Building Sustainable Success Through Irrelevance
Renowned advisor and podcast host, Charles Day, offers key insights for long-term success and highlights the impact of trust and self-awareness for cultivating effective, fearless leadership
Charles Day is an advisor to innovative and creative companies, from iconic global brands to founder-led startups. He works with individual leaders and teams to help them identify their strengths and unlock their potential. His work combines both the strategic and human dynamics of leadership.
Charles is also the host of the acclaimed 'Fearless Creative Leadership' podcast, which features conversations with the world’s most original and inspiring business leaders about what makes them successful—from the pragmatic to the personal. The podcast boasts almost 300 episodes, and he’s talked to some of the biggest names in the industry.
Charles is a frequent contributor to Fast Company. He has also been an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, teaching about the art and science of building companies that unlock 'Profitable Creativity,’ and a coach in Harvard Business School’s Executive Education Program.
The Continuum recently sat down with Charles to discuss his career, his advice to the leaders he works with, and why defining success is so important.
You’ve made quite a name for yourself in advertising and marketing, with a long-running podcast and serving as a coach to leaders in the field. What was the journey that brought you here?
I grew up in England and was not a great academic student. At 19, having failed my A-Levels twice, my father gave me the choice of getting a job or moving to the US and going to a college I'd never heard of. I thought the second option sounded much better, which is how I ended up at Beloit, a wonderful, small liberal arts college in Wisconsin.
Coming out of that, I got a job working for Ogilvy in New York. This was back when it was still an independent, privately held company, and you would see David occasionally walking the halls. There was a real cultural distinctiveness about Ogilvy back then; the ethos of the place, the way that you were taught and trained, and the way they invested in you was just extraordinary. I learned a lot from that.
I loved Ogilvy, but I didn't very much like New York my first time living there. So, I asked if they'd moved me to Chicago. I spent the next seven or eight years at Ogilvy in Chicago doing most of the things you could do at an agency back then—I started in media, moved into account management, and ended up in production. Along the way, I learned that fundamentally, I’m a problem solver.
When you left Ogilvy, you started a film editing company even though you were never a film editor. How did that come about?
I left Ogilvy and went to DDB, where I met the woman who became my business partner and wife. We had this totally platonic relationship for two or three years, and then, one night, we went to see a Bruce Hornsby concert. After about the fourth song, I turned to her and said, “I love being here with you.” She said, “I love being here with you too.” And suddenly, the whole world changed. Now, this very powerful professional partnership also had a personal side, and after a few months, we realized, you know, we could do something with this.
We decided we would start a film editing company. Neither of us were film editors, but we'd worked with many of them in our roles on the production side. We found an investor and set a really clear goal - to create the world’s best film editing company.
The post-production world back then was very insular and very, very local. But even then, the ad industry itself didn't work that way. You would have Chicago agencies doing shoots in LA with London-based directors, and then they wanted to do the post-production with somebody in London or the music with a friend in Austin or Minneapolis. We wanted to create a company that made it easy for them to do this. Remember, in 1994, a networked company was technologically very hard. Most people were still doing the “you’ve got mail” thing with AOL. But we were very conscious of trying to build a company that was always living in the future.
By the time we left the Whitehouse after 11 years, we’d built offices in New York, Chicago, LA and London that were totally interconnected. The job could be shot in LA for an agency working with one of our editors in London. Shortly after the shoot, the dailies could be digitized into our system in LA, and our London-based editor could be working on the project hours later. It was a revolutionary company and ahead of its time. It still is.
“We realized, sort of instinctively, that the best way to build a creative service business is to do it in such a way that you become irrelevant to its success.”
Speaking of leaving, you said you set out to make yourselves irrelevant. That’s not something most founders think about. Why did you set this as a goal, and how did you implement it?
We realized, sort of instinctively, that the best way to build a creative service business is to do it in such a way that you become irrelevant to its success. If you do that, the business continues after your own level of interest in the work has ended. So many creative service businesses are really successful and relevant for the period that their founders remain fashionable as talent or passionate about the business. But as soon as that wanes, the company starts to lose energy and strength. It’s why, to this day, you don't see many creative service businesses over 35 or 40 years old. We didn't want to do that. We wanted to build something that would last.
In terms of how you do that, some of it is attitude. From an entrepreneurial founder-driven standpoint, there's a real ego dynamic in the beginning. You have to put the whole company on your back at first. You have to have a clear vision and be willing to say, “This is what we're trying to do,” “These are the standards that we apply,” and “These are the kinds of people we're looking for.” That has to be driven by you for a while, but then it has to evolve. You must start hiring people and developing them into management and leadership roles. You have to make taking responsibility part of the organization’s culture and operational practices. You have to start looking at every situation, saying, “Okay, how do we do this so that I'm not the only person who provides that reference point, answer, standard, or expectation?”
A lot of it is being able to put your ego aside and not be afraid of making yourself superfluous. I think a lot of founders worry about irrelevance and say, “Oh, my God, they don’t need me.” Well, the fact is, you still own the equity, so you get to control when that happens, but the way to build sustainable businesses is to make yourselves irrelevant over time.
After 11 years, we realized we'd reached the point where the company was, by every measure, the most successful film editing company in the world, and we sold our interest in the business.
What did you do after making yourself purposely irrelevant and selling your share of the company?
We needed to shake things up; we’d been in Chicago for a long time. Chris and I moved to upstate New York and established ourselves as consultants to production companies, ad agencies, and brands. Our focus was always on unlocking creativity at the organizational level.
The leaders of those companies would often ask us if we would work one-on-one with them to help them build confidence in themselves and clarity about how they were leading. For a long time, we said no because we hadn’t been formally trained. One day, Chris turned to me and said, “I think you could be good at this”. So, I said yes to the next person, who happened to be well-known in the industry, and quickly realized I was helping.
Over time, that has morphed our business into a coaching practice. I would say that about 20% of my time is spent consulting of some kind, and the rest is spent coaching leaders one-on-one. Chris coaches women leaders exclusively.
“Traditionally, true leaders are supposed to be unafraid. But the truth is that we’re all human, and these jobs are challenging and difficult, sometimes even frightening.”
In addition to coaching and consulting, you have a very successful podcast, 'Fearless Creative Leadership,' which has almost 300 episodes. What made you launch a podcast, and what do you hope listeners get out of it?
I was asked to do a series of webinars by The 4A's. The problem with webinars is that you have to have a conversation with somebody, put the slides together, and then have the same conversation again. I got bored by that, and so did the guests, and if I’m being honest, the webinars were terrible. Someone said the conversations with guests would make a great podcast. I was intrigued and reached out to five or six people I knew and put the first few episodes together.
Jonathan Mildenhall told me early on, “Oh, you're building a real resource for generations to come.” That was the verbalization of something I felt instinctively but had not put into words. So, I've treated it that way ever since. I don’t take any advertising because I want this to be an objective reference point. We have a website where we have the audio of every episode and have taken the time to clean up the transcript and mark it up so people can really use it.
I've been fortunate enough to talk to many of the most extraordinary leaders in creative and innovation, and there is so much wisdom, knowledge, and insight inside that. What I pride myself on is that people are willing to trust me, and they're willing to talk publicly about things they probably haven't discussed in the past. And because of the caliber of the people I'm talking to, it really resonates. When you hear Marcel Marcondes, who has a massive job as the CMO of AB InBev, admit that his job is sometimes terrifying, it’s powerful.
That’s one of the reasons I called the podcast Fearless. Traditionally, true leaders are supposed to be unafraid. But the truth is that we’re all human, and these jobs are challenging and difficult, sometimes even frightening. The personal impact of that on leaders is enormous, and I hope getting powerful people to admit that sometimes they feel uncertain and fragile can be inspiring to listeners.
I remember when I interviewed Robbie Kaplan, who was E. Jean Carroll's lawyer. Talk about walking into the lion’s den—this woman went to Mar a Lago twice to take depositions from Trump. She argued for gay marriage in front of the Supreme Court. We watch her from the outside and say, “This woman is fearless.” Yet she told me that to this day, she has profound imposter syndrome. She described a moment in front of the Supreme Court when things got heated and emotional, and her voice cracked. She said, “I just couldn't contain that part of me any longer.”
The notion of leaders being somehow superhuman is just not true. I’m trying to help people see themselves fully, to understand the things they are truly brilliant at, to be unafraid of their weaknesses and to help them find out what is possible when they unlock the potential of others.
“One of my priorities is to help build a leader’s confidence in their own unique skills and encourage them to trust others to do the rest of it.”
The people you work with in high-powered roles are being asked to react all day long, whether asked to solve a problem or just provide an opinion. It’s easy to get bogged down in being reactive. What advice do you have for leaders that can help them be proactive and strategic as well?
In these high-profile leadership positions, you have to deal with extraordinary amounts of incoming information and endless, apparently urgent demands. Sometimes, you’re fighting what feels like existential threats to the organization. Under that kind of pressure, many of us fixate on the moment. We pour emotional energy into the fires in front of us, and then a few months later, we can't even remember what that issue was.
There are actually similarities to the emotional dynamic of being in a combat situation. When you’re in combat mode, the parts of your brain that control reasoning and planning shut down. You start to develop tunnel vision and recency bias, which makes you fixate on the data that supports your argument rather than see the big picture.
I try to help people reset their perspective about what is actually important and truly meaningful and how much of this they will remember as critical a month or year from now. I can feel the tension release when we do this, and then suddenly, they're able to re-engage with what success really looks like and how they can best get their organization to that place.
There’s another part of it which is almost always true, I find. Most of us—including people we consider hugely successful—don’t recognize our innate strengths. We assume that if something is easy for us to do, it must be easy for everyone. Many leaders dramatically undervalue what they're brilliant at and then overcompensate by trying to become good at everything. You end up with this waste of potential on one side and a massive over-investment on the other in things that many other people inside the organization could do just as well. One of my priorities is to help build a leader’s confidence in their own unique skills and encourage them to trust others to do the rest of it. I say this to clients all the time, “Do the things that only you can do.”
So many people trust your advice that we want to end by asking for the one piece of advice you would give today’s leaders or those who aspire to be leaders in the future.
Be open to understanding who you are, what drives you, and what holds you back. When we are clear about our strengths and less inhibited by what is usually a misguided sense of our inadequacies, our ability to unlock the potential of those around us – which, after all, is the definition of great leadership – is exponentially greater. Trust yourself. Because – to quote one of my favorite holiday movies – “You’re already better than you think you are.”
September 17, 2024
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