Joanna Coles of Northern Star
Why You Need To Be Able To Look Back and Forward.
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 301: Joanna Coles
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.
Welcome to Season 3, which we’re calling, “Leading The Future”.
We’re living in an unprecedented time. An epoch in which the collision of science, technology and humanity is changing everything we thought we knew.
How do leaders lead when none of us have ever been here before?
This week’s guest is Joanna Coles. She has been an observer and shaper of society and culture for most of her professional life.
She has worked for some of the world’s most iconic publications. The Spectator, The Guardian, The Times of London, she has been the editor of Marie Claire and of Cosmo. And the Chief Content Officer for Hearst Magazines.
Today, she is the Chairman and CEO of Northern Star, an investment vehicle that has just agreed to acquire Bark Box, a subscription service for dog lovers, in a deal that values the startup at $1.6 billion.
She sees the world through multiple lenses and that is a skill every successful leader is going to have to develop in the months and years to come.
Here’s Joanna Coles.
Charles: (01:17)
Joanna, welcome back to Fearless. Thanks so much for joining me at the launch of Season 3.
Joanna Coles: (01:22)
Oh my pleasure. I'm excited to be here even if it is over Zoom, and not in real life.
Charles: (01:28)
One of the reasons I really wanted to launch Season 3 with you as my first guest is because I think you have this extraordinary ability to look at culture through a three-dimensional lenses. And understanding culture is critical to modern leadership. Shakespeare once said that the past is prologue. So before we look forward, I’d like to start by looking back. How do you look at 2020?
Joanna Coles: (01:50)
I look at it as a year of profound shifts in people's behavior. I think it was when older generations had to become tech savvy. I think we just leapt forward 10 years in terms of the behavioral changes in our consuming habits. I think we had a recalibration of what's important in our lives. I think we also had really diverse experiences of this last year. I think people living on their own have had a devastating year, I think a lot of people with families have had a wonderful year, re-understanding each other, I think and I include myself in this.
At one point, I had three months with my sons who are at college, coming back and living in the family environment, which was not something I ever thought I would have again. And it was an unbelievable gift. But I'm also very cognizant that a lot of people have had really difficult times on their own, just not seeing people. And I am a relentless unapologetic extrovert and have found the lack of people and the lack of socializing, really challenging. I have moved my energy in other directions, but I think it's been a deeply, deeply challenging year for people. But, we will come out of it, having accelerated all sorts of trends and I think we will be in a better place.
Charles: (03:22)
So before we talk about the positive side, let's talk for a little bit about the negative side, because I think you're right. It's so clear that if you've been by yourself, this has been extraordinarily difficult. If you've been in a cramped physical space, this must be extraordinarily difficult. What do you think are the lasting scars that will come from that?
Joanna Coles: (03:39)
Well, I think first of all, there are tremendous scars from having someone who's died from COVID in your close circle, or having suffered from COVID yourself and having the lingering impact of it. This is such an unpredictable disease, or it's such an unpredictable virus, and I think living with that level of uncertainty and unpredictability has been extremely stressful collectively on a personal level, and then it was amplified by utter incompetence at a governmental level and just lies being told to us about how fast it was spreading and who was being impacted by it. And then you've had the economic impact of this extraordinary shut down around the disease, which has been a rolling shut down. I mean, in Paris, as we're talking, you can't go out, there's a 6 PM curfew. In London. I have two friends who were fined for having a so-called picnic because they got sandwiches and a coffee, and were sitting on a bench together.
I have a friend whose son was stopped twice by police for going out on a Saturday night to a friend's house. So, an extraordinary addition to police powers in Europe, needing papers to go out in Paris, if you want to go out for the evening. And in America, just this catastrophic failure of governments to get this thing under control. And we know from Germany, we know from South Korea that advanced nations should be able to do this. We know there should be a rollout of the vaccine, which should be efficient and we know it's not happening and it's deeply frustrating and it's shining a light on all the things that feel very wrong with America right now. And this is from a purely, not even a political point of view, just a competence point of view.
Charles: (05:36)
Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. I also think one of the things that we'll be dealing with is, this almost delayed grief. To your point, 400,000 plus people have died, the families are affected by that. And to a large extent, they haven't been able to grieve properly yet because they haven't been able to share their grief with very many people. So I suspect that as we do start to reemerge, there'll be an awful lot of pent-up grief that we'll have to get expressed before some people can really move forward properly.
Joanna Coles: (06:01)
And, I think the thing that has been particularly devastating about COVID deaths as opposed to flu deaths, which they're constantly compared to, is that people are dying on their own, dealing with medical staff, you've got three layers of protective gear on them, and just this inhumanity of that is deeply, deeply affecting.
Charles: (06:23)
And the lack of dignity in some cases where your body is shoved into a truck, a refrigeration truck, for weeks on end or mass graves outside New York City. I don’t think we've even begun to address the emotional damage that's been caused by so much of this stuff. Turning on a positive note, as you've said, it's been a time of real connection for a lot of people as well. And as you described, I think we felt the same thing that we've had a chance to connect in different ways with people in ways we probably wouldn't have been able to. In some cases, our relationships have deepened. What do you think are the lasting impacts of that?
Joanna Coles: (06:56)
Well, I think a lot of people have lost their larger social circles, clearly people have had to be much more focused on the immediate family or their immediate friends or people living right in their vicinity, and that can be fantastic for the deepening of relationships, which perhaps weren't getting enough time. I think when you look at business travel, for example, and you talk to people in business, you discover that people now realize they didn't need to do a lot of the business travel they were doing. They did it because they thought it was necessary, and we now realize a lot of that can actually be done on Zoom.
A friend who was telling me that he used to have to go to Japan frequently to do in-person meetings, because the culture insists upon it. Well, now the culture has really shifted. You no longer have to fly to Narita, deal with a nightmare time change and then have to go out and do karaoke, Bon Jovi karaoke late at night with the team to prove that you want to do your deal, you can do it over Zoom. And that is surely of enormous benefit. I think you're hearing a lot of people talking about quality of life benefits that they see more of their family.
They're spending time with their pets. They're not wasting 45 minutes in the morning and another 45 minutes at night commuting. And I do think that what it has meant is that companies who are normally pretty corporate in their assumption that you really need to spend time in the office, are going to have to readdress that and give staff more flexibility. Clearly people are going to need that and demand it. And also there's much more acknowledgement that actually just because someone's not in the office, doesn't mean they're sitting at home eating Bonbons or they're on the golf course, they can actually work quite efficiently without all the extra drama of the office and the office politics.
Charles: (08:57)
So looking at that through a leadership standpoint, and a business standpoint, do you think that means that the best companies will be more flexible than their competitors? I mean, is that part of what will make up the definition of the best businesses going forward?
Joanna Coles: (09:10)
I think it depends what business you're in, and the extent to which you need people physically in the office to get things done, but I think smart businesses will be reappraising how their workforces have responded to this and be thinking about, what is the benefit of work? What is the social benefit of work? What if actually we allowed people to work more at home if it's quieter? And it may not be for people with three little children or five little children running around, it’s probably not quieter. And it's probably more stressful, but what are the benefits of allowing people to assess their own situation and figure out where they need to work quietly on their own, and be more productive? How can we allow them to be more productive? And how can we allow them still to get the benefits of office life? Which might be a social life for lots of Gen Z and millennials, it's where their life begins.
These colleagues are the people who become their friends, their lovers, their partners, and we don't want to strip work life by insisting everybody works remotely, but it may be that you can do a lot of your job much more effectively remotely. And I'm not a huge believer in the open plan office, I think that there's a lot of noise and unnecessary distraction, and that it's really underestimated how important it is for people to have quiet time where they just sit and read or work intently on something. Even an email is hard to do when you've got, people wandering past and the high fiving and sharing a snack and all that business. So I think allowing people quiet time is really important. And I hope we focus more on that going forward.
Charles: (10:56)
You're a keen observer of human nature. One of the things that's been a great equalizer over the last year now almost, is that we've all been forced to be at home. There are…the rules have been the same for everybody. At some point this year that will no longer be true. Companies will open up in different ways, people will have different responses to their desire to re-engage. What do you think will happen from a human dynamic standpoint when some people can go back into the office and other people choose not to? How do you think that changes the nature of the office environment?
Joanna Coles: (11:26)
Yeah, it's a great question. I think that a lot of it depends again on the company, and it depends on the attitude of the boss. And I think this is a generational thing that boomers and above still believe to some extent that it's really important to have face time, and face time can be really important. I didn't want to underestimate its impact, but we're also seeing that from an efficiency point of view. People can be really efficient working from home when they're set up. Thank goodness this pandemic happened now and not 15 years ago because the advances in tech have allowed people to stay connected in ways we couldn't have done five years ago, even. So, I do think that people will still have to show up and be present, but I think perhaps we'll be more thoughtful about how we use meeting time so that people aren't sitting there in meetings with people they don't really need to be in the room with.
When I look back over my last five to 10 years in corporate life, I realized so much of it was spent in meetings that other people told me were important for me to be in, but in fact, took time away from the stuff that was actually important. And I think it's very easy to distract yourself in an office, and also people are often trying to make sure that they're included in things because they don't want to be excluded. And when you're working from home, that's less of an issue. So I think the fear of missing out, it’s such a relief to have that lifted, not necessarily from social life, but from work life, knowing that there aren't hundreds of things going on that you might miss out on if you're not there, is a big relief for people.
Charles: (13:17)
How do you see the tension of travelling versus connecting over Zoom playing out on the pandemic is behind us? Do you think people be satisfied travelling less overall? Or do you think we’ll travel less for business and less for relaxation?
Joanna Coles: (13:31)
I think we were in many cases over-travelled for business, and I think business travel will not go back to anything like the levels we knew it as. And I don't know how airlines cope with that because so often they made their money on their ridiculously overpriced business class seats. I do think however, that people will long to get back to traveling for leisure's sake, and feel that they've been deprived and feel cooped up. And also, I think we all have a sense of, "Oh, life is much more precious and precarious than we realized." You mentioned earlier that 400,000 people have died, and we all know someone that we wouldn't have expected to have been felled by this disease or at least impacted by it. Because again, it's so unpredictable.
So I do think people are going to think, "You know what, I've never been to the Maldives, I really want to go. Or I really do want to go to Machu Picchu and climb it. Or I'm finally going to go skiing twice a year instead of once a year." So I think you're going to see pent-up leisure dollars spent quite aggressively once the vaccines hit and we can go out and travel, so I would anticipate much more leisure travel, much less business travel. I think this is great for Airbnb.
I think it's less good for Marriott Hotels. I think it's a very good time to be in the experience business because people are hungry for actual experiences. And I think that the fact that we've all become much more comfortable with connecting on tech, is going to be really important. And if I were starting afresh, setting up a boutique hotel in a place like Costa Rica, where you could really explore the rainforest, and you could somehow be connected on a hotel network, I think would be really powerful.
And I bet what we see going forward over the next year to five years is hotels asking people whether or not they want to opt in to meet other guests in the hotels. Whether or not, are you traveling on your own, a mini bio of every guest in the hotel, do you want to be part of this network or not part of the network? But I think we'll start seeing that. And if I were in the hospitality business, that is what I would be thinking of doing. It's entirely optional, you don't have to do if you don't want, but I bet that that becomes a new part of hotel travel, that if you want to figure out how to meet other guests, you'll be able to.
Charles: (16:00)
What kind of stories do you think we’ll be drawn to over the next year, as we emerge from this?
Joanna Coles: (16:06)
That's a great question. I think if you look at some of the shows that have been really popular over the last few months, I mean, A Teacher, which is the most watched show on Hulu, about a female teacher abusing or having an inappropriate relationship with one of her students. We've been looking at pretty dark things. I'm anticipating a return to much more fun, more comedy, they say that when things are going well, we want to watch dark things, but actually a lot of the viewing patterns, if you think about the big Scandinavian dramas, if you think about Little Fires Everywhere, which was very popular on Hulu, if you think of the darker documentary strains on Netflix, the Jeffrey Epstein documentary, The Ripper documentary, I think we're in for some real wild, fun entertainment as people begin to allow themselves to enjoy themselves again.
I think there's such a feeling of anxiety and uncertainty that people don't feel great about watching things that aren't entirely frivolous. You almost feel guilty for doing it. And…which is not to say that people don't enjoy escapes like Bridgerton, but I think that we will have...I think comedians come out feeling more certain about that territory. I think right now it's quite difficult being a comedian because there's so much darkness and it's quite difficult to make fun of the government incompetence of COVID, which is what we're living through.
Charles: (17:48)
It's a great pivot to the issue of leadership in general.
I think that it's been remarkable to watch leaders either rise to the challenge or fall completely by the wayside because there is no rule book and so people come busk it anymore. The last year has been pretty evident about who can lead and who can't, whether you're talking politically or through a business lens. What do you think of the leadership lessons that come out of this?
Joanna Coles: (18:12)
Well, I think a lot about the word responsibility, which is not a word you would ever associate with the Trump administration, and how it fell off as a requirement for leadership and how it's never been more necessary. And how leading by social media is not actually a quality of leadership. But responsibility, seriousness, competence become really valuable qualities in leadership, which I think we underestimated and we were living in a world where we thought it was funny to have a reality television star as a president. And in the last year, sadly, we realized that actually that's not the quality. You need someone who will read the briefings, who will allow the people around them who do know what they're talking about to have room and resources and attention to do the right thing. And not everything needs to be politicized, like mask wearing. And the very unfortunate reality that high-quality reliable information is now a luxury good, and our world divides between people who've got access to that, and people who will believe any old crap, that's thrown at them by attention seekers.
Charles: (19:40)
Yeah, it's really remarkable, isn't it? That when we hire for CEO positions or C-suite positions, the vetting process, the evaluation is just extraordinary. And yet when we hire for the leaders of countries, there seems to be so much attention paid to charisma. And so little attention paid to accomplishment. I mean, I'm struck by looking at our native country, Britain, through a different lens, where I think they've actually tried to do this, but have failed nearly as much as they have in the U.S I think in many ways over the last nine, 10, 11 months. I think they're getting the vaccine together but I think until then, the efforts have been pretty terrible. And again, you look at someone like Boris Johnson, who got in based on power of charisma and power of message and not power of historical accomplishment in doing anything really of any note. There was no real attention paid to, can he govern? Can he make decisions? Can he actually lead? The evidence is pretty stark, that he clearly can't do any of those things, I think.
Joanna Coles: (20:37)
Well, I think it's always been thus that people who were charismatic, naturally charismatic, which Boris is and Trump is, regardless of whether or not you like him, they're both incredibly smart manipulators of television which is still as a mass vehicle, pretty powerful to get someone elected. But you also have social media and the speed with which social media can spread disinformation, but can also spread, or can also allow them to reach over the head of the media and speak directly to people and to voters more importantly, that's just unprecedented in these times. I mean, we didn't need social media to... Or we didn’t, Germany didn't need social media to get Hitler elected. So I don't want to pretend that this has never happened before, but the amount of disinformation out there is truly shocking and it makes it very difficult to govern.
Charles: (21:38)
And to your point, extraordinary to see how fast the temperature dialed down after the attack on the Capitol, when the social media channels kicked Trump off. I mean, I think we were all really concerned about what the next 14 days would look like, and as soon as they turned him off, the temperature went down pretty fast, actually.
Joanna Coles: (21:55)
Yeah. I saw that there was a 78% reduction in misinformation on Facebook and Twitter. And that's so powerful. And what a relief. I think everybody felt what…my feeling was that people were exhausted by this level of tension and uncertainty and provocation, and it's like being trapped with someone at a dinner where they're just boorishly talking nonstop and it's frequently nonsense and they're a bit drunk and you just cannot wait to leave. It feels like we've been trapped in that in America for the last four years.
Charles: (22:33)
Yeah, absolutely. Last couple of questions for you. Are there examples of great leadership that you've seen over the last year that really stand out for you?
Joanna Coles: (22:42)
Well, I do think Angela Merkel is an extraordinary leader, and I think what she's managed to do in Germany is really impressive. They've certainly had far, far fewer deaths from COVID. Similarly in South Korea, different cultures, but nonetheless, they were able to get on top of the virus and its spread by being super technocratic about it and just super pragmatic. This is what we need to do, and everybody understood and people got on board. So I think that they have handled the pandemic really impressively. Everybody's talked about New Zealand, but New Zealand is a much easier country to manage clearly than countries the size of South Korea or Germany or indeed the United States.
And I think the way that President Biden led his campaign, which was very calm, not to get drawn into political battles, to make it very pragmatic, was extremely appealing to people, certainly to the people who voted for him. And actually for him not to get caught up in the history on this was I think, very powerful. And actually one of the advantages of him being much older that I think he knew if you just stay the course and promise people, we will get you access to healthcare. We'll get you access to a vaccine, we're not going to politicize it. I think it was super powerful to people who want something calmer.
Charles: (24:14)
I do think calm, reasoned, reasonable will be very big themes for leadership over the next 12 to 18 months as we start to come out of this. Last question for you. What have you learned about yourself over the last year?
Joanna Coles: (24:28)
Well, I've learned that I spend a lot of time, which I think of as,…I've learned that I was definitely over traveling, and I've learned that I'm very easily distracted, and that actually if I put my head down, and don't go to three parties a night, I can get quite a lot done. That said, I'm quite looking forward to going back to three parties a night. But, I really have not met an envelope I don't want to turn up to the opening of...I'm not quite that bad, but I'm someone that gets a lot of energy from talking to other people, I get my ideas from talking to other people. I like the energy of people and I've really missed it, but in that time, I've also managed to slightly pivot careers and learn a new skill. So that feels better than nothing.
The one other thing I would say is, that I think this thing has actually humbled, even the most arrogant among us, because you do feel much more vulnerable than we are used to feeling. You realize that you're much more dependent on people than you realized. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Nobody would wish this pandemic on anybody, but you have to look for the silver linings. And I also think watching the boss on Zoom with the kids wandering in and the dog on the sofa, softens that person.
And interestingly, Zoom is much less hierarchical than the office. So it's much more noticeable when it's all men on the Zoom, and there's just one box with a woman, or there's just one box with a darker skin, and everybody else is white. It's much more glaringly obvious. And people don't get the size of a box that accords to their power within the hierarchy. So when you're talking, you get just as much attention, if you're a junior person as you do, if you're a senior person. So I think that we will also see a slight leveling out of power in the office and an appreciation of each level, which I don't think we were heading to. I think that's a new trend.
Charles: (26:43)
So there's a democratization that comes out of this?
Joanna Coles: (26:45)
And an appreciation that people have home lives, and the whole thing is now mixed up.
Charles: (26:51)
I mean, September 11 changed New York I think. Substantively and I think from a lasting standpoint. I mean, it has felt kinder by comparison after 9/11 that it was before 9/11, I think. Do you think we'll have the same lasting impact in society with people taking more time to worry about each other and caring more and understanding each other?
Joanna Coles: (27:12)
I do. I think the very moving moments in New York city when people came out and banged their pots to show their appreciation for first-line workers, I think incredible appreciation of the people that deliver things, I think we will have big structural changes in the way we think of how we run our households, I think people now ordering staples online will become de rigueur. I think whole generations that didn't want to deal with Amazon have now dealt with Amazon and figured out how to do it. And also this thing has gone on for almost a year at this point. This was not three months where we had to suspend our regular behavior, this has been 10 months where actually we have evolved and changed our behavior. And it's very hard as you know, to change consumer habits. This has really accelerated the change that was inevitable.
The head of Shopify said, he thought it was 10 years worth, compressed into one year. I think that's right. And we won't get back to the way we did things before. No one's going back to... No one's looking forward to going back into supermarkets and hauling great bags of dog kibble or hauling enormous packets of Bounty and toilet roll, all that stuff we were panicked about getting at the beginning of it, we've now got down, it's being delivered by subscription or it's being delivered regularly in a much faster interaction with your local grocer online. And so I think our consumer behaviors have changed. And I think there'll be a new appreciation for friendships. And I think a lot of friendships will have fallen by the wayside, and we won’t end up picking them back up again.
Charles: (28:52)
And I think, we’re still... do you think four to five months away really from feeling like for many people, that we can actually go out and make different choices about how we spend our time and how we re-engage on a physical basis? I mean, it feels to me like it will be May, June, somewhere around then we're talking about really start to feel confident about that. And maybe a little later in some cases. So in many ways we're really only two-thirds of the way through this. And I think the next three or four months will be very formative. We'll see a lot of change really happening and start to happen in the next three or four months as we start to stretch ourselves again. Start to imagine how do we want to engage now that we start to get more permission and ability used to do so.
Joanna Coles: (29:28)
Yeah. I still think we have another six months to go before people feel confident. And I think it slightly depends on the experiences people have had themselves with COVID and whether or not they know someone in their family, who has been really badly impacted by it. If you haven't been, you feel slightly more nonchalant I think about taking a risk. And obviously it will depend when most people get the vaccine. But, hopefully in six to nine months, things will start evolving, we'll be outside again, we'll be mixing again, and then I think you see an enormous amount of pent up dollars. People haven't been spending in the same way, people have been saving money. Again, there's a big division between people who've lost their jobs and then people who've been fortunate enough to just transfer. They work from home, and you will see people taking advantage of it and doing all the things that they wanted to do, which they'd never made time for, now they're going to make time for.
Charles: (30:26)
Joanna, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been an absolute pleasure and insightful as always.
Joanna Coles: (30:30)
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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