On this episode of Tame the Mobile Beast, host Tom Butta dives deep into the challenges of breaking down business silos and fostering creativity with Nick Law, Creative Chairperson at Accenture Song.
On this episode of Tame the Mobile Beast, host Tom Butta dives deep into the challenges of breaking down business silos and fostering creativity with Nick Law, Creative Chairperson at Accenture Song.
Throughout their conversation, Nick and Tom explore the importance of aligning what matters to customers with what drives profitability for the business. Nick argues that “ You're not making business decisions separate from what's good for the customer, and you're also not making customer decisions that aren't gonna be good for business.”
Together, they emphasize that a unified approach not only fosters a more cohesive customer experiencem, but also strengthens the organization as a whole. Nick points out that while operating in silos is a natural step of scaling your organization, it can create costly inefficiencies and jeapordizies a collaboration that is rooted in shared vision and principles.
Drawing on real-world examples from his own career, Nick reflects on how businesses can adapt to technological advancements without sacrificing empathy and creativity. Ultimately, he urges organizations to remember that technology should enhance, not replace, the nuanced human judgment that’s essential for delivering exceptional customer experiences.
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Guest Quote
" The hardest thing is to reverse engineer everything from your customer. Now, it doesn't mean by the way that we surrender to everything the customer wants, but don't run a business. We're always a business. But what you need to align is what's relevant for the customer with what's gonna make you money. There’s an overlap there. It's not a silo. You're not making business decisions separate from what's good for the customer, and you're also not making customer decisions that aren't gonna be good for business. So that's the trick.” – Nick Law
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Time Stamps
00:53 Introducing Nick Law and the Beast of the Week
01:17 Understanding business silos
02:56 The importance of collaboration in creativity
06:45 Designing effective collaborations
12:46 The role of vision in breaking down silos
18:50 Principles vs. practices in creative work
23:13 Leadership and vision in organizations
26:14 Customer-centric business strategies
29:17 Balancing systematic and empathetic thinking
38:45 The future of creativity and AI
44:59 Rapid Fire Questions
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Links
[00:00:00] Nick Law: The hardest thing is to reverse engineer everything from your customer. Now, it doesn't mean by the way that we surrender to everything the customer wants, but don't run a a business. We're always a business. But what you need to align is what's relevant for the customer with what's gonna make you money.
[00:00:19] Nick Law: It's an overlap there. It's not a silo. You're not making business decisions separate from what's good for the customer, and you're also not making. Customer decisions that aren't gonna be good for business. So that's the trick. So how do you do that?
[00:00:35] Voiceover: Welcome to Tame the Mobile Beast, everything you need to capture customer value. Here's your host, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Airship, Tom Butta.
[00:00:51] Tom Butta: Welcome to Tame the Mobile Beast. I'm your host, Tom Butta, and today I have the pleasure of talking with Nick Law, a good friend and longtime [00:01:00] colleague. Nick is Creative Chairperson at Accenture Song. Welcome to the show, Nick. Thanks Tom. It's great to be here. So before we talk more about you and the work you're doing with Accenture and Accenture Song, I wanted to kick off today's conversation with what we're calling our beast of the week.
[00:01:17] Tom Butta: The beast of the week for this conversation is going to be about business silos. Yeah, I like that. It certainly is a beast, Tom. Well, let me explain to people who might be tuning in for the first time what, what we mean by a A beast. A beast is one of those challenges that's pretty big and something that's quite difficult to solve, but something that I think a lot of people are trying to, so the beast of the week is business silos.
[00:01:46] Tom Butta: Nick, can you talk about this beast and maybe your thoughts and experience around it?
[00:01:51] Nick Law: I think it's one of the outcomes of scale. So if you're a big global company and you're successful, you [00:02:00] gotta figure out how to keep being successful by making sure the right people have got responsibility, making sure that you've divided up tasks in a responsible way.
[00:02:11] Nick Law: And this, there's just something that happens over time. Where silos start to be created. Now, this is not good for any business, but for the businesses I'm in, which is business of creativity, it's particularly ruin us because creativity is in the end, just existing ideas that sort of come mix up together to create new ideas, right?
[00:02:34] Nick Law: It's this sort of act of combinations and, and it's generally most successful when the inputs are from people with. Overlapping skills with very different backgrounds. And so if you're siloed and you haven't figured out how to connect with people around you to create new things, then you don't create new things.
[00:02:55] Tom Butta: Yeah. Well, by nature you're saying that the, the creative process is [00:03:00] one that's often about collaboration, right? Absolutely, yeah. It's about, and, and collaboration
[00:03:05] Nick Law: that is very, very specifically. It's not just a connection that. Where you learn something from someone or you help someone, it's more a connection where a conversation leads to creation.
[00:03:20] Nick Law: And so it's very organic, sometimes a little bit chaotic process, and it requires this, a proximity of these different ways of thinking. So as soon as you start to think, oh, if you know, it's would be much more efficient if we put all the people to look like that over there. All the people look like this over there.
[00:03:38] Nick Law: Then give them incentives to sort of keep them defending a p and l or their own people. Then you've just created silos.
[00:03:45] Tom Butta: Yeah. Understand. Well, we're certainly seeing that as it relates to the big issue of, uh, you know, the experience that we all have with the brand.
[00:03:54] Nick Law: Yeah.
[00:03:55] Tom Butta: We experience these, you know, disconnected, sometimes [00:04:00] broken experiences depending upon where you're choosing to interact with a brand.
[00:04:04] Tom Butta: Yeah. And especially digitally. 'cause you know, you can, you can go from your app to your website, you know, to, uh, an HTML page to a, a wallet communication or text messaging, whatever it might be these days. And often those experiences are very, very different.
[00:04:20] Nick Law: Yeah. I mean, and if you're creating some sort of digital product or you're doing marketing and so you are, you're trying to create a sort of cohesive experience or message for your customer.
[00:04:32] Nick Law: And that's where being integrated internally is important because it creates integrated experiences. It's very difficult to create an experience that is sort of seamless if you aren't collaborating. You know, so you, the process of making something should be integrated so that the experience itself is integrated.
[00:04:51] Nick Law: And we've all had these experiences where with a brand it feels very different. You know, when we buy something or when we, and then when we get. [00:05:00] Some sort of customer service or when we see a lower funnel ad compared to a, you know, a social post that you, I think it's very difficult if you think about the nature of the internet.
[00:05:10] Nick Law: It, it, the nature of the internet is it's connecting a whole bunch of nodes, right? So it's a connection machine. And so it's not only a problem if the experiences are, aren't integrated, it's exacerbated by the fact that we're having to sort of combine. So many different experiences now compared to like when you and I started working together, Tom, things weren't as fragmented.
[00:05:34] Nick Law: You didn't have to sort of chase people around this, this sort of weird network in the hope that they see you or get it was a lot much more consolidated. So, and you know, if you silo up your teams and map them against distinctive channels or contexts and they're not connected, then obviously when the customer goes from each of those channels or contexts.
[00:05:55] Nick Law: It's gonna feel very dissident.
[00:05:57] Tom Butta: Yeah. And that is, you know, so when you talk, just to be specific [00:06:00] for some people, so when you talk, when you talk about these, you know, these silos and you talk about, you know, the natural organizations of, of companies as they grow and scale, I. People are being organized by function, right?
[00:06:15] Tom Butta: Yeah. They're being organized by, you know, responsibility, by geography, by vertical. Very, very specific.
[00:06:22] Nick Law: Yeah. And often it is a, a, a matrixed silo too, because the things you just mentioned could all be part of whatever that matrix is. So it could be regional, it could be function. It could be a, a whole bunch of different things.
[00:06:36] Nick Law: Uh, and then that gets even more complicated. Right. And yeah. And the administration tax of just navigating your way through an environment like that is really
[00:06:45] Tom Butta: difficult. How do you all think about that kind of integration to create in the case of a customer experience or in the case of a customer engagement?
[00:06:55] Tom Butta: Yeah. How do you all think about integrating it? Yeah. Across these [00:07:00] silos and functions and. Units.
[00:07:02] Nick Law: Well, I mean, I, I started to think about this when I left rj, which was an agency that had thousands of people, but I still sort of could fit it into my head, right? Mm-hmm. And I knew where the offices were. I knew the main people everywhere.
[00:07:17] Nick Law: And then I moved to Publicis, which is a holding company and has huge scale, right? And then I started to think about, okay, what do we mean by collaboration? Right? Because the only reason you would work with someone else is, is actually to get something done. And so I think you have to design those connections based on what you need to get done.
[00:07:36] Nick Law: And there's a lot of different things you need to get done. So what I've found is one of the reasons that these silos start to happen is because we haven't gone to the effort of designing whatever those collaborations are. And the default collaboration is just sharing information. And big companies tend to do that fairly well.
[00:07:55] Nick Law: Sure. You know, there are internal communications where people sort of know what's going on. They know where people [00:08:00] sit. Most of the time that's something that is not hard. But then when you get down into the actual, the work, there's instances where your work is dependent on another team's work. So if I'm a creative, I need a strategist to sort of brief me, right?
[00:08:17] Nick Law: If I'm in production, I need a creative to give me the thing that I need to produce. Like, so there, there are a whole bunch of sort of connections there that I call compound connections, where the first party makes the second party better. So that's different to just sharing stuff. And then the third sort of collaboration I think about, which is really the cold face of innovation and creativity is when you are actually making something.
[00:08:40] Nick Law: And I call it a synthetic connection because it's often like two or three people working together and creating something that none of them individually could create. Hmm. Those of you who are students of advertising know that in the late fifties. There was this organizational innovation by Bill Burn back [00:09:00] when he took what was then the creative team, a copywriter, and added an art director to him.
[00:09:06] Nick Law: So if you watch madman, Don Draper is in his office that's pre burn back. He's coming up with ideas and then he is sending those ideas downstairs basically to get illustrated or colored in by an art director. And maybe because the, uh, the mediums were getting more visual. Burn back was like, you know, it might be interesting if we actually bought the art directors from upstairs and they worked in the same room in a conversation organically over time.
[00:09:31] Nick Law: And then the result of that was to create a revolution, right? Which was, in fact, the burn back work that is most associated with that was is the VW work. Lemon is a, is a very famous ad where it just has a beautifully shot. Small VW Beetle and the headline is lemon, and then it has very witty and interesting, you know, copy underneath the print ad.
[00:09:54] Nick Law: The point with that ad is that if you took the copy away, it doesn't make any sense if [00:10:00] you took the image away. It doesn't make any sense. So there's this sort of symbiotic relationship between image and message that you can only get when an art director copywriter is sitting in the same world. Because prior to that, if I had written that the, uh, if I was doing an ad for a car and I said, you know, the Lincoln is the great family car, and that was the headline.
[00:10:22] Nick Law: As a copywriter, if I received that as the art director without any sort of collaboration, I would've just drawn a, drawn a car, put a family in it, right? And it would sort of worked in parallel. The image and the copy would work in parallel. You know, another example would be Apple, sort of famously and still pretty uniquely.
[00:10:41] Nick Law: It combines hardware and software. And jobs would say that it's, you know, that they work at the intersection of humanities and science. And so these two things are by themselves very different put together, create something completely new. And that's the point, right? So when you've got scale, [00:11:00] and I said, you know, like publicists, which is a big advertising holding company, it was big, but, but where I'm working now, Accenture.
[00:11:08] Nick Law: We've got like 700,000 people.
[00:11:10] Tom Butta: Amazing.
[00:11:10] Nick Law: So you could imagine how you need to design those connections between all these pieces of, you know, and you know, and for Accenture's Song, which is the sort of customer facing part of Accenture, and therefore has creative people making useful and interesting things.
[00:11:26] Nick Law: So we organize ourselves from the practice point of view, marketing, design, service, and combos. But if you stack them all together. There's an overlap. There's always an overlap, right? So if you're doing some sort of retailers, obviously you could, you could, uh, connect advertising to retail. You can design a digital product around that.
[00:11:46] Nick Law: You might wanna create service or like, there are many instances where we will start with one of those things and it'll be connected to another thing. So to do that, you just need to have really strong [00:12:00] leadership where the structure works. Incentives work. The culture works to, to bring these things together.
[00:12:07] Nick Law: So they're the three sort of vectors I think about.
[00:12:09] Tom Butta: Yeah. So, so, so let's actually dig into that, because the last part of what you just talked about is, or maybe to summarize a little bit of what we, how we got to this last part is we talked about this challenge, this challenge being silos. We talked about the importance of, you know, collaboration, connectivity, right?
[00:12:29] Tom Butta: To create a better outcome. And then you just started to talk about the idea of how actually to do that. Well,
[00:12:35] Tom Butta: yeah.
[00:12:36] Tom Butta: So maybe let's get into that a little bit.
[00:12:39] Nick Law: Yeah. Well, I mean, I can, there's different ways you can think about this. There's definitely forces that come from the top down and then forces that come from the bottom up.
[00:12:46] Nick Law: A successful company, and again, particularly a successful creative company, has a singular vision and a collaborative culture, and it's really important to understand that because it's very difficult to be collaborative if you don't have a vision to collaborate around. [00:13:00] If we can't agree what we stand for or how we do something uniquely, our point of view, what are our rules of thumb?
[00:13:07] Nick Law: There's a whole bunch of ways that we sort of align and agree on what we're trying to do, and you do that around a singular vision. So just gotta start at the top. A vision like that, it can't, it's not like a vision isn't informed by stuff that's coming up from the bottom. Sure it's emergent, but I think that's a really important point is it's often why.
[00:13:26] Nick Law: In the beginnings of startups, you know, they, they move very quickly and are incredibly innovative because they have this singular vision because it's a founder. And it's pretty hard to question a founder at the beginning of a startup because they are the business. Right. And so that's why they are the why.
[00:13:42] Nick Law: They are the why. Yeah, they're, that's right. You know, and their success is based entirely on, you know, how great that vision is. Once you get to scale, you still have the same problem. And, um. You can also be a little bit broader with your vision, but you know, if I was to think about when I was at RGA and [00:14:00] helping sort of design that business so that we could do different work, if one thing that we could all agree on was that we were gonna be the best practitioners of this new medium called the internet.
[00:14:12] Nick Law: But having made that decision, we needed to understand that the internet was changing all the time. So having principles that you could map against practices, I. Is really important. So the principles don't change. The practices change constantly, but you are better able to execute those practices in a unique way that only you can if you've got principles because you've got clarity.
[00:14:36] Nick Law: Yeah, exactly. You know, and it might be, we believe in simplicity. It might be. In the case of rj, our big thing was that we believe in the intersection of a message and a behavior, right? Because the internet. Was sort of unique in media in that I had an interface. Right. And at some point, if you are creating anything in media, you've gotta negotiate an interface.
[00:14:58] Nick Law: And that's a layer that [00:15:00]
[00:15:00] Tom Butta: gives you the ability to behave. Because like the idea of a message typically has always been kind of one way, right?
[00:15:05] Tom Butta: That's right. Yeah.
[00:15:06] Tom Butta: And the internet created this vehicle for where it's actually in real time, potentially two-way all, although you're getting an immediate response to that message through this form, and which is the behavior.
[00:15:18] Tom Butta: Uh, at, at least in one example.
[00:15:20] Nick Law: And if you think about the broadening context that that interface creates, so there was a time when this one way media, mass media didn't have an interface, didn't have an I ability to interact with it. And so there was sort of a, a flattening out of everything. Like you could advertise a cigarette and an airplane in the same format, right in the same template because their context was sort of flattened.
[00:15:44] Nick Law: That you are a passive viewer in front of a TV screen. Nowadays, you've got all of these different options of how to engage and, and often the success of your message, the acid test is, is someone interested enough to actually engage? [00:16:00] So, so, you know, instead of thinking about video in terms of this is what we wanna tell the world and let's push it down into the world, it's like, if we put this in someone's feed, are they gonna watch a whole thing?
[00:16:13] Nick Law: Are they gonna share it? Are they gonna comment? Are they gonna make their own version of it? These are all things that, that indicate how engaged and interested they are with your message. So there's something that's unforgiving about interfacing in front of what you're doing and that's why this intersection of message and behavior would be sort of inverted for us at rj.
[00:16:36] Nick Law: We would start with the behavior. 'cause our thinking was. Not every message can be turned into a behavior. There are plenty of messages are metaphorical and just designed to make you feel good. Sure, right. But if you, if you are more sort of demonstrative and you create a reason for someone to behave, you can always distill into a message that vision was pointy at the top, brought down the bottom.
[00:16:58] Nick Law: And, and unlike a lot of the hand [00:17:00] wavy, uh, visions that you see in the lobby of big companies, it was something that you could look at the work and use to steer the work. To me, that's what vision is. Vision is something that should influence what everyone does in their day-to-day job. Doesn't just make 'em
[00:17:13] Tom Butta: feel
[00:17:14] Nick Law: good.
[00:17:15] Tom Butta: So you've talked about two things in terms of this success criteria to break down these silos in order to get to a better result for frankly, you and me as consumers of of stuff and everybody else. Um, you talked about this idea of a singular vision. I love that. By the way, I remember in my very first job as a very young, barely able to shave, you know, uh, you know, training.
[00:17:39] Tom Butta: Training in the training program of Young and Rubic. Yeah. Which was the largest advertising agency in the world at the time. One day when we went into the office on our desk was this, when know was this little plaque, and the plaque had a picture of a, a sky and a bird and had the following words and it said, you can really fly when you know where you're [00:18:00] going.
[00:18:01] Tom Butta: And what that basically meant was, right. A strategic vision is critical. Yeah. 'cause it opens up all kinds of potential of how you actually bring that to life.
[00:18:11] Nick Law: Yeah. And you know, I was, I was saying that there's this sort of top down business and the bottom up bit I've also, and partly is because I, I didn't have as much of an education, didn't go to college or anything, so I'm not very academic.
[00:18:23] Nick Law: Okay. We'll cut that part of the interview. Yeah, yeah. Uh, but, but I do believe that theory is at the service of practice. So the bottom up thing is what you learn from actually doing the thing. Sure. And so, you know, you have a vision that is very top down, but it's continually fed by your experience of trying to execute that vision.
[00:18:43] Nick Law: And, you know, you sort of, you, you adjust. You adjust, not the principle but the practice. Right. If you are a big believer that simplicity is a really important quality. In creative work because simplicity clarifies that makes it, you know, communicate [00:19:00] and it just has a nice sort of aesthetic. If you believe in that, then there's a very, there's a difference between being simple in a message and simple in a interface.
[00:19:08] Nick Law: They're just different crafts, but the principle's still true. You still wanna be able to navigate someone through an interface when they look at the whole thing. They need to know where to go. And a simple story is just one that leads you through the message in a way where you're left with one thing at the end.
[00:19:26] Nick Law: Right? So, so they've, they're different. One is more spatial, one's more temporal, that you need different people to do it. But the principle is still clarifying. It's still true. And so that's where I think the power of not mixing these things up are because if you start to mistake your practices and you start thinking they're principles.
[00:19:46] Nick Law: That's when you get in trouble because when the new technology comes along or the or new context comes along, then the practice that you got really good at, you start forcing it into the new technology and, and often it doesn't work. So [00:20:00] your
[00:20:00] Tom Butta: point is you've got probably fixed singular vision. Yeah.
[00:20:05] Tom Butta: You
[00:20:05] Tom Butta: have a set of principles that are mostly permanent.
[00:20:11] Tom Butta: Mostly. Yeah. And then you have practices. Are continuously adjusting Yeah. To the principles. I'll give you
[00:20:18] Nick Law: another example. You know, apple, one of the principles Apple has is simplicity. There's a sort of clarity to their packaging, for example. Hundred
[00:20:26] Tom Butta: percent. Like when you,
[00:20:27] Nick Law: you know, and when you get, uh, an iPhone, they're beauty almost.
[00:20:30] Nick Law: Don't wanna throw 'em out. They're beautiful. Yeah. They're, they're, and they, there's no, like, there's not a bunch of texts. It's just images, you know. A decision was made, I think it was about four years ago or something, that, you know, not to pack the power brick in with the phone and for good reason, right?
[00:20:45] Nick Law: Because most people had a draw full of charging stuff and also environmentally it wasn't good. So there's a version of simplicity, which is not just the how the package looks, but what goes in the package. And in this case, let's simplify this, let's make it less damaging to the [00:21:00] environment. And that was another expression of the same thing, right?
[00:21:03] Nick Law: But it, but it was the context. Was was just different to when it started. So that, that's the trick. And it's definitely true that I've seen examples at companies where people think that a practice is a principle and they won't let go of a practice or a process or something like that, that somehow they'll believe that that's what made them successful.
[00:21:26] Nick Law: There wasn't the, it wasn't something sort of more elevated that, you know, so, so that I think it's particularly when technology changes so quickly. There's plenty of examples in the advertising world. This was true when the internet started, but it's also true now where you'll see a YouTube video, which is a cutdown of a TV spot.
[00:21:47] Nick Law: It's like you are cutting down the thing that has the least dimension, right? Because you can't interact with it because it's in the template of 30 seconds. You're cutting that down for a medium that has all the [00:22:00] dimensions. It can be as long as you want. It can be interacted with, it can teach you something.
[00:22:05] Nick Law: Mm-hmm. You know, and when people are in these environments, they're not necessarily looking for a big corporate metaphor. They might be looking for something useful. So there's a context there. Again, you could vert that and start thinking about, well, why wouldn't we as storytellers, video stories, let's start.
[00:22:21] Nick Law: In the most dimensional spot, and this is what we did at RGA and then cut it down for tv. Yeah, we did the opposite.
[00:22:26] Tom Butta: Yeah,
[00:22:26] Nick Law: exactly. You know, the Beats by DRE work that we did, we did a long film for the Soccer World Cup with Namar Jr. It was a long and, and, you know, wonderful film to, you know, on, on YouTube.
[00:22:37] Nick Law: We cut it down for TV and it worked really well on TV and it worked really well on TV too because it was designed for a medium that would only be successful if someone was interested enough to share it. So we'd already got through that hurdle and then, and then we'd distilled it from there. So a lot of these things, these received wisdom of an old medium [00:23:00] just doesn't work in a new medium.
[00:23:01] Nick Law: So you have to, but the principle, right, which is that it's a cultural. Should say something about the culture of both the company and the people that are watching it.
[00:23:09] Tom Butta: Hmm.
[00:23:09] Nick Law: You know, that it, it should be interesting and revealing and all, all that stuff.
[00:23:13] Tom Butta: So you mentioned another, I call it success criteria.
[00:23:16] Tom Butta: You, you mentioned the, you know, really, really important word of leadership and so you have a vision, you have a set of principles. We know collaboration, we know integration, connectivity between teams, et cetera. Working off of a singular vision. Applying principles is better, but we have human beings here.
[00:23:38] Tom Butta: Yeah. Right. And yes, organizations are great at sharing because it's easy to just through Slack or an email or through a server or what have you, you're sharing information, but like. Doesn't it really come down to true leadership to actually make those things work in real life?
[00:23:57] Nick Law: Yeah. Well first of all, leadership [00:24:00] should embody the vision.
[00:24:01] Nick Law: No one else can. Right? So, so you should have, so you're walking the talk. Yeah. And, and, and you know, one of the things that leaders need to understand, especially in big companies and in the public sphere, is that just 'cause you've said it. 10 times that day doesn't mean that everyone else has heard it 10 times a day.
[00:24:18] Nick Law: So you need to be really good at being repetitive. I know that sounds trite, but being really singular and just saying the same thing over and over again is a really important thing. Right. Um, just again, it's about clarity, it's about focus, it's about all those things. But the other thing about leadership, especially in a, in a larger company is that we're going back to the silo point.
[00:24:39] Nick Law: The reason that companies silo is, is because they have scale and because they have to create. They have to push a certain amount of responsibility down into either business units or regions or stuff like that. And that can set up some really bad incentives. You can start protecting your, your p and l, your people, and which phrase, any connection like, so [00:25:00] what's the incentive?
[00:25:00] Nick Law: If I own a p and L in a region or an apartment, why would I share that with another one? Right? So that's where leadership comes really important. Now, hopefully you've thought about. How you structure your company in such a way that you balance those incentives so you haven't made them so stark and singular that people do the wrong thing.
[00:25:21] Nick Law: But another incentive is just cultural. As a leader, you should be making sure people know that you'll be judged based on your contribution to the whole company, not just your department, not just your p and l. And that can be a strong incentive when you know that that's one of the ways. You're gonna be judged, right?
[00:25:39] Nick Law: So that's why I think the worst examples of siloing are people following a perverse incentive and not being corrected in a cultural way. And then you start building up a culture that is really political and then that, that makes it even harder to collaborate. 'cause not only are you protecting your p and l, [00:26:00] but you're pissed off with people.
[00:26:01] Nick Law: You're protecting yourself. Yeah, exactly. So. So the culture of like, this may not be the best thing for my department or, but, but this is the best thing for the company as a leader, you should be rewarding that.
[00:26:13] Tom Butta: Yeah. So maybe let's step back from that and talk about the customers that you all serve and, you know, everyone is looking to find ways to better interact with their end customers, right?
[00:26:26] Tom Butta: Yeah. Whether it's, you know, continuing to provide value to your existing customers, you know, and. To find ones that maybe are like them, you know, that's the future customer, you know, and we started out by talking about how, you know, one of the big barriers to to, to having that very positive, rewarding, mutually valuable experience is this idea that businesses are set up in silos and integrating a seamless experience across those silos is really, really difficult.
[00:26:58] Tom Butta: And, you know, you talked about. [00:27:00] You, you need a singular vision. You need some key principles. Uh, you need some critical, you know, leadership. You need to understand, you know, that your practices need to evolve based upon your principles, but executing that is really hard. How do you all, you know, help your, the brands that you work with to understand that and, and actually help do that?
[00:27:21] Nick Law: Well, the hardest thing, and again, this comes back to scale, is to reverse engineer everything from your customer. Uh, uh, it's hard because, because in a big company there's lots of processes. There's, you know, there's, there's supporting disciplines like finance and operations and things which are essential to run a great business, but aren't the product.
[00:27:44] Nick Law: Yeah. So there should be in support of the product, what happens is leadership tends to be filled over time as a company gets bigger by operations and finance. Right, because businesses are a system and the bigger that [00:28:00] system gets, the more you need those things. But they, but they forget then that they're in a supporting role and somehow the product two two to whatever the product is for the customer.
[00:28:09] Nick Law: Right? Right. So, you know, Drucker, Peter Drucker said that you don't have a business without a customer. Well, you don't have a customer where they're great product. So there is a sort of a, a logic to that that sort of starts with. A product that customers find worthy. That's a starting point. The starting point isn't this, this continual financialization and operations, that's a really important part, but you've gotta understand what proceeds the other, right?
[00:28:37] Nick Law: And this is, I think, where people get mixed up. Scale Companies start to forget about their customer. Now it doesn't mean, by the way. We surrender to everything the customer wants. But don't run a a business. We're always a business. But what you need to align is what's relevant for the customer. You know, with with what's gonna make you money, [00:29:00] right?
[00:29:00] Nick Law: You've gotta align those things. There's an overlap there. And so again, it goes back to it's not a silo. You're not making businesses, business decisions separate from what's good for the customer. And you're also not making customer decisions that aren't gonna be good for business. So that's the trick.
[00:29:16] Nick Law: So how do you do that? Well, typically the people that are building the product and have an empathy for the customer are different to the people that might operationalize that. Or make sure that you know that the pricing is right or the, you know, the, all those more systematic tasks. So you've got these two personality types working in a business, right?
[00:29:36] Nick Law: Systematic thinkers and then empathetic thinkers. And when that balance go, goes off, then, then you forget the customer. And as I was saying before, the bigger the company, the more likely it is that the systematizes win and somehow they forget that they're building a product. Right. There's plenty of contemporary examples of this, of, you know, and what's interesting about this, [00:30:00] this process is that in the short term, when you really make things efficient, system ties things really well.
[00:30:06] Nick Law: And there is a short term sugar high from that because, because you open up your margins and you get, you get efficien and everything, and then there's sort of plateauing and then, and then a decline because, because it takes a while for sometimes for the customer to realize that you, they're just not getting from you what they used to get or, or you haven't innovated as much as you could have, or you don't understand that you're creating a bad experience.
[00:30:30] Nick Law: You know, all those sort of things. So that's the balance. Balancing those two things and it's really,
[00:30:35] Tom Butta: really hard. So I would imagine that in this sort of systematic view or practice versus an empathetic practice or view, I would imagine that the two letters, AI or blowing both of those up and causing a lot of, yeah, a lot of, I don't know, maybe glee in the one hand for people who really get it, but sheer like.
[00:30:59] Tom Butta: Concern [00:31:00] about on the other, because the, as you talk about maybe the operational side of the business is driving down, you know, dr. Use ai, create more efficiency. Maybe we can, I don't know, we can, uh, drive better margins by, uh, having AI replace people or whatever it might be. Then you got the empathetic people say, well, hang on, hang on, hang on.
[00:31:19] Tom Butta: Like, how do we know that this automated system is gonna create better? A better product or a better experience. How do you think about ai? How does, how does you know, you know, Accenture Songs? Well, just to, just to
[00:31:30] Nick Law: clarify, you know, when I think about systematic thinking and empathetic thinking, there is a creative version of both of those things.
[00:31:37] Nick Law: I don't want you to think it's left, right. It's sort of classic left brain and right brain think because there are really inventive, systematic people just as there are really great like storytellers and you know, empathetic people. In fact, the way that I'd characterize two ways of those, two ways of thinking from a creative point of view.
[00:31:54] Nick Law: Is that, and the, the systematic thinkers sort of ask the questions, how do I make something work? And [00:32:00] sometimes making something work in a way that's never worked before is sort of incredible. Like the, the people that have that created these large language models, they're systematic thinkers, right? So I'm not saying that systematic thinking, you know, but typically they're more interested in things than people, right?
[00:32:17] Nick Law: Because while they're thinking about how do you make things work, the pe empathetic people are, how do I make people feel? And so that human layer on top of the digital product needs to have empathy, needs to have designers that understand how to create affordances that, that people understand and find useful, or they need to figure out how to tell stories to help people understand and, and, and are sort of, you know, are engaged.
[00:32:41] Nick Law: So there's those two ways of thinking right now. There's also an executional part of each of those things. So if I'm building software, I'm not necessarily inventing a digital product. If I'm in media, I'm not necessarily a great storyteller. I might, so there is like an executional part, what I worry about, the sort of creeping influence [00:33:00] of, of systematic thinking.
[00:33:01] Nick Law: It's the executional piece. It's less the inventive piece. But I do think even the inventive piece, because it becomes a zero sum game when you're on the end of this spectrum between system and empathy, right? Because I think the value of systematic thinking is sometimes inversely related to their ability to empathize.
[00:33:21] Nick Law: The opposite is true also, which is why a lot of empathetic thinkers tend not to be CEOs because, 'cause they have to do with big systems and understand how things work. But they're both really important because if you make something that's really inventive for some, for your average human to use it or even to value it, you need that sort of empathetic thing.
[00:33:42] Nick Law: So again, it's like, it's a, it's a zero sum game choosing one over the other. I worry that systematic thinking is taken over, but I'd be equally concerned if only empathetic people were running businesses because it would be still unbalanced. It would be one hemisphere of the blame would be sort of severed from the other and, and you would make bad [00:34:00] decisions.
[00:34:00] Nick Law: So, so I think the, the point is to is to always balance these things and it's just hard because the thing that empathetic people have is they've got a theory of mind. They're able to imagine what someone else. Is going to feel when they see something or when they engage or they're or, or able to imagine what might be useful for someone.
[00:34:22] Nick Law: So you always need that if you've got a customer, right? You've always gotta understand the customer, but you also need something to sell and something sort of inventive and interesting, especially in my industry. And so that's where I think like you sort of classic sort of engineer, inventive engineer may not be a particularly emotionally intelligent, but they're sort of geniuses.
[00:34:42] Nick Law: You know, and sometimes the more they're on that inventive spectrum, the less likely they are to concern themselves with how people feeling. 'cause they're too, they're too connected into how to make this thing work, right? So again, it goes back to like, apple is a great [00:35:00] example of not making this false choice, right?
[00:35:03] Nick Law: Is you know, the things work and people love them, right? You wanna do both of those things. You wanna love things and you wanna love people and you wanna. Make them relate to each other in a way that is, and it comes back to the culture, and it comes back to the principles. Yes. And it also comes back to structure in a way, because if one culture is always ascendant, then that's when you get there.
[00:35:23] Nick Law: Right? So if I'm a creative person, I should be reporting to someone, understands my craft. If I'm a systematic person, I should be reporting to someone who understands what it takes to, you know, be inventive. Uh, but, but often, and more and more you get. Companies where there's this sort of dominant culture at the top, they haven't managed to get that balance at the top.
[00:35:47] Nick Law: And so it becomes difficult. Like in the agency world, there was a whole generation of really interesting digital thinkers that dipped their toe in, in the advertising industries and left immediately because, because they were being [00:36:00] directed, they were nested underneath the old thing. And so art director, copywriter teams were telling experienced designers.
[00:36:07] Nick Law: To take their TV spot and turn into a digital product, it makes absolutely no sense. If I'm an experienced designer and that's, and that's the person above me who doesn't really know what I do, I'm leaving, I'm going to Silicon Valley. And so this is what happened. You know, it happened very swiftly. There was this glimmer that maybe Madison Avenue would, would sort of balance out and have the ability not just to tell stories, but to create great products and services, but.
[00:36:35] Nick Law: But it was squash because you had the storytellers at the top and they wouldn't, they wouldn't balance out the leadership. Now the opposite is true of Silicon Valley, right? There's, there's, there's lots of examples where, where that culture has not understood, you know, how to connect with people in a way that, you know, that sort of is, is [00:37:00] deeper and less sort of transactional and mechanical.
[00:37:02] Tom Butta: Yeah. Yeah. Or understands how to connect with people like the founder, but as the business naturally has the opportunity to scale, you need to open up that up to people that are not just like the founder and yeah, what they do day in and day out, but the people that can benefit from the products that you're offering that can help the business, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:37:23] Nick Law: Yeah. So, no. Yeah, I mean, it just, just because I don't wanna, I don't wanna paint a world where you, where, where you've just got two sorts of people. That is a spectrum from, from systematic to empathetic as a spectrum. There are people in the middle, there are people a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right.
[00:37:40] Nick Law: It's just, what's interesting is that when you get to the very edges, your skillset becomes really deep. So some of the most amazing, empathetic creatives, musicians and filmmakers are are basket case, right? Because they can't manage their lives. Right? But the thing is that you still need. People on the [00:38:00] edges.
[00:38:00] Nick Law: So then you've gotta have people in the middle to sort of connect them often. So again, it's, this is not like a, a war between two types of people because there's a spectrum of different types of people. My point is that there's a lot of value when you get to the edges, but they're very eccentric on the edges.
[00:38:15] Nick Law: So you've gotta figure out how to connect them in ways that, that
[00:38:20] Tom Butta: you're not. Getting off balance. Right. Makes sense. Well, this is a fascinating conversation. I, I just wonder, without opening up another hour's worth of dialogue, if, if you think beyond this, these sort of business silos as the big beast that needs to get tamed, do you think there's anything next in your view of, you know, one of those big kind of hunky challenges that need to be addressed?
[00:38:45] Nick Law: Well, in some ways it's the. Opposite of what we're talking about. So if the thing that distinguished the internet was it connects everything, then the thing that distinguishes AI is that it combines everything. [00:39:00] So, you know, I was talking about how creativity is a sort of synthetic teams. Well, generative AI is a synthetic technology.
[00:39:07] Nick Law: You, you can create things you think generally via, because it brings all these things together. And, and the model is able to make sense of everything and turn into one thing, turn into an answer, turn into an image, turn into, so, so in a way, the siloing of the disciplines becomes less of a problem in creation.
[00:39:28] Nick Law: Right? And then, and then the thing you need to be connecting is a human sensibility with these agents. Artificial. And so, you know, I was talking about the relationship between a doctor, a copywriter, being synthetic. I think we're gonna have that same synthetic relationship between humans and and agents.
[00:39:48] Nick Law: Uh, and so what that means is you've gotta ask the question, well, where's the human value come from? Right? Because there's a lot of stuff, and this was also by the way true when software came along. And, you [00:40:00] know, I spent my early career doing. Pay stop, you know, with a drafting table and a T square and then all of a sudden Photoshop took that job away.
[00:40:08] Nick Law: I was happy for it, but, but I was, I was considered a creative when I was doing that crafting job and there, and there's gonna be almost every job, just part of crafting something, it's gonna go away. So where does a craft come from? Well, it comes from our heads. And in a way that's always been what creativity is.
[00:40:26] Nick Law: Creativity is people that make good decisions now. In the past, it means they make a good decision and then they have to have the sort of the facility to craft whatever that decision is. But now, it's now the craft is a decision, right? Does that look better than that? And my 10,000 hours doing whatever that thing is, has given me the taste, the discernment, the understanding of aesthetics, the understanding of meaning and message and all that sort of stuff.
[00:40:54] Nick Law: So I can make those decisions. And that's what creativity is. So if I think about. The two human qualities [00:41:00] that bookend these agents that are doing everything, that are actually generating everything. It's intention. Okay, what's your strategy and is it singular enough that it can survive the infinite options that you're gonna get as soon as you can create something instantly, right?
[00:41:16] Nick Law: So you need to focus intention, that strategy and and creative decisions. And I could have exactly the same technology that is incredibly powerful. We can create anything. And if I don't have good, if I don't have a focus and I, and I don't have the, the discernment to make good decisions, then I could make rubbish, complete rubbish.
[00:41:37] Nick Law: The technology itself is impressive, but the output could just be garbage because I'm making bad decisions and because I went in without a focus. So I do think that that's the next thing is gonna be figuring out the connection between. Intention decisions and, and these agents that are gonna be sort of amazing and are gonna be, and, and what it also means, by the [00:42:00] way, is that just as I grew up as a creative, doing these more menial but creative tasks, now you've gotta ask a question.
[00:42:07] Nick Law: What, how does a young person enter into a company and become good at something? And the, and the best analogy I can think of is a military where you could become an infantryman or you could go to West Point, become an officer. And I think that everyone needs to go to West Point. So you're gonna have to learn instead of learning how to be a manager by being managed, you're gonna learn how to be a manager by managing right agents.
[00:42:31] Nick Law: Uh, there'll be someone looking over and see what you're doing and make sure it's working. But it's sort of exciting for a young person to learn how to be an officer straight away. So I do think that that's, and so the premium is the original minds that have the sort of the, the discipline of decisions and.
[00:42:50] Nick Law: Intention.
[00:42:51] Tom Butta: Yeah. Well, you know it, it's actually, actually, I think we were, just bring this back and we're gonna wrap up here in a minute. You can apply the same principles you talked about [00:43:00] before to what needs to happen now as it relates to keep getting the most leverage out of this new facility. Right.
[00:43:07] Tom Butta: Ai. Yeah. And that is need to understand what your vision is. You need to have some fundamental principles that you apply. Yeah. And based off those fundamental princes, you now have this practice of how to, of making stuff. Which is different. Yeah. Um, and fast and pretty amazing. But based on those principles, you know, you, you can be in a better position to make better decisions, especially if you have the right people in place.
[00:43:31] Tom Butta: So, well, I'll tell you one of the
[00:43:33] Nick Law: principles that, that, uh, um, I guess has always been true, but it's something that has become particularly urgent now. Because this technology does help you get straight to an answer. Get straight to you. Don't have pro, the people don't enjoy the process, you know, and there are times when they don't wanna enjoy the process, but there are times when you do.
[00:43:53] Nick Law: So. My, my heuristic for designing with generative AI is remove friction from the [00:44:00] mundane, but add texture to the humane. And what I mean by that is left in the hands of the sy systematizes. Every experience will just be about expedience and not experience, and we know that there are times where actually the experience is valuable, even if it slows things down.
[00:44:17] Nick Law: An example would be shopping. Like I could use an agent to shop and get an immediate singular answer to something I'm looking for, but maybe I don't want it. Maybe I like shopping. Maybe I'd like to see 10 options and mull them around and play with them. And maybe that's part of. What makes me human and interesting and idiosyncratic.
[00:44:40] Nick Law: So I think that balance, and again, it's it's at, it's at this intersection, but of systematizing and empathizing. But I do think we need to balance those things because these technologies take us immediately to taking friction away from everything and we just need to know when to add texture back in.
[00:44:58] Tom Butta: Yeah.
[00:44:59] Tom Butta: Cool. [00:45:00] Nick, this is great. We're gonna just move quickly here into this sort of rapid fire, so like Yeah, yeah. Quick response. All. In your life, is there an app that you can't live without?
[00:45:10] Nick Law: Well, I have to say that Instagram has been the one app that I've, 'cause I, I bounced around a lot. I, I actually one of these people that will use different apps and then I won't use 'em in their world.
[00:45:19] Nick Law: The most consistent one since it's inception actually. Been Instagram, and I think it's because I'm visual. I'm pretty visual.
[00:45:26] Tom Butta: Yeah. I, I, I'm, I hope you're actually planning to document your, your amazing photographs from your, uh, what do you call it? Windows? Hashtag Windows. Oh, windows. Yeah. I did that. It's a, it's a sad indictment of how much travel I do, but, but, but they're beautiful photographs.
[00:45:42] Tom Butta: They really are. Um, you've got an amazing eye. Oh, thank you. So, yeah, you should, you should, you should make a picture book out of those. Is there a feature or an experience that you, you know, you
[00:45:56] Nick Law: remember fondly? Just to stay on the theme of Instagram, there was [00:46:00] an app before Instagram and some of, some of us will remember this called Hipster Magic.
[00:46:04] Nick Law: There was a photo app, but it didn't really have the social piece to it. And I think that that was what made it Instagram. So, because if you had described ipso. To someone and then describe Instagram. If you'd left out the social piece, it would've been very similar. And so to me, what, what made Instagram sort of win that little, you know, ancient battle was, was the social piece.
[00:46:32] Nick Law: Yeah. And you know, there's just good things, bad things about social, but um, I think that it is incredible. The good piece is that, is is that the exposure that you have to every person's creativity is amazing.
[00:46:45] Tom Butta: It it really is. Yeah. It really is. Well, I guess it was a good purchase by, by meta and the fact that they've left and they've, and they've mostly left them alone.
[00:46:53] Tom Butta: Right. So that's been great. Well, Nick, thanks so much for your time. It's been a great pleasure and, um. I wish [00:47:00] you a lot of luck and as you continue on your, your amazing journey. Thanks, Sam. I appreciate it. Even though I'm in my autumn years, maybe I'll keep working. Maybe, maybe our paths will come together once again.
[00:47:11] Tom Butta: Yeah, I, I'm sure it will.
[00:47:16] Voiceover: Thank you for listening to Tame the Mobile Beast brought to you by the team at airship. Find out more about how you can help your brand deliver better, more personalized mobile experience@airship.com. If you enjoyed today's episode, please take a moment to subscribe and rate the show.