Ep 273: Karl Lieberman of Wieden + Kennedy - "The Non-Conformer"

Fearless Creative Leadership

What does your company reject?

Karl Lieberman is the Global Chief Creative Officer of Wieden + Kennedy. Wieden is a reference point among creative companies in many industries. For almost 45 years, they'd been impacting culture and driving business for their clients by unlocking the creativity of their people. .

Creating the kind of environment in which people feel safe to put all their ideas on the table is the easiest thing to aspire to. And the hardest thing to do, in my experience.

It means giving people a voice. It means being open, genuinely open to another way of looking at the world. And to the possibility that being criticized is much more desirable than being ignored.

These criteria are at best challenging for most leaders to accept. Control and predict are much more natural. But predictability and conformity are creative kryptonite.

To unlock creativity and unleash its power to maximum effect, you have to be willing to break the norms, to encourage the irrational and sometimes even the absurd.

You have to reject predictability for possibility.

And when you're yelled at, because no one has ever done it like that before, you have to be willing to shrug.

You'll hear all that and more in my conversation with Karl.