What does the future of branding look like, and why do creative leaders need a stronger voice in the boardroom?
In this episode, Jacob Cass & Matt Davies sit down with Ekaterina Solomeina, creative director, TEDx speaker, co-founder of Future London Academy, and host of Creative Capes, to explore how branding, design, and creative leadership are evolving.
As AI accelerates execution and businesses face more complex cultural, technological, and commercial challenges, the value of creativity is shifting. It is no longer enough for designers and brand leaders to simply make things look good. The real opportunity is to connect creativity to business value, strategic decisions, customer trust, innovation, culture, and growth.
Ekaterina shares her perspective on what separates talented creatives from true creative leaders, why many businesses still underestimate design, and how creatives can better communicate their value in language executives understand.
Together, Jacob and Ekaterina discuss the future of branding, the business value of design, the skills creative leaders need beyond the portfolio, and why more companies would benefit from having creative representation at the highest level.
If you want to become a more strategic, commercially valuable, and future ready creative leader, this conversation is packed with insight.
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding. Branding has always been about more than just logos, campaigns, or clever taglines. But right now, the role of branding is changing fast. As businesses face AI disruption, cultural shifts, talent challenges, and more complex markets, the creative leaders who thrive won’t just make things look good. They’ll connect creativity to business value. So what does the future of branding look like? And what role should creative leaders play in shaping it? That’s what today’s conversation is all about. And today we’re joined by Ekaterina Solomeina. And Ekaterina is a creative director, a TEDx speaker, and co-founder of Future London Academy, an executive school for creatives. And over the past 20 years, she’s worked as a creative director. And in 2013, she co-founded that Academy to help creatives connect, learn and lead at a higher level. So today we’re talking about the future of branding, the business value of design, and what creative leaders can bring to the boardroom. It would be great to hear a little bit of your backstory and how you started Future London Academy and anything else you’d like to share.
Thank you for having me. And yes, it has been quite a journey. I’ve been in branding and creative industry for quite a while. As my official profile mentions 20 years, that’s probably about right, might be a bit longer. And I worked as a creative director and I worked across branding, advertising, anything from traditional branding, rebrands. I was very lucky to work with Michael Wolfe, the founder of Wafolins, absolutely legendary person within the creative industry, who is turning I think 93 this year. So he is the one who one of the, I suppose, legends and figures and branding who inspired me when I was starting within the industry. And now he has his own book as well that I would recommend to everyone because he is just a marvellous and genius person. And yeah, I’ve been working across a variety of design and creative fields from shooting commercials to digital product design or back then multimedia design, whatever we called back then. And I had quite a fun career. I worked with the Nutella Versace, I worked with really cool brands, big campaigns, whatever anyone dreams about. I’ve done it, won awards. But I think one thing that kind of started feeling throughout reaching probably 15 years or something like that, is that you get to this point where you’re already very good at what you do, you won your awards, you established yourself as a brilliant creative person, brilliant branding person, and you’re invited into these boardrooms with CEOs and CFOs and people who make bigger decisions, talk about strategic values of business. You feel like you lack this language to communicate with them. In general, there are less and less places for yourself to learn. I think that’s across any industry, but specifically in the creative industry, the further you go in your career, the less new information you can find that is actually helpful and practical. I think when you’re very junior, you can go on YouTube and literally learn anything from scratch, the more senior you get, the less useful information you can find, but also the less time you have to find it. That was basically my personal pain that started Future London Academy. I wanted the place for myself to learn, I wanted to progress, I didn’t think that my career stops after I’ve done the biggest campaign or whatever, take the boxes that I needed to take as a creative director. I wanted to learn, I wanted to be better. Again, speaking of Michael Wolfe, who still works and was working his whole life, he never retired from doing branding. I saw him as who I want to be, I didn’t want to stop doing my creative work, I wanted to continue to be inspired and also to feel fulfilled by the work I’m doing because if you do the same project, the same type of thing every day and you kind of, you know the recipe, you know how to do a good campaign, you know how to do a good brand, it becomes very repetitive and boring. So I was thinking, how can I continue being inspired, continue learning, continue be the best I could be? And yes, that’s what started Future London Academy. And it has been quite a ride since then. We obviously won awards. Actually, just last year we won the Norman Award for impact on education industry, which is especially important because I feel like we wanted to change not just what we do, but the industry overall. And the Norman, obviously another legend and father of modern design, who wrote Design of Everyday Things. So specifically getting an award from him meant a lot for us. And now all the top creative directors, heads of design come to study on our courses and programs, whether it is from Apple or Netflix. All top companies trust us as the best place to learn about branding, leadership, strategy, business, and all these topics that creatives and designers rarely taught. So I feel very grateful, very privileged, and also excited about what the future is, because there is so much more that will be happening in the industry in the next 10 years, that it excites me to wake up every day.
Awesome. Ekaterina, kudos to you for setting up. I mean, it’s not easy to set anything up, but to do it with such success is incredible. I just wanted to ask you about something you just said. So you mentioned you wanted to change the industry or have that impact. What was it like before? And then what’s the change that you’re making and looking to make in the sector?
Great question. So one thing, there are a few structural things. We as a society, as a, I don’t know, educational industry are set up in a certain way. We go to school, we go kindergarten school, then university, then maybe someone will do a MA or PhD or whatever. And if you do it back to back, which is what a lot of people do, you finish at the end of 25 with your degrees and everything. And then the rest of the life, you’re supposed to figure everything out on your own. So on one hand, you need to make these big decisions of who you want to be, when you grow up, what you want to do at the age of 18. And then for the rest of your life, you have to stick whatever you chose, and not learn in any shape or form, which is ridiculous considering how fast the industry changes, how much exciting innovation going on, and also how cool creativity is, and how much there is to learn from each other. So I always found that setup ridiculous in the first place. So we believe in never stop learning, and this is as Future London Academy our motto, never stop learning because it is true, and especially as a creative, you literally can never stop learning. The second thing that personally was confusing to me is what do you need to learn? Okay, you’ve learned the design, you’re good at design, you practice design, branding, whatever it is, creative skills. You kind of feel confident, I nailed it. I know what I’m doing. What do you learn next? How do you pick the subjects that you need to learn? What would be helpful to help you with your career? And that’s not a linear and easy question. And I personally, and we as a team, spend a lot of time trying to understand, okay, what do you need to learn at this stage in your career? Let’s say you have 10 or 15 years of experience to get to the next level. What are the skills you are missing? Or what skills that have been missing through your education, whether it was formal education through university, or whether you are self-taught designer and creative, who kind of learned everything by doing, what are the things they’re missing? And the answer is business. No one teaches designers business. No one teaches designers strategy in a broader sense. No one teaches designers leadership. And all creatives and designers at some point become leaders, whether it is leaders who manage big teams, or whether it is leaders, meaning people who influence them, even if you’re still one person team, you have a lot of influence. Or how do you influence people? All these things stop creatives and designers from growing further and actually achieving more, which is very sad to see when kind of everyone has this incredible journey until the age of 30, 40, 45, and then kind of gets this confusion point and midlife crisis because what am I supposed to do next? Like I ticked all my boxes. So, yes, that’s what we are trying to change and have been successfully changing for the past 13 years. So it’s a lot of fun.
That question of creative leadership is amazing. Like I do a lot of work with creatives and I do a lot of consulting with creative agencies. And I’ve seen this in my career. I ran a business, creative business for nearly 10 years. And then I went in house at a corporate and ran a creative team. And one of the things that I observed and have continually observed throughout my whole career is that what happens is you get a great designer who’s got a great personality, they’re brilliant, they do great work, and then they get promoted, right? So they go up the ranks and eventually they’re given a team, right? So here’s your team. Now, they’re a great designer or a great marketeer, but they’re not necessarily a great leader. And I see this a lot where that can either people can say, oh, actually I kind of like leading a team or they see it as a real drag because they don’t get to do the work that made them great. So courses on leadership, I think, are really, really kind of key. I wonder if you could share anything like any kind of key tips to anyone perhaps who is just taking on a new team or been promoted into an area that allows them to kind of hire into their team. What sort of tips might you point to to help them?
Sure. And I just first of all want to echo what you just said. This is exactly what happens to the majority of creators. But on top of that, I feel like right now it’s even harder because of the remote work and a lot of people not being in the office. That learning curve of you used to step up as a leader after observing your manager or your boss or whatever, your creative director managing other people for the past five years. So you roll a bottle on it or against it depending on how good your leader was. But you at least know what leadership could look like. Now with a lot of people having flexible and remote work, you might not see what this leadership looks like. And by leadership, I mean this in between conversations, how someone gave feedback, how another person reacted to feedback, what happened next. All these tiny micro-interactions that you see how someone deals with stress, how do you deal with difficult clients? All these things are now hidden behind zooms and homes and conversations that are private. And therefore, you’re right, when a new person steps up as a manager, as a leader, it is a very confusing place to be because you don’t really know what good looks like or what even bad looks like. You haven’t seen anything at all. You might have seen versions of it on maybe TV or maybe worse, TikTok, which do not learn anything from TikTok or rather definitely check your sources when you’re learning anything from TikTok. But it is a confusing place. On top of that, for any new role, you need practice. The one is to know what good looks like and then actually go in and practicing it and making your own mistakes and falling flat on your face. That’s part of it and also being okay with that and knowing that it’s okay. There are lots of micro things that just much harder now than ever before. This is why it’s even more important for learning to provide that support where someone doesn’t burn out when they become a leader. Someone doesn’t quit and feel like, I can’t do it, this is not my thing, like I’m really bad at it.
Yeah, I’ve seen that.
Yes, exactly because you haven’t seen other managers and leaders struggling with the same thing. It’s not easy. No one said it will be easy. But if you haven’t seen that struggle, you’re seeing there’s something wrong with me. I’m not supposed to do this. I’m not built for this. I don’t have skills for that. So equipping people with skills and confidence that they can do it and then support if they need to learn something new, how do you go about it? It’s very important. Now, practical tips. What new managers and new leaders can do? I suppose there are plenty of things and depending of what level of leadership we are talking about, because being a first-time manager leader, there is a lot that you need to understand about yourself as a leader, as a person, your leadership style, and how you can give the best value to your team. I think one just very random tip that I remembered from talking to actually Sir John Huggerty, another legendary person in design and advertising. He was saying, when you give feedback to your team or to any team member, you need to make sure they live with less work rather than with more work. I think it’s such a simple tip, but it’s actually quite profound if you think about it. And finding this balance where what you say, we have lots of ideas, I think. And as a leader, you have many opinions of someone else’s work. But what you say really defines what this other person will do. So how do you plan what you say and how do you provide feedback in a way that will be the most helpful? And one way to go about it is they need to do less work than more work. And it is a really good mind game that you can play before any meeting. Like what is the most helpful in this meeting? What kind of feedback should I provide in this meeting that will move the project further? And then as you progress throughout the career ladder, it’s about your personal skills as a leader, then it becomes about team dynamics. When you become manager of managers, you can’t really see every single person. So it becomes more about influencing people through other people, creating the vision that is compelling, that people can follow, understanding when to step in and where to step out. Again, the bigger the team grows, you can’t be in every meeting. So really understanding the process. We actually have a course on creative leadership that is taught by brilliant person, Matt, who was creative director and head of design of HUGE, which is an iconic creative agency. And he had the highest retention rate in his team. So way above industry average, way above, I forgot the exact number, it was something over 10 years or something. So people who worked for him, stayed with him for a very long time. And again, this is your role as a leader. We know that people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers. So your job becomes about retention, about creating the culture, the fosters, creativity, how you create conditions for creative work to be done. And then how do you know micro-manage? Like, how do you maintain the quality of work that you set, that you know this is what good looks like, but also not be in every single meeting. And Matt actually has this wonderful way where he describes it, kind of looking at the full process of creative work end to end from first initial briefing, getting everything to the end point and sending it to print or publishing or whatever, or is it digital then going live. Which points are the most crucial for you as a creative leader to be in and which ones you don’t need to be? And really being very strategic about that, because we all know the situation when we are too late to give feedback. It’s already going to print. You giving 10 pages of feedback about everything needs to be changed is not going to make anyone happy, not going to make a difference. It actually will create tension in the team and actually probably will produce worse work because now people will start changing things. There will be more mistakes. The final product will be even worse. So how do you think strategically about this overall journey of the project and where you can be in and out of it and where you can be the most helpful to the team, where they do need your opinion, where they do need your support, versus when you step out and let them fail, let them experiment, let them figure things out, but you gave them the criteria of what it looks like. So it’s a tough one. But then the most exciting one is when you go over and beyond that. So now you’re not just managing creative work, you’re managing business. And that I’ve seen the hardest. If the ones that I’ve described, I think there is nothing new, they have been happening throughout generations of creatives. You can read old books on that and there is wisdom in every single one of them and it’s the matter of practice and actually looking at it through the frameworks that someone can provide you. The last step is the hardest because when you get to Chief Design Officer, Chief Creative Officer, or whatever is the highest title, creative title within your organisation, your work stops being about just design, creativity and branding. It becomes, it starts being about business. And leaders within your business expect that you understand that. But a lot of creatives unfortunately don’t make this shift. It’s not natural to us. I don’t think that is natural to anyone to do creative work their entire life, join the industry because we love creativity, because we love doing branding. And then suddenly one day someone says, you know what, it’s not your job anymore. Stop doing this. You cannot be doing creative work. You need to actually think about the business. That’s the hardest part. This is where as Future London Academy, we also try to help leaders navigate this. We have our executive MBA program specifically about that, but also we try to publish content about this because I think this is quite a new shift. It wasn’t like this 10, 20 years ago. It’s definitely even the job title of Chief Design Officer is very new. We have the first Chief Design Officer of United States, former Airbnb co-founder, Microsoft High Chief Design Officer two weeks ago. It’s the first Chief Design Officer at Microsoft, literally two weeks ago through the entire history of the company. It is new. It’s a new shift that is happening in the industry. Anyone who is creative, whether it’s branding, creative design, product design, whatever that is, if you want to prepare for your next 10 years of career, you need to start thinking what you need to pick up now to be ready for that shift.
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I suppose I can approach it from two sides. One is pure creative branding, which is again probably relevant for a big part of your audience and one is more of the strategic and kind of leadership part, which is very much connected. So from the branding side, obviously branding and brands do evolve and change with culture. I think brands reflect culture and society. So therefore, as we evolve as a society, brands and branding changes, that’s normal. So there I wouldn’t be able to predict long term future because literally this is how our society changes. But there are a few interesting things that excite me right now that I can see as, I would call them maybe micro trends, things that are exciting in this moment, anyone working in branding might enjoy. So for example, I love this new trend of that traditional way of thinking about audiences, segmentation, anything else is going away towards being, creating something for one weird person. So we used to think of demographics, and that kind of got canceled in terms of like, there is no such thing as 40 year old, whatever professional working. Then we started talking about psychographics and just kind of behaviors. And now it went into this weird, wonderful world, which I absolutely love, when there are content creators, there are brands who are just going full on weird, literally talking to one weird person out there, whether it is someone who’s super obsessed with some strange trend and let’s go very deep, nerdy about it. And that’s what my brand is all about. You can see a lot of this on TikTok, on social media, on any sort of platform. This is the content that goes viral, not your generic trying to cater to kind of every single person who likes sports and is an athlete or whatever. It is about this finding this very deep, quirky insight about one particular person and literally doubling down on it and making it as weird as possible and that’s what works. And I find it personally more fun because then there is more variety in brands and branding because it’s not, I suppose, commoditized and bland because we’re essentially talking to very similar audiences out there. Everyone wants to target people who have spending budgets in their prime time of buying and being interested in brands and culture and all of this. And a lot of brands define their audience as this influential and affluent people. Their love, quality and love, I can appreciate good brands. But with all honesty, it’s all about the one weird person they can find out there that you’re talking to. And turns out that if you talk to one, there are many other weird people who resonate with what you’re saying, so you don’t need to be afraid of that. And I suppose distribution helps with that. I think back then, when I suppose we started all in branding and advertising, that was a risky strategy because the distribution wasn’t there. You can be talking to this one person on one billboard, and this one person doesn’t live in this one city, so you kind of missed the whole opportunity of talking to your audience. But now with, again, social media, giving access to global audiences, you can have millions of people who feed this one quirky profile across the world and really, really resonating what you have to say. So that’s, I suppose, one example, but there are so many other things that, again, all about cultural relevance and all about brands, moving along with culture, not being stuck in what branding used to be, balancing consistency, balancing strong vision, strong point of view and all the other things. The second shift that excites me is obviously about branding as an industry and brand professionals, creative directors, branding strategists are moving now into the business conversations, which is, again, something that I already mentioned is happening across all design and creative industries. Design is being seen as a strategic tool more and more because with technology being commoditized, anyone can vibe code an app in a day, anyone can copy anything. Again, the actual visual skills, visualization skills are being commoditized. It comes back to imagination, it comes back to vision, it comes back to creative problem-solving. That’s what’s unique about any creative professional. We are trained in that way, we literally practice this every day, we can solve problems in unconventional ways whether it’s business problem, whether it’s creative problems, whether it’s marketing and branding problems. And that becomes the main value. Now to make sure that the rest of the organization sees this as a value, the creative and branding professionals need to understand the business side. So if you just come to your boardroom and say, in the age of AI, branding is the only thing that can differentiate us. We need to really invest more money in branding. Branding is amazing. Look, this latest campaign they have done is really cool. This re-brand, look how great typography is and this special effects and everything. And we can like, they will shut down immediately and they wouldn’t be interested in hearing what you have to say. Now, if as a creative or branding professional, come to the board, CEO, founder, whatever, the business person and say, I can help you increase your market share. I noticed that your tea brand or whatever is currently only consumed by mainly people who are kind of just looking for a cheapest brand to buy and whatever is on the shelf. But I can see how we can shift it to the demographic that cares about health, because we actually use these great ingredients that are higher quality. So we can appeal to this new wave of people who are very conscious about what the tea bag is made from and what goes into each tea leaf. And we can actually have that very clear in the packaging, in the brand and communication and everything. And that opens us total addressable market of an extra, let’s say, one billion people globally and within our current market of the UK or Australia, wherever you are, that even if we take a market share of 2%, this will increase sales by this amount of money. On top of that, our customer acquisition cost will go down because currently we are running ads very inefficiently because we are competing with all brands on the generic messaging of just buy tea and this is good tea. If we start talking about our ingredients and health and everything else, then we can run an experiment and see, and maybe I already ran an experiment and saw the ad that talks more about health benefit, customer acquisition cost goes down, the lending page will be optimized for that. Again, you can start talking about business metric and how you can save company money or make company more money. Any CEO, CMO or business leader will love you because you just came to them telling them how their company can make more money, grow their audience or save money on all the efforts they’re doing. Then you’ll become their best friend, you’ll become the go-to person for any advice, any conversation. Yes, you’re doing it through creative work and branding, but you have this unique insight how to make business grow and that’s what matters.
Yeah, that’s about the strategy question, isn’t it? Growing the brand from a business perspective, as you say, like you’ve got to have both sides, haven’t you? You’ve got to have that creative brand edge, understanding consumers, understanding the problem that’s being solved, understanding how to communicate. But then you have to plug that into an organization that can deliver on that. So it’s about harmonizing both sides. Such a challenge and so needed. So it sounds like you’re doing some really awesome work. I had a question for you. Obviously, Future London Academy, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t ask you about the rise of AI into the future and what your take on where that’s going to push the industry in the future. So, AI, go, Ekaterina.
Great question. I was wondering if we can-
You knew it was coming. No, I took.
But it’s actually quite interesting. We were having this conversation yesterday. So obviously, as Future London Academy, we teach about the future and everything that is going. So naturally, we are in the industry with top leaders constantly having this conversation, what they’re seeing, what they’re feeling. Yesterday, we actually were sitting with some of top CEOs and CFOs as part of our final judging panel for our Executive MBA program. We were just discussing what they’re seeing in the industry and what shifts. They were comparing, I suppose, our wonderful alumni who were graduating and presenting their final projects. Again, trying to sense what is the feeling in the market. What they said is quite interesting. I think this year became less about AI overall in general. I don’t know if you see that in your conversations. I think last year was definitely very AI focused, very AI heavy about how we can use AI for this, how we can use AI for that, how it will change. This year, it’s becoming a bit of more of an underlying conversation out there, that AI is there, it’s not going away. There is a bit of a fear and uncertainty regarding the industry, the job market. There are so many uncertainties about who we are, what our jobs and professions will look like. But there is no urge to suddenly plug AI in everything that we do. I think everyone played enough with it to understand where it can be used, where it can have limitation. It obviously evolves very fast, so we’ll see more new use cases. There is a big shift on obviously using AI for operationalizing companies, and that’s where there is a massive impact that is being seen on making companies more effective and kind of going operational side companies or people in general, making people more effective. Now within the creative world, as any tool, I think it has so many great things that it has to offer. And we’ve been through many shifts throughout our careers, from Internet and Photoshop appearing to many more tools like Figma appearing. I actually remember when I was in one of the agencies, and obviously back then it was Photoshop that we used to draw and to create branding. And I remember I had an art director who said, you can’t really say that you created a good branding if you haven’t drawn it by hand, because he was trained to draw everything by hand with all those curvy rulers. And I think there is some beauty in doing everything by hand. It definitely helps your thinking process. But it’s not how I was trained. And I might sketch something about I wouldn’t do the final version of the logo using this all special rulers and circles and things to create the shape. And I remember at that point thinking how interesting, like clearly I grew up in a completely different era that doesn’t even come across my mind. And I think that’s what the future generation will feel like. Whatever we are using as tools now to do creative work, to do branding will be very different 10 years in the future. And we have to adapt, we have not to be stuck to our way of thinking, but also we need to understand what we can offer as humans, as creative, which is unique. And it probably won’t be the very good visualization skills, but it probably will be something around thinking about understanding humans, because at the end of the day, these brands will be consumed by humans. And we’re closer to humans than AI, so we understand better. It will be a lot about communication as well. And I think that’s where AI lacks a lot. I think there is a difference between writing or summarizing versus good copywriting. And I think we all know the difference. I read somewhere, I think one of the copywriters saying, now you know how we all felt the entire time when everyone said they could write, but copywriting is not writing. And I feel like this is exactly what we are experiencing in other parts. The fact that you can write doesn’t mean you’re good at writing. The fact that you can create an image doesn’t mean it’s a good image or brand strategy. Even if Chad GPT or Claude wrote you a go-to-market or brand strategy, it doesn’t mean it’s a good one. And it requires understanding in the context and connecting many pieces to actually decide what good looks like. So I am excited about where the industry is going, because I don’t think it would be fun to work in an industry that is just stuck and it’s the same and nothing changes. It’s great to see changes. I don’t know where it will push us. I can appreciate and empathize with an anxiety that is out there, that is tough. But the only thing we all can do as creatives, as humans is not be scared and just trying things out, playing around and seeing where we want to go as professionals.
All right. From here, I’d love to just loop back to it.
I love that there is no one wants to go deep into conversation about AI. This is exactly what I feel like this year is all about. If last year we would have had a debate for another half an hour, what AI can and cannot do, what it’s shifting or not shifting right now, everyone’s like, oh yeah, that’s what it is. Let’s move on.
Every conversation has been about AI, but there’s always a different perspective, especially depending on what the conversation is about. But I do want to go back to the creative leadership thing we’re talking about because that’s the theme of this. And getting creative leaders into boardrooms, like going upstream a little bit more. So how do we actually go about that? Like what are creators doing wrong and what should they be doing to actually get there?
My favorite question, and literally this is where we are putting a lot of efforts for Future London Academy to make sure there are more creatives and designers at that board level. For many reasons, I personally believe that obviously creativity and design has enormous power. And as I already mentioned, first of all, it’s a very unique perspective and skill set that creative or design leader can add to the boardroom with their creative problem solving, imagination, empathy, and all of that the businesses need. Now, yes, to growth of businesses and growing their revenue, but I also feel like creatives and designers are the only ones currently who care about sustainability, ethics, humanity, other things that maybe CRO or CFO or COO might not be as obsessed about. And we need those people in those high level conversations to make sure these big companies, we as consumers, we as humans are all influenced by and affected by. We want someone speaking on our behalf there in the boardrooms and shifting this decision in the right direction. And I would dare to say not just companies, but governments and other organizations where decisions will affect all of us. I want more creatives to be there because they won’t make decisions just from the pure financial, capitalistic point of view. They will make decisions understanding the broader context, the system thinking aspect of it, the humans they involved in it, the planet they is involved in it, and all these other things that very naturally as humans we are drawn to. And in general, we come from a place of curiosity and open-mindedness that is very often lacking at that. So one is I just generally want more people to be at that level. Now, we’re not there yet. The trend is positive. And I already mentioned that there are more and more chief design offices and chief creative offices appearing in larger organizations, which is a great thing, which shows that there is a massive opportunity for anyone who is a creative designer right now to step up to those roles. But you’re right, this is not as easy as just wishing that you get the role and then getting it or just applying for it. And there are a few elements. One is understanding the business context, understanding business language, understanding how businesses are operating. And again, it’s not something as creatives as designers we are ever thought, through the design schools or self-education. These are not the conversations that come up for us throughout our careers. So if we want to make this strategic move to boardrooms and chief design offer positions, or even if you are an independent person and just want to win bigger clients because they will trust you bigger budgets, you need to understand the business side. So when the client comes to you, you don’t offer them every brand. You don’t offer them a creative campaign. You offer them a business solution. And for that, you need to understand what pain point the business has, what metrics they’re using to address it, what is the strategic metrics they are having this year as the numbers they need to hit. The CEO would not care about rebranding new packaging or whatever. The CEO cares about whether they’re hitting this financial target. Or maybe it’s not about financial target. Maybe it’s about market growth and they’re actually not trying to make profit this year. They’re trying to invest as much money as possible into securing a bigger market share. So again, that’s where you can come in and offer that strategy how to secure market share. So it’s not one-feet-all. You really need to understand what’s happening inside that business that you’re talking to or you’re part of. What are the strategic business priorities and how you can help influence them through your creative and design work. And for that, yes, you need to understand operations, finance, P&L, marketing, logistics and supply chain, all sorts of subjects that are not on designer’s agenda whatsoever. And this is the reason why we have our executive MBA that literally teaches that because there is literally no place. If you go to a traditional MBA, even though they technically cover those subjects, they cover it from perspective of non-creative business. You actually cannot apply that to your work. You will learn what an ideal P&L might look like. But when you go to your company and look at the real P&L, it’s like, I have no idea how to translate that knowledge to what I’m looking at. So P&L, by the way, Profit and Loss Statement for anyone who is not at P&L stage yet. It’s the most important document, one of the three most important documents in financial statement universe for businesses. So very important to understand how to read one and which one to read as well.
Can I just jump in there? Yes. Having that language is one thing, but one thing I’ve experienced in my career is, I’ve got a background in design, is that one thing that we as creatives are brilliant at is about stepping into, looking at all the information that’s available to us, assessing that, figuring out what’s important, and then stepping forward and proposing ways forward. That might be a little uncertain, we’ll obviously going to base it on the knowledge that we’ve got, but we’re used to stepping into the unknown. We’re used to trying stuff, designing stuff. I’ve shifted my career from doing the actual designing of, I guess, marketing materials and advertising and creative stuff like that, to actually helping business leaders designing parts of their business, like exactly what you were saying. I just think there’s so much that we as creatives have to offer modern business in a way that, because we think in a completely different way to people who are, they like surety, they like the data, they like the numbers. But if you want to progress, if you want to innovate, if you want to change things up, you can’t just look back at the safety of yesterday. You have to step forward into the unknown of tomorrow. So I just wanted to clap you on that one. We’ve got to give people the vocabulary, we’ve got to give people the knowledge and the information. But then don’t lose sight of what makes us great as creatives. I think that’s such an important point to make.
I’m glad you mentioned that. This is exactly, I 100 percent agree with you. And I suppose these are the two sides of the coin. So as with any game, you need to learn the rules, how to play it, but then you need to have the skills and the tricks. So yes, the finance and the business is literally the rules of the game. You cannot be influential within the business if you don’t understand how business works. It’s just no one going to listen to you, no matter how many tricks you have up your sleeve. Now, when you do get to those conversations, when people trust you, they understand you’re a decent person, you understand, you have the intention to grow this business together with all of us. Now, exactly to your point, what unique do you bring as a creative person? Because there is no point in all of us turning into CFOs. We don’t want anyone who goes through Future London Academy programs to become a CFO or just be a business person. That would be a very boring wall to live in. There are enough of people who are just obsessed about business, and it’s fantastic. And I think it’s great. There are people who love numbers, who love looking at spreadsheets. Creatives should understand spreadsheets, should tolerate them to a certain extent. They don’t need necessarily to obsess about them, and maybe they can spend their time actually doing exactly what you said, creative problems or imagination division. That’s, I suppose, what creatives most well-known for is setting up this vision for the company, and Steve Jobses of the world who are setting up where we are going, and we might not see what it is, but these creative leaders can visualize it for us, visualize in the verbal way, visualize in a very practical visual way, so they can help visualize the future. This is what creativity is. It helps in the world of uncertainty, in a world where no one knows in general what the future looks like, but also where even every day changes so much, creatives can provide that tactile, that visualized prototype version of the future and align people around it, so we can all move forward in the same direction. Previously, throughout the, suppose, the history of creativity has been done through, again, creating a prototype that everyone can believe in or creating a visual deck or whatever this is, for people to believe in the future, because if we all sit in the room and we just talk, we all have different picture of what the future looks like, so a creative coming in and using the facilitation tools of what it is all drawing together, what it is us creating one sentence that we believe in, that what the future is and just really aligning all the people with different opinions in the room around the vision we all believe in, that’s one of the skills. Another brilliant skill is obviously the different point of view and creative problem-solving, seeing the system, seeing the connection between the user and the business and the market and kind of all the different elements. Again, that’s another very important point of view. And I think that’s what creatives want to bring anyway, so I don’t think they necessarily need to be taught that, but I think the rules of the game is what stops them from bringing this vision across and communicate it in the way that other leaders will appear. And actually, communication, like speaking of AI and everything else, that’s probably one of the most important skills that we all will have to learn and relearn in the next 10 years. And communication has always been difficult. And the more senior you get, the more important communication becomes because potentially you only have 10 minutes or one minute with a senior person to get your idea across or ask a question or get the information you need to make the next step. So you really need to be super clear about what are you communicating, how you’re communicating that. And I think being able to be concise, being able to be clear, being able to ask the right questions, it is some of the most important skill for any leader, not just creative, but anyone who is moving up that ladder, who wants to be in those conversations. We actually, one of the, our faculty members who teach in our executive program, our executive MBA for design leaders, is executive recruiter for Google. So he basically hires C-level for Google. So it’s fascinating to hear what he had to say, what he looks for when he hires for C-level versus top management or lead, mid-management, and what skills you actually need to have at that level. And a lot of it comes down to communication, because hopefully by that time, if you’re already at that top VP position, you’re probably good at your job. I think you proved yourself. That’s a note. Now, can you communicate with a lot of people in a clear way where your message is not lost? Because again, you might be at Google. There are thousands of people who work in the organization. How can you make sure that at that level, whatever you communicate is cascaded down across all departments and not gets lost because you don’t have the luxury of talking to every single person. You don’t have a luxury to be in many meetings. So how can you learn these communication skills that actually will make you influential, trustworthy, and visionary leader? That’s a massive skill to learn. And again, this is all this big package of skills that creatives and designers are never learned, never taught. And that’s, yeah, that’s we at Future London Academy believe that a massive gap is. And I hope there are more creatives who do that, because I think if creatives don’t step up, unfortunately, someone will take that position of chief design and chief creative officers who may be been in a short course about design and speaks business very well and maybe can dress up and look like a designer. And for the rest of the business, it would be creative enough to make creative decisions, maybe not as grounded in the broader system thinking as traditional creatives and designers.
All right, I do have a follow up question to make it a little bit more practical, because there is such a huge gap and there’s so much to learn to climb that ladder to get to that spot. So, for someone listening to this, what would be some practical first steps to get started? They may not have the means for a huge course or MBA or anything like that, but how do they get going?
If you’re working in a company, first of all, befriend people from other departments. So, go for a coffee with your finance person, your marketing person, your salesperson, your legal person. Just befriend them. You don’t need to have too deep of a conversation. Just try to understand what they worry about, what they care about, what’s on their mind. Have you ever had a coffee with a legal person? Have you ever had a coffee with a finance person? If you haven’t, literally invite them tomorrow. They’re also humans. They also have their lives and families and interests. Trust me, you’ll learn so much from just talking to them in a friendly matter. So ask what are their priorities? You might be trying to approve your budget for the new rebrand or for hiring more people in your design team for the past six months and hitting the wall. If you take for a coffee a few people from finance and understand what pressures they are on, what costs they’re trying to cut, but where are they giving budget? Where CEO said, you know what this line on the P&L or this area of our business, spend as much as you need, this is a priority right now. We’re expanding to Brazil and whatever we need to do to expand to Brazil, that’s what you spend money on. Now, that is a massive insight. So now if you say, I want to grow my design team because I actually want to start hiring more people in Brazil, we can have the local insight into the culture and the what’s happening within consumers, within that market and we will have team on the ground that can make our brand more relevant in those markets. Look at that, you already sign off yourself a budget for a new hire. So if you don’t know these things, you don’t know why you’re hearing no, whether it’s for your personal promotion, whether it is for some decisions that you’re trying to make within your creative or branding or design world. So take anyone for a coffee, have a chat, that’s step number one. If you are a consultant, if you are an individual freelancer or someone who tries to win bigger clients, I would say the same, ask clients more questions. Ask them what are they really trying to achieve. Yes, they come to you with a new branding or new website they need or app or whatever they came to you for or packaging, poster. I don’t know what they ask you to create. Why are they asking you to create that? What is this video that you’re shooting? What is it for? Is it to create brand awareness? And the only thing they care about is that their brand is out there and more people can see it and they just try to be more visible in the UK market. Fantastic. Then what do you need to make it happen, to make it more visible in the UK market? Is it a video that you need to show to be more visible in the UK market? If YouTube doesn’t have any followers, and this video will be dropped to five lovely people who will watch it, is that really where the budget should be spent? Or should it be maybe more social collabs with influences? Yes, you will use your lovely strategic thinking as a cinematographer and videographer to curate this content, because you know all the influences within the industry. You will co-create Instagram content with them, and that will give them visibility within the UK market using the skills that you have. But maybe it’s not this beautiful, glamorous video that you were asked to create, because what happens then? You take this project and you deliver it to the perfection. Now it didn’t make any impact. The client hopes that this massive video, they’ve seen these videos do well, they go viral and then the fame comes, and then it didn’t. And then you’ll never be hired again by this company because they spent money on you, you didn’t bring any money back, why would they hire you? Now, if you dug deeper and really understood what they’re trying to do and really tried to help them achieve that through the tools that you have, through the network that you have, through the skills that you have, even if you don’t succeed to the highest point, nothing is guaranteed in this life. But if the client sees that you really try to understand what problem they’re trying to solve, you genuinely try to help them solve this problem and grow. They will write signs here and there. There is a bit of mention here, influencer reshared it there, and maybe this real got at least some views compared to this video that would have set on their website, maybe, I don’t know where. Then you can already say, look, this is what we learned from this, this is what we done right. If you want to do it again, I think this is how I can help you again. But it all starts with conversation and all starts with question. Ask what are you as a client, as a business trying to achieve? And is that what you ask me to do? Are we 100% sure we’re going to achieve it? And how are we going to measure that we achieve that? Is it views on the video or is it even the new packaging? Are we expecting the increase of sales, increase of sales in which market, of which audience, new audience, existing audience? What are we trying to do? Let’s set the targets up. So we’ll set up each other for success and then we’ll continue this relationship for the future.
Love that. It’s about, I think that’s such a great tip to give people like around asking the right questions, right? Don’t just take a brief, do the brief. Like if you don’t understand what’s behind it, then you’ve got a problem. I always like to think you’re there to improve the client’s condition. You know, and when I say client, it’s like your client could be internal or external, right? It could be someone’s hiring you. So you’ve got to understand what improvement means to them, what problems they’ve got and what they’re looking for you to help them to solve. And there’s loads around that, isn’t there? There’s the root issue, but then there’s probably also a little bit periphery kind of challenges. You know, I often get asked to help with communication of a strategy, for example. That’s not normally why I’m hired. I’m hired to help craft the strategy, but then I find that there’s a need within the leadership team or wherever it might be that they could do with a hand, someone stepping up at the town hall and sharing it in a high-energy, exciting and hopefully bearded way. And that kind of works. So you’re right. It’s about what’s the challenge? What’s the problem? How can I add value? And really picking that apart. So I think that’s a great tip.
Thank you. And also having a coffee chat, I think what you’re doing there is trying to get some leverage or insight, as you mentioned, because everyone in an organization has their own agenda. And if you can tap into that to understand how can you help them and they help you, that’s going to help you get a little bit of leverage for whatever.
And it’s also about building relationships, right? People don’t ever, as you were saying, Ekaterina, no one sort of trains you in this. It’s like relationships are everything, like influences everything. And just building empathy and understanding, and just kind of being seen around as somebody who’s connected and thoughtful, and just a nice person to be around, rather than this kind of grumpy creative who sits in the corner, kind of demanding that everybody looks at Kerning and Pantone swatches. You need to be connected. You need to understand the reality of what happens outside of your bubble. And I think that’s such another great thing. Relationships are underplayed. We talked about AI a moment ago. That’s one thing AI can never do. It can’t build those human-to-human connections and build those relationships around a business to help then influence it going forward. So usually mine is with beer rather than coffee. But I definitely think I’d definitely recommend the same thing because you would learn so much from other people and building those relationships. And it’s free. And it’s free, right? And then if you do want to kind of push an idea forward or you need them to back you at a moment, if you’ve already got a relationship in place, a working relationship, that could be so helpful because even if you’re in a competitive environment, if somebody’s had a coffee with yourself, but then the other person that’s sort of countering you, they haven’t had a coffee with, they can’t help it. Humans will instinctively connect with the people and back the people that they feel that they understand. So I think that’s so crucial. More coffee is needed and beers. Jacob, drink the pasta.
I’ll write that one down. Awesome. All right. There’s one final segment I’d love to just go a little bit into is your podcast. You wrote a podcast too, Creative Capes, and you’ve interviewed some really top-tier guests. Is there any insights you’d like to share from some of your episodes or anything else you just want to unpack?
So many, and yes, I’ve been very lucky to sit together with some of the most inspiring guests including Michael Wolfe. We actually visited his house. Everyone wants to see how Michael Wolfe’s house looks like. Go to our YouTube, check out the episode with him, and all the paintings he has. It’s actually, I think maybe the biggest learning for me is going inside people’s minds. I think practical tips and tricks, I can list many and there are many that they share. But I feel like what is very unique that I try to do without podcast, and I’m very lucky that people who come to our podcast, majority of them are my very good friends and my former colleagues, or people who I worked with, so they trust me and our team that we will do a good job. They invite us to their houses, so we just filmed an interview with James Hilton, who is the co-founder of AKQA, one of the iconic digital creative agencies that I think he sold majority of the stake for half a billion dollars to WPP in a few years back. So he did very well. They have offices, I think, in 13 different countries, something like that. So they’re a massive company, and he is reflecting on obviously his years in the industry and what he has been doing to grow the company, but also what he has done since and kind of what he reflects on. He may be done wrong while growing his business. And that’s valuable insight into his life. But what’s even more exciting, we went to his house. So he invited, he’s a very reserved person. He’s very introverted person. He doesn’t invite people around. But he trusts us and he loves, he also teaches in our executive MBA program. So he’s seen what we try to bring to the industry. So he believes that this is something that is needed and this is why he keeps collaborating with us. And he showed us around his house, his vinyls that he has, the books that he reads, how his work desk looks like, the first thing that he bought when he earned his big money. Like it’s a fascinating insight into someone else’s life. And I think that’s where creativity comes from. Speaking again about remote or in-person, we miss out on all these in-betweens right now. We have very strategic and well-planned conversations over Zoom. We have an agenda. We know what needs to be discussed. We finish on time. We’ve done everything. But we miss out on the in-betweens of the water cooler conversations, of the things that are currently on your mind. And they’re not really about anything, but it’s just something I thought about, I want to mention. But I watched these episodes or something on Netflix or Apple TV or who knows, or I actually went to this museum. Random things or something about my dog or my cat, who knows, this in-between conversations, this is what gives us inspirations as creatives. And we don’t have enough of them right now in our lives. So that’s what we try to provide with Creative Capes Podcast and really get into the insides of these minds. And we just launched the latest episode with Ivy Ross, Chief Design Officer for Hardware Devices at Google. So she’s the, again, Chief Design Officer got to this C-level. But she’s, she worked at Mattel, she partied with Calvin Klein, she was at Studio 54. She had just such an incredible life. They just like, I could listen to her for hours. And yes, I learned a lot from her about Chief Design Officer and the value of business, how to bring it to the boardroom. But I also learned so much about her as how to be inhuman, how to live this life so you stay inspired, you feel happy, you feel fulfilled, and you actually enjoy this journey that you have. So if you want to have a broader conversation about what creativity and design is, but also understand what business impact it can have, definitely check it out.
Yeah, it’s amazing. And that’s how I feel about interviewing folks like yourself. You interview passionate people that have so much energy that they bring to the table and they share it and you just learn from those different perspectives. So thank you for coming in today and sharing your wisdom. And thank you so much. Is there any closing remarks you want to share and where can people connect with you and learn more?
Thank you. And I’m a very friendly person. So anyone listening, please connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s Ekaterina Solomeina. It’s a very long name, so I’m sure it’s in the title of this podcast, in the show notes somewhere. Find it. I love meeting new people. So Ekaterina Solomeina on LinkedIn. Do find me. Obviously, follow Future London Academy. We are on all social networks. You can find us. We constantly provide insights from the industry in a very short and very easy form. Our podcast, Creative Capes, obviously listen to that. And if you are the person who feel like, okay, now is the time when I’m ready to become Chief Design Officer or Chief Creative Officer, obviously check out our Executive Program for Design Leaders, our executive MBA program essentially that teaches all these things in London and Silicon Valley. So it’s an immersive year experience. So definitely changed so many lives and it just keeps inspiring me seeing what our alumni do from their career perspective and from business perspective. Yeah, and I think keep doing what you’re doing. If you’re listening to this podcast, you must be a very curious, creative person. So first of all, you must be curious to listen to some new information. So well done to you. Don’t never stop being curious. That’s what makes creativity. And also never stop creating. I think it’s so important in the world that we live right now. Never stop that creative process. And as you said, Matt, like even when you get to this strategic conversation, still be creative, be that person who comes up with those ideas. Yes, learn business, learn how to translate your ideas, but yeah, keep doing what you’re doing. And our life will be better with more creatives at all sorts of leadership and influential positions.
Nice. I think we should close with the slogan from Future London Academy, right? Like, would you agree, Ekaterina, do you want to remind us of the slogan?
Oh, you mean our manifesto?
Yeah.
Well, no, you said it earlier.
I’ll never stop learning. Actually, can I read our manifesto because I think…
Let’s do it. So never stop learning. This is the manifesto. Go on.
Manifesto from Future London Academy. You’re brave and conventional, weird, fun, intelligent, passionate, positive, sarcastic, hardworking, imaginative, introverted, extroverted, ingenious, innovative, wise, original, always young, resourceful. You’re here to erase borders, question everything, inspire others, ignite ideas, make friends, challenge the impossible, start a movement, invent solutions, think different, change the world and never, never stop learning.
Boom.
There we are.
Thanks so much for coming on.
We’ve really enjoyed this conversation and best of luck to you and everybody in your team for all the great work you’re doing over there. So appreciate you and kudos to you. So thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.