[ Music ]
>> So what I'm here to talk to you about today is the rise of the creative class.
And the reason I entitled it The Rise of the Creative Class, because each of you play a part
in this emergent desire to want to be near design or be involved in design,
so it's about all of us essentially.
So some of the titles that I've held throughout my career, they've been vast, they've been many,
but these are the core highlights.
I'm currently a designer in residence at Excel Partners, which is a venture capital firm
in the Silicon Valley, where I work on a myriad of things, helping portfolio companies think
about their creative culture, but also incubating my own business, my own concept,
which is called Super Heroic, and we're a company focused on enabling and encouraging play
for children around the world, and we qualify children as anybody with an imagination.
I don't know about you, I'm a grown child.
I'm not an adult.
So I fit within that demographic.
I'm also the founder of The Tribe, which is a non-profit focused on young boys of color,
Afro-Latino, specifically, so Latino boys and young boys of color.
Essentially, what I did was I took over the Boy Scouts and reinvented it
to teach young men how to navigate today's complexity.
I'm also a media designer at the Stanford D School.
This is interesting, because when I joined the D School, my twitter blew up with a bunch
of real designers saying, oh, you design thinking now,
what happened to you man, what's going on?
You fell off.
It was a pretty interesting dialogue that I had with creative people
to understand the differences between design thinking and design doing,
so I kind of sit at the middle of that.
Before that, I was a design director at Nike, for Jordan brand for a really long time.
They hired me at the age of 19.
I was born and raised in the south side of Chicago, so I was extremely thankful and lucky
to be the first design intern to join Brent, and surprisingly, the first intern of color
in design, which was shocking considering all the athletes were people of color.
But the most important job ever is the [inaudible], the home gardening technician.
Basically I shoveled snow and I cut grass on the south side of Chicago,
to buy every single pair of shoes that I wanted.
This was critical, because this was my first entrepreneurial venture,
I realized that I could make a lot more money and save time if I hire other people
to shovel snow and cut grass for me, and my friends also wanted to buy Jordans,
so it was an easy proposition, if I give you the contact list, you make money,
we buy shoes together, we all were fresh [laughter],
so there is the value proposition of your culture, it's important.
And so a lot of it is about this constant of us versus them.
Us, being the design team, the people that are very creative, the people that are often left
out of the conversation when they say hey, we need a seat at the table.
I like to say hey, we design the table, so we necessarily don't need a seat,
we just need our seat back [laughter].
And then, the managers, the people that control the budget right?
And a lot of times, any credible organization,
you think of the budget as institutionalized love.
So how much money they throw toward you to do your work is how much they love you.
But it's a new day.
It's a different problem that we're trying to solve.
So it's really about us and them coming together in this new economy.
And so one of the things that I like to do is break stuff down, it's a very simple equation.
This new economy has serious problems, right?
There's a lack of diversity, there is a lack of, you know, understanding of youth,
there is a lack of understanding of the nuances of culture changing.
So how can we get after this and create products that are truly meaningful,
like the Bevel product, like the things that are happening within Joy.
This is a new demographic.
This is a new mindset.
So what I've done is distilled it based on my experience, my humble experience,
since it's three simple, or two simple steps that equals return.
So it's about culture, relevance and return, right?
So culture is qualified as the culture of your company.
That is essentially the first product you create.
Your first customer is your employee base.
If you think about your company as a product itself, you have to design a culture.
You have to make sure that you serve the people that work for you.
You have to make sure you understand their needs.
You have to understand why they show up to work.
It isn't just that I want a job, it's that I want to provide for my wife and children.
That's bigger than me filling out an application.
That's bigger than me submitting a resume.
That's a purpose, that's my why.
That's why I come in.
That's why I grind 24/7.
You have to understand those things.
Relevancy is about understanding the nuances of the market, the consumer.
Their hopes, their dreams, their aspirations.
There is a myriad of choices out there.
Why are you different and better, not just different and new.
Anything can be new nowadays.
There is a new product on Instagram that I see every 15 minutes,
and some of that stuff is terrible.
At Nike, we call it polishing a turd [laughter], there's a lot of polished turds out there,
but the problem is that the tools of creation have been democratized, but taste is earned
over time, so how do you find that balance
between tasteful acquisition and just ubiquitous consumption.
It's very different, right?
So in return, when you do these things well, you see a significant return,
not only in your brand affinity, but in your bottom line.
So first example is the startup that I joined after leaving Nike.
We were focused on a very sticky problem, and it was a technological area that we focused
on specifically called multi-complex spectroscopy, which is a really long word,
and what that means, is that we use light, infrared, to measure molecules in a liquid,
to understand what ingredients are in the food that you eat.
My son had gotten sick, and as a result, he had developed significant food allergies,
and it really pained me that I spent so much time working with the world's best athletes,
but yet here it is, coming home, I couldn't even help my own child.
So with anything, as a father, and as a person of faith, the first thing I did is I went home,
and I prayed, and I went and resigned the next day.
My parents thought I was completely crazy.
But for me, my why was that I was focused on providing for my wife and children,
not necessarily saying that I had my dream job anymore.
My dream was to be a good dad.
So joining this company, we have to figure out how do you get mechanical engineers,
how do you get people that have, you know, physics background, electrical engineers,
scientists, doctors, designers, to all agree.
We had to design our culture.
It was about radical collaboration and team formation.
So there is a quote that I always love to use.
It's from Carl Sagan, the original host of Cosmos.
Many of you probably are too young to remember that [laughs],
so this is me showing my age a little bit, but it is,
"the beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it,
but the way that those atoms are put together."
So we celebrate the end result.
But if you understand the decisions that need to be made to create
that structure, that's the beauty.
Beauty is in the chaos of creation.
And that is the same thing when you're designing a culture.
It is the way that you arrange that team.
It is the way you optimize them against that single focus mentioned.
And so for us, our mission was simple.
To provide people with a sense of clarity, provide people with a sense of wellness,
so to be cognitively sharp, and physically strong.
Irene was a person that also supported the company early on.
I started as an adviser, then fell in love with the mission and the product,
and joined as the first Head of Design.
And it was fascinating to see how we all argued over what the end result would be.
To take a ubiquitous object, and take the thing very special and digitally enabled.
It was fascinating to see.
It was also a case study in how not to do a startup.
But at the same time [laughter], you have to learn.
I'm a big fan of trying and failing versus failing to try.
So we created a new flying formation.
We have to have a new offense, right?
To get after this product proposition in the market.
And we focused on creating a brand of distinction,
not just a brand of differentiation.
And from working with Jordan brand since the very beginning, we were a very distinct brand.
What we did was different than Nike.
We zigged, when everyone else zagged.
That was the phrase we used quite often.
And we distilled those down into five key principles of distinction.
It's about insights.
How do you actually understand the voice of your consumer?
It's about storytelling.
Taking those little moments of discovery and turning them into meaningful narratives,
that drive the value of your business, for many generations to come.
It's about innovation, which is often an over-used word, but in our sense,
innovation was the simplicity of now taking a very known behavior of looking at a can
and reading the label, into something that gave you a new level of insight and discovery.
It is about aesthetics, having a very specific look and feel
to the product, and the product's mission.
And craftsmanship.
You know, I obsess over craftsmanship and finish.
We work in a digital world where people say oh, what's the crafted version of a UXUI experience?
I think anything can be crafted with intentionality.
At Nike, we would say "edit to amplify."
So it's really about that.
How do you finish something and take that last little bit of your design away to make it sing?
Because a lot of times, when you explain to creative people what we do,
we think it's an additive process, and when in essence, it's editing.
It's curation.
It's really simplifying things down to its natural state.
So we created a very unique cadence in terms of how we work together.
Everyone was responsible for talking to the consumer.
Everyone was responsible for insights.
We all were together, we learn together, we would discover.
Then we would go back and ideate with one another.
That was allowing myself to dream out loud.
Not only with customers and employees, but with the teams inside.
It was no longer hey design, go back into your bubble and figure out the solution
to this problem we've discovered.
It was about all of us sitting in a room and dreaming together.
And then I'm a big fan of business cases, and when John talked
about total addressable market earlier, designers, don't get intimidated to go in
and say hey, here is who we think the market really looks like.
Here is the numbers.
Here is the actual meat on the bone.
This gives you the credibility to go into the thing you designed, beyond just the idea itself.
So I would ask my team, how many people do you think this can help?
And if it did help, then what do they look like in three to five years?
And how would they refer this brand to someone else?
Then what would they also talk about if they were dissatisfied?
So it was pre-mortem and post-mortem.
It was looking at the success before it happened,
and looking at the failure before it happened, and creating those conditions to be able
to argue which direction to take.
This is critical.
Business cases don't always have to, you know, have budgets and numbers attached.
Sometimes the best data point is how the person feels.
So I would ask them, how does the consumer feel about what we're doing?
And how many people can feel this way if we do our jobs well?
Then we created low-resolution proofs of concept, you know, working in hardware and ILT,
it cost a lot of money to do tooling, so with the rapid prototyping and paper
and just using a little bit of imagination like children, we created some of those solutions
in house to be able to see if we were working on them ourselves, they will work for us,
ourselves, and then we went through the rest of the cadence, right?
Where we would build it, test it, launch it, then go into sustain mode.
But what's fun about this process is that everyone did not always agree.
But it was our goal to figure out how do you get people to align?
Whenever you're a creative leader in any organization, you're fighting for agreement.
Agreements will not be something that come about through brut force,
but you can align if you're very clear on your mission.
So always be clear on why you're doing what you're doing, or who you're doing it for,
because that is where you find the magic.
That is where the teams actually come together
and create good working-excuse me, create good work.
So the next piece that was really interesting was about this concept of relevance.
Many of you have seen some of our competitors in the market when I was still at Nike.
The biggest competitor was Under Armor.
They dominated in terms of opening up this concept of team sport.
Their first introduction into the market in 2006 was this notion of, you know, pop Warner,
pee-wee football, kids on the bus, the little kid claps, he flexes,
he looked like a 12-year-old superhero, it was amazing.
The best thing ever.
And it punched Nike in the stomach.
We realized that we were losing grip.
We didn't control the conversation anymore about football and what it meant to our demographic.
We took them for granted.
They were buying our products, but we weren't having a true conversation.
So we had to change the way we gathered insights.
We had to re-approach our market.
We had to go back to doing what Mr. Bowerman [assumed spelling] and Mr. Knight taught us all
to do, which is listening to the voice of the athlete.
This sounds very simple, but it means putting yourself in a position of just comfort.
Doing things out of your normal behavior.
Allowing yourself to understand their why.
We would obsess over why do these people play football?
Is it bigger than just that one moment where they get the highlight, the tackle, the steal,
you know, the pick six, what is it that they're actually playing for?
And what we did was we realized we needed to know them to serve them.
We didn't know them enough.
We knew about them.
We knew what they liked, but we did not know them.
Times had changed.
Conditions had changed.
Problems had changed.
But our brand didn't change.
So we were at an impasse.
We needed to evolve quickly.
So this video that I'm going to show is a great example of how we evolve, because we started
by listening to the voice of the athlete, knowing them to serve them,
then providing an experience that was first class for every athlete that came through Nike.
[ Banging Sounds ]
>> There is hope for people in my community, and I just want to be that special one
who shows other individuals that flowers do grow from concrete.
>> Think about going out, I think about partying, having fun, you know, about my family,
back of my mind, they really need me to make it.
So I have no choice.
>> You're the center of attention, and you know everybody is waiting on you to make some type
of big play, whether we had a good game or not, they're going to talk
about it at the end of the night.
>> When I work out, I just always think
about somebody doing better than-so I always try to do my best [inaudible].
>> Come home, he got a little bit of either you're all in,
and you do it right, or don't bother doing it.
[ Machine Sound ]
[ Music ]
[ Crowd Chanting ]
>> Man that gets me hyped every time!
Oh man, I just want to run at [inaudible] right now, every time I see that [laughter],
but what was interesting about that is that we discovered their why.
When they ran the ball, they weren't running to score a touchdown.
They were running past the system designed to snare them
into the uncertainty of low expectations.
They were shattering stereotypes.
They were providing a better way for their family to get out of inner city circumstances,
to be the son that takes care of his mother because she was raising a single child.
To be an example in a neighborhood that told kids it was possible to go to college.
This was bigger than football for each and every one
of these young men, but somehow we missed that.
We thought that it was about studs and cleats and tackles and highlights, when really it was
about aspirations and dreams and doing something that people said was impossible.
This was about hope.
And we have to figure out how do you provide the modern uniform for the modern warrior?
A warrior of the light.
Fighting against the darkness and uncertainty of where they came from.
So we created a moment called the opening.
And really what it was, was we allowed every single athlete
to feel like they were a D1 recruit.
If you were the fastest kid in the nation, or you were the slowest kid.
It was about your mindset.
It was about coming together and agreeing that the benefit
of being an athlete is a certain level of work ethic and a certain level of stick-to-it-ness,
that unwillingness to quit when other people succeed-excuse me,
other people can see other people acquiesce to the powers that be.
These men were standing up for themselves, and we wanted to support them
through creating a unique experience.
So when they came to Nike, we outfitted a part of our campus to make it look
like it was a locker room and an NFL team, so every single kid that came
through received special treatment.
They all felt like they were the top recruit at this camp.
So we had this moment of time where it was called environmental fairness in education,
and people often self-calibrate to a success or failure.
So what you expect of a person is what they become.
We expected great things.
So when they came in and they told us about the aspirations to go to college, it's like hey,
we're not impressed with that, because we expect you to go to college.
We expect you to do well.
This is the first time some of these young men ever had expectations for positivity, you know?
And so to see that shift, to see them believe that they can come in here,
and not only perform, but perform at the highest level, for me, was transformation
but what I think for the brain was highly impactful,
and it level set everyone as to why we do what we do.
And so what we saw was a significant increase,
not only in the emotional self-efficacy development, but in physical development.
Some of these athletes were breaking their personal records coming
to this camp when we first did it.
We saw people get faster, stronger, more confident, more focused,
simply because we expected them to be better than what the world expected them to be.
But we also expected more of ourselves as a business.
So we doubled down our unique partnerships with people like champs.
We created the Nike yard line, which is essentially a retail shopping shop,
where we started to outfit the narrative and the story of what football meant to us.
It wasn't about, like I said, the studs and spikes anymore.
It was about the full modern uniform of the modern warrior.
So you could see down here, in that corner,
we started to even change our mannequins to be more action pose oriented.
I mean, that's a common sense idea, a mannequin should look like athletes.
They should be in motion instead of stoic.
But no one had ever done that.
This is the first time we actually put movement into our retail presence
to show people this is bigger than just a uniform.
This is about a movement.
This is about emotion.
We try to capture that with the designs we created.
What we saw was a significant increase in our market.
In terms of our market share and our market relevance.
People gravitated back to Nike as the preferred brand of choice for football,
which allowed us to get the NFL contract.
And for me, as a Bears fan, to see a swoosh and a Bears jersey,
it was like, "Yo, this is amazing!"
[laughter].
The last thing I want to talk about is, you know, one of the things I did
in my career was I rolled the dice.
I believe as creative people, you have to invest in yourself when people say take a risk.
Betting on yourself is not a risk.
I've always bet on myself, because I know my strengths and weaknesses.
I know what I'm not good at.
I know what I'm great at.
And I'm confident enough to ask for help when I feel like I'm not good at something.
In this instance, I wanted to figure out a new way to find the next Michael Jordan.
Now, we work for Jordan brand, and mind you, we had never had the conversation
of who the next Michael would be.
The whole world had this conversation except for us.
We just took Michael Jordan for granted, like we have the first one.
We don't need the next one.
But the interesting piece is that once again,
we know that consumers didn't want to be like Michael.
They wanted to beat Michael.
So how do we give them the tools to beat our hero?
And that was something that is usually important to me.
Because I knew that I could never dump from the Freeco [phonetic spelling] line,
the only thing we had in common is that we both went bald prematurely [laughter],
but thankfully my head is aerodynamic,
and it allows me to be swift [laughter], but-it does, it does.
But the good part about it is that I knew that the same emotions that I got
from watching him perform from being my muse, for him being someone that I aspired to learn
from and work with-we can find that next Michael, to inspire the next generation
of great creatives, great business leaders, great entrepreneurs.
So I invested in myself, and I worked on a project
that focused heavily on predictive analytics.
So when I went back to Jordan brand, after business school,
I was working on part general management, part innovation,
part data science and strategy and part design.
So I had a lot of jobs.
And I was full-time at each.
So even though I said part, it was a full-time role doing five different things.
But one thing I was obsessing over was how do I find the next Michael,
and how do we encourage consumers to pursue their greatness.
So what we did is we gave ourselves a mission statement, and it was very simple.
Leverage the power at TDA to unleash the Michael Jordan to everyone.
We had heard our consumers refer to themselves as the Michael Jordan of dentistry,
as the Michael Jordan of golf, as the Michael Jordan
of accounting, which is amazing to hear, right?
Like imagine your accountant comes in and they dunk on you
and then [laughter]-it's fascinating.
But they basically turned him into this, you know, into a synonym.
He was the bar of excellence that everyone wanted to aspire toward in their career.
So we have to figure out how do we unleash that in everyone?
So we used TDA, which is simple.
It's topological data analytics.
What that means is that it's machine learning versus big data.
And it's non-biased.
So this isn't an Excel spreadsheet, like money ball.
You put your assumptions in, you put in your data, and this defines interdependencies
between these data points to look for patterns and clusters.
These patterns and clusters allow us to go in
and ask deeper questions as to why is this happening?
So this is really an interesting exercise, using data as a medium for creation.
We had leather, and cotton and foam.
Now we have data.
So understand how to make better products for our consumers.
One thing that we discovered is that it was not about the position on the court,
it was about their style of play.
We have been designing the wrong products to move differently, right?
And so with these new, different styles of play, we had to figure out how do you create products
to these new emerging archetypes?
This is what it looks like, and if you're wondering
where Michael Jordan falls on his graph, he's over here.
He's a statistical anomaly, which is fascinating to see.
His hero is Bruce Lee, and so he had this mindset that he was shapeless.
He had to become like water, so he mastered all 10 of these styles.
He never really was stuck in one category, which is why he is the greatest predator of all time.
We call his project Predator.
Predators evolve to capture their prey, Michael evolved every single minute
in every single minute to capture his prey.
What that gave us is the innovation return on investment,
so product differentiation and immersive experiences.
It allows us to make the visible invisible, quantify what it meant to be
"Jordanesque" and fuel the pursuit.
So we innovated for the athlete, and we evolved with the game.
We understood, once again, that it was not about positions, it was about styles of play.
So we created a product that was extremely versatile for our staple of athletes.
We understood that the big man cannot move like the point guard.
The point guard cannot be in the [inaudible] grab and rebound, so we needed a product
that was more universal, more flexible for how people played the game,
not what their positions said they should play like.
We also doubled down our understanding on how to sign athletes.
You know, I don't know about you, but giving someone 30 to 60 million dollars
without any due diligence is not a smart idea.
And so we created a Michael Jordan performance index on a scale of 0 to 23,
how likely are you to be like Mike [laughter]?
Once you get to a certain benchmark, then we start to take you serious and then we will look
at you as someone that can be a brand ambassador.
The last thing is we focused on delivering premium digital experiences, so allowing people
to be in their moment, to beat Michael's records.
This was insanely fun.
This was an NBA All-Star in New York a few years ago.
So you can live out that moment.
Everybody has their moment in their driveway or in their room with a laundry basket,
when they were hitting the game on the jump shot.
We allow people to really do that.
So they were able to play against Michael and see themselves
in his likeness, and beat his record.
The last piece is that we were able to use data to create a new muse.
Since the next Michael didn't exist, we made him up.
So this character is designed by data.
Everything from his height, weight, skin tone, tattoos on his body-all the data that we pull
from this research told us, most likely, this is what the next Michael will look like.
Surprisingly enough, this was done about three and a half years ago, four years ago.
This is eerily similar to Ben Simmons.
So if you're a basketball fan, it's crazy.
Like double down and put your money on the sixes, because [laughter],
if Ben Simmons is this good, then we're going to be in for a treat for the next 10 or 15 years.
So in the end of the day, what design is really about is
about problem finding, not problem solving.
It's our job to see the world differently than our peers, and our counterparts,
and ask better questions to get better results.
We've been put at the end of the sentence, now we're the beginning of the sentence.
We're no longer the period, right?
We're the "the," you know?
We're the "if," we're the "why," we're the "what."
We are at the very beginning of the conversation, so focus on problem finding
versus problem solving, and with that, I say thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> The lack of women-not like being critical here.
And maybe it was just that certain campaign was only geared toward men, and young men.
I don't know if, at the same time, there was another campaign or project for women,
or in generally at Nike, did you see some sort of gender gap or like there was no women
around or what was going on with that?
>> Yeah, in terms of the projects we worked on and stuff?
>> Right.
>> Yeah, well for me, I was specifically tasked with men's basketball in particular.
We had different categories that were focused specifically on women, so women's training,
women's tennis, actually Nike training club, which his a women-focused app, is the largest
and most used training app in the world for any category, so there is an extreme focus on women.
It's just my job was to reinvigorate men's basketball,
specifically, or men's training specifically.
Earlier in my career, I worked on everything.
I was a part of a group called the bench, where we rotated between women's and kids
and you know, sometimes even retail expression stuff
that we did, so there's an extreme focus now.
There could always be more people that focused
on women's product, in terms of what Nike is doing.
I think brands like Lululemon are pushing companies like Nike to think about that,
but at least what I was charged with was focus heavily on men's basketball and men's training.
>> Okay. Thank you!
>> Thank you.
[ Applause and Music ]