Laura Holson of The New York Times
Why living a creative life is a choice.
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 320: Laura Holson
Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact and grow their business. To help them succeed where leadership lives - at the intersection of strategy and humanity.
These next few months are going to be chaotic. Industries are being reformed, culture is being redefined. New rules are being written and rewritten. It’s happening already. Decisions are being made today, about how to compete for talent and relevance in this new world. So, how should leaders lead as we meet a world of new possibilities and expectations?
This week’s guest is Laura Holson of The New York Times. She is a brilliant and award-winning feature writer and visual editor who has written extensively about Hollywood, Silicon Valley, as well as powerful figures in finance and politics.
Our conversation covered a lot of areas. Her love of and approach to writing compelling stories. Why and how she created The Box Session salons which pull together extraordinarily creative people from all areas of the creative industries. Her firsthand and up-close insights into the leadership of Steve Jobs at Pixar, and Michael Eisner and Bob Iger at Disney. And her own views of the priorities and challenges faced by today’s leaders.
At the heart of all of it is Laura’s own journey, one that included a bout of long COVID that she wrote about in the Times earlier this year.
Like a lot of us, Laura has had time to reflect about life.
“If you choose to live a creative life, it's fundamentally a brave act because it's so much easier to go along with the gang, go along with what society says, than it is to say, "Oh, I'm going to step out of what makes me feel comfortable and do something that might maybe take me to another level, but what will people think?”
Creativity is a human attribute. It also scares a lot of people.
But then so does life.
We spend so much time tying to find our place in the world, so much time trying to adapt, to adjust and to fit in. We care so much about what other people think of us. Of what we do. Or how we behave.
Then suddenly life is over, and in the process of fitting into other people’s definitions of who we are, we suddenly discover that we never found out who we could have been.
Or we can choose another path. One that we design ourselves. One in which we show up as the full version of who we are.
And then watch people follow your leadership.
How do you do that? Perhaps, Mark Twain said it best.
“Sing like no one is listening, love like you never been hurt, dance like no one is watching and live like it is heaven on earth.”
Here’s Laura Holson.
Charles: (02:50)
Laura, welcome to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Laura Holson: (02:53)
I'm so happy to be here.
Charles: (02:55)
When did creativity first show up in your life? When did you realize that creativity was a thing?
Laura Holson: (03:01)
As a kid, I was always that young woman who had lots of painting and drawing in my childhood. And most kids about the age eight or nine, creativity kind of goes away because you want to conform and you want to be part of your soon-to-be teenage pack. And so a lot of the painting and drawing I did as a little girl kind of went away until about a decade ago when I went back to college for a year for a sabbatical. And I decided to study creativity, which meant I took voiceover classes, I took acting classes. I picked up a camera for the first time in my life. I'd never done that before. And I realized I was missing something and that year taught me what I needed to have in my life. And it was more creativity.
Charles: (03:50)
How did you end up as a writer?
Laura Holson: (03:52)
I didn't expect to be a writer at all. I thought I'd be a professor, I was going to be teaching art history at a college somewhere. And I remember it was in the 1980s when the stock market crashed, I was working at an investment bank and I had my stock brokers license, which is very… the opposite. In many ways, people think it's not creative, it's creative in a different way than painting and drawing. And when I saw what was happening, I was looking at the world and I thought, I should be telling this story. And that's how I decided to become a writer as I saw these things happening in the world. And I wanted to tell them from my perspective.
Charles: (04:29)
What makes a great story? What are the pieces you have to have for the story to be really compelling?
Laura Holson: (04:34)
I just was with some colleagues from work and we were talking about storytelling and when I read a magazine piece, I look at it as a movie and it's a movie with five or six scenes. Because people want to connect to the written word, but they want that written word to come alive in their minds. So how do you do that? Look how movies are made, they start with an action sequence. If you look at a James Bond film, for example, it draws you in with a great car chase or something that people can say, "I'm there, I'm in the moment." And then the movie pulls back and it gives you a reason as to why you're there. Why are you in the middle of this car chase?
What is this thing that James Bond is going to have to grapple with? And good storytelling does the same thing, in my view. So a lot of times when I'm doing a magazine piece, it's going to start with some action. And then I kind of pull back and tell the reader, this is why you care about that action. And I'm going to take you on a ride. You're going to learn something by the end of this, but I'm going to make it come alive for you.
Charles: (05:44)
What do you want the result of the story of somebody reading the story to be?
Laura Holson: (05:48)
I love to give enough information that people can draw their own conclusion at the end. So as many people who read the... I write for the New York Times. I wrote a piece about having COVID and what that was like for me. And the reason I wrote that, because I don't write about myself all that much, but the reason I wrote it, is because I figured in 100 years from now, when we're looking back on this very momentous time in our lives, I thought there should be some kind of record, from someone, from me, about what my experience was like. And to me, that's the kind of journalism I love. I love that somebody can look back on something and say, "Oh, that's what was going on in culture at the time." It can be… good writing is also kind of education, if you will, in terms of teaching somebody something about a time or a place that they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
Charles: (06:48)
So are you writing for yourself or are you writing for the audience? Who's in your head as you're writing?
Laura Holson: (06:54)
My sister actually. There's that wonderful adage that someone taught me that when you write a story, you should be like writing a letter to someone. So when I'm having a hard time writing, I'll start a story with, ‘Dear Mary, I'm going to tell you a story.’ And that kind of gets me going, because I realize I'm writing to someone. So Mary really though is a proxy for the reader, any reader. And so if I know that if Mary will relate to it, then everybody else will because she's a very good reader.
Charles: (07:33)
One of the quotes I've always been struck by over the last 40 years, I guess, I think it was Alan Ayckbourn, the English playwright, who once said, "I don't know what I think until I've written it down." Does that resonate for you?
Laura Holson: (07:46)
Well, that's interesting because it probably means, or I shouldn't speak for the writer, is that they love editing because Annie Lamott, if I don't know if you read Annie Lamott—
Charles: (07:57)
Yeah.
Laura Holson: (07:58)
—but she talks a lot about getting your bad draft out at first and she calls it her shitty draft and she's just like, write it, get it out and then edit later. And that's really smart because I think people get really stuck with this idea that everything they do right away has to be perfect. We all live in a society where everything has to be just so, but when you're writing, sometimes you do know what you want to say, but you don't know how to use the right words or you're not quite sure what to say. And when you put it down, you're like, "Well, that's not really what I want, so I really mean this." So I think to me, a lot of my best writing is writing that I edit myself. I'll just put it out there and it'll look not perfect in any kind of way. And then it's the process of refining that I love personally, is I love the refining and making sure that every word means something.
Charles: (08:55)
One of the challenges I often face when I'm working with a leader is getting them to express themselves about something for the first time. So maybe it's company mission or vision, or maybe it's their own leadership philosophy, or any number of issues. And the challenge that a lot of people face, is the opposite of what you've described, which is they face the challenge of judging themselves and being worried about how other people will judge them based on the first draft.
Laura Holson: (09:21)
If I were a leader the first thing I would choose is someone who I could trust that I could share my vulnerabilities and know that I'm not going to be judged, and know that that person is there to help me be a better communicator. And I think if any leader has that as their person that they're working with, that takes a lot of the pressure off because you don't worry so much. But a lot of times ego and vanity get in the way of what should be done because people, if you're a leader of a big company, you're expected to know everything, strategy and how to manage employees, why can't you write. Well, if you haven't, you're not doing it every day, if it's not your craft, it's hard. So you need someone there to help guide you. For a leader it’s setting aside your sense of what you should be doing and just let it be, just be yourself.
Charles: (10:18)
One of the reasons I want you to come on the show is because, as you mentioned earlier, you've come to a recognition of the importance and the power of creativity in a broader sense for you more recently. And you've put your money where your mouth is. You've actually started to create a real structure around that. Talk to us about The Box Sessions and how that came about and why you've done that.
Laura Holson: (10:39)
So after I came back from this year away, university and trying all these new things, I came back to my job and I was brimming with all the changes I wanted to make in the world and at work. And as one comes back to a job, there's a structure that is the work that you do. And so I found myself thinking, wait a minute, maybe I'm trying to get too much personal satisfaction from work that maybe I should be looking outside of work for things that satisfy me. So I started a salon with three of my friends across the country, and we’d get on the phone every Sunday night and would task ourselves with doing a new creative thing every week. So my first week I went to tap dancing class, but I just didn't go to tap dancing class.
Oh, and by the way, I'm not a tap dancer. I went to a masterclass thinking, oh, it's for beginners. And not knowing that it's not for beginners and to make things even more complicated, I didn't even own tap shoes. So I showed up in my tennis shoes and you would think this is the worst disaster, right? You show up and you're ill-prepared, you're way in over your head. And I remember slamming my foot into the floor, my tennis shoes, and the instructor looks at me and he's like, "What are you doing?" And I'm like, "I'm trying to make noise." And he goes, "You don't have the shoes. Sometimes you just have to be who you are." And I was just like, "Boom, that was such a lesson." Quit trying to fit in with everybody when you're not like everybody. And that was my first big creative ‘aha’ after leaving for this year, and everybody over the course of a year… I mean, we were in the salon for a number of years.
But really during that first intense year had that aha moment, something they wanted to do or they thought about and thought about doing and did it. One friend wanted to join a food bank and she's really great at finance, and she did. Another one to write a cookbook and she did. Another wanted to do glassblowing. And she was a lawyer who'd never did any kind of artistic endeavor. And she did with her son. So that's really the genesis of starting the BOX Sessions was realizing that if you get within a community of people who support you, you can do things that you didn't think you could do.
Charles: (13:08)
And, and you've gone beyond that, haven't you? Because you're not just getting within a community, you're actually creating a community for which that's true.
Laura Holson: (13:17)
100%. So the extension, if you will, of this creativity salon with my friends, we started, or I started a creative gathering called The Box Sessions, which we held in February of 2020. And it was to take those principles that we learned in our salon and take them to the wider world. So my career has always been in writing about people in entertainment and finance and in Silicon Valley. So I invited a lot of creatives to come speak on stage like Jon Chu who just did the movie In the Heights. Samin Nosrat who wrote this acclaimed cookbook called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Linda Barry who's an artist, Jonathan Franzen who's an art author. Connections that I had because of my life, my career. I wanted to share their creative process with people who would come to this creative gathering, but it wasn't just enough for people to listen to what other people were doing.
I was asking them to do, as well, to try something out. So we had… The Moth came and they're a storytelling group and they taught a storytelling class. And then people got on stage on Saturday night and told their stories. We had a magician who came and taught people how to do magic. Linda Barry, who's a phenomenal speaker and a phenomenal artist, she did comics, she has drawn a lot of comics. She taught a class in drawing. We had a singing, a voice workshop because going back to my love of voiceover, and we had another man, his name was Fred Dust and he's used to work at IDO. And he did this one gathering where he just made people move around the room and use their voice and talk. And people loved it, because as adults, we don't do that that much, kids are always running around and playing, but we as adults don't do that because it's not cool.
Charles: (15:22)
Have you found as you put these people together that they are inspiring each other? I mean, you're obviously dealing with very accomplished, very successful people who have developed phenomenal careers in creative spaces, but are you finding that the chemistry that's created by putting that together creates unusual, surprising, unpredictable outcomes?
Laura Holson: (15:41)
Definitely. The number of people who were at this gathering in February of 2020, many of them have connected with each other. And this, I have to say, really surprised me, this next thing I'm going to tell you surprised me. I'm sure, you know a lot of executives who goes to a conference or go to a speaking gig and they go, they stay there for an hour and then they leave. They're in, they're out, because they've got other things to do in life. What I loved about our gathering was probably about 75% of the speakers who spoke on stage, stayed for the whole weekend. And I was getting texts from this one producer I know and she was like, "Can you get me into Linda Barry's class?" And I'm thinking, “This woman has produced big movies!” And I'm like, “100%.”
And it's because she wanted to learn something new. I can tell you tonight I'm going out with some friends who were at the festival and they weren't friends before, they're friends now, and we're all going to go dancing together. And you create these wonderful moments where people can just be authentic and genuine with each other. Which leads to a really important point. And that if you choose to live a creative life, it's fundamentally a brave act because it's so much easier to go along with the gang, go along with what society says, than it is to say, "Oh, I'm going to step out of what makes me feel comfortable and do something that might maybe take me to another level, but what will people think?" Well, the thing I've learned is people think it's cool.
Charles: (17:28)
I'm always struck by the fact that even in the most creative and innovative businesses, one of the challenges is to have the leaders be able to start to recognize the potential of the places that they could take that business and the way that they might be able to expand and change the parameters about what's possible. Business leadership is a really… it's a tough dynamic because you're dealing with the tension between everything you've just described from a creative standpoint, the unpredictability, the uncertainty, the sense of exploration. And you're doing that in an environment business, which demands predictability and the ability to forecast and know what's going to happen next and doesn't deal very well with risk.
I'm curious whether, in all the experiences you've had both in terms of The Box Sessions, but also in terms of your own writing observations, what have you seen are the characteristics that inhabit the companies that are best able to unlock creative thinking and innovation?
Laura Holson: (18:28)
A good part of my career, I spent a lot of time writing about Pixar and speaking to Steve Jobs, for example, like a lot of technology journalists did. And the one thing I would say about someone like Steve, what I appreciated about the way he thought, is that you could come to him with solutions. He really was about not doing things the way everybody else was doing them. I think it's important to look at your workforce because they may have ideas about how to do something better, but if they're afraid to speak, then that idea just dies.
And so if I were a CEO of running a large company, I would try to create an environment where people could have the freedom to truly speak their mind without feeling like they're going to be punished or that they're going to be laughed at, or aren't going to be listened to, because you never know where the next best idea is going to come from.
And if you look at a lot of really innovative ideas, they come from people who are doing stuff way outside the box. I think the challenge then for a leader is to say, "Okay, how do I take these creative individuals and channel that energy into something that works for us?"
Charles: (19:53)
How do you think Steve was able to overcome that reputation he had for being dictatorial and create an environment in which so much brilliant original thinking was produced?
Laura Holson: (20:04)
From looking at what he did at Pixar, he allowed people to experiment and he, in a way, trusted them, because it was a world he didn't really know. He trusted them to do innovative work. At the same time you had executives very early on who were willing to push back and say to him, "No, we want to do it this way, or we're interested, we're going to try it this way." So there's that creative tension, if you will, between a powerful person and also people who have vision, and finding some middle way, some middle ground that everybody can agree on.
Charles: (20:45)
To what extent do you think the company was driven by a sense of purpose and mission? They produced very little products in the early years, didn't they? I mean, there was those films were such an enormous undertaking that there was almost one a year, not even one a year, I think in some cases in the early years. To what extent do you think they were guided by a really clear understanding about what it was that they were about? What was… what their mission was, I guess?
Laura Holson: (21:09)
They started a brain trust of a group of people who got together and would help guide their mission. So I definitely think they had a mission, but they also experimented. And if something didn't work, they’d throw it out and start all over again. And that's where, if you have a good leader… and Steve would, I'm sure he didn't love that because they weren't making money at that time. But at the same time, he let them do that because they were trying to really experiment and create in a very new level. Now if you're at a big organization, if you're part of a smaller department, maybe that's something you can work out within your company. And say, "Oh, I want to work,” and say, “We're going to spend some more time in this R&D phase of certain products." And let people play.
I mean, Google did that. I mean, I remember going to visit executives at Google when I think there were, I forget if they were… what they were launching, maybe Google Watch or something like that. And it had been private, no one knew about it until that day. It was one of the first times they introduced it to the press, and it’d been so private, no one knew about it. Working in private is kind of good because then you can make mistakes and no one knows. That's why I love this first drafts. No one has to see those first drafts, the public doesn't have to see those first drafts.
Charles: (22:33)
One of the things about it that really strikes me is that we're talking about trust essentially. Trust in ourselves, trust in what other people are going to think of us. Increasingly, I think trust is absolutely central and critical to being able to create an environment in which creative thinking and innovation can be unlocked. What have you observed about environments that are based around or able to engender trust in the people that work for them?
Laura Holson: (22:57)
I would almost turn it on its head. It's how much fear do you have in an organization? So if an organization is fear-driven, no one is going to feel any kind of comfort putting their necks out for an idea, because they're going to be so afraid of it, their head getting chopped off, that they're just going to just not act. There's that saying that if you're the nail that sticks up, if there's a hammer close by, the hammer's job is to nail it back in. And so if you're working in a company of a bunch of hammers, it's pretty hard to be a nail. So I look at it more, if you have a culture that people aren't afraid to speak their mind, then they will trust you.
And then they will just be more apt to say what they really think, within reason. I mean, obviously an organization, if you have a CEO for a reason, it's their vision. And so you want to feed that vision. But again, you never know where a good idea can come from. And I see a lot of fear in organizations actually. For a long time, before Bob Iger became CEO of Disney, I covered… I spent a lot of time with Michael Eisner who was a leader who people really feared. And there was so much fear at that company of people speaking up. And I know I was talking to all the executives that the company kind of shriveled a bit.
And then when Bob Iger came in, and there were a lot of questions about Bob Iger when he came in as the Disney chief, but he seemed to empower people, guiding them do their best work. And he was smart about acquiring. So he acquired Pixar, he acquired Marvel, and just let them do what they do best. And didn't try to impose an overlay of Disney in those organizations. So as a CEO, letting people do what they do best is really smart.
Charles: (24:58)
Yeah. That's a fascinating comparison actually, because you're right. Under Bob Iger Disney really took off. I mean, the explosion and creative output was and remains, I think to this day, phenomenal. What did you see in him when he started showing up, or what did you see in him that really gave him the ability to unlock that?
Laura Holson: (25:20)
I think it was just his open-mindedness. Executives who I talked… and who have worked with him. And I haven't written about that company in a long time. Let me just be clear about that. But he just seems more open-minded to where the solution can come from. And he's more of a bridge-builder. I remember once being in a meeting with Michael Eisner and I asked him, I go, "Do you have any questions for me?" And he said, "Yeah.” He goes, why don't people like me?" I was like, and like, everybody in the room was shocked. And I said, Well….” How do you answer that diplomatically? But the one thing I did say, I was like, "Well, people are afraid. They're afraid to tell you what they think, because they don't want to have a spotlight on them because it's maybe not a good thing."
And I think Bob was able to turn the spotlight on different businesses. Let's say, Disney Animation, and say, "How do we make this better?" And so partly it was acquisition of Pixar and trying to infuse some of Pixar's ethos into Disney Animation. That's one way he tried to be a bridge-builder, if you will. I think he did a really good job at that. They have a new CEO now, but Bob did help them become one of the most dominant media and entertainment companies in the world.
Charles: (26:39)
How do you think Michael Eisner got the job given the level of fear that he imposed and instilled in other people?
Laura Holson: (26:46)
Well, I think what happens in careers is, when you start, you're super excited and you're ready to go. And he was super innovative when he started his job, he had Jeffrey Katzenberg there, but he made some missteps, like hiring Mike Obits, who was an agent, to be president of the company. That wasn't quite a good pick and it only lasted a year and ended up in a huge lawsuit. My gut is probably just not letting his people do their thing or making them feel like they were special. Everybody wants to feel special, right? Whether you're the clerk at the grocery store or you're the customer at the grocery store, everybody wants to feel like they're listened to. And I think Michael lost his way a little bit in that. He was even creative after he left Disney, but he just didn't have that trust that you were talking about earlier, to trust people to do what they could do well. And so you just… why try, if you feel like you're going to get yelled at?
Charles: (27:48)
When you look at most of the successful leaders that you've come across, what do you think has been the biggest challenge they've had to overcome? What the fear that they've had to overcome?
Laura Holson: (27:57)
Technology and innovation. I mean, I think in the 20 years I've been a journalist, technology has really changed the way people live their lives and how, again, I look at my own company, The New York Times. I mean, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, maybe they were using typewriters? I don't know. They could have been. But they have had to become not just a print… I mean, they are still a print report, but they have had to transform themselves into a digital report. And so for many years people were like, "Print is dead. All these newspapers are going to die." The Times didn't, because they innovated and there's a lot of credit to be given to our CEO just left, Mark Thompson, but he helped the paper become more digital and ensured its survival. So to me, it's technology and knowing what to do with it and how to make it work for you versus rule you or run away from it because it's too scary.
Charles: (28:57)
Yeah. I interviewed Mark a couple of years ago actually, and was struck by the fact that, I think I said it this way. I was struck by the fact that he had figured out that the purpose of The New York Times was news and not paper. And he did a brilliant job, I think, of adapting and evolving that business into something that is incredibly relevant today at a time when it could easily disappeared, actually.
Laura Holson: (29:21)
Yeah. And he's… I should say that when I started The Box Sessions, it's something that I started on my own, but a big proponent was Mark Thompson. We would sit in meetings and I would say, 'Well, I'm trying this, what do you think?" And he would just give me guidance and to me, that said a lot to me about him as a leader that even though this wasn't a New York Times product, it was my own, he loved the idea so much that he even moderated, he came and he moderated and he stayed in the audience. And as an employee, to see the CEO show up for me and for this idea, trust me, that made me work harder because I realized someone cared about me beyond just the workplace.
Charles: (30:08)
He also had a certain fearlessness, certainly because he came from the BBC, which is in and of itself a massive institution and went to the New York Times, another massive institution, and was unafraid in terms of taking on, head first I think, the things that those businesses needed to go through. And I was struck by the nearly matter of fact attitude he had about the challenges in front of him and the scale of the administrative battles and so on. But he was very resolved, I always thought, in terms of what he needed to do for the good of the businesses.
Laura Holson: (30:43)
Yeah. I think a lot of people who have a vision about what they want to do, they'll make it happen, right? It's like the word you use for that I loved was ‘resolve,’ that you are going to make this happen no matter how you do it. Some people call it persistence. Some people call it something else. But if we look at our own personal lives and we look at the things that we have in our personal lives that we want and really, really want, for the most part, you'll probably get it because you can't really live a life or imagine a life not having it. For me, it was my creative gathering. I just didn’t want to see my life without having created that. And it's been so much more rewarding than I even thought. I should say after creating The Box Sessions, 10 days later, the world went into lockdown.
And so for many people, it was the last public gathering they had before not seeing friends and family and literally over the months after, I would get these emails saying, "Thank you so much. I don't think I could be thriving at all in this pandemic if I hadn't had that experience.” That magician meant so much more to them because of where we were in the pandemic. And what you noticed during the pandemic is that people turned to creative offerings. If you’re on Instagram, everybody was teaching a drawing class, a painting class, everybody was baking bread. I mean, people in this dark, dark time were looking for something more fulfilling. And so it was painting, drawing, singing together on Zooms, which if you ever listen to one of those, they were helpful.
They were kind of amazing, but they were kind of hilarious too. One of my doctors is like, "I sing on Zoom," and I'm like, "You do?" I'm like, "What are you singing?" "It's Gregorian chants." I'm like, "You do?" We're coming out of a… who knows where we are in this pandemic, with this new Delta variant. But I think that people learn that they are more than their jobs, that there's something bigger to life and it's something creative and if we can take some of that energy and put it into work, that's awesome. But if we take some of that energy and put it into personal lives, that's even more awesome. Because then your life will be that much richer. Which, isn’t that what we're aiming for in life, is to have richer lives?
Charles: (33:07)
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it's a great reference point in so many of the conversations I'm having these days, are about people trying to figure out what's the balance of the life that they want to have and what's really important and what's sustainably important and what can we spend less time thinking about and worrying about? Let me ask you two last questions, based on all of the perspective you've had, all of the experiences you've had, personally and professionally, pre-pandemic and through the pandemic, how do you think leaders should lead going forward in creative businesses?
Laura Holson: (33:42)
Well, the first thing I would think is, if I was a leader and my employees were saying, "I don't want to come back to the office." I would try to dig down and figure out why. Is it because they're looking for more freedom or is it because the culture is off? Because look, let's face it. Work is work. It's not home time, it's work, but for those companies where you have a lot of employees saying, "I don't want to come back." I would really try to dig down and look at my culture because now is a time… it's kind of like after 9/11 in New York. It was a time for companies to reinvent themselves because they'd all been through this horrific experience.
And some of them created these cultures that were just so much more inclusive than they were before 9/11, and more softer and more adaptable. We're in a similar situation now, where people are looking for a culture to serve them, not just… I don't want to say, just be a part of, you don't want to feel like a cog in a wheel. If I were a leader I'd be looking at, do my employees want to come back and if they don't, why? Figure out the cultural issues and try to make it so that they want to be there.
Charles: (35:00)
And what do you think leaders should be afraid of?
Laura Holson: (35:03)
I think they should be afraid of their employees don't want to come back because there's something wrong. And I think that this next year, as much as we as human beings have looked inward over this past year, corporations should be looking inward, as well. Are we inclusive enough? Are we representative of the population, of culture? Are we giving people what they need to thrive in the workplace? And I would be afraid if I'm not doing those things. And if I'm just trying to go back to business as usual, because we have all just been through some life-altering experience and it's not going to be business as usual. As we're already seeing with the move to tele-working and people not wanting to maybe be in big cities as much. So I think the smart companies are listening and adapting.
Charles: (35:56)
I want to thank you for joining me today. Great conversation as I knew it would be. And I want to wish you all the luck in the world with Box Sessions among other things. And I know you've got a big move coming up as well, so just best of luck to you. And thank you so much for being with me today.
Laura Holson: (36:11)
It's always a treat. Thank you so much.
—————
Let us know if there are other guests you’d like to hear from, and areas you’d like to know more about or questions you have.
And don’t forget to share Fearless with your friends and colleagues.
If you’d like more, go to fearlesscreativeleadership.com where you’ll find the audio and the transcripts of every episode.
If you’d like to know more about our leadership practice, go to thelookinglass.com.
Fearless is produced by Podfly. Frances Harlow is the show’s Executive Producer. Josh Suhy is our Producer and editor. Sarah Pardoe is the Media Director for Fearless.
Thanks for listening.
