The Inner Game of Creative Leadership

Todd Henry [00:00:03]:

Most leaders don't wake up one day and realize they've drifted. It happens slowly, inch by inch, decision by decision. A new role, more responsibility, a new opportunity that promises growth, influence and impact. But with each step, it becomes easier to lose sight of the very reasons we started leading in the first place, the very reason why we got into the work we do. Pretty soon it becomes more about getting by, getting to the next place, getting to the next level. In Hurting Tigers, I wrote about the importance of understanding what I call your core drivers. The values or the inner motivations that quietly but powerfully shape the way that you work and the way that you lead. And here's the thing.

Todd Henry [00:00:42]:

If you don't pay attention to them, the noise of leadership decisions, client demands, organizational demands, will eventually drown out the things that once mattered so deeply to you. The the demands of the day, the expectations of others, the allure of success, chasing after the thing that you think you want. It all works to pull you away from the core of who you are. You cannot separate what you value, the things that are most important for you, the pillars by which you make decisions from your day to day actions. If you allow that drift to occur over time, you will wake up one day and realize you were very far from the leader and the person you intended to be. And that's the real danger of leadership drift. It's not dramatic. It often feels like progress.

Todd Henry [00:01:29]:

You're hitting your goals, you're being recognized, you're moving up. But one day you look around and you realize you've built a life or a career that maybe looks successful on the outside, but feels a little bit hollow on the inside. Here's the truth. You can't lead others effectively if you're not honest with yourself about what's driving you about your true motivations. Because whether you're aware of it or not, your motivations are shaping your team's culture, your decision making, and ultimately your impact. Even if it's in subtle ways, eventually what you truly value will come through. If you're leading from a place of insecurity, that insecurity will show up in your systems and in your standards. If you're leading from a desire to be liked, that desire will subtly shift how you communicate, what you prioritize, and how you manage tension.

Todd Henry [00:02:19]:

But if you're grounded in purpose, if you've done the hard work of identifying and revisiting those core values, the things that truly matter to you, then you have something stable to return to when everything around you is in motion. And let's Face it, friends, everything around us is in motion right now. That's what this episode is about. It's about the inner game of leadership. And by the way, when I say leadership, I don't necessarily mean positional leadership. I mean leading others around you, leading your peers, your teammates, your clients, leading up within your organization. And yes, for many of us, it means leading a team of people. But we're going to talk about the inner game of leadership, what it means to show up every day and understand not just how to be effective in your role, but how to bring the things that really matter to you to the work you do.

Todd Henry [00:03:09]:

Today I'm speaking with two people who know this journey very well. Klaus Kleinfeld is the only Fortune 500 CEO to lead two companies on two separate continents. And yet what struck me the most in our conversation wasn't just his business track record, which is obviously very impressive. It was his deep sense that the inner game matters as much as the outer one. Then we're going to talk to Eric Liedtke. He's the former brand president at Adidas and he's now at Under Armour. He helped shape some of the most globally recognized brands. And yet he decided a few years ago, upon encountering some new information he wasn't previously aware of, that some things mattered enough to go all in on them, even if it meant walking away from a role that would be the pinnacle of many people's careers.

Todd Henry [00:03:56]:

In both of these conversations, you're going to hear stories not just about strategy or success, but about moments of reflection, realignment and return. You'll hear about the importance of checking in with yourself before you check off another goal. And hopefully you'll be reminded to pause and ask, wait a minute, what's driving me right now? What kind of leader am I really becoming? What kind of leader do I truly want to be? Because leadership just about moving forward. It's about moving forward on purpose. This is Daily Creative, a show for creative pros who want to be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:04:40]:

There's a reason why this age has been called the industrial age. When Skinner came around and introduced behavioral psychology, he taught how can you train people to do certain things? You give them some rewards and make them feel that this is great and the rewards are there. We are mostly trained to see it as financial gains. So that's, I think, the situation most people are in. And when you're early in your career and you want, you aspire to have a career that's Also, basically what we are all told, and also what gives us financial freedom.

Todd Henry [00:05:10]:

That's Klaus Kleinfeld. As I mentioned, he is the only Fortune 500 CEO to lead two separate Fortune 500 companies on two different continents. He's also the author of a book called Leading to Thrive, which shares a lot of what he's learned over his many decades in the workplace about not just being successful in the moment, but being successful over the long term.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:05:33]:

And then one day you realize probably, hey, if I don't integrate this and just see not just business, but also see business and private as one, because you're just one human being, then it might end up not so well. The life, the one life that we.

Todd Henry [00:05:49]:

Are here on this planet for multiple times in the book you write, life is not a dress rehearsal. And I really. I enjoyed that phrase. I do think that one of the. One of the more poignant elements of the book, I think, is that some people write as if, oh, hey, don't. Maybe don't work so hard. Take better care of yourself. To be clear, that's not what you're saying in the book.

Todd Henry [00:06:10]:

The word you just use is integrating. You said we need to work hard, but we need to integrate our life. Many people live a disintegrated life where they're only pursuing external success, but they're ignoring internal success, and the net result of that is disaster. Am I describing that correctly?

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:06:27]:

I think you're absolutely describing it correctly, yes.

Todd Henry [00:06:29]:

So you discuss as part of that two games that we play, I guess you could put it that way, the inner game and the outer game. Can you describe each of these two? And these really are the two parts of the book, the inner game and the outer game. Can you describe each of these to us and how they relate to one another?

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:06:45]:

So the inner game basically is what are the fundamental questions that we ask ourselves, most of us, all of our lives? It starts with a simple one of who are we? What are we here for? What do we want? What do we like? What do we not like? Who do we like? Who do we not like? What's the purpose of us being here? What value do certain things have? Those things that go on in our mind whether we like it or not? And, and I call it, sometimes the monkeys are hopping around in your head and all talking to you at the same time, particularly when it gets very stressful. So that. That is the inner game and the question of, then, can you carve out your own voice? Can you find your path to understand who you are, what you want? And how do you deal with that? And that deals a lot with energy. And we'll talk about that, I assume, Todd, because it is really all about how much energy, how do you use it and how do you gain it. And it in the end, life is about performance. Performance, where you put it can be in the private space. You have children, you want to bring up your children, you love playing sports, so you want to be good at that or in business. So in the end, energy is one of the defining elements of it and also one of the ways on how you are able to develop yourself, show yourself in this world.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:08:08]:

And that's the outer game. The outer game is where does it show. So the one thing is how do you handle yourself? How do you handle your energy, how do you handle your purpose? And the other game is where do you bring it to and what do you bring it to and how do you bring it to that?

Todd Henry [00:08:25]:

You mentioned that you came across the work of Jim Laura and Tony Schwartz. The powerful engagement which was also transformative for me, by the way, when I read that book 20 something years ago, the idea that we don't manage time, we have to learn to manage energy. Yes, time management without energy management is useless. We can stack meeting after meeting, obligation after obligation, but if we have nothing to give, then it's pointless. And. But something I had not discovered before was something you wrote about in this book is where we get our energy from the things that feed our energy. What did you learn from that about yourself? Can you describe how that transformed your own leadership when you started thinking about energy management?

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:09:03]:

Massive. Massive. I have born and raised in Germany being taught that it's all about willpower and time management. A lot of people who worked with me would say, Klaus, as a time management addict and. And I have been a time management addict. I confess that until I realized it's not about managing your time, it's managing energy. And I've made a lot of mistakes at that time pushing teams to late night to come to a conclusion. Next morning, waking up, looking at it with a little bit more of a clear mind and saying this is crap.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:09:33]:

This we are not going to do that. Let's get back with a bit of a better open mind and let's find something better. So it very fundamentally changed my way of thinking of things. So the very fact that usually when I took some time off, I saw that, hey Klaus, you're slacking willpower. Get on it. If you would have asked me what is life and business like, I would have said it's an ultra marathon. So you can you run and run and run. One marathon is not enough.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:09:58]:

It's life is a marathon. Whereas today, I would say it's a number of sprints and rest time in between different size sprints and rest time. So rest time suddenly becomes productive time because you always have to recharge. And the other thing that. What opened my mind was on the one hand the James Bock and. And all the other things that he did before that, but he came from the sports side and that that actually really. And the first things that he did is on tennis. And.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:10:26]:

And when. When I realized the tennis world, world that I like has understood it very early on that you have to manage your inner game. Because there have been at that time a lot of tennis stars who shot up and then burned out. Boom, done. But we then saw them coming back. Suddenly we saw a generation coming back and what had changed. They had learned how to handle their inner game. They had also learned how to recharge very fast.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:10:53]:

Literally, when you're on the court, you have 20 seconds and that's the time in between a serve. That's the time for recharge. You can't say, hey, I'll take some time out. Let me give a sabbatical here on the court.

Todd Henry [00:11:08]:

Okay. This was a fascinating observation to me as someone who has casually watched tennis, but I'm not really all that aware of the nuances of the game. I didn't realize that those little pauses, those little breaks where they're taking balls and they're looking at them and they're trying to decide which one they're going to use, or, you know, going and getting a towel and wiping their face. I didn't realize that so many of those pauses are strategic energy resets for the players. They're using that as a way to, even in the midst of a match, to reclaim some energy, to refocus their mind, to reset their motivation in the midst of the match, I didn't realize that. And it's something that made me think about how often do I do that in my own life, in my own work? Do I take moments in the course of my day to pause to do something ritualistic, to do something that reroutes me, that helps me reclaim my sense of focus and energy? What if I begin to think of myself as a kind of creative athlete?

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:12:15]:

So I saw that something really crazy was going on and was going like wildfire in the sports and high performance world, whereas the opposite was happening in the business world. In the business world. You saw people burning out earlier and earlier. And the thing that. One of the major things why I said I have to write this book is because I also saw it in the young generation and the generation of people who have been founders and I'm not on one company that I'm on the board of. The founder who's a great individual, almost died. Almost died. He was barely 30 years old after a capital race where he had ignored a cold.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:12:52]:

The cold has basically attached to his heart. The heart got inflamed and boom, life was almost over. And when I saw this, I said, I have to give people a different framework. And I also don't have the time to. I go around and tell everybody I have to find some medium, how to multiply, multiply the message.

Todd Henry [00:13:10]:

You described it just a moment ago as how rest can be productive. I don't think that's a common mindset. I think we. I once heard it described as we rest from our work. In other words, I'm going to exhaust myself and then I'm going to collapse because I'm resting from my work. But I heard somebody once say, no, we don't rest from our work, we work from our rest. Meaning I'm going to strategically rest so that when I go back to engage the work, I have more energy, I'm ready to go, I'm focused. And I think that mindset shift is a little bit of what you're describing, which is we need to make sure that we're caring for our inner self so that we have the resources, the faculty to be able to attack the things that matter to us.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:13:50]:

Yeah, why I wanted to bring it into the business world is because I felt like when we talk about the sources of energy being physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, many people then start to think about, oh, he's become a tree hugger. My friends would say, oh, Klaus has.

Todd Henry [00:14:06]:

Become a tree hugger.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:14:07]:

And I think what people have to understand, on the contrary, I'm a hard nosed performance person. Performance is the measure in almost everything, wherever you apply it. So I'm talking about the things that make you a sustainable high performer. That's what I'm talking about. I'm the opposite of seeing this as, oh, do it as a. You just do it for good. No, you do it to be able to do more of the things that you want to do. And also the misconception that a recharge time has to be equal time to the time that you exert.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:14:46]:

And that's also completely wrong. And little things like what I call microhabits. People say, hey, you know what? I just lean back and I do a breathing exercise. A breathing exercise of a minute, Of a minute or two. You don't need any equipment for this, but it's super powerful, recharged. You can even do it without being visible in a meeting. You can do these things. Don't think of it like you have to now take another four weeks off or whatever.

Klaus Kleinfeld [00:15:13]:

No, that is not the point.

Todd Henry [00:15:17]:

Dr. Klaus Kleinfeld is the former CEO of Alcoa and Siemens, and he's the author of the new book Leading to Thrive. I found this conversation fascinating, first of all, because Dr. Kleinfeld is a practitioner. He's somebody who's led at the highest levels. And even he had to learn over time, wait a minute. I cannot run myself into the ground. This is not sustainable.

Todd Henry [00:15:41]:

I think his advice is good advice for those of us who are maybe earlier in our careers recognizing that, yes, we can have ambition, yes, we can have passion, yes, we can chase after our goals. We can try to create something meaningful and valuable in the world. And if we lose ourself in the process, what is it all worth? If you'd like to hear our full interview, in which we go into how to identify which goals we should pursue, you can listen to it@dailycreativeplus.com it's absolutely free. Just go there, enter your name and email and you will get a private feed where you can listen to the full interviews from every episode. When we come back in just a minute, we're going to hear about a moment in Eric Liedke's life that changed his ambitions forever. Stick around, we'll be right back.

Eric Liedtke [00:16:44]:

I love doing sports. I recognized early on if I wasn't doing sports, thinking about sports, having done sports, then I wasn't so happy. And so as I came out of university and started thinking about what I was going to do, I wanted to work for sports.

Todd Henry [00:16:57]:

That's Eric Liedtke. And he did get a career in sports. In fact, he led brand at one of the biggest sportswear manufacturers in the world.

Eric Liedtke [00:17:04]:

It ended up being sports apparel. And I fell in love with what some of the legends were doing out here in Oregon with Nike, Rob Strasser in particular, and Peter Moore started just diving into all the stuff I could read about what they were doing with Phil Knight at the time. And when they broke off from from Nike and started the Amer, the Adidas America subsidiary, I just became an avid stalker. So I started writing letters. This is before email and before cell phone. So I started writing letters back in 92, 93, just trying to get my foot in the door. And in 94, I'm happy to report that I did get in the door and I camped right next to the. Right next to the mailroom.

Eric Liedtke [00:17:40]:

Yes.

Todd Henry [00:17:41]:

You went after it with a fishing pole, not with a net. You went. You specifically said, I'm going after this. This is where I want to be.

Eric Liedtke [00:17:47]:

Yeah, I think I was again, I'm sitting in Detroit working for Cadillac's ad agency called Darcy, Macy's, Benton and Bowles, wearing a suit and tie every day, getting nauseous Sunday nights before having to go back because it just wasn't a fit. It was. It was not a cultural Eric slash Cadillac suit and tie fit. So I knew I had to get out of what I was doing. And then you start talking to friends in contacts that, you know, and you start, oh, you know what, My best friend from childhood, he's designing shoes for Adidas in Germany. And he knows some guys that, you know, are setting up the Adidas equipment range back in the day out of Portland, Oregon, that are former Nike guys. And then I started diving into who those guys were. I was like, oh, my God, these guys are fantastic.

Eric Liedtke [00:18:27]:

People I'd love to work with. And it's in sports. And I get to talk and think and do sports all day long. That's. That sounds like something I do. Once I got that in my teeth, I didn't let go.

Todd Henry [00:18:36]:

So you spent 20 plus years, 26. 26 years at Adidas, and you launched some of the biggest brand partnerships, ones that we're all aware of, we all know about, really, at the height of your game, very successful on the executive board. And in 2019, you decided to do something that probably a lot of people from the outside, like most people at that point in their career, are starting to think about, okay, how am I going to ride this out? Can you talk us through what that was? And then the decision that you made.

Eric Liedtke [00:19:05]:

In 2019, 2015, when I took the board seat, which was the executive board member of Global Brands, in American translation, it's like I was brand president, which means I looked after all strategy and creation for the brand. When you get into a situation where you're trying to do a turnaround, you start to really look at your consumer and start to dive into some deep consumer, qualitative, quantitative work. And what we found was the culture of sport doesn't stop when you stop playing it, when you leave the pitch, when you leave the court, when you leave the field. The culture goes with you into the hallways and the streets and the music venues. But also what became readily apparent is our consumers, the same ones, were very concerned about the state of affairs in the world. Now that's blown up and it's common practice. But it wasn't back in 2014, 2015, consumers were feeling distressed. They didn't know how.

Eric Liedtke [00:19:53]:

They want to make a difference. They didn't know how. So we started to look at that as a game life world strategy. And then each one of those was clicked down. And the world thing was super interesting to me because we started working with a association called Parley for the Oceans. And they came into my office one day and said, hey, would you like to save the oceans? I was like, yeah, but I'm pretty busy. Personally, I care very much about it, but I got. He goes, no, you're part of the problems.

Eric Liedtke [00:20:16]:

And then they started educating me on the fact of microplastics, nanoplastics, the chemicals use that, how it's killing out the phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are responsible for every second breath we breathe and isn't that important to sport. And so the whole thing kind of leveled up. So we got to work, like picking a fight with plastic, if you will, and we made the first ever ocean plastic shoe, which then when we put that post out on Instagram in 2015 and everything, it was as far as wide as anything we ever did with Kanye or with Lionel Mess. And that was a light bulb moment for me, but also for the board saying, if you look at your consumer holistically and you come up with solutions to all of their problems, you can actually raise very, very quickly the brand advocacy as you deliver those results. And so when we did that, then we got to work on that, and then I started to understand more and more about the problems and the impact that fast. Fashion, sports, if you are, or which is basically what sports industry is because 70% is made out of petroleum. And we're always turning over the next leaf to the next object of desire that you need to buy.

Eric Liedtke [00:21:14]:

When you start to look at the impact you're having, you can't unhear and unsee that stuff. So I did what I could at Adidas to try to drive that home as far as, let's go, 100% move towards recycled polyester from virgin polyester. And that, I'm happy to say they. They stuck to after I left, and they accomplished that in 2024. But also just looking at further out there saying, what if we replace plastic. Everybody knows that if we make stuff out of harmless things that go away harmlessly into the ground and don't invade our food systems and her air and our drinks and stuff, everything like that, maybe we can make stuff not, not based on petroleum but based on plates. And so that's always been a widely known lever for the industry, but no one's really acted on it. And so a few of us took a brave step at the end of 19 and said, okay, let's go solve and let's, we've done what we can do here.

Eric Liedtke [00:22:05]:

We built, we had successful run with ADI, we grew 8 billion in six years. We did all sorts of financial engineering that really brought the brand back to prominence and I'm still happy to say it's continued that prominence ever since. But I wanted to solve for a different issue and I like to build things and take on big challenges. So I wanted to solve now for this problem of plastic waste. At the end of life, when you're done wearing something, what happens to it and what happens to it, mostly because it's made out of petroleum, is it doesn't go away, it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that you know are now, as we now have seen all the research are, we're digesting a credit card, a week of worth of plastic based upon your diet and where you live. That's scary for me and I wanted to commit the rest of my life to solving for that.

Todd Henry [00:22:44]:

Eric's solution was a new brand called Unless Collective, which is the first 100%.

Eric Liedtke [00:22:49]:

Plant based fashion brand. But that was the journey of awareness and how it came to be. And then obviously I just couldn't sleep with myself anymore so I had to go do something about it or try.

Todd Henry [00:22:59]:

So it's interesting how often people think, oh, if I'm going to change the world, I have to go out and find something out there that I can do that's different from what I'm doing right now. And like your initial response was, yeah, sure, I'd love to save the oceans, but what am I going to do managing a brand here? You know? Exactly, I'm busy. But we fail to realize how often the very platform and experiences we have can be leveraged to achieve results that we would never have thought they could be achieved, used to achieve like in your case, realizing your industry or the industry that you're in is a substantial contributor to the issue. Right?

Eric Liedtke [00:23:35]:

It's a 3 trillion. Fashion is a 3 trillion a year industry. $3 trillion a year industry that has the carbon footprint of the country of Spain on an annual basis or Mexico. So it's quite significant. We just need some of those different industries to have thought leaders that can systemically change them because I think they are, they're out there. The electric vehicle movement, the plant based protein movement, there's a lot of different movements that are moving this. We just need to do it. There's so many industries out there that need this kind of reset and not say you have to compromise.

Eric Liedtke [00:24:06]:

And that's my biggest thing is I don't want people to compromise their taste for their values or their values for their taste. Let's give them something they expect from the highest level of fashion, the highest level of sport, but it's made on a plant based stack.

Todd Henry [00:24:18]:

So let's talk about the problems then that you, the problem set that you were addressing when you were trying to start on less collective because it wasn't obviously you can make something that looks really terrible and it's really good for the environment but I would never be caught deb wearing it and people aren't going to buy it. You can make something looks really great but it's made of petroleum. So how did you like, how did you define that problem you were trying to solve?

Eric Liedtke [00:24:37]:

Yeah, I think you nailed it. First of all, I think your listeners will appreciate designers and engineers can solve anything. I've never experienced a problem they can't solve. But you have to make sure the brief is the right brief. What is the question you're trying to answer? Because I think there's a, there's an old adage in advertising like the client gets what they deserve. So if you can really nail the brief, you're going to get killer answers. And so I believe that 100, I've seen that in play a hundred different ways. So we really fixated on, we want to solve, we want zero harmful waste at end of life.

Eric Liedtke [00:25:11]:

That was our brief. So to start with the end in mind, and I don't think any other companies really do that, let's be very fastidious to the end state we want and then let's walk back from that. Okay, if we're going to have zero harmful waste then we have to say what our inputs are going to be. Our inputs then need to naturally decompose. They need to be compostable things that go back to creating nutrient rich soil that creates great warming plant. Right. So if you start with that and say okay, what can we find? What can we make? How do we do that? How do we put it Together, what are the. So it then becomes a very clear ingredient set that you have to go out there and solve for.

Eric Liedtke [00:25:46]:

But we really don't want to compromise on it. So when we make something, we can say it's not 80%, it's not 90% ish, it's 100% plants and minerals that will harmlessly go away. If you give it back to us, we'll make it go with industrial composter in 30 days and we'll give you a discount in your future order. If you put it in your rose garden yourself or your tomato garden, it will still go away and create good food for plants and minerals. So plants and worms. So the idea is, let's solve for that specific problem and then we can talk about the material sets to make a shoe, to make a sock, to make a knit, to make a woven. Then you get more complicated as you go. And now as we fast forward to a partnership with a brand like Under Armour, now you've got this unbelievable research and development center that can help us solve for the things we haven't been able to solve for our own.

Eric Liedtke [00:26:31]:

Because as a startup, you've got limited capital, you've got limited distribution, so you've got all sorts of challenges to overcome just to keep the, just to keep the cash flow running. And then you set like a flag out there. You said, we're not, it's not just we're going to be part of it. We're, we're going to create a material revolution, which is what we did. We planted a flag and said Under Armour and Less are going to lead this regenerative fashion revolution and we're going to create a material. We're basically going to create a material revolution around basically the toolbox that is plants versus a toolbox that is plastics and polyester. Which one would you rather wear? Which one would you rather have in your house? Which one would you like your child to wear and breathe? You know, we care so much about the food we put in ourselves, but the, the biggest organ we have is our skin. And think about what we're absorbing every day when we wear, when we sweat, when we breathe.

Eric Liedtke [00:27:19]:

And it's like, oh, I don't want to wear that stuff anymore.

Todd Henry [00:27:23]:

I would be remiss if I did not ask you, given your extensive experience and what you've done, what you've been able to accomplish. We have a lot of leaders who are young, newer in their career, maybe mid career right now, and are starting to ask a lot of questions, like, where do I want to go? What do I want to be? What do I want to do with the rest of my life, the rest of my career? What advice would you give to people who are in that place in their career where they're asking, maybe they're starting to ask some of the questions or think about some of the things that you've. You were thinking at. Thinking of a decade ago when you started examining the path your career was going to take.

Eric Liedtke [00:27:57]:

Yeah, I think I got two words of advice and one that I've lived on or try, I've tried to live on for a number of years, which is don't let perfect get in the way better. I think too often we just don't take that step. And it's like you alluded to earlier, sometimes you just have to take a step and then take another step, and then take another step. And don't worry about where the perfect lies. Perfect is a state of mind. It's not reality. And I think I would never have jumped into this thing. To your point earlier, I could have retired and spent my days at the Oregon coast trying to surf.

Eric Liedtke [00:28:27]:

But I decided to lean back in because I feel passionately about using my expertise now to create, to systemically change an industry that was so good to me. So I want to lean into that and provide a better solution for my children's children. So my point being is if we just focus on perfect, sometimes that paralyzes us. And using that model of 10 minutes a day doing something for yourself, 10 minutes a day doing something for the world, 10 minutes of self doing something for your community, that adds up and all those little things matter. It's a. It's. I've seen it happen. I didn't come up with half the ideas at adi.

Eric Liedtke [00:29:00]:

I simply gave people permission to express themselves. And that's how we picked a fight with plastic. And that's how the first ocean plastic shoe was made. It wasn't my idea. I didn't brief it, I didn't ask for it. I just simply said, this is important to our consumer. We should think about it. And next thing I know, that.

Eric Liedtke [00:29:14]:

Or eliminating plastic bags from stores or creating a moonshot goal of getting off of virgin polyester. We're doing all these things. So it's like giving yourself permission, giving your team's permission to think bigger than the daily transaction. I think those are words I would live by.

Todd Henry [00:29:31]:

If you want to learn more about what Eric Liedtke and his team are up to, you can do so@ unlesscollective.com you can also listen to our full interview at dailycreativeplus.com we get into a lot more specifics about how Eric made the decision to start unless collective and some additional advice for young creative leaders. Hey thanks so much for listening. My name is Todd Henry. You can find me my work, my speaking, all of my books@toddhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant.