Straight Answers

“Well, and they're wrong because why exactly? What, what are they wrong about?”

answered: “Okay, here I'm going to, um, I'm going to call on William James.”

“Does it make it hard to hire? I mean, if you're hiring people from other firms that have a different approach, how, how are you building teams of people who have, who get the Gensler way and want to work this way?”

answered: “We really have a unique culture. We call it a one firm, firm culture”

“So this was the way into other celebrities?”

answered: “And there was another moment too that you probably don't remember”

“Um, not long after you left, uh, Oprah reached out as she does, you know, uh, uh, and, and asked you to help her build her company. What's a lesson you learned from working with Oprah that you haven't shared with the world before?”

answered: “I helped mostly in the business side. Can we get a deal with Comcast”

“What does that mean for some small businessman, right? If you can't take a stand, who can?”

answered: “to take us into a lighter place. Um, I want you to imagine”

“Can you talk to us a little bit about how, how the game works and some of the questions that, that are, that are in this hundred card pack? How do you envision people using it?”

answered: “Maybe just before I tell you how we'd use it, I'll tell you”

“Like, um, you know, there's, uh, high-profile cases, uh, where, uh, uh, people have psychotic breaks because they have, like, delusions of grandeur and things like that, and ChatGPT is, like, reinforcing that, and that's, like, really bad. And I think it's incumbent on the, uh, labs as well to, like, start a program pushback into these machines as well, right?”

answered: “that's the wrong, long path. Now back to the jobs thing.”

“And the thing that we're trying to figure out is, how can you help people prepare and rehearse being creative under those kinds of uncertain circumstances? Because when you're in the moment, you're under lots of stress, and so if you haven't actually built that capacity and those skills, um, you're less likely to be able to really respond in that kind of resilient way.”

answered: “I hadn't thought about that use case as much.”

“Um, uh, from both the candidate and from the hiring side, again, what are the, the most common mistakes, and what are you, what are the most coachable opportunities?”

answered: “Let me start with just the methodology I recommend people follow.”

“And Elizabeth, what's a question that everyone who's undertaking a design process should ask the firm that they're contemplating using to help them with, with the project?”

answered: “I think the firm should definitely ask all the clients what, um, what do”

“What, what were they telling you when they were saying no? What were you hearing?”

answered: “I have a way of not remembering anything that I don't love.”

“You can do some research, but how do you, how do you even figure out how to start manufacturing socks? How do you figure that out?”

answered: “having zero experience in the apparel manufacturing retail world outside of”

“Did you take a minute? Did you, did you literally go and walk about as an avid hiker, um, to, to kind of create some space before your next act?”

answered: “I was already working on Love Life before I left.”

“I mean, it's just a statement about the, the bias toward traditional markets for better for your products, um, and what happens when you expand your aperture. Um, as you started looking at the data around that, how did that then influence your ongoing marketing efforts?”

answered: “I think until we did a Superbowl ad, we just were like never looking at”

“Just by nature of how you work, especially in an in-person world. Um, given how important culture has been for not just Method, but your companies and for you personally as a leader, How, how have you managed through the scaling journey, um, keeping the culture heading in the right direction?”

answered: “I recognize within advertising how important culture is, and I always carry that forward”

“What did you see walking through the supermarkets in London?”

answered: “arguably my best tactic for developing new ideas is to be in a foreign market”

“How would you take the current kind of coding enablement? Like what, if your younger self had that coding enablement, how would your younger self have done this differently?”

answered: “So for kids nowadays growing up, for parents encouraging their kids to code, just go and repl it”

“I mean, those are pretty extraordinary numbers for a, a, a, a CPG company, certainly one in, in beauty. Um, how are you able to do that?”

answered: “I don't know. I only do what I do, and I don't know”

“Yep. Um, what, what is in what you're teaching right now that would have surprised you, shocked you as different from, from how you saw the world back then?”

answered: “there are some truisms that never have changed about business”

“Uh, and then as we, as COVID restrictions came down and we started going back to gyms and socializing more, um, the, the, the, the trend line went in the wrong direction. How have you all managed the, the coming out of COVID?”

answered: “Let me take a step back. I've been working on this space for 13 years”

“So, um, a couple of AI questions. Uh, one from Shelley who emailed us, um, asking us to ask you, aside from upskilling, up, upskilling with AI, what should white collar workers be doing to change their approach to both their jobs and the job market?”

answered: “What I would say is, it's just start using it”

“What was it hard to be perceived by people who were mission aligned as having switched from, uh, being a Jedi Knight to being Darth Vader?”

answered: “it bothered me a little bit. That's when my politics began to change.”

“Well, there's a little bit of a chicken egg here, right? You don't know how much you need to raise, or, or, or did you have a number in mind of what you needed to get to?”

answered: “We had a number, but it wasn't that, it wasn't even that easy”

“Let's say 65. Let's give me a few, let's give me four more years of this show.”

answered: “it's more of a question of of how do you use AI to extend your creativity”

“Um, Is that where they still live from?”

answered: “It sounds like you and I had similar formative experiences where we're making”