Leading In The Time Of Virus
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 216: Carl Johnson
Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact.
This episode is part of Season 2 - which we’ve sub-titled, “Leading In The Time Of Virus”.
In these conversations we discover how some of the world’s most innovative and creative leaders are adapting their leadership to our new reality.
These people are among the world’s best problem solvers.
This episode is a conversation with Carl Johnson, one of the founding partners and the Executive Chairman of Anomaly.
It was recorded just before George Floyd’s death. But it is filled with insights and truths that I believe must be at the heart of modern leadership as together we invent a future that welcomes and supports everyone.
Carl was my guest on Episode 2 of the podcast, 3 years ago. He has always been a disruptor - unafraid to break the rules. In fact, he wants to. Faced by a pandemic or inspired by a movement for lasting social change and he’ll lead the charge - whether it’s inventing the office of the future or redefining how great companies attract and unlock the potential of all talent.
in these conversations, one thing’s becoming clear to me. The better leaders are moving faster. And as the saying goes, they’re not satisfied with predicting the future. They’re inventing it. The expectations for which have never been higher.
Here’s Carl Johnson.
Charles: (01:38)
Carl, welcome back to Fearless. Thanks for coming back on the show.
Carl Johnson: (01:41)
No problem.
Charles: (01:42)
It's good to see you. You're looking really well actually, I have to say.
Carl Johnson: (01:46)
Yeah, I think it's the fresh air. I'm getting more fresh air because we're out of the office so I'm able to get sunlight, and it has a really big effect on me, psychologically. Truly, I'm enjoying that part a bit for sure.
Charles: (01:59)
So tell us where you are. Where are you locked down?
Carl Johnson: (02:02)
I am locked down in a relatively lucky part of the world. I am in the Hamptons, which basically means that I can see trees and grass and fresh air. So I'm one of the lucky ones and I'm conscious of that.
Charles: (02:19)
The other place you used to live a lot was on planes and airports and everything in between that. So this has been a dramatic difference for you and just the way you live.
Carl Johnson: (02:29)
Yeah. So there's a good and a bad to that. The good is the hours you waste going to JFK checking in, flying, getting a cab all for a two hour meeting or maybe a few more if you're lucky. Which messes up your time zones, messes up your eating, messes up your sleeping and it's basically, that takes a real wear and tear out of a body. And there are some times when I feel like totally rubbish. So having not do that anymore, I'm much more energized and I can sleep a whole night again and again. It's quite good.
The bad bit is I've got two children in London and a mother-in-law in London and brothers and sisters. So that's a big problem. I mean, what you discover is the positive power of Zoom. I can't believe we didn't do this before. It's really irritating. You do occasional phone calls but now every week we’re having a laugh as a family. So that will never change, which is good. So yeah, on a wear and tear to my body and my working day, this is easier. There is no question.
Charles: (03:47)
Has it brought you closer together as a family? Do you feel that?
Carl Johnson: (03:50)
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. No question. I can see my brothers’ and sisters' faces. We can mock each other, which is fun. And rather than just feel good for thoughts from a distance you can see each other. It's so easy and the same with my four children, two in London, two in New York. So we all have a little bit of a laugh. On the one with the kids we barely speak. Me and my wife we basically let them just take the piss out of each other and then us. So there's quite a lot of surprising amount of warmth and intimacy possible via Zoom, much more than I thought. Even when we're on the phone doing a Zoom call, say, to our Shanghai office, places you may not have got to that often. It's just everything's just closer and much better. I don't think I ever want to do a conference call again into a void of I don't even know who's there, what they're listening to, or if they're listening. This is different, you're engaged and it feels pretty close. So I'm transformed on that front and I think our company has been brought closer together.
You can have an all staff meeting with 700 people. You can do inspirational talks. You can do stupid talks. You can teach everybody how to edit a film on their phone. You can have a laugh. So the positive impact has been pretty significant in that area. Everybody feels, they intellectually knew they belonged to something bigger than just their office but now they can really emotionally feel it. And that's everybody in the office. The senior people always felt like that because they would talk and work together a lot. But every single person in office now knows they belong. So I should be talking on Thursday to the whole of Anomaly.
I've been given a spot on Anomaly TV, which we've created and is full of nonsense. And I was told, I think this tells you everything about me, my partner Mike Burn said, "Just tell him some of those old war stories you’re always banging on about people love hearing those stories." They're usually things I've learned and errors I’ve made and lessons I learned. So that’ll be a laugh and people can tune in from home or not and we'll see. But usually there's a really good attendance and people, like I said, they feel like they belong even more, which is great.
Charles: (06:20)
It is incredible how physical separation has to your point created more intimacy both personally and professionally. I mean it's striking, isn't it? How much of that do you think will sustain? How conscious are you of thinking about how to sustain those feelings?
Carl Johnson: (06:34)
Very conscious. It's related to, what is an office and what is an office for? So we're spending a lot of time, Karina, who's Global CEO, and I are spending most of our time on that topic. How will we work? Given that a lot of what we're doing now works better. Some things work less well, will come to them, but some things definitely work better. How do we go forward rather than go back? What do we go forward to? What role does an office play? What can you do there that you can't do from home? And what can you do better at home? I always used to go home anyway when I was writing a paper or a presentation. I want to be left alone with my headphones on and just write my paper. But in terms of feeling the culture much easier as you walk about, in terms of feeling the intangibles and if you're like me and you rely a great deal on emotional intelligence, you can feel the vibe, you can see people's body language, you can see in their eyes. So that's been massively compressed.
So I don't think there's any doubt in our world that we need an office, we're still working on to do what. I think just sitting there in rows of desks doing your solo job is a total waste of time. I think collaborating, huge. Weirdly, because of the way I am, maybe the thing I miss the most is a whiteboard. Anomaly works off whiteboards with six, seven or eight of us collaborate standing around a whiteboard, writing things, rubbing them off, changing. So you can't do that very well, even if there's supposedly technology products that help but you still can't do it like that. So I miss that. So maybe you need an office for that. Maybe you need an office for the energy you get from other people which is no question you do.
We might abandon conventional desks and just have more and more collaborative spaces, more and more chances to work well together like that. But we are definitely also throwing in one other huge discovery. I kind of like…it’s not much of a discovery, but it's a realization on this. We've always worked well across offices, given that we span Shanghai to LA via Europe, New York, Toronto, and we've always worked well across them. Now we've worked incredibly well. And I don't even know where anybody is. I don't know whether the Account Director has gone home to their parents and is in South Carolina or whether they're in Texas or whether they're in Portland or whether they're in London, it doesn't matter.
Now as soon as you say that, everybody in the country, if not the world, is available to be brought onboard. If you limit the requirement that they must come to the office, you have access to a whole lot more talent. So I'm very excited in the decoupling of what an office is and who works for you. Then you have the chance to access more talent with more backgrounds from more places, more frequently. So I think we will be a blend of people who are in the office some of the time and at home some of the time. And we'll also have more people that we principally work with offline because, let's pretend they work in Atlanta and they're great. Or they work in Nashville and they're great. New York wants to work with them. Well, now they can without feeling like arms length.
I feel like you could belong because if you combined it with the point about Zoom, I feel like you can belong to a company for definite and still not be here all the time and we want their talent. So given that we've always been driven with accessing the best, most collaborative, most diverse talent you can get, I just feel like we've gained an extra power and we will re-imagine an office and re-imagine how we work with talent. And that's only going to make us better. So despite the world being screwed up in many ways, there is a definite opportunity to reinvent as you go forward, which I love.
Charles: (11:03)
How does that description you've just given us of how to look at talent, how does that change your casting process? How do you start to think about putting people on projects? How do you put people together in different ways?
Carl Johnson: (11:14)
We will want to know more people than we've ever known before. And we will want to find all those people that want a full time job, a part time job, every now and again job. And there's an awful lot of people who are really talented who don't want a full time job and they don't want to live in New York. We want every variation and all I can see now is we have more options to match high quality temp talent with the way they want to work.
So we've always been able to do that. Most companies can't do that. So we will just have even more focus on the ability to do that. And I do think there'll be different jobs, principally the ability to spot talent, nurture talent, and maybe there's a space, there's a job where you're an employed person and then there's a job where you're a freelancer where you're less emotionally committed. And we've always wanted emotional contracts, not financial contracts. I think there's an in between space, some form of community which means that you have to be informed, listened to, worked with. But basically the notion of belonging in a way that's much deeper than freelance. Freelance is still too transactional to me. I want someone who emotionally is vested in our collective success of which they are a part. So it's the talent space that I think that is the most exciting.
Charles: (12:49)
You've always liked disrupting the status quo, you've always liked to break the rules, to be forward thinking. As you look forward, how are you constructing timelines for yourself? Obviously you've got the short term reaction of everyone being locked down. Now you've got the, what is the first stage of recovery or rebuilding? How far out are you looking? Or how are you breaking them apart?
Carl Johnson: (13:12)
Good question. We've always been a bit weird, right? No one could ever understand. When I've been asked in the past things like, "I expect your business plan before you started, normally it was really thorough?" And the answer is nope, not at all. We had a view that the industry was screwed and if we obeyed the following principles we would build a business because we had enough talent and more willpower than most people. Our timeline is there's like right now, which is a very common timeline. Right now what can you do right this second? And then the timeline is governed on things like legal issues. How do you return to an office safely? Kind of crossing legal and moral. We're not going to just run back and put people in any kind of harm's way. So we're going to go as fast as we can be safe, but we will not go faster than we can be safe. So on that basis, we're governed by the overarching principle of first, do no harm. And most important thing is look after the people.
We're doing fine. We're actually winning a ton of business at the moment, which is very lucky, touch wood. But we are not in a rush to go back and we will not go back unless it's safe. And if in order to make it safe it becomes not worth going back, don't go back. On the sort of where are we progressing to, again we're lucky in that our model was always right for this kind of scenario because at its heart, it's solve a business problem. Well that hasn't gone away. Solve it in any way that's possible, yep. We do really well when it's concentrated a few people under intense time pressures. That's when we're actually best. Great.
So all the things that we were good at, the world is leaning in our direction. And in terms of taking advantage like re-imagining an office and re-imagining how talent goes, it's just as fast as we can think of it. There's nothing to wait for. There's no one to ask. We just have to talk amongst a few of us most senior people, listen to how the staff are, we poll the staff all the time and how they're feeling and what they're looking for and what they wish. And then we will just rush at it. But all of us are extremely impatient people because there's no reason to wait. There's not… we can… I've said to you before, it's a huge competitive advantage that we can just decide something today. And then I'll just email 700 people or Karina will email 700 people. And then that's it.
That was it. We decided. We did. So we will be racing to anywhere better, remembering that most of what we've got is built for now which is therefore no surprise we're winning quite a lot of business. But there is a better use of talent out there and there's a better use of an office. So I think it's yeah, again now as soon as it's legally safe and fuck it, let's go. I've always been a bit of a fan on things like this with ready, fire, aim. I think you can talk yourself into paralysis or you can worry about ego, all the things that debilitate people, we don't have. No politics, no greed, no envy, nobody frightened of what might go wrong. All we see is opportunity and all we then do is make it come true by just fully committing.
Charles: (16:50)
How has your leadership changed?
Carl Johnson: (16:53)
Mainly it hasn't okay. Because most of the principals were always the same, value-based principles. We know what we're here for. We know what we care about. We know what we don't care about and they don't change. A couple of things at hand. I've suddenly got a whole slug of time doing things I never used to do, all to do with this crisis. So I'm now spending more time that I want to on understanding the different government support schemes all around the world - if we furloughed anybody. What a safe office looks like. How do we reconcile safety with the fact that although I have a nice time set out here in the grass and the trees, some young people in small studios in big cities are going out of their mind and they crave an office just for humanity sake.
So how do we balance those things? So one area is just the topics. Let's pretend I'm doing that 20% of the time. It used to be nothing, right? All around the world it's slightly different and there's a lot of people and a lot of issues. The other thing that I think is happening is related to that. Because we can't see everybody, you can't feel, so you have to be more structured and deliberate in understanding where people's minds and hearts and emotions are. So you need to be more strategic about how you make sure you're looking after people, how you make sure you know if they're okay. Who's looking after that 25 year old?
It can't just be nobody's job. How are we going to do it? So I think it's, the main thing I think is, make sure you have enough time to do the important things and really look after people. Apart from that, stick to what made it good and if anything, accelerate. I think accelerate is, like I was talking to Jason DeLand, another one of my partners who said it's a common observation that one of the things this crisis has done is it's accelerated decision-making. If you were thinking about it and you didn't really want to do it, shut it down. And if you do think about it, you did, do it right now. And I like that because again that's a bit like we are. So we have used the fuel of this crisis to accelerate. Because it's always easy to accelerate to better. And we obviously believe it is better, what we're seeing ahead of ourselves.
And I guess if anything, just make sure… over emphasize compassion. Really, really work hard. A long time ago we had a slightly less… maybe 10 years ago, it was quite a hard place to work in. It's still not easy because you're expected to be good so there's standards expected of you. But we were a little bit like throw him in, get on with the team, here we go. And if no one is complaining, you're doing well, what's the problem? Which is, yeah, okay. That doesn't work now, you can't do that. You need to be really much more aware of feedback. You don't know what's in their heads. You don't know what they're thinking of. Is it because of the world and they just met, is one of their friends now unemployed, do they suddenly panic and think they'll be made and employed or be furloughed? Are they worried about their parents, thousands of miles away? Are they lonely?
You can't just go. You have to really, really work hard to get past your own situation without seeing them as much as you would if you walk around the office. And without the clue when you walk down our office in Soho, you can see the strain on someone's face, or you could see them looking a bit down. You could go and just have a chat. So you've got to dial that up. All those antennae have to be much more on alert and then go out of your way to care at the same time as powering forward. So it's create a safe haven for everybody and then move forward.
Charles: (21:23)
What have you learned about yourself?
Carl Johnson: (21:27)
I like change. I think I'm galvanized, I'm more energized now than I was four months ago. I'm galvanized by the opportunity that change creates. So I get… I just step up into another gear of enthusiasm and resolve and then rush towards it, making sure that we're listening to everyone who's got smart opinions of which there are many here. So yeah, I think that, plus I really, really miss travel, but not for work, but for the… my Italy holiday was canceled with my friends from New Zealand and Australia. That's crap. The ability to see my kids, crap. The ability to see my football team Tottenham, crap. So I miss the stimulus of travel, and different places and different people, different experiences. So on that side. On work it's clear, it's clear, change creates opportunity. And when there are, usually when there are winners or losers, we win. So the shakeout is good.
So I almost apologize for feeling as positive as this, but I do, but I do. I do. And I've seen a lot of… I've been shocked, positively shocked by the energy, creativity, and the sort of willingness to forge culture via the screen that our staff have. They threw themselves into all of this Anomaly TV presentations and stupidity. It is hilarious and funny and they're fast and they're up. And I know myself, being slightly boring person, I would have not been any good at that. I'm much better at standing on the side, admiring it with a glow that Anomaly people are that good on a thing like that. And I love them for it. It's great.
Charles: (23:40)
A proud parent.
Carl Johnson: (23:41)
I do feel a bit like that. Yeah. I'm certainly old enough.
Charles: (23:47)
And last question, what are you afraid of?
Carl Johnson: (23:50)
I am afraid of missing the signs of damage to people. That's the only thing I'm afraid of. But, I'm quite afraid of that.
Charles: (24:05)
Yeah, to your point, hard to see past a screen sometimes.
Carl Johnson: (24:07)
Yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of people who I may not see because I might be dealing with too many senior people or I might not work on that client. So there's going to be a whole bunch of people I didn't see, who I would have seen in the office. So I'm just stressing the need for the vast talent pool to be covered by somebody. There's a, pastoral probably is the right word, duty which we have to take very seriously.
Charles: (24:42)
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think it's the biggest issue as I talk to people and probably will cycle through a number of versions of it over the next few weeks and months right.
Carl Johnson: (24:55)
Definitely yeah.
Charles: (24:56)
I wish you nothing but the best going forward.
Carl Johnson: (24:58)
Thank you very much Charles. Good to talk to you again.
Charles: (25:02)
You too, as always.
—————
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 where you’ll also find links to articles I’ve written for Fast Company and for the Profitable Creativity blog on creative leadership.
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.
