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Driving Business Impact — Creatively
August 13, 2021 Gated
Guest Speaker

Chase Jarvis

CreativeLive co-founder & CEO

Chase Jarvis is a photographer, entrepreneur, and co-founder/CEO of CreativeLive. Frequently cited as one of the most influential photographers of the past decade, Chase has won numerous awards from Prix de la Photographie de Paris, The Addys, and The Lions, contributed to the Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times story Snowfall and earned an Emmy nomination for Portrait of a City. Chase has also created hundreds of campaigns for brands including Nike, Apple, Google, and Red Bull.

Driving business impact — creatively

For creative leaders, thriving in today’s digital-first environment means zeroing in on business priorities and finding new ways to engage and activate audiences — a process artist, entrepreneur, and CreativeLive Co-founder & CEO Chase Jarvis knows well.

In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, Adam Morgan and Chase explore what it takes to understand and act on business priorities so you can drive meaningful, measurable bottom line impact with every creative asset.

Watch this episode to learn about:

  • The role of the modern creative in today’s digital-first landscape
  • How creative experiences can — and should — drive bottom-line growth
  • Processes, relationships, and tools needed to deliver high-value creative content

This event is sponsored by Adobe Creative Cloud for teams — a complete integrated platform that empowers creative collaboration and innovation. If you would like to learn more about Adobe Creative Cloud for teams, please let us know!

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Comments (1)

De
August 27, 2021 at 9:01 pm
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I think an important part of this conversation is also if you have a creative team filled with creative thinkers and design thinkers etc., it is important to first make sure those people aren’t so overloaded that they can leave the “cave” and go be creative with the rest of the company, and then look to them for new ideas whenever possible. You’ve talked a lot about how that creative person may not be a designer or an artist but at the same time they could be, right. Don’t just ask for presentations and sell sheets from your creative team, bring them goals and see what they come up with and how they came up with it.

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Transcript

Chase:

It’s our job to sort of shift that mentality to where creativity can truly drive innovation, business and results, fulfillment, all the best stuff.

Adam:

Welcome to Real Creative Leadership, a place where creative leaders can find insights and practical guidance on the day-to-day job of being a creative leader. We focus on real issues, topics, and insights of creativity in the business world. Join me as we explore the best strategies for developing your team, getting others to embrace your vision, and generating amazing experiences. This webinar series is produced by the Stoke group. I’m your host, Adam Morgan, Adobe executive creative director, author of Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business. And this is Real Creative Leadership.

Adam:

Welcome to Real Creative Leadership. We have a special session today. We’re going to be talking about driving business creatively, but first, let me introduce my special guest, Chase Jarvis, a huge name in the creative industry. He is the co-founder and CEO of CreativeLlive, the author of creative calling. Chase, welcome to the show.

Chase:

Thanks so much for having me and I’m very excited to be here.

Adam:

I’m excited too. All right. So I talked about the topic, Driving Business Creatively, and really what we want to do is, we’re going to talk at a high level of kind of the business environment we’re at today. Post pandemic, where things are moving, how we can add more creativity and create, kind of give business that extra edge with creativity rather than just going with what we used to do in the past. But before we get into that, we also are sponsored today by Creative Cloud for teams. So I want to give a special shout out to them as our sponsor. And also we are going to watch a short, quick video from that Creative Cloud for teams, groups, so that we can see what they have to offer. And then we’ll jump back in and get going with our conversation.

Video:

Adobe Creative Cloud, makes it easy to collaborate across all your favorite applications and devices, no matter where inspiration strikes. With our pro applications on mobile, seamlessly transition from your mobile devices to desktop and back again. Since your documents are automatically saved in the cloud, you can always go back to previous versions of your work. With Creative Cloud libraries, you always have access to all of your team’s creative elements, wherever you need them, maintaining consistency and scaling creative assets across your work has never been easier. With Creative Cloud, you can also easily work with others on the same document. Simply invite people to edit, and get to work. When you’re ready for feedback, share online previews, that can be easily accessed by clients or stakeholders, even if they don’t have a Creative Cloud subscription. Manage, organize, and stay up to date on all of your work through our desktop application, whether working across teams or devices, Adobe has tools to make collaboration easy, so you can create incredible content, anywhere.

Adam:

Awesome. Thanks for watching that. And thanks Creative Cloud for teams. We’ll get into it a little bit later of how they relate to this topic for today. But anyhow, anything that you want to say Chase, before we get going?

Chase:

No, just excited to dive in. I think this is one of the most exciting topics of our time right now. And there’s a massive shift from thought, the thinking around managers versus creators as leaders for the next generation of business. So let’s get into it, Adam.

Adam:

I couldn’t agree more like getting more aware creative leadership is a bigger deal today. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit later, but let me first set the stage for today’s topic. So obviously we’re still in the pandemic. It seems like we were coming out of it, but we’re not, we’re still in it and things have changed. And here’s some of the, least the things that I’ve observed over the last little while, is that obviously coming out of this, like we’ve definitely moved to more of this hybrid remote model, so many companies, and we’ve been talking about this for years that you need to digitally transform. And those who didn’t found themselves up a creek and those who did totally figured out, okay, great, this is how the modern business environment is going to be working like from now on. You look at like startups that are coming out of the last couple of years and how they’re disrupting huge giants.

Adam:

We’re doing, there’s all this adaptation, but really what I’m noticing the biggest thing of all, is that right before the pandemic, it was like the whole world was going to this data-driven model. Like it’s all about, oh, you got to have data and you’ve got to like, prove it all out. And it was all science, which is awesome. But I noticed through the pandemic, it’s like we finally came out of that, realizing that there’s a human side to business.

Adam:

It’s not just about data and models and all that kind of stuff, but there are people behind the scenes. And so that’s where I felt like this pendulum switched and started to swing back where it’s like, all right, maybe back in the eighties, at least for me, in the mid nineties, when I started my career, I was like all about this crazy emotional, creative world, which was fun. And then we swung out of it, but I feel like we’re bringing it back to center where, it’s that balance of art and science, right? It’s the balance of data and then also humanity and people and emotion and all of that’s coming together. So that’s the setting in today’s business that we’re realizing and where we need to like realize a change and move from that.

Chase:

I would love to add something, Adam, if I can, first of all, I want to stake out, some footprint for us to talk about today. You mentioned creativity. I’ve written at length about this in my book, Creative Calling, there are a couple types of creativity. I like to think of creativity with a capital C and creativity with a small c. so much of our culture operates around creativity with the small c, thinking that our design, painting, music, all of those things, as that is what creativity is in totality. And what we know today is that’s not true, that creativity with a small c, that art is a subset of creativity with a capital C. And so when I say creativity, the capital C, that’s the domain that we want to be talking about today. And some examples there is, creativity with the capital C, is basically anything that combines two or more ideas to make something new and useful.

Chase:

And if you can think about, for example, we’re, co-creating this conversation right now, if you put the wheel, for example, is mechanical engineering plus creativity. That’s how we got the wheel or electricity, is electrical engineering plus creativity. And now we have lights. So you know, this idea of creativity with a capital C, transcending just art design. And those are great examples of creativity, but the capital C, underpins the solutions to every problem that we will know in our future is going to have creativity at its core. So I think that’s one important thing to stake out. And the second thing is that we’ve been programmed, to think about creativity through the school system, through our employment, through just popular culture at large. And I want to remind viewers that this is an active role, this understanding of creativity, where it’s going, how it can be useful is an active role.

Chase:

And if you’re not taking an active role in preparing yourself, there’s so many people, right, who are telling us what we know about creativity, what we know is good for our future and the irony, those folks that have historically been in power, their goal, whether it’s overt or not is to sort of keep the status quo. And we know if you’ve been a disruptor, as you identify as a creator, then it’s our job to sort of shift that mentality too, away from people who know what was good for us. A decade ago, two decades ago, or even just in a pre pandemic world. And we start to shift the conversation toward what we know in the examples that we see in the world around us, where creativity can truly drive innovation and business and results, fulfillment, all the best stuff.

Adam:

Absolutely and it’s so funny, even at a company like Adobe, where we’re known for creativity.

Chase:

Yeah.

Adam:

The customers we talk to, different people in the industry. It’s still a struggle. Like people see creativity, when you use that word, they’re thinking arts and crafts and design or whatever it is. And I love this capital C creativity. Like that’s something that I use as well, because it’s beyond that. Like when we’re, if we talked about like this territory where we’re moving away from data to more like data and humanity, like realistically, when we talk about creativity, it’s in all of us, like every human being and whether you’re a data scientist and you’re coming up with a new way of looking at something, like you said, bringing two things together to make something new.

Adam:

That’s a hundred percent what it is. So everyone is granted. Everyone can be, but you’re right. In business, we have focused it where it’s like no serious business. I remember early in my career, it was people would always say, let’s get past the creative crap, at fluff and let’s get back to serious business, which means numbers and metrics and operational stuff, like the world has changed. It’s no longer that. And so those who are in power, those who manage big corporations or big companies or on the board of directors, like this presentation is for you. This presentation is to talk to you about like creativity in a different sense. When you look at it is really the super power we’re going to talk about here in a minute and how you can improve business. And it’s not the fluffy stuff. It’s not just the arts.

Chase:

Yeah. All you have to do is look at, some of the most effective and successful companies out there, whether those are small independents or large incumbents, the ones that are innovating, are the ones that are leading. And what is innovation?, If it’s not creativity applied, that is the definition of innovation is like, the application of creativity, new ideas, new ways of thinking. And so again, I just wanted to stake out our territory here as capital C creativity, driving innovation and change. And that’s at the core of what it is that, and the folk, the fact that you’re here, if you’re listening or watching to this right now, that tells us that you’re at least aware or what I call creative curious. And so we’ll talk a little bit more about that. I’ve got some ideas that I can introduce a little bit later on, how to think about shifting gears. If you’ve come from, you have managers that are really programmed for a different Era.

Adam:

Exactly. All right. So now that we’ve got that set up, we’ve got, here’s the world we’re living in. What is capital C creativity? What are we talking about? Now let’s just talk about, the creativity is the business advantage. Like, does design is the innovation. That’s really what we’re saying. This is the answer. So why are we saying this? Well, first of all, if we had to go back, like it’s not just Chase and Adam saying, no, no, no, no. We’re creative folks. So therefore we believe that creativity is super critical. I think what we’re saying is like, it absolutely is the answer because, if you look at today’s economy, I mean, I’ll give an example of one book, like if you’ve read the book by Daniel pink, A Whole New Mind, he talks all about, this world of commodities and the world of where it’s no longer about just the product, right?

Adam:

Like there was a phrase that I wrote years ago that we’ve used Adobe, which is, “People buy experiences, not products,” meaning that, in the past it was all about, build a better mouse trap. But today, it’s all about those experiences. People by that feeling of being young again, people buy that feeling of, the wind in their hair, people buy, whatever it is, it’s that experience that they’re seeking after. So we really are in the experience economy today. And there are a lot of other groups out there spouting, this is not just, add more doctrine. It’s really this idea that like, creativity is the secret weapon because experiences, customer experience is the business differentiator, meaning that if you’re not creating those experiences, if you’re not creating better customer experiences, then you’re in trouble because customers aren’t going to care about you and they’re not going to connect with you and they’re not going to believe in you.

Adam:

And so beyond just that, we had Adobe, we’ve done some awesome research on this. We did a co-report with Forester, on what is the value of those experiences? Like, is it really worth a lot? And we found that, at least for those companies that really put the value or put the effort into it to creating better experiences, they had an ROI (Return on Investment) of like 200 and something percent. And I know like awareness with customers was up 1.6% acquisition costs or acquisition was up 1.9x, retention is 1.7x. So there’s a lot of studies. If you’re curious, by the way of any of these studies that we spout off in this session, you can reach out to us afterwards and we can send you a list of a lot of the studies and reports. But anyhow, the point is that, it’s a proven fact now.

Adam:

It’s like the science has caught up with the softer side of things, in that creativity or customer experiences or those emotional connected experiences, truly do equal, better business and by better business, that’s just a better future for you, as a whole. So I think that’s the point we just want to make creativity, is real. It’s not just the fluffy stuff. This is really the stuff that’s going to move the needle for your business, so that you just need to start considering and focusing on how do I introduce more creativity into my business.

Chase:

So I think that I’m reminded of something from this, let’s call it five years ago or seven years ago, maybe eight years ago, where the cannon of pop culture was saying that. Well, social media for example, is nice, but it’s really not all that effective. And it’s just fluffy stuff out there. And now, we know that’s not true as we see ad dollars flood from other, previously established media giants, like radio and television and print into a digital environment. And specifically into social media. Now we are more aware than ever of not only is it more effective, but you can measure it as well. So the only thing that changed, social media didn’t really change the fact that you could post a message, anyone had access to the platform et cetera. What changed is, our ability to measure it, our acknowledgement and development of tools to reconcile this thing that used to be perceived as fluffy as now, the most scientific, the most clear.

Chase:

And I think the same is true with creativity. We have historically looked at creativity as the soft fuzzy thing. Like, if you squint your eyes, you can kind of see that creativity matters. That is very akin to social media that now we’re starting to be able to understand, the tests and the reports, Adobe has done with Forrester, is a great example that not only is creativity, something that’s measurable, innovation, something that’s measurable, but it is a thing that underpins again, the solutions to every problem we will ever know, the effect of the differentiator between good and great companies. Good and great leaders. So I just want to put that marker out there, just because right now we still don’t have a good cultural awareness of our ability to measure creativity and innovation, that doesn’t actually correlate to it being effective much like social media of the days passed.

Chase:

So I think that’s an important thing to establish. And also, if you look around, I use the example of companies earlier, whether you look at individuals, humans, or companies, what does our economy?, What does our culture, prize, does it prize, stopping what you’re doing inserting yourself into the machine and hiding as an employee, or even as a leader inside a larger organization, or does the economy, our culture and our personal fulfillment, does that get juiced up by taking an active role in our future? I think that there’s, if you look at the things that are rewarded, that is doing something different, it is taking risk.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:16:04]

Chase:

It is taking risk. It is standing for something that is different from the past. And I just find that that is an interesting model to map onto the workplace and onto the future of the economy. And I would just call it value at the business level and fulfillment as the human, like this idea of leaning into these things that historically were not rewarded. It’s no longer 40 years and the gold watch, retire, and hope for the best. We’re in a completely different universe. And if you can apply that across these other vectors, it starts to make a lot of sense. I like to think of that risk/reward with the moves that you make as a leader, being asymmetric to the benefits. If you just play it safe, the way I like to think about it is it’s the riskiest time in the world to play it safe.

Chase:

Let’s just put it that way. And now let’s think about that specifically with respect to career and leadership and business. We used to have, or our parents rather, had one job. We will have five and the next generation will have five roles at the same time. That’s just the nature of where culture is going. And I think if we can, again, understand that it’s our job to change culture, to change the way we think about employment, to change the way we think about careers and specifically education, that we’re empowering ourselves. We’re opening the aperture to a new universe of possibility. And you see it manifest itself in the individual basis that I mentioned, you’re no longer 40 years and a watch. The work is… We’re going to have so many different roles. We’re going to have to learn at a rate that’s completely different and much more dynamic.

Chase:

That’s part of what creativity is, right? It’s putting these new things together, whether that’s a factoid at work or your career or your trajectory as an employee. You’re a leader. And I think education is another glaring difference from what it used to be even just five, 10 years ago. Imagine, the education system used to be very much like a factory and it was built off the models of the 1800s where you put, whether it’s kids or training at your workplace, you put them in one end, you march them through, everyone learns the same thing on the same day in the same way, and at the end that was actually very good, very effective at making widgets. And that may have worked at a previous era where what we’re trying to do is give people office jobs, where they were typing and not, again, this creativity with a capital C role that we see as the future of employment.

Chase:

So if you can think differently, we can start to realize that your education as a leader, as a business owner, that it’s your responsibility. And the fact that you’re here listening tells us that you are already a step ahead of most because you’re taking an active role in your own development. I just want to underscore that that is critical to the role, the active role that we have to take in shifting the perception, changing culture from the previous models to what the future is going to look like. And again that you are here right now is a good sign, but it is necessary, but not sufficient. There’s a lot more work you’re going to have to do to shift culture in your workplace to shift your own educational director.

Adam:

Oh, absolutely. When you think about it, it’s not just changing culture, but we’re really talking about how do we make change, right? And you had a great example in culture and an education and doing that at the workplace as well. But to me, it’s also, if you look at what creativity in business has been… I talked about my career path, where it was seen as just this extra fluffy arts and crafts stuff. But to me, another big step that we need to make, and this’ll take all of us, is how to make it so that creativity is no longer just a service, but it’s a strategic function. And that’s a really critical change in mindset, right? Cause right now, you look at creativity in terms of if we’re building these awesome experiences for customers in our companies.

Adam:

And then we just have the creatives that are in the back cave, building all this stuff, but they’re not taken as much more than just a service arm, right? They’re not a strategic function. But I want to talk… I want to break apart the idea of creativity and strategy, because there was an interesting lesson that I learned from one of my old bosses back in 1996, Darryl Smith, at an ad agency. This is when I was early on, trying to figure out should I go into creative department? Should I go into the strategy department? And he was like, “Listen, Adam, the reality is this. Strategy is creative. It’s just a different form of it.” And as I went into figuring out my book and trying to prove the value of creativity, it absolutely made sense from a neuroscience perspective, that the way that we’re coming up with the big ideas and also looking at things from new directions of strategically, it’s the same thing.

Adam:

So if we can start to understand that fact that, whether I’m coming up with a business strategy or I’m coming up with a creative experience for a customer, that’s the same function of a strategic thought. And when you look at it like today, if you think of the word innovation, certainly with IDEO and the design-led movement, we’ve made the point that yes, that design can be innovation. It can be a strategic function. It can be a business asset. But I think across the board, we still need to see creativity as an investment and not as an expense, right? We need to understand that all of that customer experience, that’s our currency. And that is something we need invest in and think of it as something more than just the last step execution.

Adam:

So I think that’s super, super important. And there’s backup to all that. Again, there are more and more studies of when companies see creativity as an investment and they see that as the value, they can earn 200% more than other non-design related companies. They have better lifetime value. They have increased sales. They have better first impressions. All of those elements play a part of it, but it’s almost like you’re looking in the cooking industry. And it’s those who are really creative and pushing the limits, we see them as rock stars, but we don’t see that in the rest of business. We only put operations and finance on the pedestal as the true leaders.

Chase:

Hey Adam, you had a really good point. There’s a study from McKinsey that was talking about… They had done a fantastic job of quantifying it. You want to share that again? I don’t remember.

Adam:

We did a study on creative leadership, which was interesting. Not just companies who happen to use creativity, but it was creative leadership specifically. And what they found, and this is McKinsey, this is one of the top research firms in the country or the world, right? So we’re not just some little yahoos saying something here. What they found is, they looked at all of these different creative leaders in business, and they found that the creative leaders had a 67% return above average on financial results. Meaning that if you had a creative leader in the mix, your chances of having better financial results were higher. And they went through and broke it all apart and there’s a lot of reasons why. It’s because creative leaders, and if you really stop and think about it, why creativity? How are we different then?

Adam:

Is it just because we’re better at drawing? No. Better at writing words? No. If you think about it deep down, when you’re talking about what creativity is, putting two parts together, people who are creative have been thinking about and forcing their brain to be trained, to focus on emotional experiences. So you look at finance and operations, they’ve trained their brains for their whole lives to look at the nuances on spreadsheets or on a finance document, whatever it is. And that’s why they’re good at the leadership level to say, this is what we need to do financially and this is how we need to make better operations.

Adam:

But we’re saying, from McKinsey and others saying, those who have looked at situations in different ways, they’ve hardwired their brain to look for different creative ideas and look things different ways. They’re fanatics, meaning that it’s not an option. You have to have creativity. It’s not just an optional thing. They learn how to pivot very quickly in business. They learn how to bring together the right ecosystem. So there’s all these qualities of creative leaders that are super critical. And the net out of that is, it’s more money. So clearly us spouting about putting creative leadership as a priority is critical because we’ve proven it out. The science is there. We know the studies are there that it is more valuable. Absolutely.

Chase:

Yeah. And it’s less about, I think historically it was about avoiding mistakes, right? You just wouldn’t put yourself at risk and avoid mistakes. And now what we know, just look at short product development cycles, companies that are releasing new additions of software on the weekly. It’s not about making mistakes, it’s about error recovery. The companies that move fast… You’ve heard the move fast and break things. I think that’s less applicable, but consistently we see companies that are able to innovate quickly, go out to market, test the market, and respond.

Chase:

Again, that is very akin to the creative process, right? The creative process is you do something, you see how it works or looks, then you adapt, whether you’re writing or building code or designing a business plan. This idea of, historically it was don’t make mistakes and just tow the line, and now it’s about how can we move fast, how can we innovate, and how can we get good at recovering from bad decisions rather than either not making them or making the most conservative decisions as possible? Elon Musk is not sitting around thinking about how to make the most conservative decision that doesn’t make a mistake. And whether you like Elon or not, the concept is, I think, it’s very durable across all factors of business, from the biggest companies down to the smallest individual sole proprietorships.

Adam:

Oh, absolutely. The word you said that stood out to me was the word adapt.

Chase:

Yeah.

Adam:

Because if you look at this pandemic that we came out of, the companies that did well, they adapted quickly, they pivoted, right? Those are good business terms, but what they really mean? Adaptability is creativity, seeing things in a new way, seeing it from a new perspective, trying something new. So, that’s what we’re getting at. We need more of that. So let’s move on to this last section, which I think is really, really important, which is, all right, so we believe all this stuff. How do we help companies change? How do we actually put it into practice so it’s not just theory? What are we going to do? And so we’re going to talk about a few, three different strategies that we’ve come up with that you can do now to help do that and help a company change.

Adam:

So the first one, the first point that we have is make it so creativity can thrive. And this is critical. So this is stuff that you can do right now as a creative leader or a creative director or a creative person on your team. And so often as creatives, we’re used to just going off in the creative cave, which is important. You’ve got to go down there and do your flow state and do your work. But there are so many other elements around making it so creativity can thrive, which I call building the creative machine. And so building the creative machine, it requires a lot of stuff. It’s not just a switch like “Okay, we’re just going to be creative now, we’re going to be way more productive.” You’ve got to get your house in order first.

Adam:

And there are a lot of things you have to do. You have to make sure that you have increased collaboration, increase the chances for creativity to be effective. And this is just a good plug for a creative cloud for teams right now of getting your house in order. I think back when decades before, where we’d be chasing down fonts and images and all the assets and art and blah, blah, blah. If a company wants to be really effective and have their house in order, they need to have everything organized, meaning you need to have all your files together, your shared libraries from creative cloud. You need to be able to use all the same tools and move fluidly between them all. You need to make sure that you have your approval processes that are streamlined.

Adam:

All of these things come from some of the benefits that… Grateful for Adobe of putting it together. So making sure that you can be on brand and you can stay on brand and you can keep everything moving smoothly. And I think that time to market is critical. So that’s the first thing, get your house in order. Beyond that, there are ideas that I think we as businesses need to keep in mind. If you’ve ever read Creativity, Inc, which is an awesome book by ed Catmull, he talked about how they created structure in the actual physical presence of their office to make it so that people crash into each other and come up and start talking about things and more collaboration can happen.

Adam:

So I think the answer is also, as we’re all coming out of this pandemic, there’s going to be this whole, how do we do this remotely? How do we do this if we’re not physically together? And I think it’s really… The catch is, get your house in order, be intentional about how you’re going to gather, be intentional about which ways you meet together. And can you be physical and digital and do both seamlessly? So that’s step one, get your house in order and make it so creativity can thrive. And I think that sets us up as creative leaders to take the next few steps, which is what we’re going to talk about, so going to pass over you Chase.

Chase:

Yeah. As I listened to you talk about this and talk about how do companies change? For example, the interesting thing about a company is that that is not… A company is innate. It’s not a real thing. It can’t take action. It is comprised of humans. And this idea of, if not you, who, and if not now, when, this idea that someone else is going to manage it, someone else is going to take the lead and it’s your job to follow. Or the company is just going to do it. Again, the company is made of individuals, most of which are no more creative, sophisticated, intelligent, inspired than you. Radical ownership here and companies don’t change without the individuals in them changing.

Chase:

And there’s a phrase that has stuck with me for more than a decade now. And it was the thing that got me to put my work forward, put my views forward, in hopes that it would spur on others. And so talking to the creative leaders who are listening and watching now, or whether you are one or aspire to be one, there’s this phrase, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” So if you are a believer that what we’re talking about, creativity, innovation, all of these things are critical for the future of business, large and small, then you really ought to look at your own role in that equation. How can you stand up for the beliefs that you have, giving things the space that they deserve, to dovetail on what you were speaking about, Adam, to getting out of the creative cave down where the room is dark and there’s a lot of video editing happening or whatever that is.

Chase:

And how can you be present at the business meetings and show… Sure you want to speak khaki fluently. You want to speak Excel fluently. It does harken what I mentioned earlier on education. That’s your responsibility. If you want to be taken seriously at the table and you want to show up, then I like to think of transcending your roles that historically were thought of as the ones that you were protective of, the more creative historically roles within the company. And how can you integrate the business functionality? How do you speak the language of managers, that other mode of leading that I think is a vector of the past. And how do you relate to your coworkers in such a way that you can be heard? How can you communicate, body language, public speaking?

Chase:

You know, this is an interesting plug for creative life. We find that those classes are the most evergreen classes. It’s less about… As much as we admire the new version of Photoshop and want to learn all the tools and tricks, there are these evergreen skills that, going back to you listeners and watchers right now, if you can’t get people to understand your ideas in any environment, at the foundation we are social animals. So finding a way to communicate-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:32:04]

Chase:

At the foundation, we are social animals so finding a way to communicate effectively and efficiently, that has been at the core of our human social existence for a really long time. So you think that is a skill that you ought to lean into to master, to practice. And this, these are not natural gifts. These are, you may be more inclined than someone else. You may be introverted or extroverted, but these are still skills that are learnable, teachable and learnable on platforms like Creative, Live, and others. So I think that’s a really interesting and important point to make that you have to do that. And I mentioned a moment ago, speaking khaki, I’m speaking the role of the language that the business leaders of a previous generation speak, such that you can intertwine your ideas and be heard at that table.

Chase:

I started very early on in my creative career reading a lot of business books and the ability to relate. You mentioned… You’ve mentioned some books, I had a couple that I, did really well for me and helped me understand things. One was a book called ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’ by Ben Horowitz, which is about a startup. And there are chapters they are titled How to Fire a Friend, how to, these are things that are very uncomfortable, but in engaging with these business books and almost engaging in a language, whether that’s foreign or new or something that you’d like you to evolve into is it’s a very powerful [inaudible 00:33:26] in your role either now or in the future as someone who is thought of as a leader whose opinion at the table is valued.

Chase:

A couple others that came to mind. I just made some notes here while you were talking Adam. ‘The Effective Executive’, which is a legendary manager book by Peter Drucker. ‘Good to Great’, which is a lot about products and companies standing out in a crowded marketplace by Jim Collins, ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell, similar topic ‘Dare to Lead’ about vulnerability and authenticity from Brene Brown and ‘Start With Why’, which is a fantastic book from Simon Sinek. So this idea of you can’t be what you can’t see. So if you want change in your organization, or you want to take a more active role in shaping the future of creativity, innovation at your company, if not you who stand up, be seen, you can’t be what you can’t see. And if you want more of you, more of these ideas in your business, then it’s up to you to take an active role there.

Chase:

And then the last one, the last, I think concept is that might make you uncomfortable, Right? But remember you can’t stand out and fit in at the same time. If you want it to usher change in the business environment and your company and your team and your group, or even the small business that you may run, you have to be willing to put yourself out there. And I believe now more than ever that showing vulnerability, showing authenticity is not seen as a weakness. Again, go back to Brene Brown and the book ‘Dare to Lead’. These are human strengths. These are attributes that the most effective leaders of the future possess in spades and being willing to go there, I believe is an unlock for lots of us. it was for me. And I’ve seen it with a lot of other leaders in my startup space, operating CreativeLive down for the last 10 years. So I don’t know, let’s get out of the cave, show yourself and be a leader. That’s part of what it’s all about.

Adam:

Yeah. I love that. I love just this idea that it’s like so many times we can sit back and complain. “Oh, why isn’t more creativity part of business.” And then we’re expecting these leaders who are already on the boards of directors to come to us. They’re not going to like… No one’s over there encouraging them to speak creativity. So it’s like, it’s up to us to learn to speak business. So we’ve got to, we’ve got to make that move. We’ve got to… We’ve got to put ourselves up first. So this brings us to the last thing, the third thing that we can do. So yes. First get your house in order, second you got to read the lead or you got to learn somewhere CreativeLive wherever that is, start to become a better business person. And then number three is this idea of promoting creative minds.

Adam:

So absolutely if you think about like we’ve trained ourselves as creative people to focus on those emotional experiences, to focus on better customer experiences. But if we don’t have the right seat, we’re not going to make a change. And this is the hardest one, because I think a lot of times we had a conversation on clubhouse a week ago on the same topic, and someone brought up the fact they’re like, “Well, sure, it’s great to say, do all these things, but we’re not, we don’t have the power. There are people in business who aren’t creatives who have the power right now.” And I think we want to talk a little bit about that, of like what you can do them. And so it’s, if you’re promoting creative minds, you can do that in your area.

Adam:

How do you look for people who are using their super power of zigging and zagging and pivoting and trying different things and looking at things in new ways a hundred percent. We’re not saying that a creative mind has to be a designer or a writer or a videographer or whatever. It’s anyone who’s using creativity and believes in creativity. If we want a 10X the amount of creative output in business today, it starts at multiple levels with different types of people, all [inaudible 00:37:20] . So I’d say, use your creative super power to make change now. Let’s start with that.

Chase:

Yeah, I mean, again, if you look out at creative leaders that we reward culturally, that if you think of your own personal friend circle, again it goes back to those people are willing to stand out because you can’t stand out and fit in at the same time. And I think it’s, if you’re chasing the World’s Best Boss mug to get at the holiday party this is probably the wrong approach. I think, understanding and being willing to take risks and again recover quickly, whether that’s a higher or a strategic approach. I mean, I’ve at CreativeLive, I’ve hired hundreds of people over the course of the last decade, personally into our process and the ones, invariably, the folks who didn’t look like all of the other folks that had a different background in education, had a different set of experiences, that had a different educational trajectory, outperformed the lift and stamp resume a hundred percent of the time.

Chase:

They may have required some more coaching or different coaching, but if you’re truly looking for the unlock for yourself, we’ve been a little bit prescriptive. I think this idea of promoting creative minds, like first of all, your ability to identify a creative mind, identify a different thinker. We restructured the way we had interviews at CreativeLive, specifically to solve for and source people who thought differently, people who had a different background, whether that was from a historically an art background or data science. We hired data scientists who studied widely divergent things than business models and financial modeling in their educational trajectory.

Chase:

And that, I think it’s a huge piece of being able to promote these ideas or promote creative minds is first being able to identify raw talent. Second, to be able to, to be willing to take a risk at hiring that talent or adopting that strategy. And again, then developing the muscles internally to be able to react quickly and change to adapt to the given marketplace, to a mistake or to a new strategic direction that as we know, as we learned in the pandemic, they’re all imminently coming around the corner. And what will you do to be prepared? Those people are dynamic. That is what it means to think on your feet, to be a creative quick thinker, whether you’re a leader now or you aspire to be one.

Adam:

I love it. I love just your thought of hiring data scientists and different backgrounds, because, and here’s the truth, in today’s environment we know that diversity on teams is important, Right? Like you want to have cultures, different ethnicity, is you want to have different genders, whatever it may be, a variety of backgrounds help. And I guess what we’re saying too is like, and also in business, make sure that you have creative minds. People who will think things differently and adapt rather than just linear, logical, rational thinkers that you normally in the past have been like real business leaders, Right. So that’s what we’re trying to say. And the other thing is like, here’s one point, if you look at boards of directors, well, while I’m on that topic, most boards of directors are made up of operations [inaudible 00:41:02] level.

Adam:

And I think, yes, none of us, not all of us have the ability, you have your own company. You can decide the makeup of the people who are on your leadership team, Right. But a lot of big corporations who have the power, someone may say Adam, yeah right. They’re not going to suddenly just say, “Oh great. Let’s put a creative person on the board,” which is what we want. We want that. If we’re really thinking this is the economy for experiences, we should have creative minds on the boards. But my point to that is yes, we… You may not have the power to do that at your company, but you know what? You can at least ask, we can ask, we can bring it up. Just back when we were trying to get people, in this last era of business to bring more diversity, they didn’t have the power either, but they asked and they started to bring up the point.

Adam:

And so together collectively, if we all say this is really important, if your business is going to make into the future, you have to have creativity at the… On the board, start sharing those ideas with the board leaders, start sharing it with upper leadership. Talk to them about how that diversity of thought on the board helps the business. And we can give you all the stats you want for that. But you got to ask, you’ve got to try, you’ve got to at least push it forward. You’ve got to promote creative minds. And I think that’s what we’re saying collectively is let’s start promoting creative minds. Let’s start putting them in the right positions. Let’s give them an opportunity to change business.

Chase:

That’s The reason it’s very important to be a great communicator. And these are again, fundamental human [inaudible 00:42:26]. Look at some of the best orators of our time. They were very good at adept at pitching their ideas. And this has nothing to do with being an introvert or extrovert. That’s about where you get your energy. These are skills helping. For example, if you are trying to promote a creative solution to a problem that’s outside what the management is typically seeing, you can, if you are a good communicator, you can look at other examples, case studies from other businesses or within your own organization put together a presentation that helps that leadership see that different solution, actually could provide a better path forward than this idea of best practices. CreativeLive did not become successful because of best practices. We developed, we looked at best practices, fine. Looked at what the rules historically had been, where they were flexible, where we could break those rules.

Chase:

And I think that paradigm in your company, whether it’s an enterprise of a hundred thousand employees or a team of 10, that mentality is the thing that you’re trying to cultivate as either a leader today or a future creative business leader. That’s I can’t overstate that it doesn’t happen. There is no lean back here. And the fact that you’re on this presentation right now tells me you’re, well-suited, you’re interested in learning and we’re just trying to be pragmatic after 10 years in the space. I know Adam, you’ve written extensively on this as have I with my book ‘Creative Calling’. These are lessons hard learned in the trenches. And it’s my hope that we’ve given you a couple tools to be able to apply this stuff. I don’t know, Adam, maybe you can take us across the line. And if there are questions that we’ve taken over the course of the registration process, I’m happy to take a few questions if you are, but I’ll leave that up to you as the boss man running the show here.

Adam:

Not at all. Again this is co-creation.

Chase:

Okay.

Adam:

And hopefully again, our whole point of this presentation is to tee up the value of creativity in business, and then a few practical steps that you can take now to improve the level of creativity that’s infused into your company. So hopefully you can pick from some of those nuggets. But yeah, let’s get into some Q and A.

Chase:

How do you refill a team’s creative juices? Do you want to take that one or do you want me to take it first, but…

Adam:

I’ll give a quick answer. I mean, this is a good one and then I’ll pass over to you. So how have I done it in the past? Really what you’re asking is how do you inspire your team? Because you’re right. It’s easy to get discouraged and easy to get, especially, in whatever environment you’re working in that you might get down. But for me, there was this other way that I’ve done it is we’ve had a standing weekly meeting every Friday morning that we call our creative workshop. And this was something I learned from my mentor, Ron Stone back in the nineties is he would have this meeting with the creative department. And at Adobe we’ve expanded it beyond the start creative team and right of writers and designers. We have people all over the company who joined in this meeting. But it’s really just an inspiration meeting.

Adam:

And every week we’ll have someone take a different turn of presenting on a topic. Maybe we’ll just share a cold Ted talk and then talk about it. Maybe we’ll have a guest author. We had an author come in this last week and just talk about his personal experience and learned experience. But it’s really just like sharing ideas and concepts and big creative ideas. And that’s how you get inspired. And you just rejuvenate your team by getting them inspired every week. And I know going into that meeting, we were all just like, “Yes, we can do this. We can change the world, make a dent in it,” just by seeing the impact that others have had and then having a chat about it. And knowing that you have a shot at it as well.

Chase:

Yeah. We had lots of different vectors to solve for this at CreativeLive. If you want to, if you’ve got creativity in your name, you [inaudible 00:46:14] better run a creative company. And so people learn in different ways. We have different learning modalities. Some people prefer to read, other people’s prefer to be passive, some people prefer active. And these were small things. We had a small, simple budget that was quarterly based that would allow us to pay for speakers, to have to buy books for people who are so I’ll just, leaders are readers. So we had a book club that has, it was established, I think probably 2013 or something. And it’s been going strong for a long time. I mean, so many of the people who teach on CreativeLive as an example are authors, so we get advanced copies of their books. And anyone CreativeLive is willing to pay for anyone in the company who wanted that book.

Chase:

I think that’s an example. We also cultivated the fact that [inaudible 00:47:05] these amazing teachers on the platform, creative innovators and legends like Sir Richard Branson or Daymond John from Shark Tank or Sheri Riley, Brene Brown, Tim Ferriss or some of the brightest, marketing thought leadership minds of our time and the fact that they would come teach a class. We would often, if there was time permitted have them just teach a little thing to our audience, to our employees. So these don’t have to be high budget. They don’t have to be a far reaching. For the people who learned practically we had events like, cooking events where we would have a chef come in and teach us how to make something. We had Graffiti workshops where we went out into the community in [inaudible 00:47:51] or walls and boards that were set aside just for us to practice and learn about the history of hip hop and graffiti and how it applies to popular culture. For example, that’s something.

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]

Chase:

Pop and graffiti and how it applies to popular culture, for example. That’s something more experiential. So there’s just a handful of very simple things that don’t require a lot of money. And don’t require a ton of time that if you can create it, kind of set it and forget it, that every quarter we’ve got this activation a new book or a new event, I think that fosters a lot of it. I like the regular weekly thing that you mentioned, and I think there’s also room for something, these bigger milestones and markers along the way.

Adam:

That’s fun. It’s really exposure, right? Exposure to new ideas. It Inspires you. For managers of creative teams giving efficient feedback is important, but sometimes it’s tricky because of how personal the work is. Any pointers giving feedback? Yeah. That’s easy.

Chase:

Anna. Thanks for the question. I’ll jump in here, Adam. I think I wrote a lot about this in creative calling with less about how to give feedback for others and more about how to think about your own work, but they are obviously very synergistic, whether you’re looking at your own output or the output of someone else, I think it’s most important to separate the human from the output. So what you’re criticizing is not an individual, whether that work is your own, and you’re not criticizing your own ego, or a peer, or someone who works for you, that you’re looking at the work and the process that got you to the work. And I think so that distinction, you can be an amazing human and still give good crit feedback or critical feedback. In the art world. That’s what we call it, where you post someone’s work on the wall and, and people in the room talk about it.

Chase:

I think companies that are transparent, that lean into that, and have a goal of finding the best idea, if you can empower that philosophically in your company, philosophically in your team… Again, this works if you’re a small business or an enterprise, and you’re leading a group of two or a group of 200. How do you demonstrate that? This is a practice, right? Just like anything else, creativity is a habit, not a skill, and so are these interpersonal aspects that we’re sharing here. How can you talk about someone’s work or more importantly, the process of how you got there? Maybe you didn’t have enough revolutions, maybe you didn’t have enough input time on the way in. Maybe you didn’t have the right tools for the job and you can add in a little critique, set yourself up for success next time. So the most important takeaway for me is separate the human from the work and the output, and then look at both the product, but most importantly, the process of how you got there, because I think that’s the thing that you can change the most easily.

Adam:

Absolutely. I love splitting that apart because yeah, if you want guidance on how to critique or how to give feedback to people on their job, go read a book like Radical Candor. Radical Candor is the gold standard for me, it’s just awesome. That’s a great way to learn how to be a good manager and give good feedback to people in a timely fashion and care about them. But if it’s about the work, you’re totally right, because you look at the design led thinking, it’s missing a critical part, which is that critique that you talked about. Most of my career, when looking at the work, you need that critique to grow. If you don’t have that critique, then you’re just doing the same low-hanging fruit, terrible work, right? And so as a creative director or a creative leader, just keep in mind that critique, isn’t just destroying the work.

Adam:

You can poke holes in anything, but it’s also giving a vision of where to go. That’s where you, as a creative leader need to go and say, “This work is either great or good or bad or whatever it is, but here’s where we need to go,” a vision for the future. I think there’s far less of that. And people need to start giving more vision of where to go rather than just poking holes in stuff. That’s good.

Chase:

Awesome.

Adam:

As a new owner of a creative agency, what should my focus be in the first three to four months? I would say, make sure you have good enough client. You’ve got to sell your services for sure. But if we’re talking about creative leadership, what do you do in the very beginning of establishing business?

Chase:

Well, I Think that there’s a flywheel, Adam, you talked about having great clients, but the way you get great clients is by doing great work. And ideally, that’s a virtuous cycle that builds on itself and allows you to scale, not just your client profile, but revenues, the ability to bring on great talent. And especially in the early days, this is going to, I think be a little bit counterintuitive. My favorite answers are the ones that are not obvious. I believe that establishing process is actually a very important and fundamental underpinning of success in any field. If you look at a world-class athlete, all you have to do is look at how they spend their time. What are their habits? What do they actually do? Not what they think, but what is the output?

Chase:

What is the number of free throw reps that they take, if you’re a basketball player or laps that you take, if you’re a swimmer and by extension apply that to your team. What’s the process that you go through to manage the client? What’s the process that you go through to have internal teams compete for the work or to present ideas? What are these very simple, fundamental, and most importantly, repeatable things? Because if you’re chasing the idea of the ability to just pull one idea out of thin air on a whim, that’s not really building the muscle that you’re going to need to be successful over the long time. So my answer to Joe would be double down on process, and process does not have to be rules process. You create a system, you are a systemic thinker, ideally as a leader so that you can create the space in order to be the most creative or the most effective or the most fulfilled.

Chase:

If you’re not creating the space, these things don’t happen accidentally. They don’t happen on their own. You need to set it up so that it’s repeatable and you get the best process and there’s some reflection and adaptation at the end of each process so that it gets better over time. I’m a big fanatic of structure. I used to think that if I’m creative, then structure is my enemy. And ironically the best creators in the world, they sit down and create every day, the best writers write five pages or a thousand words or I think Chuck Close said, “If I was just sitting around waiting for inspiration in order to paint a great painting, I probably wouldn’t have painted very many things.” So I like the idea of just getting to work and orienting around process.

Adam:

A hundred percent. In fact, that’s something we brought up earlier in this presentation, get your house in order. That’s really what it is. It’s like, build that creative machine. I would say early on in your agency, what do you stand for? What matters to you? What type of work do you want to do? How are you going to accomplish that work? How are you going to organize the team? How are you going to get all the structure in place? How are you going to create all the processes? Build that creative machine. That’s a hundred percent hands down the best way to for success, is to get it all in order. And I think that’s perfect. How are you sharing things? How are you doing reviews? All those things that seem just like admin busy work, they’re so critical.

Adam:

It’s so critical to get your house in order first. It’s so funny. I wrote an article, Chase you’re talking about writing, but so many people think it’s just having really big goals and that that’s the secret success. And I was like, “Goals don’t matter. It’s your process that matters.” So for me, when I wrote my first book, if I hadn’t established exactly what day of the week, when I was writing, who I was writing near, and we had a writing group and there was a deep structure to it. And I had been dreaming about writing a book for 10 years and never did it. And then once I got the process down, it happened within a matter of months to get through it all. So absolutely focused on that. I agree.

Chase:

And as a leader, I think this is an interesting exercise, if you want to see how effective you are, you want to understand where you have opportunities to grow and change, audit yourself, running an audit of your time, and you will find out where you’re spending disproportion. I did this. It was very surprising to me. I did it about five years ago, and I had rejoined Creative Live as the CEO. I took a couple of years off there and I had to completely realign how I was spending my time, and it revealed a lot to me, and it gave me a handful of clues on how to change. And just like we want to change a company, if you as a leader, the fact that you’re going to make a decision to do something differently, you’re still looking at the results of that changed behavior, right?

Chase:

If you’re not looking at it and tweaking it, iterating, much like a creative process, then I think you’re doing it wrong. The fact that you can put an idea out in the company or start a new process or look how you’re spending your time, coaching, mentoring, securing new business, is that effective. If you measured it on some interim basis? You’ll get some data, and with that data, you can change. I got a little thing that I call the creative pyramid. At the bottom is mindset. You have to be open and willing to change. You have to be aware that change or growth is necessary for your business or your personal development. The next thing on the pyramid is habits because you end up being what you do. You’ve got to do the verb to be the noun and what you do on a regular basis, that is the most direct line to your goals.

Chase:

So we think of starting with a goal, but a goal is actually the tip of the pyramid. If you design a mindset that says that you can change and grow, and in fact, that’s your number one objective, and then you have a series of behaviors that you do such that you can’t not accomplish the goal, the goal ends up being the most easy thing if you’ve set yourself up for success. So again, I feel like I’m preaching a little bit, but I love the nature of the question. And again, I think all of these topics are valuable, but all of these things are not going to resonate with everyone who’s listening. So I suggest you pick and choose a couple of new titles that you’ve heard a couple of new techniques, a different way of thinking about showing up in your workplace. Hopefully there are a couple of gems in here for the folks who are watching or listening.

Adam:

Yeah. And were at time so we’ve got to wrap it up here, we got a couple of minutes left, so hang with us just for a few minutes longer. But yeah, so one thing to take away, and everyone who registered for this webinar, you can get it… We’ll send a link out afterwards, we can re-watch it and go through all the books that we talked about, all the nuggets and the things. So you don’t have to worry that those are gone. So that’s absolutely a good takeaway is to go back and check on all those things. Last thing I want to do is where we can find people and just kind of checking in on things, Chase, let’s talk about where can people find you and follow you or learn more about what you’ve got going on?

Chase:

Oh, I’m just Chase Jarvis pretty much ever on the internet, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all that stuff. My latest output is really Creative Live. It’s a 10 year processes. More than 10 million people learn creativity, leadership skills, business skills, photography, design, filmmaking, entrepreneurship from folks who are the best in the world in each of those things, that’s just creativelive.com. And I’ve put a lot of these ideas in a book called Creative Calling, which was a national bestseller. And I spent a lot of time writing and I think a lot of these ideas are relevant. So in addition to the other books that we’ve named, I’d steer you there.

Adam:

I bought a copy for everyone on my team. It’s awesome.

Chase:

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you Adam.

Adam:

And then for the rest of us, so realcreativeleadership.com, you can go to our website and watch all the past episodes. We have a lot of great content on becoming a creative leader and what are the different things… There’s not really a manual out there. So we have a lot of good context and videos on that. As always the Stoke Group is as the one who has produced this whole webinar, and we appreciate all of their guidance and help on pulling everything together. So if you need extra help or a good agency to guide you or to help you with your work and be creative, reach out to thestokegroup.com. And me and my personal website, adamwmorgan.com. You can find out more about my speaking gigs and my book and other articles that I’ve written.

Adam:

And then last of all, I’d like to give one last plug to Creative Cloud for teams is our sponsor. This is really, really important in that… We talked a lot about today of getting your house in order and building that credit machine. And this group… it’s a phenomenal product, at least for creative people and creative leaders to bring it all together. You can get all of your all of your licenses together in one admin console, you can manage budget, you can see who you need to trade things around with. You can share files, everything that you need to keep your brand up and running with libraries and everything else to keep it going. So if you’re not using creative cloud, I highly recommend it as a creator. It’s the baseline of the tools that you need to create awesome work.

Chase:

It’s the gold standard.

Adam:

Gold standard. Absolutely. Well, thanks everyone for joining us today. Again, we appreciate you taking an hour out of your day to listen to Chase and I chat about creative leadership and hopefully we all got some nuggets of how you can drive your business forward using creativity. So thanks for joining. We’ll see you next time.

Chase:

Bye everybody.

Adam:

Thanks for listening to real creative leadership. I’m your host, Adam Morgan. And this series was brought to you by The Stoke Group. For the most effective marketing use both sides of your brain to align your strategy, creative execution and analysis, connect with The Stoke Group for help designing each step of your marketing plan and creating a coherent vision. Visit thestokegroup.com to learn more.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:01:57]