Description

Dylan Soopramania is a creative director and consultant whose work spans the UK, Australia, and North America, with campaigns for Coca-Cola, EA Sports, KitKat, Hellmann's, and Google. He designed the covers for all three of my books and the branding for this podcast. We have known each other for thirty years, and this is the first episode recorded in person and the first under the Disengaged name.

Advertising is the one industry where creativity is the product, which makes it the sharpest test of the argument in Close the Gap. Dylan's rule for creative leads is to protect the potential of the idea: push it to the point where you and your trusted partners feel uncomfortable, because ideas get killed in internal conversations long before anyone learns where they could have gone. The same problem sits inside every business that needs to innovate. If people do not feel safe suggesting things that might get shot down, they play it down the middle. Dylan's account of what happened when I stopped chasing him on the cover, that the more I backed off the more responsible he felt, is the whole book in one sentence.

What we covered:

• What a creative director does, and why brands rent a creative's tone of voice
• How the Close the Gap cover came about
• Good briefs, bad briefs, and Hellmann's sneakers made from food waste
• Presenting irrational ideas to rational people
• Mad Men is dead: culture now informs marketing
• Protecting the potential of the idea
• Pixar's brain trust and the Overton window
• Culture fit as hiring people who look and sound like you
• Why the modern company still runs on a hierarchy inherited from the church and the factory
• The KitKat catapult
• Focus groups, market data, and the sea of sameness
• The manager as emulsifier
• Trust, control, purpose, and tension
• Why asking people to keep doing what they do well kills the spark
• Freelance versus full time
• Leaving Dylan alone: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in one example
• Proactive work, gold wall sessions, and 3M's fifteen percent time
• Executive pay, the C-suite, and the role of profit

People: Steve Hey (Dylan's creative partner), Dart Lindsley (Work for Humans), Jessie Zwaan (job, career, calling), Amy Wrzesniewski, Aaron Dignan, Rensis Likert, Abraham Maslow, Joseph Overton, Paul Buchheit, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs

Books: Close the Gap and What Pay Costs (James Seechurn), Purpose and Work (Jessie Zwaan), Brave New Work (Aaron Dignan), Colin Splodge and The Sizzledodge (Steve Hey and Dylan Soopramania)

Organizations: Pixar, Coca-Cola, KitKat / J. Walter Thompson Sydney, Hellmann's / Ogilvy, Banana Boat, Google / The Hallway, 3M, General Electric, Patagonia, Buurtzorg, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Haier, AFL-CIO, MSCI

Find Dylan on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/dylan-soopramania-5a439223 and on Instagram at @dyl_soop. KitKat catapult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD3DUt4eZZw. Close the Gap: https://amzn.to/4x4FAZ6

Music licensed through Soundstripe.
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