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i was told that the kkk was gonna get me and that's frightening when you're a child [Music] chief marketing officer to vice president of global brand an almost three decade career at nike that's right yeah you know nike was really the only brand that was putting people of color in their communication that showed me you could make a living doing what you love why is the air force one shoe an example of nike not chasing cool it wasn't created to make a statement in culture it was created to make a statement on the court and the fact that moses malone won on the court in the air force one that's cool your authenticity is your cultural currency the minute your audience can no longer see your original pursuit they partner with someone else april 2021 significant month for you in your life i got a dm through 23andme and that opened up meeting my birth families the last thing you'd want to be is rejected and it was just so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the direva ceo usa edition i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this yourself [Music] greg i'm a tremendous believer in the fact that our early years are incredibly formative what are the things that really left a remaining mark on you in terms of their influence as an experience or an event or trauma yes again i had two passions growing up sport and art and really why i got involved in art and art of all sorts whether it was drawing painting sculpting is growing up as a half black half white adopted kid into a white family going to a all-white school system and experiencing uh lots of adversity through racism and and other things art was the thing that i was ex able to essentially escape from reality and find myself in in the art and that's when i started to discover that i could draw things in accurate detail you know i could dream and then put that on paper and it was
very powerful and it was a way for me to you know not only feel empowered but also um engage my imagination and then sport as well you know sport evens the playing field if you will and so that was essentially the other escape where i felt like i wasn't such an outsider on that and so i think when you experience uh adversity like that when you're oftentimes the only one in the room um which i think you can relate to even even today um you also look out for other outsiders you know you're keeping an eye on other groups or other individuals that haven't been invited if you will and so you're right i took those uh experiences uh because they never leave you no matter how much success you have um you carry some of those chips on your shoulder but it doesn't have to be used as a negative uh and so as i made my way through life and found myself into in positions of influence i looked out for those individuals on that because again when when i grew up in the the late 70s and early 80s you were taught to not see color right that was that period of time which means how can you be empathetic if your parents or those that are there to support you teachers aren't seeing how what your experience is like so i love today where that is not the case and you do need to see people for how they identify themselves to better equip and empower them to achieve you know their hopes and dreams when you're young and you're different in some way we can all probably relate to being different in some way when we're younger but not everybody can relate to what it feels like to be racially abused when you're young and the confusion the you know the inadequacy whatever it might be that that leaves you with can you recall the first time someone racially abused you when you were younger absolutely i was actually in kindergarten and it started happening every day i was told that the kkk was going to get me
now i didn't know what the ku klux klan the kkk was but i did know that i was the only person that they were saying it to and then you'd come into school the next day and you'd hear this the kkk is going to get you and that's quite frightening when you're a child right um and um you're you're in that situation alone and you you don't necessarily have the individuals that you could talk to about it so essentially you kind of you you bottle that up and that was the first situation and the issue oftentimes with with kids certainly at you know during that particular time is you identify people through their appearance right on that and for me i just hadn't developed the voice to fight with my voice so obviously it resulted in a lot of altercations throughout my early life and even into my teenage life because it took me a while to develop a voice to be able to combat that with words right so that was the beginning but it didn't take long to uh start hearing the n-word shortly thereafter in high school uh in grade school in grade school and so again though i i share those moments more as a way of of telling people that you know make sure you're looking beyond what's on the surface this is gets back to great brand building don't just look at the assumptions and observations that we all see you got to look beyond that to see how people really are experiencing and feeling within their life and you you saw that come to life in some of the campaigns that i worked on right stand up speak up campaign with tyrion re was all about fighting racism that you act that's invisible you can't see it but the players are hearing it i want this to be uplifting but i think it's important to your point to understand where we come from and our adversity doesn't need to necessarily be something that holds us back it can be fuel for the way we are motivated to get to those points where we're we're
putting work out in the world or helping others so that they don't have to go through that you reference your art in the book as being a bit of an escape for you in the early years what was your art what was it was it design was it photography what was your art my parents didn't have much um but um i they really invested in my passion for for art and design and i shared a bedroom with my two brothers small bedroom and so imagine three beds and then there were three other elements in this bedroom okay one was my drafting table and desk where i drew all the time second was a sand filled weightlifting set that just sat in the middle and then finally my parents which is um pretty innovative they just basically left a wall white and they put a wood frame around the entire wall and they said this is your mural and you can paint or draw anything you want on it right and again cramped space i just want you to think about like three kids in here so i would draw sports logos baseball football hockey logos on this this is one of my obsession with branding um and the art of how powerful and and how logos and symbols can connect and create so much story and emotion and then the other thing i drew all the time was superheroes because i was obsessed with comic books and that idea of heroics and athleticism but within that i i started to understand how your art can communicate and through those logos and the visual communication that i saw within the world of sports started to pique my interest in in doing this and i'll take it a step further i got really lucky uh when i was 15 i got a job in a warehouse at a small publishing company just in the warehouse after school and throughout the summer just packing books into boxes but i noticed that there was an art department in this place and i'm not sure where i got the courage but somehow i did i went in and i i said hey is it possible for me to spend part of the time in this art department and
part of it in the warehouse you have you have to put yourself out there to ask i learned that at that point and they said yes and so suddenly i was shoulder to shoulder as a 15 year old with art directors and writers and creative directors and storytellers and then by the next year i spent all my time in the art department and not only in there doing menial tasks they were having me do illustrations they were having me do page layouts again this is pre-computer so um that showed me at an early age that you could make a living doing what you love what are you passionate about because up until that point i wasn't necessarily sure how you could essentially you know make a living doing that so that that was kind of my earliest stage in terms of art as commerce if you will was within the publishing arena but what it did do is it gave me a shortcut to to start to focus on that so by the time i got to college i knew that i wanted to be a designer you knew you wanted to be a designer that's right yeah and you went on and studied design at college graduated and then the story as i as i heard it is you basically get two internships post-graduation you get a call from nike nike said that they've got this urgent position you've got to drop everything and come now and start at nike and that starts and i've skipped a process there but yeah that starts the an almost three decade career at nike that's right yeah where you move from what was your first role at nike called do you remember just a graphic design intern graphic design intern to chief marketing officer to vice president of global brand innovation over almost 30 years for me this is remarkable for many reasons obviously being involved nike is one of those companies and culture and in society that is more than a brand they're more than a shoe company for many reasons which we'll talk about but also the really staggering thing is you
stayed at a company for 30 almost 30 years my question there is what is it about you that made you so loyal to that company because a lot of people can love their job but they still get that desire to move on and do something awesome 30 years at one company what is it about you that made you stay in terms of your character or whatever yeah i think two two things one is the again this this incredible situation where art and sport uh came together and this brand certainly mastered the art of art of marketing right and and expressing the art that exists in sport and the art of storytelling so i didn't have to choose it's like wow you show up to this place and it's like your two passions on full display that's number one two it's i often times told people that nike was like miniature graduate schools because every two years there was either a world cup or a summer olympics so imagine the transformation in terms of innovation in terms of new athletes in terms of new platforms and technology in terms of how you can engage with consumers and so not to mention what your audience is experiencing during that time in terms of how they want to engage with brands and so i always told people it's almost like the it was a new slightly new company every two years and to be able to participate in both these these you know essentially restarts or revolutions right so that was very exciting then i'd say the final thing um is that you know by the time i was a teenager and started to see seeing nike's commercials you know nike was really the only brand that was putting people of color in their communication really you had to look really hard around the arena of of companies to see anyone else doing that and so that started to instill in me the power that this brand has um to represent uh everyone but and also you know it's in their mission statement to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete
so um those are some of the factors that um uh kept me engaged for for that long as well as um i i have this you know nike's original um slogan was there is no finish line before just do it there is no finish line and so if you're you know maybe a perfectionist or you're always in pursuit of better and even to your own detriment sometimes right never satisfied never finished i was kind of all of those things oftentimes i think a lot of creators and makers are right so that was the other part of it that you could always keep reaching um for that next design or that next story and um and the company's expectations were just as high of you as itself you know um and what what's great about nike and certainly the nike i grew up with is complacency was the enemy of creativity so there was no sitting back right it's kind of that forward lean just like in in athletics so that's just a a few of the um aspects i think that um just you know created that longevity and loyalty brands companies teams they over time learn what's making them successful and lean further and further into that so i'm wondering in your 30 years at nike what did you see nike realize while you were there and lean more into in terms of the values of the organization how it operates from a marketing perspective a culture perspective or whatever do you understand what i'm trying to say like sure well first and foremost i think and i you know i i'm a brand advisor now with establishments brands and startups and you know what nike had from the beginning is such a clear brand house if you will its belief its mission its vision its values you know where are you going how are you gonna get there what do you believe what's your promise to your audience and what are the characteristics and traits that compose
your brand in that pursuit um to deliver inspiration and innovation to everyone and so it's imagine the power of that in terms of everyone is clear as they walk through the door to show up to work why they're there and i say this because a lot of brands can't say that a lot of startups haven't even got there yet because they're just trying to perfect their product and get it to market and so first and foremost this idea that authenticity and serving the athlete is the anchor at all times so even though you're trying to be maybe the most influential and coolest brand on earth you know and there's an art to doing that um you always have to go back and ensure that um it serves the athlete in the the deepest way possible and that's why you know maybe we'll get to this later but um i always use that mantra don't chase cool because uh most likely you're not gonna catch it and that idea that your your authenticity in terms of what i've learned over and over again keep going back to your authenticity is your cultural currency the minute your audience can no longer see your original pursuit and every company is a bit different is the day they kind of leave you and go go engage and partner with someone else that's in part because you've left yourself right in the pursuit of cool you've abandoned your authenticity you talk about that in chapter six of your book emotion by design which is out now you talk about the air force one in that chapter as an example of success in that realm so why is the air force one shoe an example of nike not chasing cool well first and foremost uh it's an innovation that was created in 1982 that was created to serve the basketball athlete right it wasn't created to make a statement in culture it was created to make a statement on the court and the designer was obsessed with creating something that gave that
athlete an advantage and it's really hard to create if you want any chance for a product to ultimately become a cultural icon if you will and by the way brands don't get to decide that you know your audience does over time then you must the the the inception and creation of that product has to start with what's the benefit that you're trying to deliver what's the problem you're trying to solve so that's that's part one and the fact that someone like moses malone who was a center for the philadelphia 76ers at the time you know won on the court in the air force one so that's cool that's proving that innovation right out of the gates and so from there as it grew in stature what was great about all the teams that played a role across all the different disciplines at nike to bring this to market every year is all of the storytelling was rooted in authenticity this colorway came from this basketball court this colorway was from this new york outdoor court and this player scored x amount of points you know the stories are rooted in an emotion like and you as a enthusiast for this sneaker got to take part in a little bit of that and as i talk about in the book you know at some point stories no longer you know belong only to the brand they get passed down um and so um the air force one is interesting because this year again it was the the highest selling sneaker out there and so it's very accessible and yet it's also you could argue the most um culturally relevant sneaker as well and so it's aspirational and so my point is that's by design you're you're ensuring that there's a level of the authentic storytelling and that those that you're partnering with the ambassadors if you will that show up in your communication um on that have a have a a real um connection and affinity for the air force one just like kendrick lamar grew up with the nike cortez sneaker very real relationship with the shoe that's very much a part of la
and so when we partnered with kendrick lamar it's coming from a shared passion and that authenticity comes through to your your audience right when it doesn't that's when it it feels like you're chasing cool um and so i always say just make sure your connections are are really really clear to your audience in terms of who you partner with what is the the real purpose of your product beyond all the the shiny new um partnerships and other things you can do you still have to kind of go back to its its roots an example of where a brand has has not done that well can you think of a couple top of them well for some reason i thought of that uh that pepsi advert i know it was a tragedy for so many reasons but when they got one of those kardashians to kind of hold the pepsi can in that social justice scene that riot scene you couldn't as an audience member understand why that kardashian was stood there apparently as the cure to a social justice issue holding a kind of it all felt and disjointed inauthentic yeah because you have to be able to connect what you sell to what the world needs in a specific moment when it comes to social impact or social justice so whether you're a food and beverage company an automobile company a sneaker company if you want to participate in that conversation and you know break down barriers and empower people or change the way people feel about a particular issue it's for nike you had to speak through the lens of sport that's the connection right and i think when you see a brand maybe miss you know sometimes you might be watching tv and you'll see an ad and it's clear that this whoever this brand is that they are trying to create positive change in the world but you can't figure it out and it's not until the end that you see the logo you're like okay i don't get the connection and so the point is is like you you have to start by saying um
is what's happening in this situation uh relate to our values and our mission and then if it does what new unique insight are we bringing to the conversation that's not already being talked about and then finally the the other thing steven is is um because i think sometimes the default is we need to say something as a brand when there are so many other ways that you can engage and and be a part of the conversation right and um just just look at what epic games did in terms of taking the uh revenue from fortnite over a period of time and making donations to ukraine relief they didn't do an ad but they found a way that was authentic to them to you know create an opportunity that's going to help a lot of people um in a really tough situation right now so that's the thing when i'm talking to to brands it's like that's just number one it's like storytelling isn't always um the example advertising in terms of you know social impact statements um and um part one and part two you you must um ensure that what you want to say clearly comes through who you are as a brand and what you bring into the world that's why i say connect what you sell with what the world needs if you can't do that then most likely you need to think about kind of moving into a different arena so those are when when i see something maybe that's tone deaf or it's not um you know it's usually because it's just simply not on brand and it's confusing to your audience much of the the things we'll talk about i'm sure are underpinned by a topic you talk about in the t and in the book in chapter two which is teams and culture um that kind of underpins everything you referenced how when people walk in the door at nike it's quite clear that there's a they have clarity of culture in terms of why they're there and what what they're doing there etc you were at nike for almost 30 years um had a lot of people work underneath you um you observe that organization from various perspectives
how does one build a culture that wins on its objective and how do they and how does someone keep that culture and police it and protect it from scale and you know harm and you know yeah no it's it's a it's a great great point um because you know creative collaboration uh is unique because oftentimes uh creativity and innovation is a very personal pursuit right it can get pretty territorial you know you've spent a lot of time on this and you know you're you you want insurance essentially that you you get credit and so a lot of what you're doing is trying to instill both self-confidence and self-awareness um so that and you're trying to eliminate kind of the silos and in independent kind of studios you if you will um i was given this awesome opportunity to run all the creative functions at nike you know here's the coolest most influential brand and so my job was to take advertising and digital marketing and brand design and event marketing take all these groups that have worked independently for quite some time where the integration took a lot of work with really long passes and i i used this example frequently and i'm sure it drove my my teams crazy but i used uh fc barcelona as an example of radical creative collaboration you know their style of play the tiki taka it's all those short passes there's there's no waiting everybody's moving around the field at the same time and i would show the team these clips of this you know pep guardiola's fc barcelona team passing the ball 40 50 60 times in a game in a row without interruption okay and how does that happen it's because you could say radical selflessness right the goal is just literally the pursuit is still to put the goal in uh the net um you need the buy-in and my job was to make sure that i was there with the empathy needed to recognize the contributions of everybody but but to also ask people to make the sacrifice so that we could run faster be more timely
create more distinctive work and ultimately as things are going the consumer expects everything in their life to be connected right the last thing they would want to hear about is that um there are these really long handoffs between agencies and brands and departments and that's why the work is kind of disjointed you can't have that you'll you'll lose your consumer so part of it is it was creating this connected team this this one team that that operated with great chemistry just like the the greatest um teams in the world on that and maybe one other piece to that was this this idea of individuality and so for for that and again i'm telling you i'm sure there's folks out there that got tired of seeing my my um parallels with the sport of football but the brazil national team was a team that i had you know this this 25-year relationship with starting as an intern right and what's great about the brazil national team is that um they played with the zhenga style which means to sway and zynga is is you know the influences of that style of play comes from capoeira you know brazilian martial arts and samba um but um it emphasized uh the individual eccentricities of the players um we've all watched brazil over the years we've been enthralled by them and sometimes they drive us a bit mad because maybe there's a bit of disorganization but at the end of the day they've won five world cups more than any other team and that's because they value the diversity and ex the the perspective and experience and expertise of each individual player and so yes there's structure that team um yes there's an expectation that there's a level of precision but they allow improv they allow spontaneity to reveal opportunity throughout those games and that's why oftentimes anywhere you go in the world it's someone's second favorite team beyond the club that they support and so that was another point of inspiration that i use to lead these these massive teams right you're talking
about just the scale of of nike in terms of the output of of creative around the world you needed to still have a high degree of operational excellence to run something like that but i wanted to make sure that you were incentivized to take risks you had the space to be able to present ideas that may not be on the plan and you had a receptive executive team that was willing to hear from you and that's why there's so many examples of the book um of work that wasn't briefed of work that was just a conversation with a couple people who were empowered to visualize that idea and then put it out in the world many of them um ideas that had great scale and are still around today so that's just a little insight in terms of how i looked at building that chemistry how did you incentivize risk or disincentivize risk adversion so it's a great call and again i i'm still figuring it out um because think about it you're you're asking individuals um right brain and left brain thinkers to essentially you're saying i said this often we're going to develop four different concepts this quarter and they're going to be outside of our normal workload because again we have to deliver the business front and center we can't get distracted from that but alongside of that we're gonna visualize and prototype four ideas but you know what only one of them probably will have a chance so that's not for everyone right oftentimes people only want to work on things that have almost 100 certainty of finding their way in the world you know and i had to condition everyone to ensure that they were were comfortable taking the big swings and part of that is seeing the end results like again let's look at the last two years you see this particular concept
that is now in you know 500 stores around the world you know it's one example but the house of hoops example we had a conversation about how could we create a store specific to basketball that had the same level of passion and energy that a kid's room would have if they loved basketball you go into a kid's room they would have posters and so much inspiration and objects and pictures that really express their passion and yet how come you go into a store oftentimes and it might just be shoes on on a wall and you're not feeling the story and the legacy of that and so rendering that up and knowing that in three days you could have an audience with the president of the company and not only that you could get a go no go that quickly of well let's let's try this concept in the wild and then lo and behold in less than two years you have 300 of those stores around the world so all you need is a couple of those examples to say okay well i'd like to participate in that and i buy into this idea that not everything we're going to do is is going to make it but why i say that i'm still trying to figure it out is is it is hard to convince some people that failure is what leads to success that and if i can use this example it's not in the book but it's literally my favorite commercial ad of all time and it's michael jordan's 9 000 shots and amazing uh commercial from 1997 and the widening kennedy agency sat down with him and learned that michael had missed 9 000 shots 26 times he was asked to take the game-winning shot and he missed and he said yet i failed over and over again but that's why i succeed and that's the spirit of risk-taking in the innovation space
you need you need to take the shot because even if you miss it success will come down the road and so that's what i try to instill uh with my team quick one we bring in eight people a month to watch these conversations live here in the studio when we're here in the uk and when we're in la if you want to be one of those people all you've got to do is hit subscribe chapter three of your book the title is never play it safe play to win which is very much in line with what you're talking about there and i think one of the more interesting concepts which which was mentioned in the book which i could really relate to was how you say that some of nike's boldest ideas came when the team had no time or resources and actually that's really what founded my company to be honest because uh we ran out of money so all of the conventional marketing um channels were out of budget so we were left to figure something else out and that's when we started thinking about social media in 2012 and it was free we could put time in and get a big return and off we went and that started my company which now you know ended up making 700 million whatever it is this year it'll make um and that was when we ran out of money our best ideas came so when i read that i thought oh this is interesting so so true so often uh and also i put a yeah a timeline in a budget um or lack of budget but a strict timeline can be amazing right do you always do timelines i was going to ask you that as well do you always make sure projects have timelines not necessarily but um but i like to put a timeline on how quickly you visualize a conversation um that is i can't say this enough and if i have one suggestion to smaller brands or even startups as they're starting to expand it's like when you have a conversation like build a either build internally or have a relationship with an agency that can take your conversations and the ideas you have and quickly visualize them in a visceral way so and you've heard it before a picture says a thousand words and the problem oftentimes with
businesses that maybe are a bit uh bureaucratic is you and i could have a conversation about a cool idea and then three months go by and we see each other again it's like you know what happened to that yeah i don't know well no one took ownership of it one and two i would walk out of those conversations over and over again i'd walk over to the visualization team and i said let's let's come back to the team let's surprise them in three days with either an image or a short gif or a film or even often times an app prototype that was working if i didn't do that um then more often than not you might forget that the conversations ever happened so i went on that tangent just to say um i think it's incredibly effective these brands large and small that have visualization capability um and that everyone understands why that's a competitive advantage um and so many of the concepts that were brought to life in this book um you know came out of the speed at which we brought the idea to life it wasn't well our agency's too busy so maybe two months from now we can talk to him about you know this this this new um nft id we have no it's like how about start to riff on some of those ideas um so that you're first to play in that in that sector on that so i guess and maybe if i can just you know there's one story in this book which was the the ronaldinho one of my favorite footballers of all time but yeah we were launching a a new boot and um there was no time and quite frankly there really wasn't a budget or it wasn't talked about right but um born out of this urgency was this very resourceful approach to storytelling which was to shoot ronaldinho with a video camera essentially getting these new soccer boots football boots on the pitch and then proceeding to do that old game
that we all played growing up of crossbar where you're sitting kind of you know just under midfield and you're trying to kick the ball and hit that top of the crossbar only in this video ronaldinho is able to do it you know two three different times without the ball hitting the ground and i'll leave it to the audience to figure out if it was real or not the point is is that you know and not only did we not have time but um there was a young platform that had just started to emerge called youtube and yeah the team dropped this particular video of ronaldinho uh on the platform and um lo and behold it becomes the first brand film to reach a million views right and quite frankly all because there was no money no time and the team had to be unbelievably resourceful to to create something that would make people want to watch and that gets back to emotion by design i want to emphasize this is that i think the best brands ask the question how do i want this work to make the consumer feel about themselves and make them feel empowered to go and do great things does the work kind of engage and stir emotions in that way where people feel that they can go out and do it or not does it create indifference or because like look there's and i'm not saying the speed at which we're having conversations now with between brands and audiences is in real time and you're not going to be able to create everything as a hit you know there's not enough time money etc um but you should have someone in the room that's representing your brand story that's representing um the emotional qualities that can be released through your work because if that person isn't in the room and it's just someone looking at it as content that needs to be distributed that that's that's not very human the stronger the emotional connections the
bigger status your brand is going to have most likely in culture and therefore the more opportunities you would have to step beyond the business to have a real impact in the world on on some of the most pressing issues of our time so i do believe there's a process to to to achieving that to create a strong emotional connection with someone else i'm presuming you have to take a strong emotional stance yourself often so i'm just thinking about the things that have revoked the strongest emotional connections with anything i do the things that i've evoked the strongest emotional connections with this podcast in its audience are strong emotional stories but that when you do that when you avoid indifference you are um putting yourself in line for potential criticism and attacks and you're going to polarize people some people are going to love and hate you how important has that been for nike and how important is it for a person starting a podcast or a business or leading a team or whatever else for a brand like nike it was you know look at the athletes that represented the brand um early on i mean they were were all rebels you know within their own sports and and so you know this idea of def and you know having a a maxim within the company that was defy convention right so your your your values kind of say it's like yeah there are going to be things we do with conviction that may be polarizing but it is the deep belief we have in those things and as long as we always relate them back to sport and this this idea of of you know serving the athlete then we're willing to go there um and if we're not clearly tethered to you know what we say and what we do then we would deserve the critique and the criticism so i think you can for any small or large company that's kind of you know that's wrestling with this that
maybe wants to kind of go beyond um just the transactions and truly move into that arena where you really are having real relationships with your audience that their affinity for you comes from the fact that they're getting meaningful benefits whether those are mental or physical that are allowing them to progress in life you know when you reach that status i believe indifference isn't an option right now i believe we need to look to brands that have that level of success and again it's not about scale because there's plenty of small brands you know mom and pop brands that are doing great things through their business to affect the lives of people underserved communities but again so much of what we're talking about is authenticity even even doing this book it's it's like well you know how much social media should i do and on this platform does that seem like i'm inauthentic and like i as so at the end of the day um because i'm driving people crazy with these questions is that because i you know i'm not the most public person right but but as long as i speak to from the the center uh and the anchor of the power of creativity in business and its ability to change the world and make that connection clear and then if people are pissed off about that then then it is what it is um but more often than not look at some of the most successful brands and they're they're it's it's made their own business successful it's accelerated their growth and so that's where i get into this um you know yeah our primary goal certainly for a public company is to drive growth both from a brand and business standpoint but more and more i believe that within that you have to integrate this you know being a great corporate citizen um and using your platform to to to you know provide your innovation and your inspiration to those that quite frankly don't have the access and opportunity to get it how do i find which story to tell because if i'm if i'm running this podcast and i'm thinking okay i need to
do the logo the branding i need to position it in a way that's going to be this is typically the way the brain thinks it's trying it's the outcome is success and it's trying to figure out which story to tell to get me to success so how do i make this podcast successful how do you go about knowing where and how to find that story in your business brand team whatever it is um and which one is the right one to tell to get the outcome i'm looking for which is success the success to me is that it's not overly packaged the success to me is that the transparency and of authenticity of the conversations and that um there's a rawness to it and that's that is branding sometimes it's the the lack of design if you will is the very thing that makes something successful versus there's there's uh you know there's go-to um it's always the same questions and so that that's the one thing i i really appreciate about what you're doing is this again back to this this being human um as as a um being human and creating emotion um and part of that is just due through people can you know see themselves in you or us um and that the yeah i mean that that's that's what i say it's less about um sometimes uh the traditional aspects of of branding which is uh i want to make sure the frame of every podcast has the color gold and it must you know so and again i'm saying this as as someone who's oftentimes been pretty rigid in terms of to grow some of these businesses to own a brand color if you will uh and you pick your pick your favorite brand there's a level of repetition needed um to build that kind of equity in a typeface in a color in a in a logo you need to build that brand frame right oftentimes startups almost skip that it's like no go back it's like really build your brand uh identifiers
your brand elements right because that's your picture frame and the stronger the picture frame the more the picture in it is going to shine the weaker that frame then your the picture within it is kind of it's it's just it's not on a on solid ground if that makes sense so that's why in the book i talk about the picture in the frame and ensuring that the frame never outshines the picture that's what i'm getting at it's like you're when you're thinking about brand brand elements and how best to express those through the different platforms it's the right question but making sure that they don't take away from the actual storytelling within it which is the picture which happens a lot for me so some things that we do intentionally to try and communicate the i guess the heart of what we're doing on this podcast for example in the branding so one of the things is we always make sure it feels like home yeah so it's in whether in l.a or in london it's actually shot in my actual kitchen on a very similar looking table people are actually surprised it looks exactly the same but we always shoot it at home because i think the conversations we're having are homely ones they're the ones people have at home they're not ones that you know we could we could go to this in a massive studio but it wouldn't be in line with our values the other thing is it's dark in here so that speaks to the subject matter sometimes it speaks to secrets the other thing is obviously the title of the podcast is the diary of a ceo and you you ask yourself what one might keep in a diary it tends to be things that are a little bit deeper yeah and there's all these small things you know we even i mean we spend many days this week me and jack debating removing the microphones because it kills what the humanness of authentic communication so we're thinking about ways where we can have the microphones hanging where you we can remove the barrier and all these small things i guess is that the frame is
when you think about brand elements you're talking more about like colors and things no i think that's the frame as well you know when i walk into a space i'm a bit obsessive compulsive about like design and details you know and i walk in i look at the carpet and what type of chairs and um like the display case and what are the objects you know and whether i go into a restaurant or the hotel i stayed in last night you know and i'm i'm i'm soaking all that up but that isn't the that isn't the actual experience that isn't the actual um story look you're revealing the story um of this podcast through all these elements but but it's that's still the the story frame and is where i'm going and then um the delivery of you know through your voice and these conversations is what sits within it but my but yes those identifiers those brand elements um play a huge role because every one of them i guess what i'm saying what i like about when i walked in is it's like everything was considered it was nothing arbitrary because what a miss for for some some brands large and small when they don't have a culture that um cares deeply about those details and i think the best ones do and certainly when you think of some of the the the most successful fashion brands like you you know there's just an ethic inside that any any detail large or small um will be intentional so and you know that's does design you know emotion by design the word design is really about intention be intentional and look to reveal something about yourself through this round table you know with the marble top it's like it all communicates um trust me i drive my my wife and my kids absolutely mad right because they've had to live with this guy who's just constantly
moving stuff around and you know is the clock is the bookcase like you know curated perfectly are the books in the right um so if i have a problem it's in some some ways that it's um uh i i've i'm you know searching for perfection too often and what can happen is you start to strip the soul and personality out of something and it's been great that i've had people throughout my career to balance that that's back to this idea of creative tension like if there's a two startup founders you know it's i love it when it's someone's it's someone represents the art and someone represents the science you know someone's more analytical in their decision-making process and others maybe a little bit more non-linear maybe a little bit more right brain thinking um and i love that tension because when you don't have that it's like one side starts to kind of creep up and that's why i got into you know i'm also the branding instructor at the university of oregon's graduate school of business and these are you know i'm in front of mainly folks that want to become future gms entrepreneurs product developers you name it right and but i'm there to say it's like you know yes we're going to go through how you create a brand plan and a brand strategy we're going to do this but you're also going to work on brand identity and don't worry about if you you can't if you don't think you're creative because that's i i just that kills me when i hear that the application of creativity yes it's oftentimes reserved for people that have created a fluency through experience and education whether it's an architect a coder etc but the creation that the site the inception of an idea we can all participate in that like the brainstorming of an idea we can all participate because what happens oftentimes is people say well i
can't draw i'm not creative and it's like well that's that's only part of the equation you know i've i've done i don't know hundred a couple hundred i've led a couple hundred brainstorm sessions over the years big and small and i've never said at the beginning of the brainstorm session um i want all the non-creative people to leave the room right now because we're going to start to concept and be creative no it's again it's writing left brain thinkers working to deliver working together to conceive great things i'm really compelled by and i talk to my team a lot about this about this and you've mentioned it twice now this the importance of details from your your 30 years of nike how did you make sure teams cared about the detail is it just continually reminding them is there something else we can do to make sure that our teams and the people we work with and ourselves even are really valuing the smallest of details yeah i do i do believe in publishing whether it's you want to call it an ethos a manifesto a set of principles where you clearly articulate what your design standards are or your creative standards i've always believed that and they they can change over time but i'm a big believer in publishing um thought publishing ideals that that you have and i'll go even further um because what i learned over the years is is i was doing a little bit too much self authorship when i really started to manage teams i'd go away and i'd come back and it's like here's the the six principles of of you know obsessing the details that we're going to focus on this year but i didn't involve them in authoring those so it's like publish what you believe invite folks into the process that have maybe slightly different opinions than you do and then complete this build the
consensus and then make sure everyone has it so that clearly as you drive down the road and you're looking at restaurant architecture you know business building architecture it's pretty clear that people just decided like it was good enough and no one will ever you know who cares if it's going to win the point isn't to win awards the point is take something as far as you can um to contribute something great to you know to society whether it is a building or um a book or this bottle design um you know the amount of thought that went into that i think that's the typeface helvetica i believe and the choices made to go upper and lower case like that's all intentional you know to have it black on white um human fuel yeah well and that's the thing i mean you have to start with naming right and one of the hardest pursuits is naming a product or naming a company because it's such a crowded space but man if you get the name right it will save you millions in marketing so if i was to ask you now and i used to say right i have a team of 100 000 people and i want them to be great marketeers but we're only allowed to give them three guiding principles which they will take with them these can just be philosophies ideas whatever but we can only give them three guiding principles to hope to make them successful what would those top three guiding principles be i'll start with the three characteristics um that i would say it's like we're gonna we're gonna have the dominant traits of empathy curiosity and let's call it courage or risk taking like those those three traits is what we're going to be known for and for empathy you know to me within the marketing process is is you know the principle that i talk about in the book is you know see what others see
find what others don't the best marketing teams and the best communication teams are able to peel back the layers get under the surface of a human being a city or a community and find the deeper insight or truth that resides there and then they reveal it through storytelling it's back to the michael jordan example how many how many more ads could you do about him dunking a basketball so empathy is like go deeper whether you're designing a product it's like you know you're you're you're revealing the the the true problem that needs to be solved you're not just observing some behavior and making um you know uh a you know hypothesis off that you're actually spending the time to go deeper and deeper into that and that's that idea of see what others see find what others don't curiosity is that idea of getting outside yourself because it's one thing to have the insight right and the problem that you're going to solve and you're clear on that but now you need to reveal it to the world and oftentimes you need uh points of inspiration coming into the process and that's why you look at nike air probably the greatest innovation in the history of of sneakers right uh air air air bags and air cushioning and sneakers well that came from an engineer at nasa who was experimenting with creating an innovation for astronaut helmets for space exploration and he brought that to nike and that led to nike air that's my point about find inspiration outside of your sector and that's the idea of bringing the outside in so that's the curiosity thing outside uh get outside yourself and then you know finally is that idea of of you know we don't play it safe we play to win um we want to def we we're not comfortable with the status quo
um and we want people comfortable kind of pursuing what's next not just getting complacent and delivering products services stories in the way everyone else is so we also want to be a team that that is obsessive about um every aspect of branding you know and so think of how powerful that can become is if you have a team and that they're deeply empathetic to who they serve like they get great at learning and asking questions they're unbelievable uh unbelievably curious and always looking beyond what's in front of them to see what else they can because so much of innovation is about transference you take something from here you bring it into your sector and you you you change the game and then and then but and then the risk-taking thing is not feeling like you have a team that has to ask for permission to use their imagination i think that's really important because if you're in a if you develop a culture where people have to ask um to think people have to get approval um then you're not i i don't believe you would be known as a leading innovator in in your space on that so those are just a few but i i just think it's also i'll tell you this when i was cmo i did an informal poll with my the marketing leaders and i'm biased of course but i felt and i believe this is the best marketing team in the world i said what are the top two characteristics you look for in any marketer that you're interviewing for a particular job within the nike marketing team and the top two um traits that came to the top from everybody was curiosity and collaborative i mean to a person and it was kind of
tied i want someone who's always searching for inspiration is curious about about their teammates about the consumer about technology entertainment art and then i want someone who who can play with others right and um that you can feel that sense that this person is um has conviction um you know believes in themselves but can play within a in a team um and those were the two that that rose to the top and and um you know and i i think that's true today quick one i just wanted to share a fantastic initiative from one of my podcast sponsors for those of you that are looking to grow your business online right now you can get 200 pounds of social media advertising paid for by vodafone business when you sign up to three unlimited mobile plans social media has a huge impact on your business if i had to start my business again from scratch right now the first thing i would do is produce content daily at a high cadence the thing that grew my company so fast was producing content on social media platforms it helps your company become known and build your digital reputation slash personal brand if you've not ventured into the space of social media or social media advertising before don't worry vodafone business will also provide the knowledge support and tips you need in creating a plan all through vodafone vhub to find out more and how i'd spend that 200 pounds at vodafone giving search vodafone digital boost and obviously terms and conditions apply april 2021 significant month for you in your life does it ring a bell yeah absolutely yes i was sitting at home uh actually reading the new york times an actual newspaper remember those um and uh yeah i got a a dm uh through 23andme i had i had done the 23andme thing 23andme for anybody that doesn't yeah so you you submit your dna um and it's along with ancestry.com um it gives you kind of your family tree you can figure out others that have joined 23andme if you're related to them uh and um you know a variety of other things in terms of what you might be susceptible for from a medical
standpoint or other and so you know as some as an adoptee and growing up not knowing who my parents were or who my families were having lots of questions my whole life but basically i'd gotten to the point where it is what it is and i'm just moving on with my life right um so i'm sitting around and i get this this dm and and through 23andme and and i usually just ignore those because sometimes it's like hey you have a uh predisposition to like uh breadcrust i mean you get these emails right and it's like oh and great another 23andme notice but i look in it and this note says um wow i had no idea i had an uncle on this uh or in life and so i looked at it and then um i looked at the name and i went to you know as you do i went to facebook right and i looked this person up and i was like whoa so the person went to my high school the person was also a graphic designer which was my what i got a degree in they had a degree and as we did my wife and i did a little bit more sleuthing it turned out that this wasn't my niece this was my sister and this meant that her mom was you know not my sister her mom was my mom and so wow that that was a lot right and that opened up uh an unbelievable door over the last year of meeting my birth families and for the first time being able to answer questions like why do i look the way i do why do i have this why is my voice the way it is and why do i have certain characteristics or passions and as i dove deeper into it um you know two things started to unfold one is the the amount of art and design um practice going back generations on both sides right not to mention my sister you know as a graphic designer my birth mom was a long time flight attendant but would spend all of her down time at art museums from around the world my birth grandmother was a painter right and there was art and design on my
father's side but kind of going back to where we started this conversation right about race and search for identity and not necessarily growing up with the black experience at least the positive one and to come all the way to today and have spent the last year diving very deep into my african-american heritage going all the way back pre-civil american civil war and um and just i i i can't tell you what a life bonus this has been um i can't put a dollar amount on it to be able to start to put the pieces together for the first time because up until now you're you're manufacturing a lot of that as someone who's who's adopted right um and um so yeah it's just uh it's it's just been an amazing run they don't all you know reuniting with birth families doesn't you know the percentages aren't always high that is going to be a positive one and in this case um everyone has been just i mean unbelievably generous with their time thoughtful and i have i could put together a museum of all the objects and pictures and um memorabilia from the generations of these families um you know now and it's just been uh it's just been amazing and i wanted to make sure i i captured some of that in the book to to honor them as well and i want to say something too it's like to learn that your grandfather was the only black man in his graduating class in college in 1955. can you imagine what that was like in america in 1955 to be the only black person let alone there was no women in that class so um yeah i i just look at that and uh
i i start to feel where some of my um drive uh to to you know create things that stand out um do things a bit differently and um and now i have a backstop if you will um a history that maybe i didn't uh get to draw from uh in the past you must have first met your and got to hug your biological mother what was that day like yeah i mean it it's again you're you're talking about a time when you know my birth parents were 17 when they had me and you know you've got two kids one's black one one's white in minnesota in 1970 that's just not acceptable you can imagine right in high school so and my birth mom right had to go live in a home as you did as a teenager if you got pregnant and to have me and then had to give me up okay so and then keeps that a secret her whole life until that day when her daughter said i have to ask you something you know i i know i have a brother so two months later after lots of discussions kind of getting comfortable getting to know i we fly out there and yeah i mean it's um as you're i'm trying to play it cool because that's me just always trying to be be um you know cool about things and um but really it's it's just like how's this gonna go i mean because the last thing you want to be is rejected but now that you've crossed that point there's you this is a new experience that you know you've never had so what's great that my birth mom did is i i as we parked and we met like at a park acro on a lake with with them is she just cause i didn't know if i could make the first move but she came running up and just gave me a big hug we didn't even say
anything and that was the beginning of that the first time i saw her in person and it was just uh yeah i mean um you know uh it's just i'll be honest i'm a happier person so you know and it's not that i was i i've gotten so much so much i have such a wonderful family and kids and such an amazing career and having the opportunity to share it with everybody um but to experience this at this stage of my life is just i mean it's just amazing thank you it's been a real honor and uh you know you you've inspired me tremendously for so many reasons and you've been a real sort of affirming uh and reaffirming force reading your book emotion by design um has taught me a lot of the things that i did right and i didn't even know i did write and then a lot of the things that i definitely could have done better in certain areas of my life and even you know i can say i'm almost 30 years old as a marketeer but you've illuminated certain things that i i don't think people talk about enough especially considering the way that the world is heading and it's and how you know creativity is being sometimes talked about in a secondary sense to things like ai and data and and we're losing the human in things but not just in marketing in the world as well there's an optimization of our lives driven by data which is which is sacrificing the love and the art and the beauty of what it is to be a human and that's also the broader point that i got from the book is and from you today is is the importance of not losing that and yeah we do have a closing tradition on this podcast which is the previous guest leaves a question for the next guest is there something right now that you know you're doing wrong but you haven't fixed yet if so how will you get unstuck wow now we're going deep
the election in america um in 2016 really damaged the relationship with my parents my parents who adopted me because i'm you know uh obviously being um you can see through the work that i'm very much um you know on the left if someone wanted to uh you know categorize me as such and i think you could cater categorize my parents maybe on the right and just through all the um uh just the divisiveness of america and the division between political parties as well as um you know the citizens of america unfortunately that is where uh my own family went right because um i don't share those values and so it's not right right now um and i'm not one to to allow something to just you know not be fixed so while i don't have the answers to that i can say and i'm revealing maybe too much about my life because on the one hand i've met my birth families and i have these two new families i'm really enjoying and engaging with and then on the other side i need to figure out how to get beyond the politics um that exists today back to this idea of getting past the ideology to have you know to go back to why we're connected in the first place through emotion you know um and so i'm gonna see everybody uh in another month and um just try to create a create a different type of um you know relationship um that is respectful on both sides so um i don't know if that fully answers the question you have it perfectly but it's uh it's a hell of a thing what's happened um
you know over over the last four or five years and how um it's it's what started within politics um just kind of moved into families and in some cases it's broken them up over um you know political views and such so it's less about me being right or others being right it's just trying to find like what is the common kind of you know cause that we can kind of at least agree on on that so perfectly answered and very very very important topic that people don't talk about enough because it i think a lot of families will relate to that division especially generationally right so kids and their parents don't tend to be part of the same left right values uh and i guess there's empathy needed because someone said to me one day which i've never forgotten which is if you were if you were them you would be making the decisions and believe what they believed and it's a really simple concept but that strikes empathy into me so i've had like a bit of a falling out with my mom lately and it's because of some you know in my view it's the way she behaves in it whatever um and and just coming back to that point of like well if i was my mom and i'd been born in nigeria and i'd had the experiences of racism that she had growing up and then moving to the uk being the only black woman in a village called plymouth in the uk having your car burned and all of these the things that have made her so bitter if i if i was her i would be doing exactly what she's doing even and her son doesn't like what she's doing but if i was her and i'd had her brain her genetics her experiences i would be doing the same thing and for me that kind of has created an empathy which allows me to try and keep building the bridge in you know an extended branch so yeah you make a great point and i and i think like you i never wanted i would see i would hear about these estranged relationships where people didn't talk family members for years and i was like
well that's never going to be me um but you can fall into it especially when there's uh in in the there's there's polarizing things happening in the world to your point where there's there's um there's bound to be generational differences in terms of you know the eyes you look through so um but um that's also good advice that that you have there it does get back to empathy and practicing what i preach thank you greg thank you appreciate it as you might know crafted one of the sponsors of this podcast and crafted are a jewelry brand and they make really meaningful pieces of jewellery and this piece by crafted when i put it on for me it represents courage it represents ambition it represents being calm and loving and respectful and nurturing while also being the antithesis of that seemingly the antithesis of that which is sometimes a little bit aggressive with my goals and determined and courageous and brave the really wonderful thing about crafty jewelry is it's super affordable it looks amazing the pieces hold tremendous meaning and they are really well made uh [Music] you