Edition 16: On wanting to know everything about everything and how a heterogeneous culture is the future of work with Creative Partner, Ale Lariu
Tell us a bit about your background and how you became a brand and creative leader, and the most influential female creative director in the world…
I love complexity and systems thinking. Some people are just happy focusing on one facet of their work, and that’s okay, but I love to know about all different dimensions of work. That’s why I don’t really have one title, but a mix… because I want to know strategy, I want to know creative direction, I want to know the difference between doing brand creative for advertising and creating great products and services — and how those things interlink. And so on.
I just love connections, and that goes for people as well as systems. And I love to understand ‘the whole’, and the synergies of the whole, to understand more in different spaces within the creative industry. I strive to be the best ‘Jackie of all trades’ out there!
You’ve spent half your career in advertising and the other half in design and innovation — how have those two worlds intersected?
For me, it’s more about how they interact rather than intersect. First I was an ad creative director, which is more on the storytelling side and then I did a double pivot to being in design and innovation as a creative initially, but then also on the strategy side. I think not that many people have that combination of product and service design experience alongside the storytelling experience to be able to talk about those products and services.
I love that combination because I like to understand the whole picture. Advertising is usually very good at talking about the what and why people should do things — mostly buy stuff — and design is better on the how and the where they do it. And I like to know the what, the where, the why and the how! The focus on both industries and different disciplines appeals to me.
I started as a web developer coding in raw HTML and then got more interested in design, which is where I focused for a while. Then a manager asked if I’d like to be an art director. So I said “YES!” and then had to Google what an art director did. As I started looking more into it, I realised I wanted to do more of it.
Over time I moved into advertising which was more on the digital side, first at small agencies and then big agencies, before deciding to come full circle back to design but more on the innovation side so I could delve deeper into Design Thinking and service design. This is when I joined frog, because I could bring the storytelling and I could learn more about the overall brand experience.
Is that your nature to accept challenges and opportunities instinctively, even if you don’t know much about them?
Yeah, very much, from day one really. So many times, I’ve been excited by someone’s idea and have thought ‘I have no idea how to do that, but I know I will find out and I will do it’. And it can be anything. How do you build a website? I taught myself and my first job was doing the web pages for new books for Random House.
And was it that all-in approach that brought you to Group Of Humans?
Group Of Humans was actually different. A friend and fellow HUMAN, Kat, told me about the founder, Rob, so I started cyber-stalking him a little and then realised I knew many HUMANS already. That’s my nature — if a friend says you should talk to Rob, even though I don’t know Rob, I will talk to him because I trust the person who told me that. It’s the power of connections and so through mine I became a HUMAN by osmosis.
Is it the community aspect of the GOH structure that draws you in the most?
GOH is a great place for learning and development.
What I love most is that there’s no homogeneous culture — we’re all very different and GOH allows for heterogeneous ways of thinking, which — according to research — drives innovation. Think about a homogeneous work culture. A lot of the time it really just means ‘the way we do things around here’, and that’s a killer for creativity and innovation. GOH has more of a ‘you do things the way you want around here’ approach — no politics, no preconceptions of how things should be done. A courageous sense of identity, devoid of egotistical or narcissistic traits, is critical to the creative industry. If a company is obsessed with company culture, I question that approach. I prefer the culture of no culture.
Work wise, I’ve done some really cool talks for Oxford University Press and Riot Games, and at the moment we’re working on a project with ENGIE about renewables. It’s really interesting how GOH is set up so that HUMANS are all individual businesses dealing with another business and its clients. We get paid differently for different types of work — the services we provide are compartmentalised and compensated accordingly. So if I do a talk for GOH, I get paid for that. If I work on a client project I get paid separately. If I work on an internal project, that’s another payment. If I was at an agency or design studio, it’s all under the same umbrella that counts as part of your salary. And I prefer a type of compensation based on the type of work you do.
I’m completely obsessed by the future of work. And GOH is the future of work with regards to how people get recruited, how they work and how they get paid. I think most workplaces were designed for our white grandfathers with our grandfathers’ perspectives in mind, and we need new ways of thinking about work that are designed by all of us for all of us. That’s what the HUMANS are doing.
