ETC BusinessLeaders – Lunch with Todd Sampson

Businesses Encouraged to Embrace Fear!

A record crowd of 300 business people at this week’s ETC BusinessLeaders event were encouraged to balance creativity and fear by top Sydney advertising executive Todd Sampson.

“Creativity has the power to change the world. It certainly has the power to change businesses, but fear has the power to stop that,” Mr Sampson said.

“The ability to be able to balance that as leaders and as Small to Medium sized businesses is critical.”

The star of the ABC’s Gruen Transfer shared with the local crowd two important strategies for maximising creativity within business, including:

1. Tapping into the creativity of people who work for you; and
2. Renting a head – borrowing someone else’s perspective.

“Rent-a-head is one of my favourite strategies and it’s all about brainstorming a problem within your business for 20 minutes amongst your own team and then asking yourselves how would Richard Branson solve it. Then ask yourselves how would IBM solve it or Bill Gates or Disney,” Mr Sampson said.

“It’s a very good way of moving beyond your own limits, which for most people they don’t know they are being limited by their own creativity but they are.”

The CEO of award winning advertising agency Leo Burnett shared with the audience his own personal experiences of embracing fear including his solo climb of Mount Everest and the day he decided to step up from his second-in-charge position at Leo Burnett to become the boss.

“Most people are generally not risk takers, adventure seekers or Type A personalities, but to me what defines a leader or someone successful is those that can be braver 5 minutes longer when it comes to making difficult, and sometimes life changing decisions,” Mr Sampson said.

The Co-founder of Earth Hour also told the audience how a group of ordinary people come up with the idea for Earth Hour over dry toast and tea in Sydney and how proud he was that the initiative, designed to ignite action on climate change, had ended up being embraced by many countries throughout the world.