Decoding the Evolution of Advertising with Rishad Tobaccowala, Renowned Author & Former Chief Strategist at Publicis Groupe

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I believe success is having freedom to spend time in the way that gives you joy. It's that simple, right? And what tends to happen is earlier on you have you're less successful because you have to do stuff sometimes just to pay the bills and you are trying to figure out what gives you joy. But later on you know, someone who decides a particular career to live in a hut and fish is as successful as someone who's a billionaire who wants to make the next billion. Because that's both what gives them joy.

To thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape, brands must move at an ever increasing pace. I'm Matt Britton, founder and CEO of Suzy. Join me and key industry leaders as we dive deep into the shifting consumer trends within their industry, why it matters now, and how you can keep up. Welcome to the Speed of Cult.

Up.

Today we're going to be speaking with an old friend, Rashad Tabakawala, an Ad Age Interactive hall of Fame inductee. Rashad received her lifetime achievement Silver Medal award from the Chicago Ad Federation, is a bestselling author of the book Restoring the Soul of Business as the host of the what's Next podcast. Rashad, so great seeing you. Thanks so much for taking the time today.

Thank you for inviting me and it's so glad to see you again. You know, we've had such a long history.

Yep, absolutely. Rashad and I worked closely together during my publicis days and I've interacted at many conferences within the ad industry over the years and I was thrilled to have him. Thrilled to Hear that he was going to be joining the podcast today. So the first question I have for you, Rashad, is how did you get into advertising to begin with?

I got into advertising for a couple of reasons. I grew up in India, got a degree in math, came to business school at the University of Chicago, and what I discovered was I needed to do two things. I needed to learn about American culture because it was very clear that I did not know about American culture, having grown up in India. And that required me to be a business that was dealing with people. On the other hand, one of my skill sets happened to be strategy. So I sort of looked at it, and it eventually came down to, should I work for a consulting company or should I work for a marketing services company? And in that year, which was 1982, which is now 41 years ago, Leo Binet, the advertising agency, was privately held and was a combination of a marketing consulting company and an advertising agency. Literally, they were like one office, 32 clients, biggest agency in the. It happened to be in Chicago. And so I talked to them, I talked to the consulting companies, and it was very clear that this was going to be more fun because I'd get more exposure to American culture. This was the people who came up with everything from Kellogg's to a whole bunch of other stuff. So that's how I started. And I thought I'd spend two or three or four years and then move on, but I ended up being, I guess, unemployable. So I stayed in the same place.

I don't know if that would be the case, but you talk about 41 years ago. Obviously, there's been so much change, which we'll get into. What hasn't changed? If you look at the advertising industry and what sort of stayed consistent throughout.

I think there are four things that have not changed at all, and everything else has changed. The first that has not changed at all is that this business lives and dies on talent, Right? And if you do not have amazing talent and an environment for talent, you can't have a good company, an agency, good, anything. That's number one. Number two is it is basically a business of ideas and risks and innovation. And that means there'll be some failures and some successes, but you have to be pioneering with ideas and risks and innovation. Number three is it is a service business. And however difficult they might be, there are things called clients, and you have to understand their needs and, you know, sometimes argue with them and sometimes be submissive. But there's this entire thing of client relationship management not Just doing good client work because they are the people who eventually pay the bill. And the last thing that hasn't changed is that it is built on a edifice of change. Because what I mean by this is it's always changing, and that's what hasn't changed. So in 1982, I worked with a lady called Jane Spitler Zanari, who was my boss, who was the head of research for Leo Burnett Media. That's what it was called. And she and I built the case as to why there would be a massive change in the media landscape. And the massive change we were talking about was cable television. So we brought in people like Ted Turner to basically say, hey, there's this massive change 20 years after that or 22 years after that. I used to bring in people like Jerry Yang and said, there's this new thing called the Internet.

The CEO and founder of Yahoo.

Right. So what basically happens is one was cable television. And then there's always been changing. And it's because underlying the advertising and marketing business is communications and communication technology has always been changing from print to radio to TV to cable to Internet to now. You know, this everything I was about.

To say, less than 10 years later, it was the advent of the iPhone and how mobile's change. Everything.

Yeah, absolutely. And so what I do do is I describe to people something which I call the three connected ages. So I said, okay, obviously there was TV and online, but I said 1993 is when the big things happened. It wasn't that things were not changing. But between 1982 and 1993, the only big thing that happened was cable television. And then online was around AOL. All these people were around. But in 1993 was the world Wide Web. And we connected to Discover and we connected to Transact. We call that search and E commerce. And then in 2007, we now connected all the time. Connected to everybody, connected to distraction. We call that mobile and social and streaming. And now we've entered the third connected age, which is data connected to data, which is AI. New ways of connecting, which is voice, AR and VR. Much faster ways of connecting, which is 5G, and new trust connections, which is blockchain. And I said, like, okay, we've got three connected ages in 30 years. And that is how fast things have changed. So three things don't change. And one thing that doesn't change is it keeps changing.

Yeah. And one interesting thing about all those evolutions is I feel like with each chapter you just described the rate of change within those verticals. Gets even faster. I mean, you look at AI and what it's like every week, it continues to change where mobile. You know, there was several years before one iPhone came out to the next.

And it is the speed and rate of change that is the key. And the big thing now is fundamental in my first book was that human beings change much slower now than technology does.

Yeah, it's true, because we just don't.

Know how to compute so fast. Right. As someone's. I just got adjusted to something, and now you're saying something else. And literally, the rate of speed of the advance between ChatGPT and GPT 4, because ChatGPT is really GPT 3.5. So between 3.5 and 4 is pretty significant. And it's six months.

So where are you going to be a year from now? So I think the challenge in that is that the consumer changes even slower than the industry. And I think in the world where everybody wants to be an ad week, everyone wants to be on the bleeding edge, let alone cutting edge. Isn't there a risk that you can kind of go too fast for the consumer and alienate a lot of the public because they don't really know what you're saying? We saw that kind of happen with the Metaverse. We saw it happen with some of the blockchain applications, NFTs, et cetera, where it just went right over the heads of consumers. How do you know what that balance is as a brand?

Well, usually I think there are two things to think about. The words I use, I use a word called save, S, A, V, E. And I basically ask people, okay, this thing that we're trying to. Either there's this technology or this program or whatever we're trying to sell or get people to buy or use, does it have S, Is it solving a.

Problem for the consumer?

Right. A, is it as accessible? Is it easy to use, easy to understand? B, is there a value? And E, is it a great experience? Now, if you notice, the key thing is, like, with, let's say, and I have purchased them, I have purchased, you know, Oculus Quest 2, right, the Pro, $1,500. Now it's a thousand bucks. And I've done it because I keep buying all these things just to keep on top of it. I don't use it much because there was no problem it was solving. It's not very accessible. First of all, it's $1,500. Then the other thing I got to put on my glasses. When you go in, there's not any great value it seems like an isolated town. And when it's not isolated, it's like somewhat on the edge of porn. So that is the other. And the entire experience is like, you have to. I have to make an appointment. Okay.

Completely change consumer habits.

Right. And so that doesn't basically work at all. On the other hand, when you think about the things that have scaled, you know, whether it was something like search that makes it easy for me to find stuff, or social for me to connect stuff, that's a different thing. And so we sometimes forget it that we. Unless it meets the save, we are sometimes overthinking it.

Right. I would say the same exists for companies, packaged goods companies that launch new products. Does a consumer really need this? What's the unmet need that you're filling?

Exactly. And what happens is, a great extent, a lot of marketing companies have become, without knowing it, they've become. A lot of brand managers have become like academics in universities. So an academic in universities are often promoted under this line, which is publish or perish. So they publish, but if you see a lot of the stuff they publish, it's a bullshit. It's just to get citations. And publishing, it makes no sense at all. So similarly, you have these new products being launched, new flavors and new variations. Absolute bullshit. But the brand manager has to say they launched a product to get promoted to the next level, to category back.

Which is why when you go into Target, you'll see 500 brands of cereal in the cereal aisle. And it's just overwhelming for the consumer.

Exactly.

So, I mean, in an economic downturn, where does it all go? How do you predict this is going to play out with, you know, the amount of choice that consumers have?

And I think what you're beginning to see, you know, early indications are this. Two, two different things. One is the US Economy is stronger than most of us think. I was just looking at the most recent Economist cover story, and it basically says the US economy remains, you know, somewhat strong. But what basically happens, it has. It has trifurcated. And that's the key thing that a lot of people are paying attention to. Trifurcated, not bifurcated. It's trifurcated. So the people who've done particularly well are the top 10% because of everything from asset prices going up and being able to own real estate or whatever it was. The other group that has done relatively well in real terms, though nowhere where they need to be is the bottom 30%. Right. But it's the middle 40%, the, what we would call the middle class. Have actually not done that well. So, you know, the question always is, which consumer are you talking about?

I talk about the barbell economy. Very similar. Right, right.

And so the thing in between this is, which is the key thing for most marketers, they are now under a lot of pressure. And the pressure is one, the real cost of what's going on, which is you have to eat and food prices are going up, you have to travel and travel prices are going up. I mean travel means gas. You may not have to fly to Miami, but you need gas, which is second. But as importantly, all the other stuff that's so important like education and healthcare and daycare, it's one of the reasons a big thing that people do not recognize, and I've written about this, is that the US population is about to go into decline. Right. Because as countries get richer, they have fewer children. But when childcare and real estate is so expensive, you kind of wonder whether you want to have children. The US actually grew a great degree because of immigration legal. But now we have some constraints even to legal immigration. And so now you begin to have for the first time, everybody's business plan is always built on increasing population. What happens, it becomes declining population.

We're seeing the same thing with companies. Right. We're just talking about several companies that are cutting and very similar.

Yep. And it's across the board and at the same stage there's, you know, you and I have lived in different eras but. And it's unfortunate that they have to go through this and I under no way do I think it's good. But I know a lot of people who are in their 30s who have never been in a downturn in an economy. And if those people in their 30s that have worked for the last 10, 15 years at one of the big tech companies, they don't know what to make of this. So people who've been at the tech companies who are like in their 50s have seen this, you know, with the dot com bust, et cetera. But for the others, it's like what happened. It's always been up to the right and those are things that you know, to worry about.

We'll be right back with the speed of culture after a few words from our sponsors.

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So you mentioned cycles and you know, you spent so much time in the advertising space and we were talking about all the changes, you know, from the Internet, from mobile, social, et cetera. When you've seen agencies and you spent most of your time within the publicist network, which is prolific advertising network, really thriving at their prime and everything's working. You talk about talent, how does that manifest into a culture of an agency that's really winning? Like what are the commonalities you've seen over time?

So one of the things I spend a lot of time today is on this topic of culture. And there are a couple of reasons for it. One is because of post Covid, you know, people are struggling with like what is return to the office. So a lot of people have basically said we have to get everybody back into the office because of culture. So I did a lot of study about culture. So I have written prolifically about this. And not everybody agrees with me. Some people do. In fact, many people do, but not the reason many people do is because it's not like an in, it's not a my way or the highway. It's a much more nuanced approach. But there's certain parts of the nuance which some people don't like. So here's my basic belief. Let's start with culture. What is culture? So great cultures have four things, and this is true for advertising, marketing, services, agency, media companies, your company. There are four things. The first is a quest for excellence. You can't have great cultures unless you are trying to do excellent work, excellent service, excellent product with excellent people. It's just high standards. So my old stuff is don't tell me about, you know, everybody loves each other. If you don't have like high standards, that's not a great culture. That's a great party. Okay, that's not a great culture. So that's number one. Second is what I call, which is the growth mindset. So growth mindset is that the people and the companies constantly thinking about growing themselves, learning from mistakes, all of that. The third one is collaboration and the fourth one is communication. So collaboration is working together. Communication is being able to tell each other the truth. Three of the four don't require people to be together. One, which is the collaboration does okay, some of the time. And so my whole basic belief is putting people in work. How does that solve for excellence? How does that solve for a growth mindset? In fact, if you want excellence, you should basically say, I want all the world's class, best, world's best talent wherever they are. Growth mindset is I'll have three, four different ways of working, not one way of working. So my belief is the future is going to basically be about what I call unbundled distributed work. So don't even call it remote hybrid, because remote makes you think that if you're not at work, you're like, isolated. Because I stopped working full time at Publicis six months before COVID I was sitting by myself at home and feeling perfectly happy. So I was talking to people, everything. It wasn't like, oh, my God, I'm by myself. Hybrid makes you think there are only two places, office and home. Today we're in Miami at Impossible Event. What is this? Not an office or home. We're having networking experiences, education, learning. We could do that at a restaurant, at a bar, at ces, at cads. So why do you think about it only being office is the place where this thing happens. In fact, usually creativity, collaboration, networking takes place outside the office, right? So once you think about it, the biggest challenge for most people is that it's a management challenge. Managers are forced to manage differently, right.

And develop talent also, because the younger people aren't going to can the new people. They need to learn somehow.

And so those are some of the big sort of struggles. But what I basically simply say is, look, think about a growth mindset, think about excellence, think about collaboration and think about communication and then think about home, office, third places, and then events and experiences and for different people, different strokes. How do you combine them? Why do you come up with one model? You know, you might say, if someone's entering my firm, I think it's very important that we build a culture of people connecting together, learning. And I'd like everybody to work three to four days a week for the first three months. After that, we'll do different things, right? Which is very different than basically saying you're senior and you have to be here every day, right?

What you're hearing, a lot of companies are saying right now.

And the two reasons, a lot of them, and it's very interesting, a lot of financial firms are saying it. And I'll tell you why financial firms are saying it. The first reason is most financial firms are deeply, deeply on their balance sheet of commercial real estate. And their own stuff is shit. If we don't do this commercial real estate, look what happens to our little thing because they have commercial real estate. Not only do they have space, but they have invested in space. Because what do you think banks loan is for commercial real estate, right?

On their balance sheets.

On their balance sheet. So they're damn worried about that. That's number one. Number two is, I believe the financial business is the easiest to disrupt. It's just a goddamn number, right? And if people begin to say at home, hey, listen, I have all the machines with AI and everything, I don't know, why do I have to spend this? Someone will say, why do I need hundreds of thousands of people at Goldman Sachs and these big buildings and helicopters? Why am I paying for that when someone's doing a better job? So if you remove all of the ornamentation, plus the problem with their balance sheet, they become just people. The whole edifice collapses. This is not about the future of work. It's about a desperate need for management to remain relevant, holding onto the past. And that is my basic belief, is this is about the next generation of leadership. And what basically has happened is if you're a manager, you've worked really hard, you got yourself a corner office, and now you got exactly the same square footage on Zoom that makes you worry, number one. Number two, what you consider to be management was checking in on people, ordering people, monitoring people. What those people are now asking you is, what the hell do you do?

Right? It's so true. And I think it's just a different lens on how to operate a business. So we'll switch gears a little bit to you, because you strike me as somebody who has an endless curiosity. It's very easy with everything you've accomplished, to not be so active, to not be on airplanes and speaking all the time. And, you know, I imagine what drives you is your ability to ask questions, meet people, collaborate. A lot of things that you just spoke about. How have you been able to stay in touch, you know, as you get older with all these changes and remain so relevant? Because a lot of people aren't able to achieve that.

So first of all, I maybe I fooled everybody, so maybe I'm just fooling people, and I don't do that.

You wouldn't be on the podcast if you were following us, right?

So here's what's basically happened over the last decade. When I was still working full time, I began to realize very senior clients were asking me a question which was really about themselves, but they were asking me the question which was exactly the same question. So they basically said, After 30 years, now it's been 40 years, but I was still working 30. How have you managed to remain relevant. What they were really asking was, was how can they remain relevant? So I quickly figured out they weren't asking about me, they were asking about themselves. And so I basically believe that there are three things that people need to do to remain relevant. And those are the three things that I do. And a couple of them sound very difficult, but they're not, and it's just a habit. And I explain to people how they can do it. So I'll tell you what the three are. The first one is you want to allocate an hour every day to learn.

So what does that look like?

The two or three ways. So for me, it basically is. I have what I call a learning hour. It's usually in the morning. So I get up early in the morning and I spend an hour either reading or doing research on the web. But an hour could also be talking.

To somebody intentionally, Rashad, About a specific.

Topic, or just it's on a couple of things. I tend to have a topic that comes up when someone, you know, you might mention something, and I'll say, like, what did Matt say? I didn't know what exactly he mentioned. Or you might say, go check this out. So I put it down on my phone, and then I say, okay, these are things I gotta check out. So those are sporadic. But then over the course of a year, I basically have a theme. So in 2020, between June 2020 and July 2021. So that year, my theme was I gotta learn about the substack thing. Okay. Then it basically became Web3, and now it's AI. And in each case, what? So I have a big theme, but then I do lots of things in between, which.

A thesis almost.

Right?

Yeah.

So I have, like an annual theme, and then I have whatever someone basically says it might basically be, hey, you should go check out this particular form of technology or read this book. It's really good. Or someone's got a particular perspective. But if you get into the learning mindset, what then happens is you become curious and you ask people questions. So I basically do that. And my thing is, if you tell me something and I don't know, I'll write it down, I'll do research, I'll ask you questions. So I won't fake it. So that's one thing. Spend an hour. So a lot of people say, rashad, it's impossible. You obviously are unemployed, starving author. You have nothing else to do. But I was doing it when I was working for Maurice Levy. And you know, you know him, he's like, Very hard charging. And I worked for him directly, right. For years. And I had two kids. So it wasn't like I wasn't. Today my kids are grown up and I don't have a job. But I was still doing it, right? So that's number one. Second is build a case for the exact opposite of what you believe once in a while. So sometimes I strongly believe in something. I stop and I try to build a case as to why I'm completely wrong.

And why do you do that?

Because when you are senior, now, of course I'm no longer senior, I'm by myself. But when I was senior, I was always scared, even though I was very approachable, that people basically would not tell me what really was going on. Because I've always told people in boardrooms that they believe that their flatulence smells like Chanel 5, right? Because people are, they don't want to.

Piss off, they drink their own Kool Aid.

So I basically say, what if I'm completely wrong? And I try to build the exact opposite case. And once in a while it helps me nuance my position. Often it does help me nuance the position saying, listen, you're being, I'm being too extremist on this. It needs to be a little bit more balanced. But it forces you to look from the other perspective and the other side and it grows you. And the third one is to actually once in a while make something, build something, create something. So like when I was doing substack, I said, okay, I've read about substack, let me start my own substack thought letter. And mine I decided not to send it to. First of all, it was gonna be free, but I wasn't gonna send it to anybody. It was a hundred percent opt in ed. You know, today like yesterday I wrote my 140th Sunday in a row. I have 35,000 readers right around the world, including 600 CEOs. And because I just built something and so right now I'm working with a bunch of people even though it's not cool to build something around learning in an nft. But I won't charge for the nft. So it's not like a money making thing. But think about NFT as basically more like a frequent flyer mile. Something like that has membership and community versus it being like a, it's going to be free or it's going to be like $10 or something. The whole idea is I want to learn certain things. So spend an hour learning once in a while. Build the exact Opposite case. And then build, create. Right. Because we're living in an age. You're building a company. I built some companies within a company. Right. I built a book. I'm writing my second book. You gotta be making things and then just start talking about things.

Yep. I look at the same way when I interview employees. I want to know what they've made, not what they're a part of. But when did you put hands on keyboard, as small as it may be? Take that initiative. Build something.

Yeah. And so, like, these days, my thing is like, I. You have this podcast. I have a podcast, I have a book, I have a substack. And my whole thing is like. Then people look at me and say, okay, maybe you're not as stupid as you look, but, you know, you need to basically have that. And that's the key. And because people. What I always tell people is after about, like, five minutes, where people get really, like, impressed by your credentials after that, they don't get that impressed. It's only the first five minutes. Right. I don't even have those credentials because I have none of those powerful positions anymore. So I get no minutes. Right. You gotta, like, be smart from the beginning or helpful, or you're gone. And that's the world we're gonna be living in. And that's one of the reasons, also, a lot of leaders don't like this new world, because people are basically saying, I've always said a boss is a title that people have to genuflect in front of, but then they make a lot of fun of you. In a bar, a leader is someone. Somebody follows. Right. And so leadership is basically a zone of influence, not a zone of control. But you don't get zone of influence unless you're really good and you're helping.

People or you're building something to your point. So I think the one piece that you left out and maybe in your mind had this part of building something is you have to publish, you have to send. And I find that's where a lot of people, especially younger people, get stumbled because they're like, are people gonna like this? What if nobody likes it? And what if nobody cares? So let's talk about that courage. Because it's a big thing.

It's a big thing. You've got to, like, put it out there. And what tends to basically happen is like, you know, I wrote this recent thing on purpose because everybody's, like, hot on purpose. And I do believe in purpose. But I said, okay, let's have some nuanced look at purpose. And I knew that some people who are deeply into purpose would get like all worked up about it. It's not an anti purpose, but it basically says I'm going to do a sort of the. What's an old movie? Rashomon, which is four ways of looking at the same thing. So I would have three ways of looking at purpose, one from a pro, one from a nuanced and one from. This makes no sense. But I had different people I talked to, right. Who were experts in the space. But where I came out was it's important, but it's like this. But if you do this, it doesn't make any sense. And there are a lot of companies who do this stuff that makes no sense. So I knew like someone would write to me and say, like, how can you say this right? I said, I'm not calling out any company. The fact that you're getting agitated about it means you have been thinking about it. But I always tell people that when you get mad, in most cases you get mad because the other person is.

Correct or there's at least a grain of truth there.

There's a grain of truth, exactly.

Absolutely. So you mentioned, as we wrap up here, AI and how it's your big thesis for this year and it's no surprise. Where do you see all of this going? Because a lot of people obviously are freaked out by it. They think it's going to take their job. They don't know if their job's going to exist. How should professionals be handling it? How should companies be looking at this? How quickly should they pivot? I know it's a big question in the podcast's own right, but just where's your head at in terms of all this?

I'll give you four very quick ways of thinking about it because they're a little different. So if you're a company, right, you basically have to be on top of it. But be very careful about how your people are using it because under the current rules, what you're. I was just talking to a very senior person at a major company just before this and I was explaining to her that, hey, listen, what your people type in there is part of the training and as they become more sophisticated, they actually type in company information into the training. So some of your quote unquote confidential information goes into the Right.

I read that happen to Samsung recently.

Yes, yes, right. So I said you have to be very careful. So as a company, you have to be on top of it because it's massively important. But how it's done. There has to be some sort of protocol. So that's number one. The second perspective is from a perspective of governance. So a lot of people. I most recently read a recent Financial Times article, the rate at which this is. We talked about, you know, six months, et cetera. The way it's doubling is doubling every six months. So, you know, GPT5. The only thing that's preventing GPT5 is Nvidia doesn't have enough GPUs to sell. But if there's going to be enough processing power, with processing power, we will basically have things that have become pretty lethally useful, but also potentially problematic. So there's a governance thing. All I know is there has to be some sort of alignment. I don't know how to do it, but there's a governance thing. Third is from a society perspective, it's somewhat unstoppable because it removes friction. And anything that removes friction and makes things easy, people adopt.

It's like the opposite of the Oculus example you gave her.

Exactly. It's just, it's going to happen. But the most important for the individual, for people listening to this as talent, my basic belief is this, that I truly believe that a talented individual plus AI will beat AI by itself. But a talented individual by themselves may not beat AI. So if you decide that you are going to compete with AI for your next job, you might lose your job. If you are going to partner with AI, you will beat AI, that is beating your job. So it's that simple. And people will say, what does that mean? I says very simply this. If you are in, if you've decided you are the world's best tour guide, I'm the world's best tour guide. I've just decided, okay, like I can take you around Miami, like in every part of Miami. And let's suppose I was the world's best tour guide and I was doing this horse and carriage and here came the automobile. I could basically second class tour guide in an automobile could beat me if I kept saying everybody's got to come with my horse and carriage. The only reason being I would only cover three or four tourist spots and this guy or lady would cover 20. Now you put me in the stupid automobile and I'll beat that other person. And that's what I'm trying to explain to people, right? And by the way, that automobile with an iPhone talking to it would beat me by myself, right? And that's what people don't realize. This is not like, you know, I just recently, my first book, which has been around for three and a half years, keeps selling really well. And I had the good opportunity to basically be at a event for both Walmart in the beginning of February and PNG at the end of February. And they bought lots of copies of my first book three years later. And they said, wait, everything in this book has come true, including I talk about AI at the end and I say it's going to be people plus AI. This was like three and a half years. I said it was so obvious it was coming. Obviously I didn't see that this capability, but it was capability. And so the reason the subtitle of my book, you know, Restoring the Soul of Business is Staying Human in the Age of Data. You could simply think about AI is really data squared.

Right.

It's just data based learning. So staying human in the base of AI. So we're going to eventually see, I think commercials, like maybe too young for this, but there's this very famous commercial from Leo Burnett called Is It Live or Is it Memorex?

Of course I remember that. Yeah.

So it's going to basically be is it live or is it AI or this Tropicana thing. 100% squeezed, fresh squeezed orange juice. It's going to be. This is 100% fully analog Mac Britain.

Right. Just because it's going to be hard, harder to distinguish over time.

It's going to be hard to distinguish. In fact, when I was talking to this very senior lady at this big firm just before I came here, I said, hey, you know, Lisa, in the future you could be sending your AI to talk to me. The zoom thing, which already has an appendage, could summarize this conversation and you could be at a beach and I wouldn't know.

Right. Yeah. It's going to be wild to see how this all plays out. So to wrap up here, Rashad, you know, again, you've had an amazing career and frankly one that I hope mine evolves to over time, where you continue to innovate, you continue to stay curious, put yourself out there. And to me, it's incredibly inspiring. What pieces of advice would you impart on younger listeners in terms of the steps they need to take to stay relevant and maybe some things they should focus on earlier in their career to set their path in the right direction.

Sure. So I think the most important thing is I focus primarily on younger people. But if people just Google me and just put in 12 career lessons and my name, you'll come across a piece where I basically shared all my learning in 12 career lessons but three of them are for later career, three of them are middle career and six of them are opening career. So I'm gonna share some of the early career. Right. So the first one is find the least sucky job you can get. I understand people have mission and vision and values you really don't know early on. Right. So that's number one. Number two is your career is gonna be 40 to 50 years long. So don't make six month decisions, think two, three years at a time. Right. And the third is eventually try new things to figure out what you're particularly good at. And ultimately the person you work for is more important than the company you work for.

I agree 100%. I mean it's people I've worked for that inspire me. Like Laura Desmond comes to mind. Working for her, it changed me as a leader and I could be working for her in a factory, I would still get that same experience. Absolutely. And to wrap things up, I mean is there all you share too much knowledge day. Is there sort of one mantra that comes to mind in terms of embodies the way that you look at your career and your life in general?

I would say yes. So I would basically say the line that I try to get people to think about is what is a definition of success? Because all along and everyone says we want to succeed. So I have a definition of success which I think works for everybody because you'll see once I define it, it is so I believe success is having freedom to spend time in the way that gives you joy. It's that simple. Right. You are successful if you can spend time in ways that give you joy. And what tends to happen is earlier on you are less successful because you have to do stuff sometimes just to pay the bills and you are trying to figure out what gives you joy. But later on someone who decides at a particular career to live in a hut and fish is as successful as someone who's a billionaire who wants to make the next billion. Because that's both what gives them joy.

Right. And sometimes people get success early in their career before they know what gives them joy and they spend their money and time in the wrong places and it goes awry.

Exactly.

That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time Rashad. It's great seeing you as again as always. And it's going to be a crazy new world that we're entering right now.

I know. And I'm going to follow Susie and figure out how you going to give me the results.

Please do we ran Suzy by you before we even launched, so really appreciate it. So on behalf of the Susie and Adweeking, thanks again to the great Rashad Dabakala for joining us today. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the Speed of Culture podcast on your favorite podcast platform. On behalf of Rashad, the Suzy team and Adweek, thanks for joining. We'll see you next time. Take care everyone. The Speed of Culture is brought to you by Suzy as part of the Ad Week podcast network and A.D. a guest creator Network. You can listen subscribe to all Adweek's podcasts by visiting Adweek.com podcasts to find out more about Suzy, head to Suzy.com and make sure to search for the Speed of Culture in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found, click follow so you don't miss out on any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Suzy, thanks for listening.

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