By James Robinson, CEO Robinson Speakers
Volume 1, Issue 2
New York’s bitter temperatures, with a wind chill of about 7,000, held no fear for one of the most controversial ladies in the speaking business. She was in Chelsea, a good half hour away from Balthazar, and the icy blast beyond our offices would have made a team of huskies blanch.
“Leaving now to walk there,” said her email. In no way could she ever be described as average.
Boldly I hopped in a cab, and headed out into the quieter side of Soho, where the narrow streets carry that faint, morning smell of espresso and Italian pastries. I would be early. Really early.
We sped past a friend, Dominick Ferraro, a local artist. He and his close buddy Robert De Niro had grown up in Little Italy back in the 60’s. They were stickball players in streets of gang fights and homicides. When Dom was eight years old, he watched his father die on the steps of the Broome Street fire station. It’s all different now. The area is a highly fashionable enclave, and in the middle of this twenty-first century microcosm stands Keith McNally’s flagship French bistro: Balthazar.
Our table was on the left side, next to where the make-up tycoon Bobbi Brown had her Christmas party, and across from Salman Rushdie’s favorite table in the far corner, a good spot for a man who’d cost the British government something akin to the national debt to keep him safe after the Satanic Verses was published.
“Ready to order, sir?”
“No, thank you. Right now my companion is about two miles out, walking!”
Five minutes later, in marched Cindy, the marketing maverick, the woman currently blowing the lid off the pornography business, which she testily describes as “an industry driven by men, funded by men, managed by men, and targeted at men, teaching teenagers a very skewed view of how girls should be treated.” She is combating porn’s influence as default sex education, by providing a counterpoint that doesn’t currently exist – the showcasing and discussion of real world sex.
The porno kings should start taking cover. Cindy’s has been a lifetime of achievement. She’s done a lot of winning since receiving her degree from Somerville College, Oxford. There she studied Victorian literature, in the same academic halls as some of the most famous minds of the twentieth century – Margaret Thatcher, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Indira Gandhi, all of them revolutionary women. After that, she entered advertising, and was a key part of expanding the small, boutique London agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, around the world.
They led her to our table, and a lot of people watched her progress. She was dressed in a brown leather jacket with a luxurious fur collar, black patent leather biker pants and buckled biker boots, one of 300 pairs of shoes lined along one wall in her living room.
“How are you, darling?” she asked.
“I’m fine. Where did you get those trousers?”
“McQueen.”
“Steve?”
Cindy laughed in mock exasperation. “Alexander McQueen, actually. Honestly, James!”
Conversations with Cindy are apt to be cheerful fencing matches. Pornography is strictly a sideline. She was, after all, the 2003 New York Advertising Woman of the Year. She founded BBH New York, worked on Levi’s, Johnnie Walker and oversaw the launch of Unilever’s Axe into the US in 2002. Her future-forward ideas of how businesses should be running are eagerly listened to.
“It’s the way big businesses conduct themselves,” she says. “Remember the Superbowl power cut last year when Baltimore won? The lights went out for 10 minutes, and immediately everybody turned to social media. Oreo was out there with an ad that swept the globe in seconds, a work of genius. It just said, ‘You can still dunk in the dark,’ with a picture of half a cookie.
“There were 10,000 retweets, 18,000 likes, 5,000 shares, and 525 million impressions in the first hour.”
The waiter arrived, but he didn’t interrupt. He stood there patiently while Cindy finished. Everyone does.
“I’ll explain Nabisco’s way of operating in a minute. Let’s have breakfast.”
We both ordered Cindy’s favorite, avocado and poached eggs on toast with tomato-jalapeno salsa. The restaurant was filling up, hardly a spare seat, white-clad staff shuffling guests into tight corners at small tables.
I looked at Cindy, and her blond bob hairstyle, the two silver necklaces she wore, one a thumbs up sign from Facebook, the other her twitter handle attached to a thin chain. She was every inch the revolutionary advertising executive, with an unmistakably smart English accent.
“Here’s how it happened,” she said. “Oreo set up a war room for their team the night of the Superbowl and put the key creative decision makers in it. They gave the Oreo team free rein to jump all over anything topical that happened, to create anything they wanted around it, and to put it out there immediately.
“It was a team with shared values, and a shared vision for the Oreo brand. Remember, shared values are the single most important foundation for any good relationship… friendships, marriage, business, brands and their consumers. Oreo’s high-trust environment allows parts of the business to run themselves.”
It’s pretty easy to find your mind reeling from Cindy’s insights. She’s fabulous as a thinker and as a speaker.
“Do you know how many departments, and levels of approval most corporations have in place?” she said. “I’ll tell you. About ten million! Nabisco has proved that removing them creates the magic. Big companies must give their best minds an environment in which to flourish, without throwing speed bumps at them all the time.”
The eggs arrived. White plates, thin toast, immaculately sliced avocado on a bed of chopped salsa. The waiter poured fresh coffee. Cindy looked up and added, “I’ll tell you something else. If the Oreo wizards had needed approval, Nabisco would have lost a thousand headlines all over the world – and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
She swears to God corporations must change from the bottom, because it will never happen at the top. It’s the juniors who must take the initiative and change the culture.” Cindy consults for some of the biggest corporations in the country, often spending an entire week studying every department, speaking to people at every level. “The whole story is never in the executive boardrooms,” she says. “It’s always in the engine room, among the troops.”
Cindy is a force for change. She defines the future of business, and she’s pretty succinct about that. “To predict the future, you have to invent it,” she says.
And she points up the biggest danger for any corporation is to keep following everyone else in the same sector of business, because the innovation will almost certainly come from the outside and someone is surely going to beat you to the punch. Harvard Business Review in 2010: If you align your strategies to what everyone else is doing, be sure a single business bullet will take you all down. (i.e. Uber, the biggest taxi company on earth doesn’t own one car, and AirBnB, the world’s fourth largest hotel chain that doesn’t even own a bed, never mind a bedroom.)
Cindy is certain businesses must restructure themselves from being purely profit driven enterprises, to being a force for good. She believes the companies of the future will be aligning themselves with social change, and will be branded in ways that makes them a force for good. She constantly analyzes how companies can spread a different message, and during breakfast, she used BP as the example. BP which caused the biggest oil spill in U.S. history – 200 million gallons of crude pumped into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
“It was a huge opportunity for BP to completely redesign their business, and they completely squandered it.” Cindy delicately placed a mouthful of toast, salsa and avocado on her fork. “I love it here. This place is a force for good,” she added, taking a sip of coffee.
“There must have been 50 million forums on the web during the disaster, people offering advice from all over the world. In the end they ignored them all, obfuscated, evaded, pointed fingers, had an army of lawyers protect them.”
“I always thought it was impossible for them?” I offered.
“Not at all. What they should have done was found some values, come clean, and openly admitted that they messed up in the most drastic fashion. Then they should have set-up an interface and asked the world for help.”
She paused, and looked at me for a beat. “It’s a funny thing, change. It takes a total disaster to make it happen, and even then it’s not guaranteed. Good intentions tend to die immediately. Companies need to be shaken to their core.”
“But how would this have benefited BP?”
“They could have implemented better solutions by accepting help from the rest of the world to redesign their business, to create the future of energy. Their current business is unsustainable in every possible sense.”
I lifted my coffee and took a long, thoughtful sip. A force for good was not an easy angle for companies to pull together. Cindy was talking about something very different to social charity – what she articulates as the business model of the future: shared values with shared action will always result in shared profit: financially and socially.
“What’s the main challenge for companies who want to change, but can’t achieve it?” I asked.
“In every company, there are two departments: Brand Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility. They never meet. One department makes money and markets the business, the other writes checks for various causes to clear the corporate conscience. Any company that integrates the two to make money because they do good will win, because it redesigns their business model, and it will reinvent the way the world views them. I want to see a future where the more money you make, the more good you do, and the more good you do, the more money you make. That’s the future I’m determined to make happen.”
We talked about ideas and New York, then I picked up the bill, and we both stood up and walked back outside into the cold.
“There is a guaranteed formula for business success. Recruit, hire and retain the most talented people, and give them an inspiring vision. Then empower them to achieve it any way they choose. At the same time, demonstrate how much you value them, privately and publicly. Then, enable them to share in the value and profit of the corporation. Almost no company operates this way, because virtually all companies operate a low-trust environment.”
A cab pulled up and Cindy opened the door. “By the way, James, that jacket is terribly smart. Where did you get it?”
“Steve McQueen.”
Cindy laughed. And her laughter seemed to hang in the icy New York air even as her cab sped away, back to Chelsea. This is a lady who must be heard.
THE END
To request Cindy Gallop to speak at your next event, contact:
Robinson Speakers Bureau | The Gold Standard For Speakers
+1 646-504-9849 | info@robinsonspeakers.com