Ogilvy CEO: Why Creative Leaders Need A Culture Of Disrespect | James Murphy

0:00James Murphy:Stop being respectful to the old blokes like me. One of the biggest barriers in creative organisations is hierarchy and process. The big guy in the corner office with the yes or the no. Because they've got more experience doesn't mean they'll have the answer. I think you have to have a culture of disrespect. That sounds like a bad thing, but what we mean by that is... James Murphy is the CEO of Ogilvy Group UK and co-founder of New Commercial Arts. From building one of the world's most awarded agencies to leading one of its largest creative networks, he spent decades proving that great leadership begins with bold ideas.

0:36James Murphy:There are a lot of clever people in our industry, but they're prone to the paralysis of perfection. How do we help people have the courage to change? What do we need to do? 99 % of success is just keeping going. First of all, you're going to get 99 no's for every one yes, but also the 99 no's won't know what they're talking about. Do you think now looking back, you needed to be ruthless to get to where you are? I just think. James, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. I want to go straight in with a question of what does courageous leadership mean to you? So I can definitely think of courageous leaders that I've been lucky to work with and for.

1:13James Murphy:I think that possibly if I was to think about my own kind of experiences, it's uh and i think an understanding that you're on a journey that you're not kind of fully formed at a certain point and i think you keep learning and changing and i look at it and plenty of times when you go i've been doing this for quite a while how can i keep making mistakes like this or getting stuff you know not being not getting this right and um and i think you have to accept that we're in such a dynamic industry, things are changing and moving around you. And I think you've got to be open to that change, open to not knowing entirely how, you know, not having the perfect answer to that change.

2:03James Murphy:And then I think you've also got to try and let people around you know that that's the situation because, you know, our industry traditionally has formed around big characters and personalities a sort of culture of the guru and the cult of personality and things like that. And I think that's pretty unhelpful in the kind of torrid and very changing times that we're in right now. So how do you, I think you've hit the nail on the head because I think a lot of people at the moment are saying, I was telling you earlier, I'm getting asked a lot to go, Jo, how do we help people have the courage to change?

2:39What do we need to do? What was it in your leadership or what have you had to learn to go, I can keep going forward even though I have no idea what the outcome is going to be and also then how did you navigate when that mistake happened so I think that

2:55James Murphy:there are a lot of clever people in our industry and really sort of interesting brains and ways of thinking but sometimes I think that we're we want to be too clever and we want to be the people the smartest people in the room and the people who crack it and visibly crack it in front of everyone in front of the client, in front of the market. And more important than that, I think, when you're trying to run somewhere is momentum. I think you've got to keep moving. And what that means is that sometimes you have to take decisions with imperfect knowledge, sometimes with a sense of, you know, unsureness about exactly what might be the outcome, but it's generally the right direction and I think there are some there's such a diversity of minds in our industry and there are definitely some people who I work with like who I go these people are very clever but they they're prone to the paralysis of perfection and and so they're really helpful but they they won't make the decision to keep us moving because they'll want it to be perfect perfect and and that that's often not the case.

4:08So are you a type of leader that can make that decision then?

4:11James Murphy:I think I'm prepared to live with the imperfection and the fact that you make a decision, you start moving and then you have to course correct as you go along. That's better than being stuck in that paralysis of perfection. So what's your relationship with fear? Because a lot of it, perfectionism thing and people not moving is the fear of failure, the fear of looking stupid, the fear of judgment. What's your relationship with fear that's enabled you to be able to do what you do? I think one thing would be that I don't think there's one single right answer to many of the challenges or the briefs or the kind of projects that we're given.

4:54James Murphy:There could be a number of answers. So the thing is, it's not a right or a wrong situation. And I think that immediately diffuses some of the fear about decision making. And I think you look at it and go, why would any of us be expected to make the right decisions all of the time? It's the important thing is to try and keep everyone moving and give people some sense of direction, even if actually you're kind of trimming the sails and course correcting the whole time. so yeah so probably as you know progress is an innate thing we need as human beings so for people to keep moving with you trust is a massive massive thing that's required what do you think in the companies you know you founded and built how important has culture been in enabling you to keep moving forward culture is central to everything and and i think you have to have a culture of um of openness and of trust uh but equally you have to have a culture that has standards and expectations and i think that's that's what people want i think they they want to have a sense of what's it what's expected from this group that they're in this gang that they're in what's the level of creative excellence or insightful thinking or innovation that we should be getting to to to have done the job well and to feel that we've kind of really really uh asserted our abilities yeah because i remember you saying to me that people were quite shocked when they'd come into adam neve ddb and hear how you all spoke to each other can you tell me a bit more about that yeah i mean i think the probably one of the biggest uh one of the biggest barriers in creative organizations is hierarchy and process.

6:51But human beings seem to innately crave some of those things.

6:57James Murphy:And the larger the group that they gather in, the more they want hierarchy and process. And I think in many ways that militates against really the purest creative energy that we have as a group. And now some people would disagree. I mean, and some people would, there are brilliant, really accomplished creative practitioners in our industry who would say, no, process liberates you, okay? Because it provides a structure to work and it provides the time. I think the problem in many of the organizations that have evolved in our industry is that because they become hierarchical and very, very process orientated.

7:41James Murphy:It's also almost reinforced this cult of the guru and the big, well, frequently the big guy in the corner office with the yes or the no on everything and so on. And you kind of go, all that does is create a kind of fear-driven culture. It kind of creates, for want of a better word, constipation in what should be a joyful creative experience. And I think we have to be vigilant about that the whole time because human nature constantly wants to sort itself and organize itself into hierarchies, you know, alphas, betas, etc. And that kills the energy and it kills the joy in what we do if we let that take over.

8:26So the big question in my mind is how? How did you make sure that didn't happen so people could feel they could freely talk to you?

8:35James Murphy:I think, I mean, I've only got my view of it really, but I think we were always keen to create cultures in which, I mean, this sounds like such a cliche, but the idea, you know, good ideas, breakthroughs could come from anywhere. and that we try to encourage that very open, very debating way of working. And I think as leaders in organisations, myself and my business partners would always, if we were talking about how to approach a brief or how to solve that challenge, a lot of freeform jazz, if you like, in terms of ideas just being kind of blurted out, safe in the knowledge that 95 % of them are not good enough and no good, but it's about moving the conversation on, keeping that momentum going.

9:34James Murphy:And then at some point, someone says something and you can tell, and it's, that's, that's an insight. That's an angle. That's a way in. That's something that we can prize open and make into something much bigger. and creating those conditions I think requires you to have be prepared to blurt out what you're thinking and have other people disagree say kind of but not quite and um and also I think I mean we talked about it perhaps and this sounds like a brutal word but we talked about trying to encourage a culture of disrespect now that sounds like a bad thing but what we mean by that is stop being respectful to the old blokes like me or the people who've got more experience because they've got more experience doesn't mean they'll have the answer.

10:26James Murphy:They might have a point of view and so on. The answer might come from fresher perspectives, from more original minds coming from different areas. I'd like to think that what we can bring to it, rather than being the people that crack things, because we're so clever and we're brilliant gurus and so on. I think we bring to it the fact that listening until suddenly that spark happens from someone, you go, that thing you said is really interesting. Why don't we try and build on it? And so that was what we meant by trying to create a culture of disrespect. And I know when we got to DDB and we took Adam and Eve in, I think they were very surprised by the, I don't know how to put it, but the brutal candor that was going on between people and also that they were really, you know, you'd have a young creative team who were basically, you know, barely out of being placements, you know, arguing vociferously with founders of the agency.

11:30James Murphy:But that was great. It was the energy that kind of created brilliant work. I love it. I'm all for this. What my brain's going in now, imagining being the DDB crew and seeing this to go within your leadership and your leadership team what was then the strategy to go how do we help them come into this culture and maybe break some of the habits of what they're used to and feel safe and feel they've got permission to be challenging like you'd created that environment to do what did you do to encourage that? I think that we were probably less thoughtful than we might have been about how to do that.

12:11James Murphy:But the nature of that coming together had a particular dynamic in the sense of the owners of DDB had bought us and said, it's stuck and a bit stale and it needs to have new energy and you need to go in there and change things and so on. And so we very much approached it with a sort of reforming zeal, if I can put it that way. And also I think you've got a situation where most of the incumbent leadership left very quickly. So in a sense, we were able to create a large Adam and Eve very fast in those circumstances. And it was a very, very good group of people that came in and we had a couple of big pitches to do, one particularly large client that had a problem that needed solving.

13:08James Murphy:And I think what happened was as those things were cracked and won and so on, very quickly people could see that, okay, this is an interesting way of working and it seems to get really good results. And actually it's quite fast with less friction and pain than perhaps they were used to. And we do something good and then move on to the next thing. It feels quite exciting. I mean, it was brilliantly exciting. Yeah. It feels different. Yeah. And I think, but, you know, but I would say actually a very different dynamic to new commercial arts going into Ogilvy where that was very much a merger. That wasn't a takeover.

13:51James Murphy:That was a coming together of more complementary cultures and so on. And, you know, look, and I think we were very aware that we were coming into really probably the most consistently creative and awarded network in the world. And we were a small, fairly upstart organization, but we had some particular ways of working. I think the view was let's meld these things together and get something, you know, that's more than the sum of the parts. So has that been a bit easier to do that one? I it's definitely been it hasn't been as brutal I think as the previous experiences and um and I think that also we've also had a situation where there's been a fairly large-scale dramatic change at the holding company level above us and actually in a way that's been helpful because it's created a big kind of shifting and a kind of dynamic of change.

14:51James Murphy:And I think in the new physics of WPP and within the constituent agencies like Ogilvy, it's allowed us to sort of evolve the dynamics of what we do in a much more broad, on a much more broad canvas. And I'm guessing for you, is it requiring quite a different type of leadership from you now in Ogilvy? because you've walked into, if anything, correct me if I'm wrong, but what is what we've described is kind of the way of working that was so probably different, the culture you had at Adam and Eve DDB, all very hierarchical, probably not having the placement teams challenging the founders and stuff.

15:29So how has that been going into that environment and looking at how you're going to approach change there? so i think there's uh i mean as fate would have it i started as a grad at ogilvy and and you can

15:47James Murphy:see there's i mean that's a long time ago but the dna is still very strong in the agency in terms of the the value that it puts on um really really high quality strategic thinking and insights embracing sort of innovation and technology, but then also just the absolute paramount importance of ideas that brands can stand on, these platforms that brands can stand on. And so there's something that's very consistent there. I think that because it's a large and successful organization, I would say I definitely feel the sense of, I don't want us to be hierarchical. I don't want us to be too process orientated and so on.

16:34James Murphy:And now equally, as technology plays a much more kind of all encompassing role with that comes process. But we've got to try and keep the human energy free and release it whenever it gets blocked in those situations. so what advice so people listening or watching now going i'm sitting in an agency that's quite hierarchical and they can really relate to all the patterns that you spoke about and they go this energy that you talk about sounds very exciting and could really i said as you said speed less pain better ideas someone's sitting in that sort of culture at the moment what would be two or three bits of advice who you'd say this is where you'd start because they might not be had to do that like radical yeah just how how would you start allowing that permission for that new way of being to come through we're lucky that we work in an industry where every time we're given a brief we have a new chance to create something and shape something and so i think if you're sitting in a in an organization the the next brief you get is that chance to try it in a new way or approach it in your way.

17:47I think it's, but I don't think people can do it on their own,

17:51James Murphy:which is actually the strength of our industry because it's not, I can't think of a single thing that myself or my business partners have particularly achieved on our own. Okay. I think this industry is an industry of brilliant and successful gangs basically. And so I think if you were sitting in a situation where you felt a bit stymied would be to say okay well do I have a gang do I the people I work with on this piece of business you know if I'm a if I have a particular skill set the people that I rely on in the other skill sets do I like working with them could we do could we approach this in a way that feels a bit more freed up and a bit more open because that the great thing about our industry is every brief then results in something being created and something being made and that can be a beacon.

18:48James Murphy:You can go, right, look what we did. Look how we did it. And I think that it's an industry of generally open minds. So people are always looking for things. They go, that's amazing. How did that happen? So I think you can use a brief to do something and sort of create change by example. I like that because Versi's going, how do I tackle, say, I don't know, say head of project management or head of account management, how do I tackle my whole team? Actually start with a project and a project team to see how that comes to life. Because at the moment, the behaviors with all this uncertainty and change and the speed of change, a lot of people are going into self-protection.

19:24They're going to siloed working again. And actually, as they say, the brief is a way to bring people, you bring in all the different skill sets together. So it's actually quite, I think, a clever strategy to go start there.

19:34James Murphy:Yeah, it's an approach. It's not everyone's approach. Some people would, I mean, some people much prefer, I think, the stand back more academic, right, let's have a look at the way we work and our systems and let's devise a new roadmap and a new, that's definitely not the way I like doing it or particularly the people I work with closely because I think our view is let's shape and forge the way we work around live challenges like the briefs that we have. Yeah. Let's not do it in a vacuum over on the side and then come up with a grand plan. And have loads of meetings and meetings. We can do it by example on the next pitch, the next brief from that client.

20:16So as a CEO, how do you approach it when you've got your leadership team around you? How do you walk into a leadership team that's maybe, as you say, used to a certain way of working and you want to give that whole team encouragement to try something new? How do you approach that?

20:32James Murphy:you've got to make it very clear that whilst you have a point of view you haven't got all the answers and that you want to hear what those people have to say I mean it's you know those are if you're sitting in a leadership team that's a very that's a wealth of experience um and you know successes sometimes frustrations or failures and so on all of those things are valuable and if people can be open about them then and you're open to listening um you can shape really interesting things together i think that's it you know and it's obviously tricky when when companies come together because there can be uh fear on one side or the other uh there can be uh people are strangers at the beginning so they don't know each other and they don't know quite how to you know how to behave and interact um and i think you've got to try and bring those barriers down and i mean hopefully people would see that you know we're all very very open and debating and we're all um frequently not right so the thing is we're not some sort of you know um overbearing group of people who always have the right answer it's sort of you know and i think we also have to you know I think you have to constantly check yourself particularly if you're working quickly and you're trying to solve things quickly that you're not accidentally shutting people down and and somehow because what can appear quite a slight movement from you as a CEO can be a brutal shutdown to someone else so how do you catch yourself on that I think you've got to try and be self-aware and I think you've got to have people around you who can call you out on it and so on and I mean you know it's a it's a double-edged thing because the kind of open debating culture that that I'd say we enjoy not everyone enjoys that and there are brilliant minds and insightful thinkers that are slower burn and more uh reflective and they don't have the quick soundbite and so on and you've got to try and work out how you don't those people don't get run over or kind of forgotten in the process and also you know we have had a you know we've had a situation where a debate over work between myself and you know one of my co-founders was pretty spirited and and you know we had someone come to us afterwards and said that was people found that quite unnerving because and a bit disorientating because you were arguing like cats and dogs in front of them and I'm kind of going yeah but that's how we do it but not everyone's going to feel like they can join that if you're just too full-on about it so it's finding that nice balance between respecting all the needs of different people and what people can handle yeah and also you know you've got you know if you're in an agency you're in an organization of some very very interesting minds and perspectives okay if you're not letting that originality and that energy out then you're not getting the most from your organization and you're not you're not being a good leader because you're you're effectively wasting resource and talent and time it sounds like what the pattern i'm hearing a lot is how important listening is to you i mean that's come through is like giving that space to others and encouraging that space for others to find their voice and understanding they'll do that differently but as long as there's that room for them to do it and they actually feel heard from doing it as well which then gives them permission to do it again because they feel valued and heard that they had a chance to speak is that fair yeah and also i think the thing is that we're in a you know we're in a hyper competitive oversupplied market we have um clients who are under relentless pressure they are often in quite lonely positions in their organizations okay so there's quite a lot of pent-up challenge and you know energy in those situations and what that means is that often you know to try and do something interesting and innovative you're going to encounter problems you know there might not be enough time there might There might not be enough money or resources to do it.

25:00James Murphy:There might not be enough imagination on perhaps the customer side of the equation. And you've got to try and overcome those problems. And I think one of the liberating things I found was I worked for – I worked at a startup called Rainy Kelly. And it was a very interesting culture there because there was definitely a problem if there weren't problems. okay when we i occasionally you would finish a job and it had and there was almost a sense of that was too smooth we weren't pushing the envelope enough and so on and i loved the fact that they sort of problems were uh accepted embraced wrestled with and that was the currency of what we did and i think we have to encourage people to say look a problem isn't that's not a problem for you okay that is what happens but you need to the important thing is to surface it share it um and then ideally you know if there's a problem say look i think one way of solving it might be this there might be another way and so on but just start the ball rolling but you know again in in a lot of organizations perhaps not necessarily in in the world of agencies but in corporate organizations, a problem is a problem.

26:20James Murphy:Yeah. And you can see there are cultures. And I can think of a couple of agency cultures that mainly agencies that turn me down at interview stage, but the, that I can see a couple of agency cultures, famous agency cultures where, and I've talked to people and they were like, no, you, you know, you've got to look good. Like you're a success the whole time. And, you know, you don't admit to things going wrong. You don't admit to anything. Okay. That's utterly toxic because things always go wrong. There are always problems. The thing is actually how you unlock them together, not pretending you weren't there when the problem happened or it's nothing to do with you, it was them over there.

26:57James Murphy:Exactly. And it's because the thing is we work in multifunctional teams where you are utterly reliant on quite a broad and diverse group of talented people. If you start either denying problems or trying to push them onto other people in a kind of blame game, you're going to be found out really quickly and it's like it reminds me i was listening to toto who runs obviously mercedes formula one and then he has a complete zero tolerance blame culture so everyone knows on that team that even if the one person i don't know gets the the wheel lock wrong it's never targeted at that one person it's just like what do we as a team need to do better next time so there's this safety in the team and also i was talking to rory sutherland as well is you've got to start measuring team not measuring the individual and when people feel like a team that is what high performance is you can't keep focusing on high performance individuals and i think that's what lovely creates that safety when you feel like you're part of a team yeah i mean although i think one of the challenges in um the evolution of the industry um is that actually the teams are sometimes becoming so big because we're working across so many different channels and specialisms that you need to how do you keep that sense of gang and how do you keep that sense of um ownership and accountability like it's up to us and you can I don't know perhaps experts in human behavior would say there's a number perhaps a team over eight people it's hard doesn't work you know but I know that I've sat discussing briefs and challenges with teams that were bigger than eight people and bigger than you know but because you are trying to marshal a number of really quite specific disciplines around a consistent strategic platform and it's how do you how do you keep everyone with a sense of not only that we all own it but that actually in this group i could be the person who makes that difference yeah i'm not just a passenger yeah i and i think that's where you create that sense of belonging and this is where i come whenever i work with teams the number one thing is i go around getting feedback on how how they're finding the leadership team how they find the company number one thing comes back is we need more clarity so i'm just finding if people are clear they know as you said before they know what's expected of them the standards are really clear like it's amazing how many companies i work with they're like oh yeah we don't know what our standards are we have some values but we've never really said what our standards are that it's very hard for people to know what are they accountable to yeah and it's something that i love um you know it's the military so it's a bit more extreme it's in the military they're more fearful of letting their team down than they are of losing their lives because they create such care and connection between a team and it's i don't know the number but is there a number and i'd hope actually there isn't of a size that couldn't have care and connection but then what that would take from a leader to go how do you instill care and connection with your team so that trust and clarity and want to be there for each other lives yeah and i think that there's we i mean i think perhaps traditionally our industry has been justifiably perhaps you know people within the industry have said look our leaders aren't the best they're not exemplary and so on and that's because we have a culture of practitioners as leaders and what's an interesting learning is that you know there are some people who are brilliant practitioners who don't make great leaders and there are some people who won't be who aren't good practitioners, but they're brilliant leaders.

30:49James Murphy:And I think that's partly about, as an individual, trying to learn about, okay, who you are and what it is that you're actually good at and what are the things you're not good at and you need other people around you to kind of buttress you on those areas and so on. But I would say definitely, I could definitely see personally the struggle between the excitement of trying to crack a brief or a problem and the kind of adrenaline and the shared endeavor in doing that versus sitting back and trying to work out a process and standards and then communicate that to everyone and then let them go off and do that.

31:33Because, you know, this industry is, you know, it suits people probably like me with a short

31:40James Murphy:attention span and a bit of a butterfly mind because you're constantly skipping across things solving problems or thinking you are and um and i think that probably as a leader you have a duty of care to not just chase after the next problem and challenge and the excitement involved in that and to try and sit back and communicate a bit more broadly what's expected i mean that's probably a central challenge that I have that's yours yeah so as you say your development then actually curious have you done much personal development to be the leader you are today or has it been all just very instinctive yeah I'd say it's basically probably in a classic agency just osmosis just yeah and I mean what I'm when I moved to Rainey Kelly and it was a startup of I was about the 11th person in and someone said to me oh you should go there because the four founders are brilliant and if you if you're close enough to them a bit might rub off and that's really what it's been you know it's just being being uh lucky to work for people like that and then lucky to find people that it's that i really enjoy working with who you know are constantly teaching me things or challenging me on things and and so on and so yeah sadly not much formal development but a lot of a lot of osmosis from other very good people around me it sounds like a real willingness to keep learning to know that are we ever the finished product because i work with a lot of leaders yeah i know how to do that i'm done i'm like okay yeah well i think the yeah like i said i would i would say despite having done it for quite a while I'm constantly surprised and slightly frightened by A, what I don't know, and B, some of the basic mistakes it seems to be still possible to make.

33:32James Murphy:And then I think the other thing is that we're an industry that it's an early adopting industry where we are on the receiving end of a huge amount of change and have been ever since I've been in the industry. But that and I would say that, you know, having been involved in several startups, almost one a decade for, you know, someone else's and then two that I've been of my own. It almost felt there was so much change that there was a case for a new model, an evolved model about every eight to 10 years and so on. But I would say that pace of change has accelerated and become more profound. And so, but that's made it an industry that's still brilliant to be in, endlessly challenging and developing because the industry adopts early.

34:26James Murphy:We are constantly looking for the next breakthrough because, as I said, it's a hyper competitive market. What can we adopt quicker and master more quickly and to get ourselves competitive in the market? Just a quick reminder, if you haven't already, to please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. It's a small action that makes a big difference. You'll be the first to know when new episodes drop and your support helps us create meaningful content for leaders like you. I'd also love to hear from you. So if you have any thoughts, questions or ideas, pop them into the comments. And if you're curious about how my leadership coaching or training could support you or your team, just drop me a DM and we'll set up a call.

35:10Thanks so much. Now let's get back to the episode. That's what I'd love to know. I find you so curious, so successful, brilliant businesses. Why do you need to keep going? I'm sure there's some people going, surely you can chill out now. You've done your bit, you've enjoyed it, have a nice time. What is it within you that needs to keep finding these problems, these challenges, keep learning? What is that?