Jean Freeman is the CEO of Zambezi, one of the largest female-owned businesses in the advertising industry, and has been twice named Small Agency of the Year by the industry publication, AdAge.

She has been recognized as a leading advocate for the advancement of women in the advertising industry. In addition, she’s been named to Adweek’s Disruptors List, included in the “100 People Who Make Advertising Great” by the 4As, received the 3 Cheers Award from The 3% Conference, and named a Working Mother of the Year by She Runs It.

Jean has also been a frequent contributor to trade publications and a respected voice on a number of issues including women in the workplace, leadership, and building a sustainable business.

Ryan Berman likes to help stuck people get unstuck.

As the founder of Courageous Brands, a consulting firm that encourages and helps companies develop more courageous brands and branding – as well as before that, a branding agency called i.d.e.a. - Ryan has spent a career developing meaningful stories for household brands including Hilton, Major League Baseball, PUMA, Subway, and UNICEF.

He works from the foundation of belief that courage can be the ultimate competitive advantage, regardless of who you are or the business you’re in.

His book ‘Return on Courage’ dives into the process of drawing on courage to do more impactful work, both personally and in your business.

Using the methodology unveiled in his book, Ryan also launched Sock Problems: a charitable sock company that allows people to address various problems in the world when they purchase their themed socks.

He’s a man of many talents, interests, and even more enthusiasm!

Chris Denson is a man of many talents and interests.

After earning a degree in packaging engineering and working for a few years as an engineer for Daimler-Chrysler, he packed up his Isuzu Rodeo and moved to LA based on a passing invitation from a TV executive who invited Chris to meet with him if he ever came to LA. Although the meeting never materialized, Chris stayed and began his illustrious career riding life’s roller coaster as an innovator in the marketing world.

While still in college, Chris began doing stand-up comedy in clubs, a pursuit that he continued for a number of years into his career. Most importantly, it was that work that built his skills and confidence in writing, developing a sense of timing, and dealing with rejection from others. He then carried those gifts into screenwriting, production, and building an expertise in marketing based on thoughtful innovation.

In 2014, Chris launched his podcast, Innovation Crush, where he hosts conversations with leaders in the world of innovation. This year, he also released his book, Crushing the Box, 10 Essential Rules for Breaking Essential Rules.

In our conversation, we dig into several areas that we share in common: persistence in the face of adversity, curiosity and asking more effective questions, a willingness to live in a moderate amount of uncertainty, constantly learning through an abundance of ‘micro-failures,” and the positive and negatives of being multi-hyphenated polymaths.

Nicole Ogoff is the Chief Marketing Officer and a Managing Partner at Story Worldwide in New York, a creative branding agency known for authentic story-making on behalf of its clients.
Nicole has built a reputation around her relentless pursuit of effective solutions for her clients which she does by giving enormous attention to details and setting high expectations for both her team and client relationships.
Although I highly value intelligence, there are a lot of brilliant people out there, especially in the world of advertising and branding. Finding people like Nicole who are smart and excel at building deep human connections with their teams as well as clients is much rarer to encounter.
As much as I’m obsessed with the story-making process and the impact that narratives have on our lives, I’ve found very few ways to measure their effectiveness for a business that uses engaging stories to connect with its audience and customers.
Listening to a presentation at the 3% Conference by Nicole and Jacqueline Lieberman, the Managing Director at Story Worldwide, got me excited about sharing their approach with you on this episode. They talked about their process of business story-making and, more importantly, of measuring impact for their clients using an assessment process that I’ve not experienced. One of the insights was the way they use the twelve archetypes of narrative character development to identify a brand’s personality.

Humor is REALLY challenging to get right, and it doesn’t take much to have an advertising message fall far off the mark and turn people away from it altogether.

Kate Baynham is an Associate Creative Director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco and has created work for clients such as Frito Lay, Adobe, Nintendo, Sonic and the Ad Council.

For her work on an AD council campaign to curb bullying called, I Am A Witness, she's won awards at the One Show, the Art Directors Club, a yellow pencil at the Design & Art Directors Awards as well as a Cannes Lion.

And most recently, Kate, along with her creative partner, Hanna Wittmark, was named one of the Next Creative Leaders by the One Club and 3% Movement.

We talk about the importance of taking a strong point of view and her deft use of humor in the work she creates.

The process of composing music – not just writing a song, but composing and layering all of the music and audio effects that move our emotions along – whether it’s in a 30 second TV commercial, video game trailer, or a feature length movie score is a craft that, I believe, is vastly under-appreciated for its ability to move the viewer into and along with the story being presented. As I’ve moved increasingly more into the motion film area of storytelling - after most of my career producing still photographs alone - my appreciation of having the appropriate music accompany the projects we were filming started to rise considerably. But I also realized that I wasn’t alone in my ignorance of all the subtle aspects of effective audio production, especially the scoring and layering of original music.

I’ve invited my guest, Andrea Saparoff, to talk about some of what goes on behind the mysterious curtain of music composition for commercial projects. Based in Los Angeles, Andrea is a composer and sound designer working primarily in the advertising and film/TV industries and has completed projects for scores of clients including Cheerios, Canon, AmEx, Nike, and City of LA as well as films for Lifetime and Hallmark. You can find examples of her work at http://saparoffmusic.com.

This is the second of a two-part series with my guest, Anissa Ferris, focusing on the power of the Enneagram personality tool to create awareness, both for yourself and others, that will transform your relationships and create opportunities for greater meaning and impact. If you’ve not listened to the previous episode, I highly recommend you do that first to give yourself some background on our discussion. In that first episode, Anissa provided an overview of the Enneagram and why it works so well to create awareness and understanding. But more importantly, she explained how that awareness can help you be more effective while burning less of your emotional energy to get your work done. In this episode, Anissa, a psychotherapist and certified Enneagram instructor, goes into a description of each of the nine Enneagram personality types and describes the strengths and challenges each type faces, and how they tend to interact with each other. We’ll discuss both the healthy and unhealthy versions of each type, and how each type uses core strengths to most effectively engage in the world. We’ll try to cover in roughly an hour the information Anissa spends a half-day or more going over in the workshops that she leads.

I first met Anissa Ferris at a birthday celebration for a mutual friend, but her reputation had preceded her since my wife Linda had already spent most of two Saturdays in Anissa’s workshop on the Enneagram, a powerful tool to increase self-awareness and help us understand others.

After only a brief conversation, I was equally taken with Anissa’s enthusiasm for how understanding and applying the Enneagram process can transform lives.

I immediately signed up for her next workshop.

Anissa holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in social work. In 1998, she opened her psychotherapy practice in Raleigh, NC, focused on working with adolescent and adult women dealing with stress, anxiety, depression and grief.

She offers practical guidance to her clients through support and insights that help them to solve problems and achieve positive change.

Her chief aim? To help them develop greater self-awareness that then leads to making more conscious and useful choices and living a more fulfilling life.

Anissa has also been a certified Enneagram teacher in the narrative/oral tradition since 2013. She finds the Enneagram very helpful in providing clients a paradigm for personal growth and lasting change.

“The Enneagram is a powerful and dynamic personality system for self-awareness and understanding others. It describes the structure and dynamics of nine distinct personality patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that represents these nine strategies that we can relate to ourselves, others and the world.”

As an avid gardener, Anissa uses the illustration of a kinked hose to explain how as human beings, we become equally twisted up and kinked.

“We all do this. We lose our flow. We all have certain gifts that we can offer the world. The Enneagram really highlights what our gift is. When we’re kinked up – stressed out, angry, fearful, sad – that’s the kink in the hose. Instead of pausing and going to where the kink is and undoing it, we often jerk on the hose and try to pull out the kink. We all know how that goes. It doesn’t work.

‘The Enneagram helps you identify where the kink is. Some of us are kinked up with fear, some of us with anger, and some of us are kinked up with a frustration that we’re not affirmed or seen. When you put the power of the Enneagram to work, you don’t have to walk all around the yard looking for the kink. You’ll know exactly where it is.”

Building on the work of psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel, Ferris explains that the Enneagram provides the awareness needed to make healthy choices in our lives.

"Frankel said that in-between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is the power to choose. If we can learn to pause, for even a moment, as we make decisions about how to respond, we can lead a more intentional life.”

Each of the Enneagram personality types offers a different lens on the world. “If we can understand how we see the world and then maybe understand that we can learn from someone else and how they see the world, that creates the potential to work together.”

I first encountered Nilofer Merchant’s work through her 2013 TED talk, “Sitting is the Smoking of Our Generation”. I then had the opportunity to meet her last year after her keynote presentation at the 3% Conference in which she laid out her passion for The Power of Onlyness, which happens to be the title of her most recent book. The sub-title of the book, "Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World", is what we talk about in this episode.

Nilofer is personally responsible for launching more than 100 products, netting $18B in sales and has held executive positions at Fortune 500 companies including Apple and Autodesk as well as startups in the early days of the Web. She continues to serve as a consultant and advisor to numerous companies including Logitech, Symantec, HP, and Yahoo.

She is also an avid hiker and wilderness backpacker as well as a lover of all-things-bacon and of dark-chocolate-covered-orange-peels, especially when they’re eaten in France.

I met Becky Buller after her band played at a bluegrass festival I was attending a few months ago. We had just wrapped up filming interviews with some musicians for a project when we slid into some seats for the start of her show. Several people had told me not to miss her performance and, holy hot-strings Batman, I’m glad I didn’t.

Her smooth vocals and fire-y hot fiddle playing along with the tight harmonies and musicianship of a well-meshed band, she tore up the stage. The more I learned about her, the more I wanted to shoehorn into her calendar so that we could have a chat.

This past year, Becky became the first person ever to win in both instrumental and vocal categories at the International Bluegrass Music Association awards, winning both the Fiddler and Female Vocalist Of The Year. In 2015, Becky was named Songwriter of the Year.

In addition to writing for her own band’s originals, she has also had her songs recorded by some of Bluegrass’s best, including Ricky Skaggs, Rhonda Vincent, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, Josh Williams, and Russell Moore & IIIrd Tyme Out.

Becky graduated in 2001 with a public relations degree from East Tennessee State University, where she took part in their Bluegrass, Old-Time and Country Music program.

If you love what you hear, check out the Becky Buller Band’s tour schedule online at her website BeckyBuller.com.