Sweathead, A Strategy Podcast

Ben Shaw is Head of Strategy at BBH London. As an eleven-year veteran of one of the world's best agencies and one of the world's favorite homes to agency strategists, Ben believes that strategy is a creative role and that strategy departments need to contain more people from different backgrounds to be as creative as possible. We discuss both topics, including BBH's year-and-a-half mission to open...

Scenario - Eighty people work in your Mumbai headquarters and you have new teams emerging in London and New York. You want to keep improving the quality of your work and you want the business to keep growing. What do you do?  After eight years in the American corporate world at GE and AIG, Libby Swan moved to India to create a new life. There she co-founded PRDXN, a creative and technology company...

Nick Williams is a strategist in Colorado. He's listened to nearly all the episodes of Sweathead. As a form of study. So I wanted to ask him what he's learned from having hours of strategy folk in his head, how he's thinking about where to take his career, and we talk through a hypothetical strategy. I rambled a bit too much in this one. Sorry, Nick! You can find Nick here:  https://nicholasawilli...

Rob Schwartz is CEO of TBWA\CHIAT\DAY New York. A big agency brand name, TBWA in New York was a shining star then it faded. When Rob arrived, the culture had been decimated and clients were either leaving or very unhappy.  In this interview, we discuss the turn-around story. Rob shares with us the business plan he shared with global CEO Troy Ruhanen and he discusses what they discussed before he t...

Nadia Piet is a freelance experience and service designer in Amsterdam. We discuss service design and trying to design a career with a focus on the power and risks in personal narratives, utopian and dystopian ideas in artificial intelligence narratives, designing a career that involves feeling like an outsider and moving around a lot. You can find Nadia here http://nadiapiet.com/ and here https:/...

Saturday afternoon in São Paulo, how good is this? Come for a walk from Pinheiros to Livraria Cultura for some chat about Brazil and strategy. Ask questions here: http://www.instagram.com/markpollard

Iuren Ramiro is a planner in São Paulo, Brazil. He helps run Planners BR, a Facebook group with thousands of Brazilian planners, as well as the podcast PlannersCast. As a fellow planner who likes to bring other planners together, I was curious to talk to Iuren about the state of strategy in Brazil - how planners feel about their industry right now, the important topics they're discussing, and how...

Vibeke Skov is a Danish psychologist with a focus on creativity. She's published six books and has a keen interest in Carl Jung, art therapy, mythology, and dreams. We discuss the power of using myths and stories as roadmaps for life, dealing with shame, depression, and feeling the wrong person in life. I know this is an episode I'll be sending to many people over the coming years. I know you'll g...

Anant Rangaswami watches advertising. Having launched Campaign Magazine in India, worked for CNBC and First Post, and, now working as the editor of MELT on WION, Anant gets around a lot of conversations happening in advertising agencies and in marketing. He believes that creativity is disappearing due to a combination of short-term thinking, too many numbers, and several other dynamics. And this i...

Today, we look at a scenario where junior strategists are the only strategists in the agency but the bosses don’t seem to want it to work. What do you do? Also, moving to a new city, charging for strategy (Jake Fagan - my accent is Australian like Keith Urban, your hero), San Francisco, and I tell you something I’ve never told people about my work. You can ask questions here: http://www.instagram....

Tom Trenta runs the research and strategy agency Positive in Chicago. Previously, he was Chief Strategist at EggStrategy and a VP of Account Planning at Leo Burnett. The point of the CV is he's been working strategy since the 1990s and he sells it every day. So, how do people buy strategy? How has selling strategy changed? What makes selling strategy difficult? And if you sell strategy for 20 year...

Laura Bambach is D&AD President, co-founder of SheSays, and Chief Creative Officer of Mr President in London. In this episode, we discuss the work of a Chief Creative Officer. What does a CCO do? How do they look at the work? What's the best way for them to spend time? Laura compares her experiences working in leading roles in large agencies to her time at Mr President. She also discusses her work...

Jon Wilkins was a cofounder of Naked, a prolific agency that burst into the world in the year 2000 then rampaged into some of the toughest advertising markets to establish itself as a much admired creative force. The agency attracted brilliant misfits and championed the idea of communications planning (using media in novel ways and in ways that magnified or played with the campaign ideas - as oppo...

Farrah Bostic runs The Difference Engine where she does brand strategy and qualitative research. In this chat, we discuss the latter and Farrah shares very clearheaded and astute observations about where research is at and is able to do so through the mind of a strategist - as in, someone who has to also use the research. We discuss the challenges research is facing, what data is, what a data-driv...

Politics, ego, and extroverts - how do you deal with them? In this episode, we answer 20-plus questions about working with other people - why it’s difficult, whether it needs to be difficult, and how to make it less difficult. Stream-of-consciousness. Someone gave the podcast a 1-star rating. If you’ve gotten something out of the 135 episodes, could you drop a 5 star rating in iTunes, please? I’m...

Olivia Poglianich is a freelance brand strategist from New York. She studied at Cornell and interned at BBDO. She was a finalist in BBH's Griffin Farley's Beautiful Minds strategy bootcamp, she volunteered for the 4A's StratFest, she studied some more and then she thought... "What have I signed up for? Maybe there's another way to live." So, now, she does strategy and marketing work while moving a...

Art direction is a beautiful thing - to reach for an idea that says one thing clearly and clearer than the other visual ideas it competes with and to do so in a way that makes unique sense for a brand. But does art direction still exist? Or, does it exist like it could? With the rise of social media, rapid turnarounds, cheap stock image options, mood boards and social media calendars, multivariate...

Bogdana Butnar is currently contracting as Digital Strategy Director at Accenture, London. She ran strategy at Poke, she once worked at Google, and she was MD of MRM in Romania. She's a ferocious learner, she loves product and service design, and, after an exceptional career in agencies, she is now playing her mind to a management consultancy.  We discuss the different shades of digital strategy,...

Today, a chat about strategy job interviews, Europe, happiness, moving goal posts, problems, favorite projects, and more. Thanks for your questions: http://www.instagram.com/markpollard

Faris Yakob is a Cofounder of strategy and innovation consultancy Genius Steals. A prolific thinker and writer, he has worked all over the world and is now six years into also living all over the world. But what we discuss in this interview is having a mind that sometimes won’t stop moving - how it feels, how Faris tries to deal with it, and why people find the topic so difficult to discuss. You c...

What research is useful research? How can we deal with bias? What’s a good way to take notes? What are common pitfalls in research interviews? Does intuition matter? And more. http://www.instagram.com/markpollard

JP Hanson is CEO of strategy consultancy Rouser where he works with executives to improve their marketing. He also contributes to Marketing Week. In this chat, we discuss what makes someone commercially minded, the CMO's struggle for credibility, and how JP approaches his writing. You can find JP here https://twitter.com/rouserjp and Rouser here https://rouser.se/ For more strategy talk: 1. Strate...

Rosie Yakob runs the nomadic strategy and innovation consultancy Genius Steals. She moves around the world with her partner Faris doing strategy work and talks, and constantly contemplates their belief system and how to apply it to their lives outside of the New York agency world. We discuss their goals of working 20 hours per week, of not having an exit strategy, how they'd work on a project with...

10+ questions from Instagram answered in Amsterdam, including:  What would you say to an immigrant strategist trying to find work in a new country? Why can’t strategists strategize their own lives? Does anxiety and depression help you be a more creative thinker? What did you learn from writing raps that makes its way into strategy work? How can I grow in strategy without a boss or a good boss? For...

Toby Ryan runs security in a large casino-resort in Macau. It’s one of the biggest in the world. He’s worked in security for over two decades, having trained in martial arts and initially wanting to apply his skills for a living. In this chat, we discuss what he’s learned about people in his job - as a “simple guy”, then a manager, and now as someone running one of the largest casino-resort securi...