Decentralised Intrapreneurship: Reinventing Creativity through Distributed Networks

“The future of the creative industry will be thousands, hundreds of thousands of solopreneurs and micro businesses living in this sort of ecosystem that will come together around projects.”
David Webster

In this episode you’ll hear about

• The evolution of work models: Exploring the evolving nature of work models, particularly in the creative industry & the need for a shift towards more flexible, decentralised approaches.
• Distributed talent: The value of assembling distributed teams of subject matter experts from around the world tailored to specific needs rather than hiring full-time employees.
• Mindset and adaptability: How to adapt your mindset to suit the changing landscape of work and embrace experimentation on a daily basis.
• Changing client-agency relationships: How the talent-driven vs customer-driven approach can rebalance this relationship, with clients needing to treat talent well to attract the best professionals.
• Intrapreneurship vs Entrepreneurship: Weighing up the challenges and benefits of both pathways and how to effectively maximise your experience in both.

Key links

David’s Ted Talk
BBDO
BBH
Michael Baulk
Procter & Gamble
Sir John Hegarty
Rishard Tobaccowala

About our guest
David Webster is the CEO and Co-founder of The Carrot Collective. With almost 20 years experience in marketing and advertising, David has been at the forefront of some of the most innovative work in Asia for brands such as Nike, Netflix, Uber, Google and Samsung among others.

He’s won over 140 creative and effectiveness awards in his career and helped lead his previous agency to win AdAge International Agency of the Year in 2018.

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.

Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.

Transcript

[00:00:07] Chris Hudson: Well, hello there and welcome back to the Company Road Podcast. This episode may be slightly unconventional as I’m talking to someone who was almost so successful within agencies and in building new teams and offerings and side hustles and labs and offshoots within one company or a couple of companies that he was pretty much the archetypal intrapreneur. But now he’s broken out of adland and he’s gone on to launch a number of ventures. We’re going to hear about those shortly. I’d love to introduce this week’s guest David Webster.

He’s a former ad maestro from global ad powerhouse and giant BBH and co-founder of the Carrot Collective. David has years and years of experience in marketing and advertising. He spent a lot of his time in his career at the forefront of some of the most innovative work in Asia for brands such as Nike, Netflix, Uber, Google, Samsung, and a few others.

He’s won over 140 creative effectiveness awards in his career and has helped lead his previous agency to win Ad Age International Agency of the Year in 2018. At his core, David is an original thinker and that’s why I’m excited to introduce him to you today and I can’t wait to share this episode with you.

So enjoy it. Thank you.

[00:01:17] Chris Hudson: David, the man, the myth, the legend.

I want to extend a huge, warm welcome to you from here in Melbourne, all the way to you over in Singapore. And it was so good to see you a couple of weeks back at the most recent AI create event in real, you know, in real life. We were introduced little while ago and that was after I’d seen your incredible Ted Talk and you just set something up quite radical in the world of work and for the world of work which we’ll get into in a little while. And before I spill the beans on that, let’s just hear a bit more about your journey and why you feel like you’ve ended up, in the place that you’ve ended up. Maybe we think back to the young David and let’s hear a bit about how you found your path if we can.

[00:01:52] David Webster: Sounds good. Well, first of all, I’m still a young David. At heart, more so than in age, but I’m absolutely still a young David. Jokes aside, look, it’s great to be here. Super fun, super excited and really great to see you last week. Let’s see, where do we start? So, well, maybe the basics.

I spent the last 20 plus years, so not so young after all in the creative industry, advertising in particular big agency world, started in London. Did about 10 years in London and not only in advertising, I started there and then moved to Singapore about 15 years ago in 2008 and sort of have been in that world ever since I very much spent the last decade, I would say, or so being that sort of pain in the backside of my CEOs constantly badgering and pushing innovation, new businesses, new ideas, new ways of doing things, new things that should be broken, and so on and so forth.

Until ultimately that became too much, I think became too much for them and for me. In 2020, I decided to leave the big advertising world, the world of sort of the grown ups. Completely serendipitous that it was just before COVID. So COVID hadn’t started yet when I resigned from my old old company where I was, I was running a team of about 120 people and based out of Singapore.

Yeah, I left to join the world of startups, eSports initially. That unfortunately didn’t go very far mostly as a result of COVID kicking in about two weeks after my official first day in the new start up meant that the round of funding was coming in, got indefinitely put a hold I then decided initially to take a bit of a break and thought, you know what, let’s spend a bit of time reflecting what next. That lasted about a week. That’s where my mild ADHD comes out. I just couldn’t stand still. And my wife did not want me not to be busy with something work related, cause I was becoming annoying.

And about a week literally in of not doing anything we started this great experiment called the Carrot Collective. And it started on the back of a call that one of my current co-founders gave me one day wanting to leave his job and me suggesting that pitching an idea to him and suggesting that if he liked it, that maybe we could do it together.

And he called me three days later telling me he had resigned, which I wasn’t expecting. And I’m like, okay, then, well, I guess we’re doing this. And a week later, we had incorporated Carrot Collective and we spent the following six, seven months figuring out what Carrot Collective actually was and eventually growing up with that over the last, two and a half, three years or so.

So that’s where I am today. So I guess to summarise that really, that move from sort of intrapreneur in the creative, business to onto a creative entrepreneur, very much, which I am today.

[00:04:30] Chris Hudson: That’s a very concise way of describing some of the things that you’ve done. I think like you, I was also starting out in advertising in the, in probably around the same sort of time.

We may even have crossed paths at some stage in the London days and it felt like an exciting time to be starting things back then, very story driven, the world of brand was obviously, held very highly, you know, in high regard across a number of businesses and a number of clients were doing some amazing work back then and it was fun, but at the same time, extremely, extremely challenging, right?

I don’t know how you felt going into that world, but do you feel like that almost set you up for the pace of life and the pace of work that was soon to follow because I feel like once you’ve run at that speed you can’t work differently.

[00:05:13] David Webster: You know what? It’s a really interesting one. I think, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, working in advertising is a great gym for being a workaholic for the rest of your life, you know, in some, it says some weird, slightly, a dystopian way. But on a serious note I think what advertising for me certainly did, I think beyond the period it was, but generally the industry is and I’ve spoken to a few people about this a lot, actually, since I genuinely believe advertising trains you for something very few other industries train you and I think sets you up perfectly for I think for the world in many ways of entrepreneurship. Right. It’s one of those few industries, those few disciplines where whatever the role you play, whether you are a creative or a strategist or an account person, doesn’t really matter.

But what it does, it basically teaches you if you want the full value chain of the ideation creation process, you know, you start by analysing the problem whether you whether it’s conscious or unconscious you develop sort of this innate intuitive analytical skills. Let me understand the problem. A problem I haven’t lived with for a very long time, you know because it’s constantly coming from the outside. Let me understand the problem really quickly. Let me break it up in something which I can communicate to others. Let me communicate it to others. Let me develop something as a result of a potential solution.

Let me sell that solution. Once that solution is sold, let me execute that solution. And then let me deploy that solution. So what you’re doing, you’re going from the analysis of the problem. Really sort of upstream all the way down to the deployment in the same role in the same sort of job, multiple times a day across multiple different types of problems.

And there’s something quite unique about that and how that sort of again sets you up almost trains your mind to think in a certain way, very elastic in many ways. And I think that’s certainly the aspect I enjoyed the most of my job, that I respect the most of the industry having been able to take a step out and look at it from the outside in. But also why I believe it’s such a huge fertile ground for great innovation, not necessarily within the advertising space but from sort of that amazing pool of talent, developing innovations and solutions to what I call real problems,

[00:07:29] Chris Hudson: Yeah, yeah. that’s a really interesting point. I think, again back to the time that we started, but actually a lot of industry was set up differently to that. So if you were a manufacturer, if you had a product or if you were developing a service offering, all of those things take time.

And usually if you’re, if you’re an employee or a team member within one of those companies, it would take a long time to I guess spread your wings and understand that end to end process because you’d usually be in one particular part of that process if you went to work at a Unilever, a Procter & Gamble or anywhere else.

And so interesting now that we fast forward into, you know, digital age, products being shipped all the time, the speed at which you can from understanding a problem to, to deploying a solution in a matter of days, weeks hours now, obviously through AI. In a way that, that microcosm of an end to end process, as you’ve outlined in advertising, it was setting people up quite well in a funny sort of way.

[00:08:20] David Webster: Absolutely, you know, and again, I think when you take that to it to do it to its own natural extreme or natural conclusion is, that’s kind of the skill sets you need when building businesses, when building companies, especially, you know, we’re both sort of entrepreneurs and uh, one minute you are, writing a business strategy.

Next meeting, you are briefing somebody on a project. Next thing you are working on the company’s accounts. Next thing you know, you’re speaking to the bank manager, because of some trivial, weird issue that happened. As it always seems to do at the wrong time. You know, so you’re constantly moving, changing, and analysing, jumping around, and I think something that we often sort of underestimate of what I call the broader creative industry.

We underestimate how well it prepares you for the real world, the act of real value creation through entrepreneurship. I think that it’s, it’s, it’s a business, it’s an industry where the huge talent, huge capability and an enormous lack of confidence in its own abilities, which is paradoxical in some ways, given, you know, the image of advertising and ad people being so, egotistical and self centred, there is really a big lack of confidence in one’s own capabilities.

I really believe that.

[00:09:30] Chris Hudson: Hmm, I mean that might be something to do with the fact that 9 out of 10 or 99 percent of ideas get shot down before they ever see the light of day. I mean it’s ruthless, right? Again when I was working in London, I went to a talk which was given by Michael Bulk.

He was the, the CEO and chairman of BBDO, at the time and he was talking very much in terms of advertising, having two, two realms, one was egos and one was silos. And I think part of the success, but also to the detriment of what was needing to happen in a lot of ways was that it was departmentalised, there was pigeonholing conversations happening here, there and everywhere around the fact that you’re creative, your strategy, you’re just going to talk to the client, manage them and actually that friction, it did create a conversation, obviously, in making that process and in making the things real.

But at the same time, it created and always, you know, everyone’s always peering over the other side of the fence to see what other people were doing. There was always a healthy debate and it created that kind of sense of momentum really, through quite, intellectual and very heated conversations, but how did you go about navigating some of those egos and silos?

[00:10:29] David Webster: I mean, the industry is what it is and I think you have to embrace sometimes having your own ego, you know, I was quite lucky in some ways, I spent the bulk of my career at one agency. I only ever worked in two agencies, despite having had a relatively long career.

You know, so my first four and a half years at LibreNet in London, moved to BBH London in January, 2006 and left BBH Singapore after an internal transfer in January, 2020. So I’ve been very lucky in a way because I think where as those internal forces exist everywhere.

I think what BBH did, and what I think is still sort of or was very special about the place, or was very special about the place is everyone was aligned on a very, very, very clear agenda, sort of North Star. And that wasn’t a North Star, you know, somewhere, up here that no one quite understands. It It was a very sort of practical North Star, meaning we are all working to the same agenda.

And that agenda was with BBH, created the absolute best work in the world. So whatever, whether you were a junior strategist, a middle level account person, or a senior creative or an intern, you were almost indoctrinated to the fact that the agenda you’re working to is one and the same. And that was built through, reinforced through culture.

It And so in some way that kind of, systemically eliminated the concept of silos. Right. Now, silos did exist, of course, in many cases, but when you use culture as a way to start moving those things aside, and even when they do exist, they’re never the priority, they never trump the work, and you’re able to bring it back to that work it really helps, you know. I was always an account person, since the day I started, and I, I’d like to think, I’ve done some pretty famous work.

I’ve worked, had a excellent relationship with, creative teams and with strategists and with everyone around me, and I think the only reason isn’t because I believe I was particularly nice, accommodating, nor smart, but it’s because I always loved the one thing we were all there to do, which was I loved the creative act of getting to great outputs and by simply doing that, whether I was wrong or right or a pain in the backside or not, everyone was very clear that whatever I was doing, whatever I was saying, however annoying I was being, it was for something which I truly believed was going to fulfil what we were all working towards.

And that I think is really important when you take a step back and you reflect that upon any kind of organisation, any kind of organisational model, any kind of culture. If you are able to align, your teams, your people, your organisations around a common goal a lot of the, seemingly insurmountable things that get in the way of organisations that organisations are very good at putting in the roadway, disappear on the road, move aside on their own.

[00:13:19] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I mean, BBH have obviously done some amazing work over the time. I think I saw a post from Sir John Hegarty either today or yesterday saying that he’d been in the industry for 50 years. And I mean, that’s incredible to go for that long, obviously, and to, just be prolific in the work that, that has obviously been created as well.

So, what an amazing achievement, but, even so, it feels like, you know, a lot of people within that industry had a shorter term view, maybe a shelf life, they wouldn’t want to be in it forever and ever. And it feels like you were able to stick it out by sticking true to that, common purpose and that, end goal.

But obviously you must have seen, there was a lot of change happening around you during that time um, which obviously is like, you’re, you’re pivoting and you’re adapting with each wave really. How was that for you?

[00:14:00] David Webster: Look, I mean I had a slightly sort of, I briefly mentioned ADHD earlier. I’ve never actually been diagnosed. I’ve self-diagnosed because I think for me, it’s more of this idea of constantly moving forward constantly, even when there isn’t a need to move things forward.

Still try to move things forward, and this really comes from this sort of, hypothesis I’ve always had, which I was likely to fulfil through my various roles. The signs of, the requirement to change or the requirement to evolve or the requirement to adapt never presents itself in an obvious way.

No one ever comes to your door, your office or sends anyone and goes, hey guys. It’s time to adapt. I wish it happened like that. It doesn’t, right. It’s a sort of very imperceptible shift, imperceptible change, and like all imperceptible change, they’re the most dangerous ones because you never see it coming until it’s usually too late.

If you start feeling it, it’s probably too late to do something about it. Right. And so the way I always used to deal with it was this idea that, well this notion that keeping the momentum is as important as what you actually do. So for me, the momentum was, if I’m constantly pushing, if I’m constantly looking for what next or how to do something better, how to improve something, if we’re doing things this way, why can’t we do them that way? If we’re doing this today, why can’t we do that tomorrow? By doing that and turning that into again a behaviour. And in a habit, if you want to, I always managed to ride that wave without ever it affecting me because I was unconsciously always a step ahead of it, it’s a bizarre way, but the interesting, I mean, this is one of the things, you know, I remember before leaving BBH Singapore in 2020, you know, obviously I had lots of sort of conversation with a lot of people.

And one of the things that was being asked a lot was especially after having spent so many years there. You would like to think you had a little bit of an impact on the business. A lot of people were asking me, what would you miss the most? Or what’s the thing that what’s the piece of advice you’d love to leave behind?

And this was it, never stop pushing. My old CEO at BBH used to talk about this idea of fires and fireworks, you don’t want a business only with fires. But you also don’t want a business only with fireworks. If you don’t have either, you’re equally screwed.

And in the case of agencies, it’s often you need those fireworks. Have someone who has got permission through whether they earned the permission, whether they were given the permission, but someone with the permission to push the agenda every single day. Every single day to be the one tapping their CEO’s shoulder and going, hey what about this?

What about that? What about that? Cause if you don’t need that before you know it, it’s too late.

[00:16:43] Chris Hudson: I love the point around permission, just to pick up on that in the last sentence there. I think that permission is helpful. You know it’s a guiding principle obviously. It gives people safety and comfort in the direction in which they’re heading. And it’s often sought out. Some managers and leaders will say seek forgiveness rather than permission and they prefer to see that pushing that you’ve described happening elsewhere, so that they could almost test their team members out and see, you know, what they would do if they had the runway and they would just go. A lot of people would find that extremely bewildering.

How would you, describe that? There are obviously people that are that way wired to just push and there are people that would much rather just be part of the community, helping support but not being that person So, I don’t know if it’s a wolf in the sheep analogy or whatever you want to use but how do you navigate that as a leader?

[00:17:29] David Webster: Yeah. That’s really, again, it’s back to that sort of fires and fireworks analogy, right? Which is again, you need balance, you can’t have an organisation full of people that are constantly trying to evolve things and break things and move things forward. It’s a very exciting place to work for about six months then it drives absolutely crazy you know. For me the biggest thing was especially start when I eventually started my own business, was to be very self-aware of the fact that I am, I’ve been that kind of firework for years, and that’s what I love doing.

I just genuinely love, and that’s what I’m good at doing. I am good at innovating and moving things on at rallying people around me, around things that seem to make no sense but actually they do make sense in my head somewhere and eventually explaining that. I’m not very good at managing the long tail. I just am not. I don’t enjoy doing it. I find it incredibly tedious and boring but there are people out there which are phenomenal at it and if they weren’t there, I certainly would not have had the career I had and wouldn’t be here today. Hundred percent. It’s a combination, you know, just to give you an analogy, brief story, you know, I remember again my ex CEO of 11 years in BBH Singapore, you know, who I credit with being a big part of what I’ve learned and, and giving me the chance to be where to do what I did.

He always used to tell me he had know, I was sitting on, on one of his shoulders and our CFO was sitting on the other shoulder. I’d be the one just bitching up here constantly. And she was the one, as CFOs do, conservative, reason, we need to control, we need to manage.

And he said, you know, the brilliant thing of having you two around me was, I listened to you and I listened to her and I did exactly something somewhere in the middle. And it was brilliant. Because I needed that. If I only followed you, we would have gone bust six times over. Maybe, without a bit of luck, but bust six times over.

If I only followed, what the CFO was saying, yeah, we we would probably be doing quite well, but be quite a boring business, perhaps. Solid, but we wouldn’t be pushing. And we need both. And that’s the reality. And that’s something which, sometimes when you’re in the role, you don’t quite recognise and realise when you’re working for someone else.

Suddenly shifting that aside and moving from intra to entrepreneur, where it’s my money ultimately on the table or our money with my co-founders. You realise that’s really important. You learn that lesson on your skin. Over and over again until it starts hurting. And therefore you learn to recognise that what are your strengths?

What are your weaknesses? When is the right time? The thing is critical in whether you’re an entrepreneur or whether you’re working for someone else to recognise when is the right time to step away? When is the right time to step back? When have you run your own course, and it’s hard in a business driven by egos really hard, but it’s somewhat weirdly satisfying when that happens, right?

Oh my god, look how amazing things are going and I can focus on the next thing and next thing, so you really, that team design, that sort of building the organisation, building the project is so critical, and as a experienced designer, you’ll know this, it balances, it’s about checks and balances, making sure things work together in sort of harmony, if you want.

That’s, you know, ultimately, I think what it comes down to.

[00:20:37] Chris Hudson: Yeah, no, it’s certainly true and I love, I love the analogy of balances and I feel like I’m always trying to, you know, fine tune and engineer the perfect formula for what would happen on a project, you know, you’re as an experienced designer thinking about how you can, how you can make deliberate choices to create the perfect conditions for success in one way or another both through working, but also through bringing the right team skill set.

Like you say, it’s yin yang and everything in between, you know, you’re kind of, got to just throw it all into the pot and then see what’s going to jump out, at the end and yeah, I’m just curious, you self identify as more in the firework camp, than the fire camp it feels like. Is that a fair assumption or more firework?

[00:21:14] David Webster: absolutely.

[00:21:15] Chris Hudson: If you were someone maybe earlier in your career you were in this position as well but you were trying to almost figure out where you know where your comfort zone, where your sweet spot was and where your effectiveness in your career would take you and where it seemed, you know, what the centre of gravity is. What behaviours in other people would you be looking at in using the analogy and then taking it a little bit further there, what would you be looking out for that would say, okay, I can see that that’s happening over there. I can see this is happening over here. I can see them effectively bringing change about by introducing new ideas and innovating here, this is very focused on delivering, seeing things through.

What are some of the behaviours and characteristics that you’re seeing?

[00:21:54] David Webster: Well look, I don’t know if these are so much behaviour characteristics rather than how to sort of identify those behaviours and characteristics in the first place. I mean, ultimately for me, it comes down to, you I’m not someone who likes, I like frameworks, but I don’t like necessarily rules. I like this idea of tools, not rules.

And I think it’s the same when trying to stimulate people, especially early on in their career, in terms of providing them with the space people need to find themselves and to understand who they ultimately are. Ultimately, again, cognisant of the fact that we are running businesses.

We’re not running schools, we’re not running playgrounds, we’re not running charities, we’re not running games but there needs to be a balance, right? And again, like everything when people come to work, certainly, and again, I can only speak from my experience within the creative industry, come to work in a creative business.

They want the chance to be creative. Now, being creative doesn’t mean that you are a great writer or a great art director. Being creative, my definition of creativity at least, maybe that’s a good way to start this is, or for me the most elegant definition of creativity, because it’s certainly not mine, is this idea, this ability to, to bring seemingly unconnected things and concepts together into something that makes sense or solves the problem or it does something right? If we define that as creativity then I think the fair assumption is that anyone coming into a creative business is looking for that, and by definition, a creative business needs to be able to offer that, and I think within the process, especially early on in one’s career, whether it’s graduate recruitment programs, whether it’s early training programs, it’s given people the chance to find their feet and identify who are they?

What do they enjoy doing? think there is often a myth that, well, of course, given a choice, everyone would want to be a firework. It’s not true. It just isn’t. It’s the same thing. You know, people say, well, of course, everyone is motivated primarily by money, but actually it’s not true.

And it’s been proved over and over again that cash is not the biggest motivator in driving people’s behaviours, and belonging, community culture and all that becomes actually trumped by the end of the day. And I think therefore in a very similar manner is how to provide people with the right opportunities, how to give people the right permissions to make certain mistakes and to find themselves how to, and then slowly, very much like when A/B testing a concept for finding where people actually sit and moving them around, and as the business scales, and as people go up their careers, giving them the opportunity to perhaps move, perhaps shift. And this is what I love about really, for me, this concept of maybe this is straying away a little bit, but the concept of the distributed or decentralised organisation, because you basically take that behaviour at scale, right? Suddenly you become this ecosystem, if you want, it starts pulling people together who are developing in different directions and organising them around projects, and that’s for me, again, the natural conclusion of that process done right, which is, again, maybe another topic, but why I believe the industry is going towards that.

[00:24:54] Chris Hudson: The skin in the game argument is a very compelling one of both for experienced entrepreneurs like yourself, but also ones that are starting out. If you’re into startup culture and you’re in conversations with people in their early twenties about the things that they’re doing. It’s all very exciting.

The risk arguably is different, you know, the situation, circumstance is different, but at the same time, there’s a desire, there’s an appetite and an acceptance of that risk to be able to say, this is what I want to do. And this is how we’re going to do it quite pragmatic. Very focused on the mission, as you were saying, but I’m wondering whether, the entrepreneur training ground in a ways is different from the intrapreneur training ground and whether one says the other up success or vice versa.

I’m just sort of playing around with that in my head, because from what you were saying, spending time as an intrapreneur, it’s almost a safer, safer environment. You could use the playground analogy even, giving people the opportunity to try out different roles, work with different people, work with different communication entrepreneur training ground in a ways is different from the intrapreneur training ground and whether one says the other up success or vice versa.

I’m just sort of playing around that in my head, because from what you were saying, you know, spending time as an intrapreneur, it’s almost a safer, safer environment. Could use the playground analogy, it’s giving people the opportunity to try out different roles, work with different people, work with different communication preferences, work at home, work in the office, whatever it is. you can usually find your way, but it does take a little bit of time and a bit of patience, obviously. So what do you think?

[00:26:28] David Webster: Yeah. It’s an interesting one. Right. I can see why certainly from my experience, starting as someone who ultimately built a career within a corporate environment, who then started becoming more of that sort of intrapreneur by just finding, being given the chance to find that was what I liked doing, what I enjoyed doing and what I was pretty good at doing, right? I think there’s benefits of that, you know, and some of those benefits I think you mentioned, which is, you’re operating within a safe environment.

You have a chance to fail without necessarily feeling the consequences of failure. If I am employed by a company and I’m trying and failing and my job is to try and fail, I will still get paid the salary. That’s a great great advantage, the fact that when you’re working in an organisation and you’re developing a new, whether it’s, a new idea, a new department you’re building or a new business vertical or a new product, if not fully, certainly you have the first steps of a go to market strategy laid out for you. You have a network around you, you have contacts\ you have great advisors and consultants around you in different parts of the world you can bring in from within the organisation.

So I think there’s lots of positives of doing that. intrapreneur to entrepreneur. In the same way. I think there’s advantages of starting from the outside in, you’re an entrepreneur first have not worked for anyone ever.

You learn the hustle, you learn that discipline that at the end of the day, the buck stops with you. Something I realised when I moved from intra to entre, which is when I turn around. I don’t have a hundred plus people there waiting to help me. Why? Because I told them they have to help me.

I don’t have that anymore, right? I don’t have a salary at the end of the month. If I don’t bring in the business, it’s just black and white. There is no mama son, hey, I need some money. Okay? So you’re gonna make money this month, and as an entrepreneur, the worst that can happen, you fail two or three quarters in a row, you might get fired. Okay? I’ll get another job. You fail two or three quarters, unless you’ve got decent amount of money in the bank as an entrepreneur, you’re kind of out of luck. You’re going to start working at the local coffee shop to pay

your bills. It’s just the reality, you know, it’s just the way it is. So I think it trains you for different things. I think there are two very different roles, if I were to step back, I was actually when I was in Melbourne last week, I had breakfast with my ex CFO who I was mentioning earlier. She’s now a good friend and she’s awesome and we’re talking about, I was telling her, you know, oh my God, I was getting some advice from her. She’s like, oh my god, David, why didn’t you do this two years before you became MD at BBH? And it could have made my life so much easier. Look at you talking about margins and finance and working capital and cash flows and I’m like wow that’s true actually, right? Because it’s stuff I never cared about I never needed to care about so again I guess you need a bit of both you need the hustle of the entrepreneur right and their appreciation for the fact that you know, you are running a business.

You are a businessman first before anything else, but balance that with what intrapreneurs have, which ultimately is a rigour, you get processes, you get best in class, how things should be done, and then it’s up to you to match, you know, then there’s a whole other problem. The problem I have is that sometimes and certainly a lot of mistakes.

I did in the first year or so, which was defaulting back to my big company behaviours. Which is something you naturally do. Oh, let’s hire someone to do that and someone to do that and someone to do that. Then you realise, damn it, I just paid three wages that I could have done myself. And now I can’t pay myself.

Damn it, so you do get into those things. But yeah, look, I think both are very legitimate routes. And I think, it really rounds you coming from one way or from the other.

[00:30:06] Chris Hudson: There’s commonality, isn’t there? I mean, I feel there’s definitely a massive theme around consistency. And like you’re saying pushing, pushing, albeit

[00:30:13] David Webster: Accountability, I guess, is the word. Sorry. I think accountability is the word that entrepreneurship really, like really digs into your brain. You are accountable to yourself, to your team, to your clients, to everybody. It’s you, it points your fingers in your face. So that’s, I think it’s good.

It’s a really good behaviour.

[00:30:30] Chris Hudson: There’s also a notion, I think within companies now who are hiring and managing intrapreneurs that accountability is also expected. You’re working in that company as if you own it and an expectation around that is almost set. You’re buying fully into the vision, the values, the things that you’re trying to deliver.

You might have some shares, you might not, but even so the expectation is there and you’re going up against people in that realm that are very much passionate about the company that they’re working for. And so it feels almost competitive in that sense. Did you experience that?

[00:31:01] David Webster: Yeah. You know, it’s a weird one, right? Cause and I don’t know if it’s age, if it’s wisdom or if just the times have changed, but certainly, when I was in my previous sort of role, when I was working for a company, I genuinely felt that, I was the company, the company was me, and I absolutely believed I drank the Kool Aid, I bought into what the company was doing and saying, and I loved every minute of it.

I was operating within a massive bubble within a bubble was operating within the company bubble and then within an industry bubble, and I only realised, like everything, you only realise you’re in a bubble when you’re outside of it, when you’re inside of it, it never looks like a bubble.

The blue sky, Truman in the Truman Show never knew he was in a warehouse until he stepped out and went, oh fuck. It’s a warehouse. I can still see the sky. It’s kind of bad, right? So I think that there is that danger. I think that there is a slightly more, I don’t think it’s a cynical answer.

I think partly is due to, again, wisdom and age, but partly as well due to circumstances, which is I think very much certainly in the advertising creative industry, we are in an employees or workers or talents market, right? It’s a massive, especially in Singapore, it’s a massive squeeze. Median salaries of people working in the creative industry in Singapore went up 52 percent between 2021 and 2022.

52 percent median salaries, that’s reflective in part to the sort of supply and demand squeeze, right? It’s very much an employee’s market. I think that certainly makes your point harder. If ultimately as we say in Italy i’ve got the knife from the handle I’m, just going to move around i’m going to move around and get more and get more and get

[00:32:35] Chris Hudson: Yeah, yeah,

[00:32:36] David Webster: Well now when I was running a comp someone else’s company that I hated that i’m like, how dare you do that?

You need to work, you need to believe in what we are doing, we’re all together in this. Look at it from the outside in. And apologies for the French, you’re more than welcome to cut this out, but what a load of shit. Sorry, but you are paying me a salary to do a job. If I do a job really well, I’m going to accrue a very small percentage of the incremental value I am creating.

If I’m lucky, if you’ve got a proper bonus scheme in place, you’re ultimately benefiting. But why, why should I care that much? Of course you should care to do your job properly, but why should, it’s not my company, and that for me, it’s a really important perspective to have, right? Because what it does is I think when organisations start realising that.

That’s when we really start moving into this real sort of human centric design of organisations, which agencies are absolutely terrible at, right. Especially knowledge based businesses that rely on talent and people and realise that actually these guys don’t have to be passionate about the company. We need to earn that kind of respect and admiration from our employees.

We can’t expect it. So what are we going to do for them? How are we going to design work differently for our employees? With Carrot for a long time, we talked about, especially at the beginning of the company, ultimately our customer is the talent, is our talent, is the talent we work with.

It’s our main source of value creation. This idea, this old world notion that agencies love to shout from the rooftops, look after the worker and everything else will take care of itself, which I absolutely believed in for years. It’s actually nonsense in many ways. It should be look after the people. And everything else would take care of itself. The work is simply a consequence of people working better or better people, people believing in something. So I do think, I guess this shift is a consequence of both, wisdom and experience, but I generally think it’s also a consequence of the world has changed, context has changed, you know, and companies are often not very good at keeping up with the change.

[00:34:43] Chris Hudson: Yeah I mean, it’s a lot more fluid than it ever was, obviously. And there was talk of a great resignation. I’m not sure people said they said that went away. Uh, I’m not sure if it has. The possibilities are now much greater and people can move more confidently forwards out into the big wide world into entrepreneurial experiments.

The gig economy is there.

[00:35:04] David Webster: Absolutely.

[00:35:05] Chris Hudson: I want to talk a bit about your new model. We’ve alluded to it a little bit, but through, through the Carrot Collective your, you know, it feels radical. It feels fresh. You know, you’ve got a decentralised working model and a working model that would enable people with, you independent skill sets.

You know, they could be leaders they could be practitioners collaborators, they could be practitioners, collaborators, but they’re able to work in a way that sits outside of a typical organisational structure. And yeah, maybe tell us a bit about how that works and maybe think then maybe we could talk a bit about how what we’ve described as being either right or wrong about some of these other organisations, accountability, how that works in in a new way of working.

[00:35:43] David Webster: In a nutshell, we are a decentralised agency, in other words, we’re a creative agency that operates a distributed tenant model.

What it means is it has two key features, right? On one hand, our front door is the door of an agency. We look like an agency, we speak like an agency. Importantly, we take the accountability that agencies take. The client is a Carrot Collective client. If something goes wrong in a project, ultimately we are accountable for that.

And therefore, because we have that accountability, that puts the onus on us to make sure that we are delivering constantly and constantly improving. The other feature is what happens behind the scenes. And that’s where it’s very different. And that’s where it operates very, very differently. I do believe creative agencies are here to stay and will always have a role for a number of reasons, which we’ll talk about. I do believe that the creative agency model as it is today is not fit for purpose. Or rather, it’s not fit for purpose for all the use cases that the model would be required for.

And so what we’re doing is providing an alternative to that, and what that sort of plumbing, if you want, looks like is, instead of having, hundreds of people performing their account management roles or their production roles, or their strategy roles or their creative roles, we access talent from around the world. Right? So, what does that mean from a macro point of view, it basically plays into macro shifts that we observed. The first one is a big move from centralised organisations to networks and ecosystems. So we operate like a network in an ecosystem, albeit with a little bit of centralisation.

And the second big shift, which I think is the most fundamental one, is this uh, it’s a mindset shift from, ownership of resources, i.e. people, to access to resources, i.e.. people. And I think this is what is most transformational for me. When I always talk to people, when I talk to people about character, they ask, well, what really matters to make me successful?

Well, actually, it’s two things. It’s our ability to identify and access the best talent in the world that’s fit for purpose across multiple disciplines and two, the ability to match that talent both to the projects and to each other to create a team so that every project in effect, it looks like a micro agency that’s bespoke for the specific project or problem at hand that’s being developed. The beautiful thing of it, of this is that because it’s distributed because it’s decentralised because it’s also got a low overhead model, meaning that employees we have within character are people who help manage the ecosystem versus people who help deliver the outputs.

Because of that, the same bespoke model applies to, a $10,000 project as it does for $10 million project. The process is exactly the same. Just the size and the complexity will change, but suddenly the $10,000 project can be profitable in the same way as $10 million project, as opposed to maybe in, in the traditional sort of agency land whereby, many agencies offer and provide and build bespoke teams for clients and projects.

But if it’s anything less than two or three, four or five million a year with a retainer lasting at least two or three years, it’s untenable for good reasons, right? I’m not criticising what agencies are doing or agencies are doing because within the context of the model they’re operating, absolutely, this is the way to make money.

It’s the only way to try to make money. My point is that that model is not anymore fit for purpose. For many use cases it is for some but not for many.

[00:39:12] Chris Hudson: Mm. thinking it through. I mean, obviously it’s creating a, another option and probably a safe option, a good option still for people to be able to, to areas that they feel is most suiting to them. It’s through self choice, you know, you, you’re probably driving your own destiny if you’re part of the collective and you’re, you’re a self starter, you’ve got to be able to push through and find your own path really. But is that something that, that you feel I know it probably needs to happen, people taking more responsibility for their own personal development without a massive, you know, without yearly targets and regular reviews and performance, for instance, appraisals, you know, all the things that get lined up in a big corporate, how does that side of things work in a way where it’s all up to you, you can join in, you might be in a project, you come in, you move on to the next project, but, but is that, is that sort of things possible too?

Thank you.

[00:40:02] David Webster: Yeah, look, I think there’s a few very important features, right and i’ll go through a few of them and hopefully I won’t miss any out but if I do then we’ll talk a little bit more. I’ll try to start right from the beginning. First thing first is that no single individual business will be able to drive this change or fulfil the needs that this change results in on their own.

And therefore, the mindset of running a distributed business cannot be that, which is a traditional sort of agency behaviour, putting your hands around your people and going, become impenetrable, no collaboration, only let’s keep it within. Absolutely not. You have to think about it from an industry or ecosystem perspective, we need to help raise the floor.

We need more. Our biggest success will come from convincing more agencies to work more in this way. Why? Because ultimately. So our biggest enemy, if you want is full time jobs. We want as many people as possible to not have to take on full time jobs to provide themselves with a living.

No single agency can do that. We need an ecosystem of companies with enough, business coming through to satisfy the needs of that sort of talent pools and talent ecosystems. So it needs to be open. It has to be open. and that’s that’s a complete mindset shift for the industry. One of my favourite authors on the matter is you probably know Rishad Tobaccowala, at Publicis Groupe, amazing, amazing thinker and guy.

And he’s got this incredible podcast or a blog, newsletter called The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past, which is so true, right? To drive this change you cannot use the metrics and the thinking and the behaviours that you’re used to, you need to break that completely because the moment you compare it to what was or what is, our bottle makes no sense.

You need to completely rewrite So that’s the first thing, The second thing is that there is no playbook, by the way, I should have said that first, there is no, we are writing the playbook as we go along, meaning we make up a lot of it, test it, fail or succeed, iterate and move on constantly.

Right? So this is a, has been a process over time. You know, your point around, sort of talent, taking more accountability, being more self disciplined as well, yes to some extent, but at the same time, this model is not for everybody. If I was starting out in the industry, I wouldn’t want to work this way.

I would want a structure around that can train me and teach me and help me provide, sit in a room with people who’ve done it before, who I can learn from. This model doesn’t do that. And we can’t claim it does, and we should never claim it does, or we’ll get back to those sort of old, old problems.

And therefore the ecosystem, but again, when you think about ecosystem, okay, what part of the ecosystem can help serve that? Well, certainly agencies, and certainly it will keep having a role to train young talent in that will then lead three to five years in. But maybe other players will emerge from either training, maybe that’s a role that headhunters need to develop into, I don’t know, maybe it’s the way that we work with a lot of educational institutions around the world, design schools in Europe, in particular in South America.

And we have a lot of conversations with very senior staff and deans of the schools and what a lot of the schools are doing is starting to implement a lot more of this training into their own curriculum. We regularly have team students, masters students from the European Institute of Design working on projects with the Carrot Collective.

Certain type of projects structured three to six month project that have become training grounds because they can’t really come in for on the fly. They don’t have the basic, the basics to do that, but there needs to be that training no matter what. So again, there needs to be an evolution of that.

The third thing I want to touch upon which you mentioned, you touched upon briefly, which is, the appraisals,

The appraisals usually are something that agencies or companies provide to obviously evaluate you and on the back of which you will usually get a pay rise or a promotion more often than not a promotion without a pay rise.

Which again is bizarre, but that’s the way of the world, you know, But again, performance appraisals and feedback is very important So if we think about performance appraisals as feedback right. Feedback to make you better that will suddenly redesign how we do these appraisals. Feedback that helps you understand how to improve yourself, when dealing with others and therefore one thing we’re implementing where we’re In the process of implementing within Carrot is at the end of every project, we have a three way appraisal system in effect, where the project lead, the client and the project team all evaluate each other.

[00:44:34] David Webster: Now, why that’s important. That’s important because at scale what that does, it becomes almost an infallible method to expunge bad actors and identify good actors.

That comes from the world of technology. I mean, Airbnb’s secret sauce is their trust that they build between the guests and the hosts, and they’ve done that through a review system. That’s ultimately it, and that’s what we’re trying to implement ultimately at scale to also maintain that quality. And one more thing I just want to touch upon in this, I think it’s very important to take it outside for a moment, is what the system also does. It helps rebalance the client versus agency relationship.

And what I mean by that is that if in, the agency let’s call it 2.0, 1.0 of the world of today all the power sits with the client. Why? Because the agency is desperate for business and most agencies today are desperate for business because they have so much overhead that they need to pay so the pressure is on, and they need to make money to pay that stuff before they make any money at all.

Okay? So the power is all in the on the client side, if you want. Now, suddenly that changes because suddenly from a client point of view, the talent is choosing to work with your client. The talent is choosing to work on this project. Now if you don’t treat the talent like the talent should be treated if the relationship isn’t healthy The best talent won’t want to work with you. They just won’t, you will start being evaluated negatively.

People will be able to see that you’re not great to work for because of these reasons, or they might have a previous bad experience with you, and they will just say no, and as long as there is enough opportunities out there, that system over time will start correcting itself. And I think there’s something quite magical about that, which at scale will create much greater harmony.

[00:46:24] Chris Hudson: Oh, there’s, yeah, there’s so many great points there. I think one of the ones that really jumps out as that last one, particularly around how to make it not only just a more level playing field between, you clients and the agencies and the consultants that they work with, many agencies and consultancy leaders are often looking at it, not from the point of view as, being a vendor or taking on a project or a piece of work, but actually from the point of view of partnership and the holy grail really is to, to feel like you’re part of the client’s organisation and to deliver outcomes that are not measured by you and your agency or consultancy standard, but in a way that actually delivers tangible value to your client.

And ultimately, that’s really hard, through one project or through a campaign or whatever it is you’re working on. But at the same time, what you’re describing is actually a starting point to make that a lot more possible. Aside from the fact that they’re hiring people in it’s basically the team orchestration, the team arrangement that then comes together and you’re all working together.

It’s in pursuit of the client’s goal that you’re working for, obviously, but it’s, you know, that, team that’s delivering it is driving it because they want to do it. And that’s the big difference. The motivation, it aligns with them, their aspirations, their values, the direction they want to take.

It can align to their development goals. I’m often amazed at how constrained it feels, having been an intrapreneur and working with an organisation myself, you’re always trying to figure out what the next learning opportunity is. It becomes process driven. You’re needing to compete with other people for training budget.

And ultimately, if you were in control of your own work, you’d be able to go off to MIT or Stanford or Oxford or wherever you wanted to go to, to do your training IDO you wouldn’t have to wait three years or four years for it because you could just afford to pay for it yourself, right? So, so, yeah, I think it’s just about feeling comfortable with the fact that you could take more on yourself and it sounds like a really, a really refreshing way of seeing the world of work, actually. Just to build on, on the points you’ve raised, I wonder if you could just maybe bring to life some of the outcomes or the, maybe talk through a project if you like, but something that just illustrates how this combination of subject matter experts from around the world has come together to deliver something that probably wouldn’t have been made, it wouldn’t have been possible through a traditional agency model in some way.

[00:48:48] David Webster: I think it’s less about that wouldn’t have been possible through an agency model cause I think at the end of the day, like an agency model can deliver anything really, if you’ve got the scale, I think it comes down to, the Holy Trinity, which is, ultimately quality, cost and time, so I think there’s a number of projects that we’ve worked on where the same thing would have been possible, but not at the same quality, at the same price and within the same timeframe.

Maybe I’ll use an example, like I won’t say what the brands are for obvious reasons because in case I say anything, I shouldn’t, but I can give you the type of brands. The first one was in the early days of Carrot C collective actually, we were right in mid pandemic, no one could travel. And there was a big movie launch happening in Australia and the client had six weeks to develop something that would normally take them four months, right? Something that at huge scale, big, biggest movie launch biggest movie launch of the year.

And, we were able to put together a team that was managed from Singapore which had a production team on the ground in Australia, in one state that had another production team in another state in Australia, because people couldn’t travel between states, that had post production in India and that had design and motion graphics in South America and Brazil.

And the reason we designed that team and were able to develop what we did was because the campaign had a few aspects and we were creating content. We were creating user generated content from hundreds of children, drawings. We were having stunts involving LED screens hanging off helicopters flying over Sydney Harbour. It was just physically impossible to do that in that timeline with the restrictions to travel from one single location, so that was quite an interesting way.

And it was, again, we can talk about that for hours because of enormously complex project, you almost seven figure project with yeah close to 20 people across five or six different markets around the world. More recently, again, that’s again, very large, more recently, a very small project, five figures low to make five figures and it was a project for the Philippines. We were branding an E-sports team, a new professional E-sports team. We needed someone who understood Filipino culture, from a strategy point of view, who understood the gaming culture. We needed a designer who understood the retail market, so merch, et cetera, as well as could understand branding and design from our sort of brand perspective.

And we needed to do all of that in two and a half weeks. Now, could an agency have done it? Yeah, probably. A small local agency in the Philippines might have been able to do it if they were able to find even the people with those skill sets and these skill sets. So what we did in a matter of 48 hours, we were able to put a team that involved a Filipino American with entertainment experience paid out based out of, LA. with a small network of gamers in Manila. And in X, I did ask a Nike designer based in Brazil and in two and a half weeks we had this world class output delivered and we made money on it, it’s a profitable project and I think that’s important. So we’re talking a project which was, 1/30th of the other, both managed by the same system, the same accountabilities and so forth.

If you want a bad story recently, similar branding project with a website builder and the team just didn’t deliver. The team just didn’t deliver it. We had to change the team two thirds of the way through. And ultimately we had to do that at our own cost because the developer didn’t want to refund us.

The responsibility is ours towards the client. And therefore it was our responsibility as the agency to take the hit for something ultimately we were fronting.

[00:52:28] Chris Hudson: mm

[00:52:28] David Webster: So again, it works both ways. It’s good and it’s bad sometimes, but I think it’s really about this two layers, right? The front end and the back end, the accountability of the front end agency with the flexibility and the benefits of the decentralised back end model.

[00:52:41] Chris Hudson: But like you say, you’re pushing forward, you’re experimenting, you’re learning from each one, and evolving, evolving the practice, and not feeling constrained by the, the agency model that you would sit within usually. Right?

[00:52:53] David Webster: Completely. You know, look and at the end of the day, that’s exactly it, Chris, right? It’s a mindset more than anything. I think a lot, I think mindset is half the problem most of the times, right?

If you’re willing to let go of some of the past and things that are holding you down, you realise how many more opportunities there actually are, you know, out there, you know, it’s this idea of a sandbox, right? If I know the parameters within which I need to operate, I can experiment freely, but those parameters need to be constant. And that’s what entrepreneurs are able to do. We know what our limitations are. We know what parameters we need to work within. Within those parameters, we can go as crazy as we want.

We know we need to be accountable. We know we need to pursue. Great. But how we do it, we can change every day until we find the perfect market fit that we need.

[00:53:33] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s a great analogy. I mean, yeah, just thinking, more broadly and and for the future of work and how people within so many roles out there are thinking, you know, is this right? Is there another way? Can I find something else that will be as fulfilling? Is the grass greener somewhere else?

There are always questions, more questions than answers usually. And from your point of view and maybe just a reflection around where the, where you feel the world of work in that respect is heading and how people can or should navigate some of the choices that they might need to make.

[00:54:04] David Webster: Yeah, so look, again, I’ll speak through the lens of the creative business and the creative agency model because I don’t, I don’t, you know, I’m not, I’m not a future work expert. I just spent a lot of time thinking about it because it’s something which is very relevant to me and something I’m very interested in.

What certainly we are working towards is, well first of all, actually, it was with my prediction on this, which is I 100 percent believe it. I’m sticking my own sort of reputation on this. And I’ve said this publicly and also keep saying it publicly is that. Within the next five years, 80 percent of creative agencies will be delivering at least 80 percent of their output through a distributed model.

It’s the only way. And the reason why 80 percent is because all of their project based work will need to be delivered through a distributed model, with potentially one or two retainers, which require a different type of setup that will require full time staff. But I’m absolutely convinced that is the future.

Number one. Number two, I don’t think there will be a model, I think that’s part of the problem the industry has had. Well, this is the model. The model is not working. Why is there a model? Oh David, is your model the future? I’m like, no, it’s a model that’s fit for purpose with regard to certain use cases.

It’s not right for everything. We don’t do retainers, for example. Economically, it absolutely makes no sense. Why would I not hire people full time if I was delivering the same outputs every time? If I was a specialist agency only doing one thing, of course I’m going to hire full time people.

It makes sense, right? And we need to start from the economic model, I think that’s really important. But, my ideal future of work and ultimately, where we are moving with Carrot over the, over time, we might never quite get there, but it’s certainly the ambition is, I’m a big fan of Web3 philosophy.

I’m a big fan of especially decentralised autonomous organisations, DAOs. I do think the DAO system, the DAO setup is absolutely perfect for the creative industry. And really why, because ultimately I think the future of the creative industry will be, thousands, hundreds of thousands of solopreneurs and micro businesses living in this sort of ecosystem that will come together around projects that will separate and will come together on other projects in different formations and where they will ultimately be rewarded for their contribution, for their participation, and those rewards will be distributed algorithmically through digital money, and through a smart contract, it’s possible it can be done tomorrow.

It can be done today. Is the market ready for it? Especially the supply side of the market that the brands are paying the bills now because accountability is a big issue. Accountability is a big issue when you’re trying to apply decentralised models to the service industry, but solutions are slowly being developed.

People often think decentralised organisations are about all small little experiments. Ethereum doesn’t have an office, a headquarter or a CEO or a management team. It’s completely decentralised and managed by a community. And that’s worth half a trillion dollars. It is absolutely possible and it deals with money, which is the thing people are most, scared about.

So it’s, is it possible? Yes. Are we still trying to think about it too much in terms of how things are today? Yes, for natural reasons and obvious reasons, but that’s certainly, I believe, the trend to where things are moving. As I said, will we ever get there in our lifetimes or ever? I don’t know. But I think trajectory is important.

[00:57:18] Chris Hudson: And you’ll have some fun in the meantime, right? There’ll still be lights in the fireworks.

[00:57:21] David Webster: Absolutely. That’s what matters ultimately is, keep learning, keep having fun, doing it with people who you enjoy working with. That’s the biggest, I believe, benefit of this model.

[00:57:30] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Not something you

can always choose if you work in a company, I might

[00:57:33] David Webster: hey, you exactly, you choose who you work with and who you work and what you work on. What better than that?

[00:57:39] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s the dream. All right. Well, I think we might wrap there actually, David. So thank you

again so much for your time. Loved your perspective on, on the new model, what you’re doing at Carrot. It’s amazing work. And yeah, I usually finish by asking our guests whether there’s a way in which people can get in touch with you.

If you, if you’d be happy for people to connect in some way.

[00:57:57] David Webster: Yeah Absolutely. Look, I mean LinkedIn is the obvious David Webster with a strange picture where I do something. I look like a greek philosopher It’s a picture from many years ago. That’s always easy or just drop an email david@thecarrotcollective.com. So anytime always happy for a chat and if you’re in Singapore for a coffee as well.

[00:58:15] Chris Hudson: Perfect. Alright, well we’ll leave it there. Thank you so much David, and I’ll leave you to the rest of your day. Thank you so much.

[00:58:19] David Webster: Take care. Bye.

[00:58:21] Chris Hudson: Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it’ll make a difference.

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