Gareth Kay of Happify Health
What questions are you asking?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 359: Gareth Kay
Here’s a question. What questions are you asking?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach their leaders to help them succeed where leadership has its greatest impact. The intersection of strategy and humanity.
This week’s guest is Gareth Kay. He’s the SVP of Brand at Happify Health. Before that, he’s been the Head of Strategy at Goodby Silverstein, and the Founding Partner at Chapter Creative Studios.
Gareth is a relentlessly curious soul. And that has made him one of the best thinkers in the world about creativity and innovation.
“One of the lost arts, in many ways, I think, of creativity and one of the things you forget about because you end up having muscle memory about how to solve problems, which just, you know, accrues over time, is you forget about the really important thing, which is trying to find a better question to solve or a different question to solve, at least, because I think that takes you to new, interesting places.”
When all the answers are out of date, or from a different reality, the only choice we have is to start asking more and better questions.
Everyone wants to know what the future of work looks like. Leaders want their people back in the building because - pick any you want from this list - I can see what they’re doing. I know who’s engaged. Our business is better when we collaborate. Our culture is crucial. I have a ten year lease on 100,000 feet of prime commercial real estate.
These are all answers to old questions. Questions focused on what works best for the company.
If you’re leading a business in which talent is not a competitive advantage, or one in which talent is easy to find, my bet is you will be able to create a new version of the old status quo by asking yourself and everyone around you old questions.
But if you’re leading a business in which talent is the game changer, and great talent is hard to find, then you’re going to win when you start to ask different questions. Questions that put the needs of the talent at the center of your curiosity.
And that starts by asking yourself new questions. The first of which is, “Like what?”.
Here’s Gareth Kay.
Charles: (02:22)
Gareth, welcome to Fearless. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Gareth Kay: (02:26)
Hi, Charles. Thanks so much for having me.
Charles: (02:29)
Tell me, when did creativity first show up in your life? When were you first conscious of creativity appearing in your life?
Gareth Kay: (02:35)
Yeah. That's a good question. It's the inevitable first question on this podcast, the one I feel I should've probably prepared for better. I think, Charles, if anyone knows me, they know I'm obsessed with music. It really is kind of the thing that probably has informed and shaped me the most, and that's probably because it's the abiding memory I have of growing up. I grew up in a family with parents who were both big into amateur dramatics. They had big record collections. There was always music on in the house. I was encouraged to pick up instruments and try and learn instruments and, often, it felt against my will because, of course, being a bit of a brat, you want to rebel against what your parents love.
But there was something about music that grabbed me, and I definitely remember, I think, the first couple of times probably, you know, the early… well, yeah, early '80s, watching Top of the Pops and seeing, you know, Gary Numan and Duran Duran and people like that and just going, "This feels like another world from, you know, the medieval city of York." It just really opened my eyes to what was possible. And I think, through my parents and then through a friend's older brother who turned me on to some of the weirder music when I was quite young, it just opened my mind to what was possible, to make people feel something different through what feels like quite a simple art form. So I think that was the moment I really first went, "Wow. You can do stuff that really moves people."
Charles: (04:08)
Is music still part of your life?
Gareth Kay: (04:11)
It is. You know, my wife would tell you it's a very dangerous part of our lives because I buy too much vinyl. I go to too many concerts. I was out last night at one. I bought a bunch of tickets for the LCD Soundsystem run of shows out here. It's a huge part of my life and it's something I find not only is a release, but it's something that helps hopefully keep me curious. I'm always looking for the new thing, and I think a lot of that kind of record digger, listening to weird music shows, not just relying on algorithms, has been something that's, hopefully, been useful for me more broadly in life, you know, where you're trying to keep yourself in a learning mindset and trying to find the new thing, as opposed just to settle down to what you've always known and what you've always liked.
Charles: (05:03)
Does that show up in other parts of your life? Has that sort of training or learning, that recognition, manifested in other parts of your life?
Gareth Kay: (05:11)
I honestly feel it's been something that I've tried to imbue in my professional career as much as possible. I honestly think any kind of success I've had as a strategist, has come down from, one, being around really, really good people, but, secondly, trying to make sure I'm always curious, because that's how you find these odd connections, just having this bank of references you can draw upon. So it's music, I love movies, I love reading books, and I try and make sure that I'm as diverse as possible in that consumption. You don't get caught in that kind of narrow world of only reading books about business or a certain type of fiction or watching a certain type of movie.
I've found it's something that's, one, I enjoy, but, two, I think is, honestly a competitive advantage when you're at work because you can just have a... if you've got a greater bank of references to draw from and draw upon, I think it's more likely for you to make weird connections, new connections, which is what creativity is really all about, and be able to inform conversations, work, things you make, with different references. So, yeah, absolutely, I think it's been a really important thing I've tried to draw upon.
Charles: (06:31)
Are you looking for answers when you're in that mindset?
Gareth Kay: (06:36)
No, I'm looking to find a better question, I think, Charles, in many ways. I think the best music, in many ways, is asking weird questions about what can these things do together? Can we make something that feels a little bit new or a little bit different, you know? What if we collide these two previously disconnected worlds together, what can end up as a result? And I think a lot of the kind of... one of the lost arts, in many ways, I think, of creativity and one of the things you forget about because you end up having muscle memory about how to solve problems, which just, you know, accrues over time, is you forget about the really important thing, which is trying to find a better question to solve or a different question to solve, at least, because I think that takes you to new, interesting places.
Charles: (07:25)
How did you get into strategy?
Gareth Kay: (07:28)
(laughs) By accident. I was studying politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford for my [inaudible]. I loved economics. I loved the way it made you think about, why do people do what they do? How do things change? I think that's really at the heart of a lot of economics is that, you know, how does behavior form and how can it be changed? That fascinated me, but I was really obsessed by music and by art. I wanted to make it in my band. I didn't. I wanted to make it in the music industry, so my first internship was at Phonogram Records, working with... my boss was Nick Beggs, who was the bass player in Kajagoogoo. He was my direct manager when I was an intern (laughing).
It was a great experience, but I learned very quickly it wasn't right for me because it felt like it was about the business rather than the music, inside the music business. And that left me really feeling, going into my kind of last 18 months at university, very unsure about what I wanted to do.
And it just suddenly dawned on me that I really loved watching ads on TV. And I was lucky enough to grow up in a time when, if you looked at all the data from the TGI survey, people thought the ads were better than the TV programs they, quote-unquote, interrupted. It was the golden era of BMP and John Webster. It was the kind of new upstarts of Howell Henry. It was just this really, you know... BBH doing amazing work, you know, year in, year out, and it was just fascinating, so I went, "You know what? Let me think about advertising."
And then one very small agency called Harari Page had won for some work they were doing for Harvey Nichols and they asked me to come in for a chat. They, for some reason, seemed to like me and they offered me a role as an account manager.
I worked there as an account man for the first year. I just realized I was not going to be a good account person. So, I began to sniff around a bunch of agencies, and I was very lucky that I managed to convince an agency called BST, to take a chance on me, and I did it because, for once, I stuck to my principles. When they offered me as a job as an account man, I said, "No, I want to be a strategist," and they gave me a chance to meet with Chris Baker, who is the Head of Strategy there, and he very kindly took a chance on me.
And I stumbled into a job I feel incredibly lucky to have stumbled into, not only for the intellectual fulfillment it's given me, not only for the chance to make some genuinely, you know, I think, work I'm incredibly proud of, but, maybe most of all, just to meet an amazing set of people to learn from. It's an industry I feel very lucky to have fallen into.
Charles: (10:16)
One of the things that's consistent in my experience across anybody who's been successful in the strategic world or the strategy world is the trait you described earlier, which is this insatiable curiosity for knowledge, for looking at the world through a different lens. Obviously, timetables bring that to a close at some point, but is there anything other than lack of time, or the need to deliver an answer to something that makes that process stop for you?
Gareth Kay: (10:48)
That's a great question, what makes it stop? I think sometimes you can get ground down. Year five, working on a specific client, it becomes hard because you kind of know, roughly, what they are, quote-unquote, going to buy, and what is right for that type of client. And that's an important skill, I think, for efficiency, but I think it can get in the way of, the kind of, you know, pursuit of curiosity. I think the trick there is to make sure that you've got interesting things that you're doing outside the day job and try to use those as a way to rekindle the passion so that, when you go and spend your time working on it, you're just a bit more prepared to maybe, you know, not take the easy path and, instead, take the path less well trod.
And I was a big believer and a big fan, you know, when I had the chance to run departments, of trying to rotate talent, because the problem is you do get, I think, a sense of what the kind of spectrum of possibility is for any particular client, sometimes for any particular category. But also, as well, you just begin to, by, I think, you know, just accretion, pick up a certain set of heuristics and shortcuts that get you to very similar sets of answers. So part of my big belief, when running departments, was, as much as possible, to keep rotating strategic talent and give them new opportunities and new problems and new clients to work on and new people to work with. So you try to always create a sense of newness because we all know, you know, there's nothing sort of in the agency business as powerful as a new business pitch when it's a new problem, new clients, new possibilities, new people. You get to amazing work, by and large, really quickly in a very, very fun way because there's a sense of exploration going on.
So I was just a big believer, both in my career, but also when I had, you know, the chance to hopefully help shape an environment to try and bring the best out of others, I was just a big believer in trying to make every day feel as fresh as possible. Kind of, you know, I think, in many ways, habits become the enemy of curiosity over time, not just timelines.
Charles: (13:26)
You've been part of some of the most, noted, successful, creative, and innovative businesses in your time, so, other than that sense of newness, which I agree is just profoundly important, what else did you find, or have you found, are fundamental characteristics of those kinds of businesses? What do you need to put in place when you're building those kinds of businesses out?
Gareth Kay: (13:47)
I think, first and foremost, it's about not just having some amazing talent, it's about having a density of diverse talent, particularly inside the creative department. That's a big lesson I learned at Goodby when I first arrived there, which was, there was just this average level of really good talent and it all was a bit different, they'd all come back with different types of answers, but it always going to be good. So a density of talent, I think, is something that's really important and, quite often, gets lost in a business that succumbs to kind of the myth of the superstar, the myth of kind of the lone individual. I just don't buy into that whatsoever.
I think trying to create the environment for serendipity and random collisions to happen is absolutely critical. That's why things, I think, at... for example, I look at 72andSunny, never had the chance to work there, but I think the wall they had there was a brilliant idea where people just put Post-it notes on work as they walked past it, whether or not they worked on the business. It tapped into naivete and the hive mind really, really well. But I think there's a way you can try and structure things so it's less meetings, more chance for conversation, and kind of serendipitous collisions, I think, is really, really key.
And then I feel, you know, the final thing that's really important, it sounds trite, but it is, I think, absolutely critical, is hire people better than you are and get out of their way. I think, a lot of the time, that is the key, is just try and bring on the best talent you can do. At the very least, bring on talent different to you and then give them the support they need, give them a clear North Star and direction, but then don't micromanage them. Get the hell out of the way. Let them bring them, their selves, their true self, their own self, their best self into the work environment every day. Those are the common traits I've seen that separate, I think, the good from the great.
Charles: (15:51)
It's interesting, actually, because sort of weaving a number of those thoughts together—
Gareth Kay: (15:56)
Mm-hmm.
Charles: (15:57)
—72andSunny, their example of putting the work on the wall, as you've just described, and letting people walk by and contribute, was, I think, a big part of their success, but they also told me that they had been, they have struggled with where to draw the line between that and idea ownership, right, that somebody has to ultimately be responsible. And, I think John Boiler once said to me, you know, "When the work's on the table, it's ours. When the work's on your desk, it's yours," which I thought was an interesting way of kind of drawing that line together. This idea of freedom is, obviously, something that comes up a lot when you're talking about, how do you unlock creativity at scale within organizations and it's always... the tension point with that is always, you have a business to run, you have needs to meet, you have schedules to, you know, to commit to, and so on.
The balance between these two, I think, has never been more difficult. You know, coming out of the pandemic, the way society is restructuring, the way that business is restructuring, how do you look at the challenges that we're all facing as we move forward, between providing enough freedom, which obviously can, and sometimes will, include working from home, for instance, as a practical example, versus putting enough structure and enough discipline and enough expectation in place to allow things to actually happen that are created by dynamic tension?
Gareth Kay: (17:16)
Yeah. It is part of the core tension that exists in business today, but probably has been there bubbling away under the surface for probably, you know, the last century, if not longer. It's that mix between encouraging contribution from people, and contribution, though, in the service of a greater goal, so it's a contribution around making things better, not trying to perhaps argue whether it is good or not. It should be the, "Yes, and," rather than the "No, but," I think becomes really important.
I think it is about contribution in a structured way, as much as possible, so there are times and places where it is used, but I think there's a difference between, I guess, contribution, and between an environment where everyone feels they have equal say or, quote-unquote, decision-making power. Because I believe, still, that it's the critical need for leadership, and, by leadership, I mean not just the ability to serve those who work for you and set up the right environment, but leadership to own the quality of the work and to make decisions and to do what, you know, Jay Chiat famously told Dave Buonaguidi in a restaurant in Chambly when they set up St. Luke's, which was, "Your job is to stop bad work going out of the door, job number one."
And I think there's a thing where that is about responsibility and ownership that exist amongst those who’ve, you know, built up the ability to demonstrate, or demonstrate the ability to really show that they can make those tough decisions, they can do it in a way that is fair and informed, and get rewarded, as a result, for having the ability to do that. So it's a tension, I think, Charles, between creating the right environment, about contribution being the "Yes, and," about contribution being at certain times and places in a process, but then having strong leadership that embraces that, but also is prepared to make the tough decisions when they do come up.
Charles: (19:35)
You've talked about your relentless curiosity and, obviously, you're taking in all these different inputs, all these different reference points, that are showing up today. I had Rishad Tobaccawala on the podcast three or four weeks ago, and he said that he thinks there are between 50 and 75% more commercial real estate in America than is needed anymore.
Gareth Kay: (19:57)
Yeah. Yeah.
Charles: (19:58)
What's your view of the office and the future of the office and the future of the workspace?
Gareth Kay: (20:03)
I think it's interesting. I think it's... maybe the shift could be summed up as a place you are required to go to five days a week for eight hours a day, versus a place you actually want to go into for a few days a week or maybe a few days a month, where it is about bringing together teams around a problem, around an opportunity, and using their ability to really generate ideas together and to put things on a wall and talk things through, which you simply can't, I don't believe, replicate using Zoom or using Slack. It just doesn't work. It's still... it just doesn't create the chemistry I believe you need.
So I think Rishad's point is absolutely correct. I think, you know, not only do we need less office space, the type of office space we need is going to be different. I mean, I look at the work we did over the last six months at Happify Health, just kind of thinking about what the new headquarters should look like in New York as an office space, and it feels very different now versus probably what we'd have designed four years ago, where it's all about maximizing space to collaborate, space to have kind of serendipitous collisions, as opposed to offices and meetings rooms. It feels like a very, very different kind of space that you're creating.
So I think that's one thing is, you're designing the physical place as a place which is more magnetic, in some way you are drawn to, at certain points in the course of the year, as opposed to somewhere you're expected to go into day in, day out. My hope is this could actually be a change in working dynamic that unlocks vast levels of creativity inside the workforce that hasn't been tapped into so far. Because I sense we can maybe try and at least better parse out busy work from creative work, better still reduce the amount of busy work that is being done, and try and allow people to do what people do best, which is about making those unexpected leaps, either by themselves or, more often than not, through a conversation with a diverse set of people with different types of experiences and perspectives on a problem.
And I think one of the big dangers that businesses have is that we focus way too much on doing the busy, busy work, the [inaudible] work, and not having the time to actually really focus on cracking problems. I think what we're seeing with the change in our desires as humans for what work should look like, coming after the pandemic, and allying that with, you know, the relentless march of technology and automation means, I think, human beings have to get back to doing the work that humans can uniquely do and that tends to be the work which is more, quote-unquote, creative in nature.
Charles: (23:22)
You know, it's so interesting because one of the pieces of advice I give a lot of the people that I work with, a lot of the leaders that I work with, is to focus on doing the things that only they can do, and I think it's an interesting comparison, actually, to draw it across human beings, and it obviously brings us to AI. There was a story last week about a Google engineer getting fired because he raised an alarm that the AI inside Google now has reached such a point that you couldn't differentiate it anymore and then all kinds of debates about whether that was true or not. When you talk about busy work, and, obviously, there's a lot of that in any organization, do you see AI ever playing a role in that stuff?
Gareth Kay: (24:00)
My hope is it can at least play a role in reducing the amount of busy work we have to do, because a lot of tasks are, by their very nature, quite repetitive or quite rule-based, for the want of a better phrase. But I think, you know, we're already seeing how some technology platforms can begin to help there in reducing that. My real hope is we can genuinely get back to work being a more kind of creative endeavor. I think there's an interesting analog when you look at the kind of, you know, post-Second World War world, going up to the 1970s, and the first kind of real rise of computation inside business. And I think, you know, we can argue it's correlation as opposed to causation, but my sense is that ability to offload some of the busy work to machines allowed for a great inflection point in terms of creativity and innovation in business.
My hope is that, coming out of the pandemic, we can turbocharge that even more because not only is the technology moving at an ever faster momentum, but, actually, I think what we've decided we enjoy doing and are good at, as a species, has perhaps never been so clear. And my hope is we do not return to what work was before the pandemic, which I don't think brought out the best of people, I really don't.
Charles: (25:36)
Yeah, it's hard to imagine us going back to that, no matter how hard some people are fighting to get back to a version of that.
And I think your point earlier about giving people a reason to want to come into the office is so important and, clearly, leaders are really struggling with, how do you actually define that, how do you put that in place? I mean, I've been fascinated by watching how hard it is for people to shift their mindset around, you know, from when to why. But, ultimately, I think, when you're trying to unlock the potential and the talent of people who are original thinkers, leaders are going to have to come up with an adaption. They're going to have to focus more on the why as opposed to the when.
Gareth Kay: (26:16)
Yes, I agree, and I think it's not going to be distributed evenly across industries as well, because I feel some industries are probably going to be much more remote first, bring people together infrequently. There are some businesses where you would argue, and I think advertising agencies, creative companies, may well be one of them, when you actually do want to have people coming together more often, because they want to be around other people, because they can see the exponential power that it has on what they're doing in terms of innovation and creativity.
So I think there's going to be an interesting story to look at over the next five years, to look at how different sectors and types of industries have responded to the pandemic and understand how different responses to the return to the office, or the return to a new way of working may be the better way of saying it, has an impact on growth, has an impact on people's happiness and the well-being inside those companies. I think there's going to be just a fascinating piece of analysis to be done to try and understand how to best… how companies have best responded to this moment in time and how they should look to respond over the next decade or two.
Charles: (27:38)
Yeah. I mean, I think the problem in the advertising industry world, particularly, is that because the business is based on hourly rates, the entire model draws people who are responsible for delivering financial performance to hours and, therefore, days, weeks, spent inside the office. But it's hard to imagine that that's a sustainable reference point when talent has now realized they call the shots, they get to decide, to a much greater extent than ever before, how this is going to work and, right, where can they do what from and what are the environment by which they're going to be successful. It's interesting to see, it's interesting… it'll be fascinating to see how long it takes for the business world to catch up with this reality.
Gareth Kay: (28:21)
Yeah. Yeah. And I have to be honest, I'm always, I think, deeply disappointed, and I think it's never truer than this moment in time, the lack of innovation in new types of business models that come from creative companies. And I know it's been talked about a lot, but the reality is we tend to just accept the fait accompli of hourly rates as opposed to thinking about, how can we build new types of compensation that really are linked to creativity and innovation and new ideas much more so than kind of the efficient delivery of, you know, two pounds of advertising, please. And that's just a dangerous, dangerous endgame to keep living in, I think for talent attraction, talent retention, and for the health of the ideas we generate.
Charles: (29:14)
Yeah. I made this point to somebody the other day, which is, you know, I get brought into creative companies of all kinds and... sometimes I walk into companies whose reputations in the outside world is pretty poor, that, you know, through whatever their lens is, whether it's advertising or marketing or technology or content or whatever it is, they've reached a point where they're looking for outside help because their reputation's poor. And I used to walk in with a predisposition that, well, part of the problem is going to be that they just don't have a lot of talent, that the really good people have left. And I think, without exception that I can think of, I was... I never found that to be true. I was always startled, in the early days, by the depth and the quality of the talent that existed in every organization and how hard the organization itself was working to deny itself access to that, and you see that still to this day.
I think the pandemic has shaken the foundations of that reality, which is obviously going to be helpful and healthy, and… if we can actually learn the lessons. Some companies, I think, will gain massive competitive advantage over the next couple of years by their ability to change, pretty fundamentally, the way they go about creating the right environment for creative people. But I think you're right, the traditional model has been a pretty perfect structure to absolutely minimize the level of creativity that comes out of some very talented people. I couldn't agree with you more about that.
Gareth Kay: (30:39)
Yeah, yeah.
Charles: (30:40)
Let me pivot and let me ask you a question that I'm not sure I've actually ever asked anybody, but I'm curious to get your answer to this. How do you think people see you?
Gareth Kay: (30:53)
Heck, that's a great question. I hope they see me as someone who is curious, as someone who wants to find a better way, maybe sometimes to an absolute fault and there really doesn't need to be a better way to be found at that moment in time. I think, I hope that I'm seen as someone who cares, and I think that sounds ridiculous, but I care about the people I work with, and I care about the type of work I'm making at any given time. Those are the two things that probably drive me more, frankly more than financial compensation or, you know, stature. It's much more around the people and the type of work I do. At least, I hope that's how people see me. I'll be intrigued to understand how my perception of self is probably completely inverse to the perception others have of me.
Charles: (31:57)
As you look back at your career so far, and, obviously, you've still got a very (laughs) long way to go, but as you look back at it so far, do you have any regrets?
Gareth Kay: (32:05)
Oh, my lord. Yes, I do, and I wish they weren't regrets. I wish I saw them more as learning opportunities. I was very risk-averse when I was younger, so I had a chance to join Naked Communications when it was about four people on a boat in London, and I should have made the jump. I didn't because I was unsure around their business model and what they were actually making, and I should have done what I normally do, which is bet on people, and I should have betted on the two Johns and Will Collin. I think they're exceptional, exceptional human beings and brilliant business people and have built very interesting, creative companies over their time.
I regret, some days, not making the move to client side earlier. I had a chance to go to Google a decade ago and, over a decade ago, and chose not to do it because I wasn't sure if client side was right for me. I actually think that would have been... just given the role there, it would've been fascinating and going in quite early on there would have been great. So it's these little moments where I have regrets.
I think, when I have real regrets, it's about maybe not having stuck to my principles or stuck to the things that I really believe in as tightly as I should do, so really putting the people and the work first. I think there's been a couple of times that I've maybe betrayed myself on that, and that's the things really stick to you. So, you know, the first two points, examples I gave, Charles, probably irritations and small regrets of decisions I could have made differently. I think the stuff that sticks with me and that I learned from is when I perhaps betray my principles, betray my desire to really do great work and to really work with and try and help great people. Those are the moments I look back on and go, "I wish I'd maybe just acted a little bit differently there."
Oh, and a bit more pragmatism. I can quite often get myself far too wound up around principles, as opposed to maybe believing more in that notion of strong principles softly held, which allows you to, I think, be a bit more pragmatic in your approach to business and life. I think that was very true of, you know, the time of, you know, when we ran Chapter, we started and ran Chapter. There's no doubt that I was way too tight on principles and way too light on pragmatism.
Charles: (34:49)
And as you look back at those moments, have they changed you? Do you now respond differently in those moments, do you think?
Gareth Kay: (35:58)
I hope so, I hope so. I try and spend time... I try and pause more. I try and slow down, particularly when I'm around people or making decisions which have got a good degree of gravity to them. I try and carve out more time for people. I also have the perpetual battle with myself not to micromanage people. As much as I know it is completely the wrong thing to do, I do have an awful tendency to kind of get stuck in the minutiae and I have to, you know, work really hard every day to stop myself doing that too much. I can't say I'm perfect, but I have to stop myself from doing it too much.
Charles: (35:46)
How do you lead today?
Gareth Kay: (35:50)
I try and listen first. I try and walk around the problem from different angles. I try to get to a balanced decision. I try and stick to it. I think one of the things I've noticed in a lot of companies I've worked with is, one, the inability sometimes to get to a decision. I think there's, you know, almost like an over-rotation on consensus-building and as David Ogilvy famously said, you know, many, many years ago, you know, "In every town and every city, there are no statues to committees," and I think there's a reality to that.
But then I think, once you do get to a decision, it's about sticking to it. You've got to be prepared to change your course occasionally, but I think one of the big dangers in leadership is being seen to not have the courage of your convictions, and that means sometimes it is about turning around and going, "I was wrong. I made this mistake and I will learn from it." But I think that's better, on balance, than flip-flopping on your decision several times. I think you need to try and have some courage of conviction. So lots of listening first, a lot of trying to get to a balanced, informed point of view, a lot of playing what-if and then getting to a decision and trying then to stick to that decision.
So that's what I try to do and I just... you know, listening, to me, is such an important skill and I, by no ways, have I learned that enough or do I practice it enough, but I'm doing it a lot more than I probably ever have done and it is so, so critical because, if you've got great people around you, the best thing you can do, apart from getting out of their way, is to listen to them. You'll always learn something and you'll always think about something in a different way because of the perspective they will bring.
Charles: (37:53)
And last question for you, what are you afraid of?
Gareth Kay: (38:00)
Staying still. I'm, you know, I guess I have shark-like tendencies, which I feel that when you, you know, stay still, you may die and I'm just someone who... it's funny, I was talking to a friend this morning about this, and both of us were just talking about the issues around kind of Brexit and, you know, the rise of populism in the States, and I genuinely believe one of the correlations you'll see, if not actually one of the drivers, of this kind of behavior, this desire to maintain the status quo, frankly, move back to the past, is down to a desire that people have just stopped learning and they've stopped trying new things and you therefore, immediately, move into kind of a defensive posture as a result.
So I'm always trying to keep moving, to learn, to be open-minded, because I think that's how you grow as a human being, but I think it's also, you know, candidly, how you stay relevant. You have to be able to change, and change at least as fast as the speed of the change that's going on in the world and culture around you. Because, otherwise, what relevance can you really bring to business, to people you work with, to your friends, frankly, to life? So I'm just incredibly, incredibly nervous about standing still for any amount of time.
Charles: (39:34)
I want to thank you for coming on today. I've always admired your generosity and your curiosity. I think the two of them work really powerfully in you, and thank you for being so honest and sharing today. I really appreciate it.
Gareth Kay: (39:47)
Well, Charles, thank you for having me on the show and thank you for running Fearless. It's a fantastic data bank of just different experiences around how people are able to, hopefully, be a bit more creative, so thank you for all you do.
Charles: (40:05)
I really appreciate that. Thanks.
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