Fearless Creative Leadership Charles Day

Can you imagine?
This episode is the second in a series of conversations I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
For the weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re focusing our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.
Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries? Do we follow the puck or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.
PJ Pereira is the Founder and Creative Chairman at Pereira O’Dell.
PJ is also a published author and an artist in his own right. We talk about a piece of animation that he recently created for his latest novel in which he used AI, and and we’ve included a link in the show notes for this episode.
One of the themes that’s emerging from the conversations and background research I’ve been doing, is one of those realizations that is both surprising while striking me immediately as unquestionably true.
As a species, human beings are particularly bad at recognizing the speed, scale and impact of exponential growth.
Let me share an example I heard on a New York Times podcast recently, that uses cases of COVID to illustrate this.
If you start with a single case, and cases double every three days, then after 30 days, you have about a thousand cases. We can all wrap our heads around that.
But then go 30 days longer.
Now, you have a million. Wait another 30 days? Now, you have a billion.
AI is moving with the speed of a virus, and we are struggling to recognize the implications in ways that we can relate to.
We don’t have to go back too far to see how quickly our understanding of “normal” can change.
On March 1st, 2020, society was operating pretty normally. Chris and I actually took a plane to Chicago on the 2nd, and we flew back to New York on the 5th.
Five days later, five days, that idea was unimaginable, and it remained that way for a year.
But speed of change is not the only measurement that we should be conscious of.
The enormity of the gap between the normal, as we understand it today, and what we will demand as normal tomorrow, is usually beyond our imagination to see or to predict or to project.
PJ brings those limitations of our imagination to life through a vivid and unforgettable example.
At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.
In the meantime, thanks for joining us.

Edited highlights of our full length conversation.
Can you imagine?
This episode is the second in a series of conversations I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
For the weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re focusing our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.
Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries? Do we follow the puck or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.
PJ Pereira is the Founder and Creative Chairman at Pereira O’Dell.
PJ is also a published author and an artist in his own right. We talk about a piece of animation that he recently created for his latest novel in which he used AI, and and we’ve included a link in the show notes for this episode.
One of the themes that’s emerging from the conversations and background research I’ve been doing, is one of those realizations that is both surprising while striking me immediately as unquestionably true.
As a species, human beings are particularly bad at recognizing the speed, scale and impact of exponential growth.
Let me share an example I heard on a New York Times podcast recently, that uses cases of COVID to illustrate this.
If you start with a single case, and cases double every three days, then after 30 days, you have about a thousand cases. We can all wrap our heads around that.
But then go 30 days longer.
Now, you have a million. Wait another 30 days? Now, you have a billion.
AI is moving with the speed of a virus, and we are struggling to recognize the implications in ways that we can relate to.
We don’t have to go back too far to see how quickly our understanding of “normal” can change.
On March 1st, 2020, society was operating pretty normally. Chris and I actually took a plane to Chicago on the 2nd, and we flew back to New York on the 5th.
Five days later, five days, that idea was unimaginable, and it remained that way for a year.
But speed of change is not the only measurement that we should be conscious of.
The enormity of the gap between the normal, as we understand it today, and what we will demand as normal tomorrow, is usually beyond our imagination to see or to predict or to project.
PJ brings those limitations of our imagination to life through a vivid and unforgettable example.
At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.
In the meantime, thanks for joining us.

Are you leading, following or getting out of the way?
This episode is the first in a series of conversations that I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
For the next five weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re going to focus our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.
Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries, or should we adjust and iterate, slowly and carefully? Do we follow the puck, or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.
We start with a conversation with Nick Law, who is Creative Chairperson at Accenture Song.
Nick has seen the creative industries from an array of extraordinary perspectives. He was Vice Chairman, Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA, he served as Chief Creative Officer at Publicis Groupe, and was Vice President of Marcom Integration at Apple, where he co-led the global design and marketing group.
On his Cannes speaker profile, Nick says that he believes all technology needs creativity to make it human, and all creativity needs technology to make it real.
At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.
It promises to be an eye opening and thought provoking journey.
Thanks for joining us.

Edited highlights of our full length conversation.
Are you leading, following or getting out of the way?
This episode is the first in a series of conversations that I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
For the next five weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re going to focus our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.
Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries, or should we adjust and iterate, slowly and carefully? Do we follow the puck, or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.
We start with a conversation with Nick Law, who is Creative Chairperson at Accenture Song.
Nick has seen the creative industries from an array of extraordinary perspectives. He was Vice Chairman, Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA, he served as Chief Creative Officer at Publicis Groupe, and was Vice President of Marcom Integration at Apple, where he co-led the global design and marketing group.
On his Cannes speaker profile, Nick says that he believes all technology needs creativity to make it human, and all creativity needs technology to make it real.
At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.
It promises to be an eye opening and thought provoking journey.
Thanks for joining us.

Edited highlights of our full length conversation.
Are you leading, following or getting out of the way?
This episode is the first in a series of conversations that I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
For the next five weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re going to focus our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.
Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries, or should we adjust and iterate, slowly and carefully? Do we follow the puck, or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.
We start with a conversation with Nick Law, who is Creative Chairperson at Accenture Song.
Nick has seen the creative industries from an array of extraordinary perspectives. He was Vice Chairman, Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA, he served as Chief Creative Officer at Publicis Groupe, and was Vice President of Marcom Integration at Apple, where he co-led the global design and marketing group.
On his Cannes speaker profile, Nick says that he believes all technology needs creativity to make it human, and all creativity needs technology to make it real.
At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.
It promises to be an eye opening and thought provoking journey.
Thanks for joining us.

Which two things are true at once?
Robbie Kaplan is a lawyer and the founding partner at Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP.
Robbie is best known for successfully challenging a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act. Today, gay marriage is legal in America because Robbie Kaplan stood in front of the Supreme Court and argued for it.
Recently, she was E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer in both of her successful lawsuits against Donald Trump.
And among Robbie's many awards is one from The Financial Times, which named her the “Most Innovative Lawyer of the Year”.
People that know her, say about Robbie Kaplan, “she just sees things from a thousand different angles all at once, it’s hard to keep up with her thought processes. She’s not afraid, if she sees a problem, to go figure out some law that’s going to allow her to fix it.” 
Others say she is “a lawyer that you don’t want to see opposing you.” 
They say, “she’s brilliant, she’s unrelenting, she can’t be intimidated and she’s not going to back down. She eats bullies for lunch.”
And the Washington Post has described Robbie as “a brash and original strategist, a crusader for underdogs who has won almost every legal accolade imaginable.”
Which may make this admission surprising.
Not everyone doubts themselves. 
But many people do. 
If you are one of those people, if sometimes feeling that you are an imposter is holding you back, is preventing you from unlocking the potential of the people around you, as in yourself, then let me offer you this.
Two things can be true at once.
You can feel like an imposter and achieve extraordinary things at the same time.
You do have to be clear about the extraordinary things, and why they matter to you.
But then that’s what leadership is all about.