely is an art to saying I'm not going to the meeting. And I mean, the great thing, again, when you're the CEO, you can decide that, right? If you're not the CEO and you say, I'm not going to the meeting, the CEO tells you to go to the meeting. When you're the CEO and you say, I'm not going to that meeting, you guys need to sort that out yourself. Then that's easy to do. But I think, now what I would try, I would, so I talked about these like catch up calls that I would have with people. And as much as possible, I tried to do those at the beginning of the week, like Monday and Tuesday, you know.

48:32Future London Academy:So I would say they will be almost like my conversation days. It was a bit like a doctor's surgery at times, whether physically or virtually. It would be like, you know, you come in, we sit down, we chat for half an hour. I mean, I didn't have a desk in my office. I had a sofa in my office because why did I need a desk? You know, I was sitting talking to people. I didn't need to be sitting there. Like, you know, I had a desk somewhere else that I could, if I needed to sit and type emails, I could do that. I mean, by the way, you know, the tyranny of email is something to try and avoid as well.

49:00Future London Academy:You know, just try and push as much of the dialogue you have with people to being in person. I learned a lot from people at one point as a brilliant, brilliant company who many of you will have heard of called Lambie Nairn, founded by Martin Lambie Nairn. It was part of WPP. And I took over running. I was running the partners and I took over running Lambie Nairn simultaneously. So I was running these two businesses. Ultimately, I merged the two of them together and some other firms to create super union because it made no sense to have separate companies. but everybody in Lambie Nairn was brilliant because the culture in Lambie Nairn was that people would just call you you know in an era where everyone else was email email email in Lambie Nairn like your phone would ring at like three o 'clock in the afternoon and somebody would say oh Jim it's Adrian I just thought I'd ring you to ask you about you know something and I love that because there's you know that spontaneity you get it's so much quicker to get things done by conversations if you want to make more time for yourself go have more conversations with people and say to people don't email me you know if you have a question ring me and if i don't get back to you fine send me an email but you know so i think things like that happen but i did try to do conversations sort of monday tuesday try to hold open wednesday thursday you know and see i was running global companies you travel and and part of the reason i tried to compress the calls into the early part of the week was because it freed me up to be able to travel um without having to reschedule everybody, you know, every, every, every week.

50:28Future London Academy:So some of that was that, but you know, some of it's just a lot of it actually is just about knowing who you are and how you want to work. That's what worked for me. It might not work for, for other people. So know who you are, know what you're comfortable with. And, you know, just, just, I mean, you made the point, Ekaterina, which I think is so important, which is at the end of the day, you know, it's, we are all human beings and we've all got limitations. And the idea that other people have powers and abilities that are superior to ours is completely false you know that that we're all limited the people who you know there a lot of it's about preference and there are some things about willingness to do stuff but but people who are senior in organizations generally speaking have become comfortable with who they are and how they like to work and then they stick to that formula so so i think anybody should you know if any but anyone who starts by saying who am i how do I like to work what works for me stick to that and you'll go a long way with that this is a

51:28Jim Prior:brilliant advice and I feel like you're so right we often forget that we cannot copy someone else's operational system to make it work for us no matter how many podcasts we listen and books we read about successful people at the end of the day we need to understand who we are and how we operate and how to get the most out of our own brains creativities productivity and everything else yeah speaking of understanding yourself how would you deal with a difficult situation or there are days in anyone's work and i'm sure in ceo's work especially they're just horrible you there is just lots of maybe bad things happen it's a dark day it's a dark day in your life in your company's life how did you first of all do you remember any of these dark days maybe you can not spare some of the details, but just describe what happened.

52:20Jim Prior:And how did you get yourself out of that state that potentially would hold you back from moving on or making the right decisions or anything else?

52:29Future London Academy:Yeah, well, what a great question. You know, there were lots of those days and I spent 20 years really as a CEO. I mean, you can't go through 20 years and not have periods where things aren't going great you know i think i probably had 17 where they were going great you know as an average but but even in that the three that weren't where the business goes backwards where you have to restructure reorganize you know you have a big client you lose a client and you you know that you're only in control of so much in our world right you have this sort of macroeconomic thing you know i was a ceo through the financial crisis in 2008-9 i was a ceo obviously through COVID.

53:12Future London Academy:So you get these periods of time where, yeah, you have to, you just have to deal with really difficult things, really tough things. How do you get through it? I mean, some, you have to create some separation in your mind, I think, between business, which is what it is, and you as a human being and you and your life, you know, you have to be able to go home and say, you know, okay, that was a bad day. I think, you know, most people are capable of doing that, right and i mean like it's not like anyone can go home and switch off completely everyone's going to have times when they're going to go home and think you know that was awful and you know they're going to get get out the box of tissues and have a little cry i mean that's like a normal thing to do you know i don't think i did it that often but i probably did it sometimes and you know i think the important thing is how do you bounce back right the important thing is how do you bounce back is and and i was always a great believer in vision and ambition and goals you know like like to be able to come back from a difficult moment and then to reaffirm to yourself and to the company and to the people around you this is why we're here this is what we're trying to you know we my ambition in the agency world was always we want to build the most creative agency in the world you know we never i don't know how you'd measure that i don't know where we ever were on a scale of success with that at different times in different companies.

54:34Future London Academy:There are times when we thought we found measures that said we were, but you know, there'd be other measures that said we weren't. But we always had that to go back to. There was always this North Star that when things weren't good, you could come back and you could say, okay, we've had a tough time for these reasons that we can control and these reasons we can't control. We've had to make these decisions that we don't like to make. This has been really difficult. I know it's awful, but let's talk about why we're here. Let's talk about where the road goes from here. Let's talk about why we made those decisions because they fit with that context of where we want to get to.

55:10Future London Academy:So I think for me, you know, vision and ambition and consistency of that and authenticity of that is really, really important. You know, back to where we started this conversation, how do you make creativity more important in business? You'll never make it more important in an organization that believes in it for a day and then forgets about it the next day, right? And it is a problem in organizations. Creativity often sits under the remit of a CMO and then CMO's there for two years and then they leave and a new CMO comes in and the new CMO says, creativity, forget it. It's all about data. So that's problematic, right?

55:44Future London Academy:But I think when you're running organizations and you get to set the vision, set it, repeat it, keep referring back to it because that is, I think, what will get you through those dark days you've described.

55:55Jim Prior:I love that you talked about focusing on North Star and actually looking at something positive and kind of focusing on what we can do and really putting all the energy there sometimes left, which is not much, but putting it towards something positive instead of getting pulled into all the negative things that can be happening and potentially are happening in any company, in any team at some point. So I love the idea of going back to the vision, going back to the positive, why we're here, what we're trying to do. I have a few other things that I wanted to talk to you about, Jim, which is to do with kind of the wisdom you accumulated throughout the years.

56:35Jim Prior:And you already mentioned a few things that you saw the changes of. And I feel like, again, it is so important for all of us to reflect of how far we've gone or where the industry is going. Sometimes it's very easy to be in the now and what's happening and everything is going wrong or everything is going right and get slightly over obsessed with the current state of everything. So a few questions about the industry that you've seen throughout the year. So one is about the role of design and gain in this metaphorical boardroom and within the senior leadership teams or design and creativity. Again, I personally see them as one.

57:13Jim Prior:Some people might debate that, but design and creativity at senior leadership level. What have you seen changed throughout this year in a positive and a negative way or anything that I suppose would be useful for design leaders to know, especially for those who potentially want to become chief design officers and kind of be at that, have that seat at the table with design? What have you seen maybe changed in any way?

57:36Future London Academy:Well, I think the first part of that goes back to that point I was making about the knowledge economy versus the creative economy. And I think that really is a significant change. So, you know, it's almost you wouldn't really imagine a chief design officer role in a lot of organizations back, you know, 15, 20 years ago, whereas you could totally imagine that in every organization now because there is, there genuinely is a recognition that design. And I agree, I mean, design and creativity are difficult terms because nobody can give you an agreed definition of what either of them mean, right? Whereas so many other disciplines in business, you probably could.

58:16Future London Academy:So they're tricky, but they're certainly interchangeable terms, I think, for the purpose that we're discussing here. So I think that's one change. I mean, I think the flip side of that, you know, organizations become incredibly political. more and more as time has gone on you know as the stakes rise and and the way that success in the larger the organization the more that's the case because of the way that they're measured and their performance is measured you know performance isn't really measured by actually how popular is your product how many customers have you got do people like you and it's not even measured by how well did you do in the last year or the last quarter or the last week it's measured by how a bunch of analysts believe you might do in the three to six months that follow relative to the three to six months that have gone past.

59:07Future London Academy:So there's this sort of very sort of false kind of set of measurements that exist in businesses. So they make organizations, as I said earlier, quite risk averse sometimes and quite difficult to deal with. So there's an interesting juxtaposition there, I think, of concepts of like design has never been more important. But on the other hand, it's harder and harder to break through in terms of those organizations. Although, you know, as I said also before, I mean, everybody in the organization suffers with that same problem. So that's not a problem that's unique to design. It applies to finance, it applies to sales, it applies to the talent function, it applies to, you know, every other part of the organization in equal measure.

59:44Future London Academy:I mean, you know, I felt very, very positive, certainly a couple of years ago, about the way that organizations had changed from, you know, when I started my career, they were brutal. I mean, you know, like everybody yelled at you. I mean, you had to like, you know, deliver like perfectly 100 % of the time and work an 18 hour day. And then, you know, back to my Stockholm syndrome thing, you might not get shouted at, but they could be brutal organizations. I think organizations have changed a lot to be much more accommodating of humanity and much more appreciative of the need for us to value people as individuals and treat people as individuals and and that has to be a good thing because what that does is it gives voice to different opinions it gives space for creativity and it gives it gives room for people who's who have diversity of thought you know and i think when we talk about diverse diversity in terms of organization what we're really aiming for is diversity of thought and when an experience and when we get that the organizations are better so i think organizations have become better at that i worry slightly that that you know like two years ago i was super optimistic about that and and now i'm sort of slightly like you know i i really don't want that reset button to be pressed any harder than it already has been you know and and i don't think it will be i mean i think again the the optimist as you can probably tell by now i mean i'm like i'm ridiculously optimistic um all the time but um i think one has to be but i believe there's a generation of leaders emerging now the next generation of senior leaders or current going into next generation of senior leaders going into ceo are naturally going to create companies and operate companies that have fabulous culture at their heart and that really celebrate and embrace people as themselves.

1:01:42Future London Academy:And that will create a better environment in which everyone can do their best work. So those are the things that I think have changed really and continue to change. I mean, technology is so interesting because, you know, so much I started working when, you know, the best way to send a message somewhere far away was a fax, right? And that was like new. It was like, oh my word, there's a fax? we can send a fax um you go through so many technology changes over time i think it's always interesting that the expectation we have of how much the world is going to change in the future is always slightly more exaggerated than what actually happens you know i mean it wasn't very long ago that everyone was saying that the metaverse was going to transform the way we do business and now no one cares about the metaverse and then it was blockchain is going to transform the way we do business and now no one really cares about blockchain and now ai is going to transform the way we do business.

1:02:35Future London Academy:And all of them are going to have some impact, but whether any of them quite have the impact that we imagine now, I don't know. And yet somehow when you look back in time, the degree of change that we hadn't necessarily anticipated is actually enormous. So there are these amazing transformations that happen all the time. We're just not very good at predicting them, in my opinion. So the future will be very different. It just won't be the different we expect. So it'd be interesting to see how that goes. I mean, and I think in the sort of AI world, as soon as people get off the sort of conversation about I'm talking about AI because I feel I should do, as opposed to I'm talking about AI because I genuinely have identified a way it can help, then I think we'll be better for that.

1:03:18Future London Academy:So yeah, those would be probably my main observations.

1:03:20Jim Prior:I love both of those points. And I love that you mentioned the humanity of businesses and that's where you see businesses moving. And I haven't seen 30 years of industry like you've done or more, but even in my chunk of time, I can see how the culture of companies changed and expectations of what does it mean to run a company or be part of the company changed. And I think this is, I agree, it's a beautiful, beautiful change that benefits all of us. And I do believe it is actually directly linked to the first point of our conversation of design and creativity at the leadership level because again designers and creatives are the ones who trained or in empathy or naturally empathic and curious and they kind of bring this lens that maybe hasn't been a traditional financial metric but something that is very natural to a lot of creative people this connection this kind of creativity collaboration and all these other things so I do believe that if we push more creative and design and leaders into leadership roles we only see more of this positive change and I would love to go as far to say that we need more creatives and governments as well and in in just in general wider society because I do believe that they bring so much um so many other skills they're just not valued enough currently in our society but actually are beneficial to everyone it's not that it's either creativity or financial performance is actually great creativity brings great financial performance great culture great empathy great human relationship create efficiency create great companies that attract the best talent and do the best business so it's never one or another and I love that you highlighted this as a positive change overall because I do believe that I'm also an optimist, as you can see.

1:05:16Jim Prior:And I hope it will keep growing up.

1:05:19Future London Academy:No, I think it's such a good point. I mean, the mistake that happens in government, of course, is every time they hire someone from the creative industries, they hire someone from like a PR firm. We need to define what we mean by creative. Yeah, I mean, well, let's sort of back to the vagueness. And by the way, I mean, there's some brilliant, brilliant people working in PR firms. It's just that the role in government tends to end up being, how can I create a messaging strategy that deflects from the truth, right? I mean, government is such a tough area. I mean, I agree with you. I mean, we need more kind of, you know, behavioral economics and more thinking about that.

1:05:54Future London Academy:But that's, yeah.

1:05:55Jim Prior:But it also goes back to what, again, we as Futureland Academy keep saying, like, yes, you need to be creative, but you need to understand the business and everything else, and geopolitics and operations and everything else. So again, whoever out of, listen, any creatives listening to this who want to go in the government, please also be backed with all the other skills that you need to survive there and make the right decisions. Because in those environments, and again, whether it is leadership in companies or in the world overall, we need creativity, but then you also need other skills to make sure you can implement this creativity and actually for everyone to benefit from it.

1:06:31Jim Prior:So I still do believe we need more push for that, by, I suppose, balancing it with all the other skills. And the second point, I love that you obviously mentioned AI. And I love that you kind of mentioned the overall scale of change that we can never predict. And I think there is a lot of anxiety about AI and creativity and where will it go. And we've seen so many changes and shifts in the platforms. And the question is really, like, how can we all move to this new direction? So what I suppose to summarize many, many questions that have been submitted about the role of AI and AI in creativity, what do you think AI will change in the future?

1:07:14Jim Prior:Or what do the CEOs or creatives should think about in the world of AI right now from your perspective? Again, there is no one knows the right answer, but from what you've seen, how should we all think about AI? What do you think is the most valuable way to think about it?

1:07:32Future London Academy:Yeah. Well, again, it's such a big question. I think the whole discussion around AI that exists in the world today is at risk of trying to put so much into this one big bucket with just two letters at the top of it. right it's like ai has become this like kind of little verbal device for like anything connected to technology i mean you know i think there's a lot of stuff we talk about with ai which you could say well actually that's been around you know since the industrial revolution i mean you know there's the process of automation of certain things is not the same as creating something that is genuinely additive to the world in that it can do something that couldn't be done before, right?

1:08:15Future London Academy:So first of all, I think there's got to be a separation made in the creative industries and the debate around that between are we talking about technologies that are simply about being able to do the same things slightly faster or even sometimes significantly faster and significantly cheaper, right? That's one thing. And a lot of big companies in the creative industries, I think are getting far too caught up in the idea of let's find a way to do things faster and cheaper. And I'm not sure I necessarily think that's AI. That's just technology and the deployment of technology. I think there's another conversation that says, are there ways in which we can take advantage of the sophistication and processing capabilities of AI that allow us to create solutions that could not exist without them, right?

1:09:07Future London Academy:And again, there's a difference there between saying there's a way to craft something into existence through prompts instead of having to ask a human being to actually produce it, which again is a technology solution, versus is there a way that we can get better solutions to problems because they're driven by AI? And again, there's the difference between large language models that are really just processing vast sources of information to get you to sometimes some quite dubious solutions versus technologies that really are about solutions that couldn't otherwise exist. So when somebody is able to sort of unpick the DNA or the structure of a specific type of cancer using AI and develop a solution for it, that is a problem being solved by AI.

1:10:02Future London Academy:That's completely different to somebody saying, oh, yeah, we've got a platform. Or if you want an ad with, you know, somebody eating a chocolate bar, you know, we can produce it for you in three nanoseconds. So those two things are completely different. So I would say, you know, the focus on AI for creative people really should be what can we do with AI that we couldn't have done with human beings? And if that is, it could have been done with human beings, but it would have taken a million years, you know, and therefore it was impractical. That's okay. And really, that's all it's ever going to be.

1:10:40Future London Academy:But anyway, but I think if that, but that's where the focus has got to be, is how do we create things that are new, that are different, that are additive? I don't think really clients are out there saying, you know, I need a solution that is driven by AI. What clients are saying is I need a solution is better than anyone that I've had before and better than anything else that's out there. And if AI is your solution to that, go for it. People can't do is ignore it, right? Any creative, it depends where you are in your career, right? I mean, the older you get, the harder it is to learn new stuff.

1:11:14Future London Academy:But don't stop learning new stuff. If you have the opportunity to go and learn more about some specific applications or uses of AI or ways to engage with AI, take it. And then you can choose whether or not it's relevant or not down the line. But, yeah, let's be focused on where it adds value, not just on where it saves time. There's going to be a very, very lucrative world out there for some people saving time and saving money. It's just I don't think those are necessarily creative people who are going to profit from that. Or, you know, they may be, but they'll be abandoning their creativity along the way.

1:11:50Jim Prior:This is a great point. And if anyone is interested in more AI conversations, we actually have the whole series coming up about AI tools and design and creativity and how the leading companies are currently trying to figure out what is the best collaboration between AI and design. So we'll dive into that there. But let's pick a few questions for Jim about leadership and the role of CEO and all these wonderful challenges that seems like we always creative communities share. Sili is asking, when you want to hold a creative workshop with senior leadership, a group that does not want to be put on the spot, be confronted with decisions, what is a good way to break through that barrier?

1:12:35Jim Prior:Open up the space? How would you organize it? How would you get them on board and have them actively participate? So senior leadership who don't want to be involved.

1:12:44Future London Academy:I love that question. So I used to do that kind of thing a lot, actually, with senior leaders. I think the trick to it is always to give them scenarios that they can react to. So if you go into a room and you've just got like a whiteboard and a pen and you say, right, let's brainstorm. It's going to fail. They don't know how to behave in that environment. They're not comfortable in that environment. It'll be stilted. It'll be really difficult. If you go in and you say, so one thing we used to do a lot when we were talking about sort of different, we were talking about brand strategy. and to some extent the design solutions that would spin off the back of that.

1:13:20Future London Academy:We would go into an organization and we would say, we have painted three different views of the future of your organization, looking five to 10 years into the future. We'd give it a name and we'd visualize what the company would look like based on different strategic scenarios. So we might have one scenario that would focus more on, let's say, the deployment of technology. And we'd say, imagine that you became a leader in the technology space in your industry. this is the kind of product mix you would have this is the kind of conversations you'd be having in the marketplace this is the kind of advertising you'd produce this is the kind of culture you would be promoting internally this is what would be written about you in the newspapers and then we'd present another scenario that would say imagine you focused more on building the world's best culture for your employees this is what that would look like and then we usually do three And we called the process triangulation because we saw it as being rather like the way that you can triangulate between masts on a cell phone network.

1:14:20Future London Academy:So, you know, basically got three different posts that are this sort of outer limit of where you could go. Somewhere inside of that triangle lies where you are. And what senior leaders love in that situation is being able to react to something that looks tangible and feels real. And they can imagine themselves there and they can say, oh, well, I like that bit of it. I wouldn't want to be like that. And I know we'd never do that. That wouldn't be right for us. But I love that bit from over there. And you could almost literally put yourself somewhere inside the triangle at the end of it. We would literally ask people to put a mark inside of a triangle where they wanted to be.

1:14:54Future London Academy:And there's always someone in the workshop that puts the mark outside the triangle, which extra creative points for that person. That's the creative person and the frustrated creative in the senior leadership team. So that would be my advice. Give specific scenarios, even if they're imagined, and let them react to it. And then the imagination will start to flow. Don't go in and start with a blank piece of paper.

1:15:16Jim Prior:This is such a brilliant advice. And I feel like this is, again, a very unique skill that creatives and designers have to visualize the intangible. And there are so many conversations that senior leadership team can have about strategy and this and that. But I think suddenly seeing, as you said, a piece of newspaper with a headline or something that is tangible suddenly gets such a straightforward reaction that sometimes cannot be captured in so many conversations and I feel like the leadership teams love when this finally happens when everyone can get aligned and on board about something that has been kind of vague.

1:15:50Future London Academy:100 % we did I remember doing it once when we did this a lot we used to pitch like that as well very often you know go in and say okay we're not going to tell you what the answer to your problem is but we're going to give you three possible directions and then you know you'll be somewhere in the middle but I remember for a very large global drinks company at one point who were looking to restructure part of their organization and create a new division that would be focused on really the sort of top-end portfolio, the luxury end of their portfolio, which included the top end of some very famous brands in that.

1:16:23Future London Academy:And we wrote them, and this was actually for the board, we wrote a magazine from the perspective of the future that imagined that they had done it, and we wrote 30 ,000 words of original copy. And I think I personally wrote about 22 ,000 words of it in a week. And they were all articles, like as if it was in a magazine. And it was one of the favorite bits of work that we ever did. And the board signed it off. They had a board meeting in a hotel somewhere, 8 a.m. in the morning. The little magazines were slipped under the door of each of the board meetings. So they were all reading and they came down to the table.

1:16:55Future London Academy:And again, you know, pre-selling for the board meeting was done. They were all, you know, they all loved the idea. So yeah, definitely give them some to react to.

1:17:03Jim Prior:Such a beautiful story. Love it. Shivam is asking, how do you balance between the creativity and business decisions? Like how do you make sure that you are making your organization, organizational decisions, not just as a business owner, but as a creative individual as well? Is running a business would lead you towards a road that's less creative and imaginative, but more analytical and factual?

1:17:28Future London Academy:Yeah, well, that's a very good question. I mean, I think, you know, and so cards on the table, you know, I never trained as a creative, right? I'd count myself as being a creative person. And I've done a lot of work that I suppose would earn the title of being, you know, creatively okay. But I never trained in that. I mean, I started my career in the textile industry, like managing production in factories. And then I moved into product line management. And then I moved into marketing. And then I moved into sort of brand consulting and design. So, and I had this big advantage in that, in that I was never pigeonholed.

1:18:02Future London Academy:So, especially when you get in the agency world, agencies are terrible at saying, are you a creative or are you a client person or are you a strategist even, which was kind of the worst of everything, which is kind of where I did start. But I think the answer to the question that you're asking is don't allow yourself to be pigeonholed, right? Don't see those things as separate. Don't see creative decisions and business decisions as being different. You're running a business and it's a creative business or you're running a business creatively. Creativity and business are two things that you are intertwining together in your mind and in your approach and in your own personal style.

1:18:38Future London Academy:And the trick is to keep those things together. And so when you're faced with the decision, sometimes you will make a decision that is going to be driven more by business factors and won't much of an element of creativity in it. And other times it will. But you just have to judge it on a case by case basis. I think in terms of running a company and making sure that you don't erode the creativity inside of the company because you've got to make, because of the needs of the business is a slightly different question. And another really, really important question. You have to, if your company's product is creativity, you have to protect it.

1:19:15Future London Academy:I mean, that's what's going wrong in a lot of marketing services holding companies right now is they're having conversations about how do we simplify the structure of the group? How do we deploy technology and AI? Like they're not having conversations about how do we protect and enhance the creativity of our product. And that's what they need to do. So if that is your business, then absolutely, you've got to put that front and center. That's back to vision. If that's the kind of company you are, do not let the business overtake that. The only way you can have a strong creative business is if there's a strong business underneath it.

1:19:46Future London Academy:So you've got to run a good business, but it's a delicate balancing act, but one you've got to strive to make.

1:19:52Jim Prior:Wow, this is a wonderful answer. And I felt like it touched on so many points that, again, every creative and designer can identify themselves with, whether they are the business owner, just try to always make decisions that have analytical part and have the creative part. But I love that, again, we should all be focused on if creativity is the main thing that we produce and that we actually focus on as a company, then it should be front of center of our decision making, of our culture, of everything else that we do. We are running out of time. So I wish we had another hour to dive into so many conversations.

1:20:30Jim Prior:But for the lucky people who are joining our executive program for design leaders, they'll have more time with Jim, learning all the wisdom of decision making at the C-level and just the difficult but very important role of a CEO. But I would love to finish with one last question that we ask everyone who comes on our podcast, which is a bit of a philosophical question. If you could change one thing in the world, what would it be?

1:20:58Future London Academy:Yeah, I mean, you know, it's probably possible to get quite philosophical about that, but it's got to be the elimination of war and conflict, right? Right. It's got to be. I mean, you know, somehow it's so interesting how everything we've been talking about here is relationship that exists between humanity and human ingenuity and collaboration and optimism. And so many people, like the vast majority of people in the world share that, right? The vast majority of people in the world share that. I mean, maybe the optimism goes up and down a little bit sometimes. But, you know, there's a fundamental kindness in almost all people.

1:21:45Future London Academy:And yet somehow we end up in a world that is so raw with this anger and this tension that then manifests itself in these horrendous acts of violence. And I don't think there's anything else I could answer the question right now that says I would have to ever change that you know you would have to i don't know how you change that but at the highest possible level you know we have to find a way to to just become cohesive entity in the world of people who respect each other and and look i noticed i mean we we almost got into politics at one point ekaterina and that is like so so hard right i don't envy anyone who gets into that because what we're talking about is not really solvable.

1:22:37Future London Academy:But in the idealistic environment that we are in right now and in response to the question that you asked, peace is the answer.

1:22:46Jim Prior:I sign up for that and definitely agree that we should be more human, empathic and curious. And I think that's what leads to more of us understanding each other and actually being able to live as one on this wonderful planet There is only one planet that we have. So we should better get along with each other. Thank you so much, Jim. It was such a pleasure having you and learning from your wisdom, as always, providing the depth that just unlimited. And I feel like we can go into so many different avenues every time and very practical and very knowledgeable in so many areas. And again, combining this wonderful world of creativity and business in one brain in a very holistic way without deciding whether to choose one or another.

1:23:36Jim Prior:And I just have so much admiration for what you've done and also how you think. So thank you so much for sharing this time with us and sharing your wisdom with our community.

1:23:46Future London Academy:Well, you're far too kind, but thank you so much for the opportunity. It's been a really great pleasure. And thanks for all of the work you do, Ekaterina, to support and promote design and creativity in this world, because that's so important. And I'm in awe of everything that you do.

1:24:02Jim Prior:Very kind of you, Jim. Thank you so much. Thanks again for joining. And until next time, bye.

1:24:08Future London Academy:Bye, everyone.