Here's a question. Which direction are you going?

I'm Charles Day. I believe that leadership offers us the greatest opportunity of our lives, to make a difference. I'm asked to help leaders discover what they're capable of, and then to maximize their impact. Welcome to the intersection of strategy and humanity.

Before we get to this week's conversation, I've got a couple of thoughts on leadership that I want to share. I don't talk specifically about partisan politics on this podcast. I'm interested in exploring how different people lead and why, what makes them successful, and what allows them to have impact on the people and the world around them. As I say in the intro, I believe that leadership offers us the greatest opportunity to make a difference.

Against that context, I can't let this week go by without observation. On Sunday afternoon at two o'clock Eastern, whatever your view of politics, the world changed.

It changed because one person decided to lead by choosing not to. To be clear, he didn't have to withdraw as his party's nominee. For all the noise and all the pressure, he could have chosen to go ahead. We can all speculate about the outcome, but I think that misses the leadership lesson, that living through this particular moment offers us.

From my perspective and my experience, the best leaders, the leaders we talk about and write about years after they've gone, are focused first on the future. What kind of world, or corner of the block, do they want to live in, and do they want to leave behind for others? And that matters to them more than their own place in it. Which is why their place in it lasts forever.

And now to this episode's guests. Nils Leonard, one of the co-founders of Uncommon, the award-winning global creative studio, has been a regular guest on this show since I started Fearless over seven years ago. In all of that time, I've wondered about his partnership with his two co-founders, Natalie Graeme and Lucy Jameson. Why did they decide to go into business together? How does the partnership work and what might get in the way?

And what makes the Uncommon partnership particularly worth understanding, is the incredible consistency between what they said mattered to them when they started, and how they show up today.

They know what will power them to the future, which Nils believes makes them different from much of the industry, as AI arrives.

“It's asking everybody a question, which is, what are you really doing? You sell low cost content that could be made by a machine now, you are screwed. That's the truth of it. So what are you really selling? What are you really about? You know, all these creative people that are here in Cannes, I would argue they don't make money selling creativity. And so that's the thing, I think that's the question it's asking. I think it's thrilling.” - Nils Leonard

They know how they want to separate themselves from their competitors. As Lucy Jameson describes:

“I think we all looked at most agency brands and went they're not brands. We want to create a brand, not a kind of professional services service thing. We wanted to create our own brand. And if you own a brand, you need to have real clarity about what it stands for and you can't deviate from that.” - Lucy Jameson

And they know which direction they're headed, as Natalie Graeme explains:

“When we did start Uncommon, we were faced with, here's this incredible client. Why don't we take that? Because they're offering us a ton of cash. But it was absolutely the wrong thing to do as a founding client of Uncommon. We were able to look at each other and, without really having to question it, it was instant decision. No, that would take us back to where we didn't want to go.” - Natalie Graeme

Leadership is about defining the future and then motivating people to join you on the journey. And along the way, from time to time, you have to remind yourself of the past you've left behind, and why you're not going back.

All of us this week have lived through a moment that, perhaps unlike any other in our lifetime, will show us the consequences of leadership. Having partners you trust and respect on that journey makes it much more likely you'll succeed. This conversation on a wet, rainy Thursday morning at an outdoor restaurant in Cannes, shows why the Uncommon partnership has worked so successfully so far, and raises some questions about how it will need to evolve to guide the company's next stage of evolution.

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