Speaker 1:

From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome, Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week, we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICEs exchanges around the world. Now let's go Inside the ICE House. Let's your host, Lance Glinn.

Lance Glinn:

Creativity in the workplace has evolved into becoming a core driver of innovation, problem solving, and growth. In today's rapidly changing world, creative thinking is no longer limited to artists and designers. It's a vital capability for professionals across every industry. As the current chairman of BBDO Worldwide and formerly president and CEO for two decades, our guest today, Andrew Robertson, has guided one of the world's most celebrated creative agencies through change. With his experiences, his failures, and successes, he has written his first book, The Creative Shift: How To Power Up Your Organization by Making Space for New Ideas. Out now from Basic Venture. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.

Andrew Robertson:

Thank you. This is easily the most exotic location I've sat in front of a microphone in.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah, it is a great ambiance. It's a great setting for podcasts here at the New York Stock Exchange. Of course, we're here to have you talk about your new book, The Creative Shift: How to Power Up Your Organization by Making Space for New Ideas. I read, it was an easy read, I think most importantly on my train rides in from New Jersey. But before we get into it, I just want to talk about your career first. You've been in the business for a long time. You've been leading BBDO since 2004 through some of the most creatively awarded years in advertising. Just what was the spark that made you decide that now was the right time to ride the creative shift, and what do you hope leaders inside and outside the creative industries take away from it?

Andrew Robertson:

I mean you didn't use the word you could have used, which is you are old and you spent a lot of time in the business. But I've had a wonderful career and it's enabled me to see deep inside a lot of different companies and organizations in lots and lots of different categories in different parts of the world. I've observed the same thing time and time again, which is leaders who know that they need ideas, that their organization needs ideas, genuinely creative ideas, completely new solutions to old or new problems in order to thrive. But they struggle to get them and they struggle to get them for all sorts of reasons, which I go into in the book and I come up with some of the remedies for that.

But fundamentally, one of the things or the things that make companies really successful, especially if you think about what happens on other floors, here are things like predictable results, operational excellence, executional brilliance. These are all things that make companies really successful and great. They're also the same things that can suppress ideas. My argument is not that those companies should change because what they're doing works and it's important and it's part of what makes them successful.

Rather what I think we should be looking to do is to use exactly the same discipline to engineer the conditions that will allow those companies to unlock the ideas of their people when and where they need it. It's not all the time everywhere, but treat it. I mean John Cleese said, "Creativity is not a talent." He said, "It's a way of operating." I think we just need to institutionalize that way of operating in order to allow companies to get the ideas out of their people, which I'm sure are there.

Lance Glinn:

So the creative shift to me feels like both individual mindset changes as well as team-wide cultural change. When you just think about the word, the creative shift, how do you define it in practical terms and how is it different from just saying, "Hey, we need to be more innovative or we need to change things up"?

Andrew Robertson:

So two parts to that question. The first is what I regard as the difference between innovation and true creativity. They're both valuable, but I think they're different. Innovation to my mind is a word that's probably been diluted through excessive use and really now means continuous improvement. That definitely is worth doing and increases business, but it's measured in percentages. So, for example, if PepsiCo introduces a new flavor of Pepsi that I regard as an innovation and it will help increase sales of Pepsi by a percentage, but when you introduce a completely new concept into the category as Gatorade was in its day for example or Red Bull was, that to me is a creation, not just an innovation.

Companies need both. I believe that in order to have those truly creative ideas, completely new solutions to problems that people have either identified or just come across, that's what you need the shift for. The shift is an intentional move, as closest word I could get, intentional move to create the conditions that will allow those ideas to come up.

Lance Glinn:

Sure. So, throughout your career at BBD, the firm's gained notoriety as the world's most effective network five times and as Network of the Decade at Cannes Lion. You yourself inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 2022. So, I know a little overdue, but congratulations three years later. How have these experiences of success as well as the challenges to reach such levels influenced your writing and shape the insights in the creative shift?

Andrew Robertson:

So having said that I've spent a career looking at clients struggle with this issue, I've also been running a creative organization. That's all we do. We live or die by the ideas that we come up with every single day. So, what I've tried to do is take the learnings that I've had from watching our organization be creative and figure out how you can engineer those into moments in different types of organization. If AT&T is handling a third of the world's data every day, you don't really want people being creative 24 hours a day and everywhere willy-nilly. But you do need it at times and it's like how do you make that shift when you need it?

Lance Glinn:

Yeah. Like you said, there's a time and place for everything, right?

Andrew Robertson:

Correct.

Lance Glinn:

That time and place varies depending on the company, depending on what they do, depending on the industry that they're in.

Andrew Robertson:

100% and this is really important because a lot of people come out and say, "Oh, well you should change. You should create a new culture. You should be a much more creative culture." I don't think so. There's a reason why these companies are as successful as they are and it's because they do the things they do as well as they do. I don't want to change that. I just want to add this as a new process and new operation.

Lance Glinn:

So early in the book, you discussed the challenges facing the flow of creativity in the workplace. These include leaders understanding the importance of creativity and the need for leaders to employ, to excuse the lead for leaders and employees to nurture new ideas when presented. So, just from your perspective, what can leaders do to make sure great ideas when the time and place comes and when these great ideas spawn, when can leaders do to make sure that they get nurtured and they don't get lost before they have a chance to grow?

Andrew Robertson:

I think that if I was to break the whole thing down into specific steps and I think leaders have an important role to play in making sure each of these steps happens, it would be this. First of all, you have to define a really wonderful question and a wonderful question is a question that is so interesting. It begs you to try and solve it. It's like a riddle or a quiz or something. You just want to try and solve it. All too often what you see is the definition of the question or the definition of the problem is simply a declaration of intent.

We want to grow sales by $2 billion or a description of the situation, we're losing share amongst Gen X. I'm giving two examples, but you'll see those things showing up as quote the problem to be solved. The first thing leaders should do, I think, is push for much more focus, much more interesting, sharper questions. There's various techniques that people can use to do that.

Lance Glinn:

Sorry to interrupt. So, move away from the broad as you've been saying, more towards the specific.

Andrew Robertson:

Yeah, well, and it's not just specific. It becomes more interesting, and if it's more interesting, people are more likely to be able to think of ideas to solve it. So, usually, I would say the biggest single problem is the problem. It's not well enough defined and there's lots of techniques that people can use to get to better questions, but I think leaders should be putting pressure on their teams to really define great questions. That's step one. Step two is the generation of ideas, and this is again, a phase in which leaders have a key role to play. In order to have a good idea, you're probably going to need to have 10, which means you're going to have nine bad ones. Most leaders create the expectation amongst their people that they want to hear a good idea. That's a really high bar to set.

So, one of the things you need to do as a leader, in my view, when you're in the idea generation phase, and it's important, I'll talk about how these phases differ, but the idea generation phase is you want lots of ideas and you want lots of bad ideas and you want to show your people not only that bad eyes are good, bad ideas are good, they're expected. We want them. We want all of these ideas because when you generate ideas in volume, those ideas stimulate new ideas. The more you have, the more likely you are to find something good. All too often as I said, the expectation that people have of their leaders is that they want me to come up with a good idea and that's a hard thing to do. So, that would be the second big part.

Lance Glinn:

Failure is okay.

Andrew Robertson:

It's not even failure because the beauty of ideas is they have no risk, then they become a risk if you execute them, which is why you have to separate the generation of ideas from the judgment and the execution of ideas. The generation of ideas has no risk at all. If anything, the risk is that you're not going to generate them. So, actively encouraging as many ideas as possible, which will include bad ideas is part of it. I think one of the ways that leaders can do that is to have bad ideas themselves and say, "Here's my idea, come on. Where's the next one? They'll come." That's in the idea generation phase. The third phase is the idea judgment phase. This is when you've got a whole body of ideas. You now need to decide which ones you think have got real potential.

Part of the problem in most situations is that those two steps get conflated. So, people are judging ideas as they're being generated and that kills off ideas and it prevents people coming up with new ones. So, you have to consciously separate generating ideas from judging ideas. When it comes to judging ideas, again, this is where you start to have risk because if you're going to act on one of these ideas, there's going to be risk attached to it. Two things that I think leaders can do with that to help that be really effective, the first is to deal with the ideas one at a time and look for what is good in them. Part of the challenge when you've got lots of ideas is our natural inclination is to try and reduce the list by desolation.

The way you desolate psychologically is by looking for things that are wrong. If you start doing that, you'll find things wrong in everything. It is much better to say, "We've got 10 ideas, let's talk about this one. What is great about this idea? What could be better?" Do that 10 times and then you'll come to a view on what the best two ideas are.

Lance Glinn:

Is it as simple as, okay, you want to look for what's great and then we look at the pros before the cons... Is it as simple as hey, the idea that we're going to produce or the idea that we're going to continue to pursue, is it the one that just has the most grades attached to it? Is it as simple as a numerical value?

Andrew Robertson:

Grades are good, and what we tend to encourage if we are doing this as one exercise, it's not always done like that. But if you're doing it as we do in a workout, for example, we just give everybody little Post-It, little circles, green ones, and you just go and stick them on anything you think is great and then you'll get a heat map in effect of greatness. Then when you've got that, then you can move to the second part of the judgment, which is think like a banker. That really came from an experience I had in Australia where our agency had done an amazing campaign for the National Australian Bank. The problem they were dealing with was that the public thought that the four big banks worked in collusion with each other and couldn't believe that they weren't.

Because of that, because they couldn't get over that hump, there was no way that they could hear the good things that NAB was doing. They'd introduced a load of services that were really valuable. So, to get over the first hump, we did a campaign which was called the Big Breakup. The idea was that on Valentine's Day, the NAB broke up with the other banks. It was very funny. It was like, "It's not us, it's you. We're fed up with you're lying and you're cheating. We're going our own way." Social media, balloons, everything. Hugely effective when an effectiveness Grand Prix increased the number of transactional accounts by 80%. It was extraordinary. I went to see the CEO of this bank because people say you need to be bold when you're judging ideas.

People say, "This is a great idea, come on, be bold, take a swing." I said to him, "That was really bold, thank you for doing that." He said, "What are you talking about?" And I said, "Well, agreeing to publicly break up with the other banks, that was a big deal." He looked at me like I had two heads and he said, "You are out of your mind." He said, "I'm a banker. I'm not paid to be bold. I'm paid to manage risk. When your guys presented this idea, they were all very excited about what it could do." I was excited about what I could do, but none of us could know what it would do. What I did was I mentally calculated the downside, I identified it and put a value on it.

I said, "I looked at it and I thought the worst that can happen is we're going to be laughed at for three weeks. We're not going to lose a corporate client. We're not going to lose a retail customer. We might be the butt of humor on late night TV shows. I might have some very awkward moments at the golf club, but after three weeks, that would wash away and something else would take its place." On the basis that I could live with the downside, I went ahead. What you see most often when people are evaluating ideas is the pursuit of certainty. It's what people crave. Again, if you go right back to what is it that makes companies as successful as they are, predictability and certainty is a key element, but not when you're judging ideas because you can't be.

So, instead of pursuing certainty, which in my view will inevitably result in the norm, the closer you get to certainty, the closer you will get to the norm. Manage the risk, identify it, quantify it, decide whether you can live with it or not. If you can't, can it be mitigated. If it can't, do something else. But I think that's another really important part that leaders can add. Then the final part is when you've made that decision, you've picked the right idea, then give it to the experts to execute because they know what they're doing when it comes to executing. What you see again far too often is these things colliding with each other. So, the question collides with the generation of idea that collides also with the judgment of the idea and even sometimes the execution of the idea. If you can consciously operationally separate those four buckets, I think you've got a much better chance of getting there.

Lance Glinn:

So you mentioned that pursuit of certainty, and I think that just speaks to leaders' desire to... When faced with, "Can we be more creative? Can we remain with the status quo?", they'll choose the status quo more often than not, I would think. At least again, dependent on organization, dependent on what a company does, dependent on the industry, I feel like because the status quo is more certain and more toward the norm, they may tend to choose the status quo more. So, with that being said, why do you think breaking away from that status quo is so difficult for a lot of people? Because I feel like it's hard-

Andrew Robertson:

Because it works.

Lance Glinn:

... to take that next step.

Andrew Robertson:

Because it works. People will talk about the imperative of a burning platform as a thing that drives change. In a way, it's easy when the platform's burning because you have to do something different. Where it gets hard is where you have something that's really working and really working well and everybody's patting you on the back and clapping because you're doing such a good job doing that thing really well.

That's when it becomes really hard to do something different because as you said, there's certainty in that and it's a good certainty. It's not just we're certain this is going to be awful. We're certain this is going to work. So, that's when it gets hard. Again, that's when I think you have to think like a banker. What are the upside? Don't really know, but think it could be great. Downside, I can quantify.

Lance Glinn:

So at the beginning of chapter two, you quote copywriter David Abbott by saying, "There isn't an advertising problem in the world that can't be solved in two days if you put the right people on it." Is he right? Is he being too optimistic?

Andrew Robertson:

No, I think he's right. I should say he went on to say, but please don't tell anybody because he always wanted more time as everybody always would. I think the right bunch of people focused on a really well-crafted question in two days will be able to come up with a winning idea as long as you approach it the way we've been talking about, which is generate lots of ideas and then after the two days settle down to judge them.

Lance Glinn:

Because as you continue on in the book, you specifically highlight these compliance-based companies. So, in those compliance-based companies where they have to follow rules and regulations and they have certain values and morals that they have to follow to a tee, how can leaders in those environments create a space where people feel safe to contribute creatively? Because it's one thing to be tasked with contributing creatively.

It's a whole other thing I think to not be tasked but still have that push and that motivation to share ideas. But it's hard obviously in those compliance-based companies. So, how can leaders create environments to make sure that their employees feel safe to do that, to go to their office and say, "Hey, I have a good idea. It's something we haven't been doing. Maybe the status quo is working, but why can't we try to take it another step further"?

Andrew Robertson:

So I mean, I think that over time you can get to the point where people might feel like that. Where I've had this idea, it's not in response to anything in particular, but I want to take it to something. But I think really where I see the biggest opportunity is to make the shift, to consciously create a separate space, environment, separate conditions where it's clear that this is not business as usual. This is a moment when we are all going to do something very different and it has a beginning, it has an end. In between those two, we're going to do something different.

I think that if in effect you're making that a process in and of itself, you're making as bizarre as it sounds, you're making people compliant with the uncompliant process. But I think that's how it has to be done because if you don't make it, part of the way the company works, people will be rightly anxious and nervous and will hold back because that's what should happen most of the time.

Lance Glinn:

So Andrew, toward the end of the book, you mentioned a question you believe creatives should ask themselves every day, WWTD. Now that means what would Taylor do? That Taylor of course is Taylor Swift who's just as relevant now as she is ever having of course just appeared on Jason and Travis Kelce's podcast. What's the story behind that question and how can adopting that WWTD mindset, what would Taylor do mindset, help creatives push themselves and grow.

Andrew Robertson:

When you say creatives, in that sentence, I think, how can that help everybody who's trying to create growth? It came about because I was on my way to Australia and I'd had an email from the guy who ran a group in Australia saying, "Would you do a town hall with all the people that are in the building and just give them your view on the future of advertising?" And I said, "Sure." Then when I was on the plane, I thought, "Oh, my God, that sounds so boring. I can't possibly do that."

Lance Glinn:

You have to space it up a little bit.

Andrew Robertson:

Taylor Swift, she'd been in Australia the week before and everybody had gone crazy and it was on doing her Eras Tour. So I thought, "Well, I think what I'm going to do is talk about how Taylor Swift creates and the elements of that are first of all and it's fascinating to see her do it again last week, she makes her move at the top of her cycle." So she doesn't wait until she's disappeared from view. She doesn't wait until her songs aren't selling. She doesn't wait until they're not being downloaded on. When she's right at the crest is when she creates the next thing. It emerged that this new The Life of a Showgirl while she was touring.

Lance Glinn:

During the Eras Tour.

Andrew Robertson:

Yeah, which is just remarkable. So, that's how our mind works, which is I'm in the middle of the most successful live tour in history, and what I'm thinking about is what I'm going to do next up to and including the... I haven't watched the whole podcast, but I've seen the snippets that have found their way on social media. The fact that on her exit from the last show, she went through an orange door, which has come back 18 months later, orange. So, first thing is when you're at your peak, that's when you need to think of what the next thing is going to be, not when you're on the way down.

The second thing is she has a remarkable way of seeing the opportunities other people can't see because she looks for them, but also seeing the opportunities that exist in problems. Getting her music back was something she desperately wanted to do. She finally did it last year, but prior to that, she had this brilliant idea of rerecording all of our albums as Taylor's Version, using her platform to get publicity for all of that and then selling millions, millions of those albums. Same music, same songs, just rerecorded because she figured out there was a way for her to own those.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah, I mean she said it in the podcast that in contracts, that's not anything that record labels were even thinking of. No one even thought, "Hey, I could just rerecord all my old songs," until she did it.

Andrew Robertson:

There is a creative answer buried in all of these problems. She's always finding that. She did it with the movie of the Eras Tour, which conventional wisdom would've said, "We'll run that as a Netflix special eight months after the tour finishes. We'll record it during the tour, but we'll run it after." She didn't do that. She recognized just how valuable the communal experience was. She saw how people were responding to the concerts and she all took that data point. She took another data point, which is lots of people couldn't get tickets to go and see her live even though she sold as many as she did. She took a third data point which wasn't connected to either of those two, which is movie theaters are empty and they're especially not attracting young girls.

She put them all together, went to AMC, and said, "I want to launch the movie of the show in your movie theaters. The tickets are going to be $19.89," connecting back to the first album, or not her first album, but one of our albums. I wanted to do it while the tour is still going, while the tour is still going. What's in it for you is you are going to get people back into the theaters who haven't been going to the theaters. What's in it for me is I'm going to create an experience for my fans who either have and want to have it again, seen the tour, or all those who didn't. I just think that was again, another brilliant bit of creative thinking for taking three different data points and coming up with a solution that nobody else would've seen.

Lance Glinn:

So Andrew, we've been talking about your book, The Creative Shift, and as we begin to wrap up our conversation, we're at a moment now where technology and AI really is accelerating faster than most of us can fully process. In your view, where does the uniquely human side of creativity fit in over the next decade, merging it obviously with everything that has already come with AI and will continue to come with AI, and how can leaders make sure they're harnessing both the power of that technology and we talked about the magic? But the magic of this human imagination.

Andrew Robertson:

So I should say upfront that I'm unbelievably excited about AI and what it can bring to us, business and the world. I'm excited about it for lots of reasons. One is the obvious thing that it can free up time from work, that can be done by machines as well as it can be done as humans, if not better. But at least as it relates to our business, the thing I'm most excited closing the gap that exists between having an idea and bringing it to life, that fourth bucket of execution. Because so often what happens now and so much time goes into trying to get an idea made. There's gaps of money, it's a great idea, but it's going to cost too much money. There's a gap of time. It's a great idea, but it's going to take too long and there's a gap of feasibility.

It's a great idea, but you can't actually do it. That is disappearing. If you've got an idea, you can bring it to life in minutes, not months, for dollars not millions of dollars, and in ways that haven't been possible before. If we use that opportunity as I think we can and should to put more and more great ideas in front of people, everybody wins. The people who have those ideas see them come to life. The people that come to life for experience them, are grateful for them, and reward brands with their business. So, you get growth. If we do that, that's just such a wonderful thing for improving my business, my client's business and the lives of consumers. All good. As it relates specifically to the generation of ideas, I think generative AI and AI has two great contributions and two great ways of value.

One is it is really good at generating lots of ideas, and as I said, step two is about generating ideas. So, we should be using AI as one of the members of a brainstorming session because it will generate a lot of ideas. Some of them will be okay. A lot of them will be bad, but that's okay because we want volume. Now, I don't think yet, maybe this will change, but I don't think yet AI would've come up with launching Taylor's movie in AMC movie theaters while the tour was still going. So, getting her the information, it could help with, but I think it takes human creativity to go.

But if I put that together with this, together with this, because it's not an answer to a single question, it's putting it all together, then you can have something totally new. So, I see it as a fantastic partner to creative people. I don't see it replacing the best creative ideas, but I think it should help us accelerate having them.

Lance Glinn:

So Andrew, as we wrap up our conversation, you've spent your career championing creativity and others. How do you keep your own creative energy charged and keep new ideas flowing?

Andrew Robertson:

I keep looking at more work. Every time I look at things, I get sometimes depressed and occasionally inspired. Again, it's about volume. If you look at lots and lots of things, you'll see something that inspires you and that'll get you to the next one. I was in Rome a couple of years ago and I went to the Borghese Museum. It's the first time I've let go of the need to retain what I'm learning. I had a fantastic guide, and she was showing us around and talking as knowledgeable guys can about these remarkable pieces of art, which were in many ways the exact opposite of what I was talking about with AI. Somebody has an idea to create a statue of [inaudible 00:34:04]. It's like four years work.

Lance Glinn:

Not quickly putting a prompt into a gen AI technology.

Andrew Robertson:

Most of us feel like when we're learning something, we have to remember it. If you just let go of the need to remember it, it's such a fun thing to do. So, part of what I like to try and do is experience a lot without having to remember anything. The things that you do remember then are obviously going to be the things worth remembering.

Lance Glinn:

The Creative Shift: How to Power Up Your Organization by Making Space for New Ideas out now from Basic Venture. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.

Andrew Robertson:

It's been a lot of fun. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X at ICE House Podcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside the ICE House. Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes.

Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. [inaudible 00:35:31] may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.