Nurock: Tell me about the creative summit that’s planned for the One Show event this year in New York. What makes it different to the other years and what was your primary objective?

Yash Egami

Egami: We wanted to create a more formal one-day conference. In the past we’ve had speaker series and we’ve had presentations that were sort of a loose format that wasn’t centred on any particular theme.

This year we created a one-day summit and the theme is disruption and reinvention.

We have two keynote speakers and throughout the day, simultaneous sessions going on with some of the top creatives from around the world.

Nurock: Who are those two keynote speakers?

Egami: Our opening keynote is David Droga, from Droga5 and our midday keynote is Fernando Machado, who is the brand manager for Burger King. The rest of the day we have some really top people that will come in and do sessions based around the topic such as Joe Alexander from The Martin Agency, Anna Qvennerstedt from Forsman & Bodenfors, as well as a team from MullenLowe, Steve Stoute from Translation – it really is a diverse mix of people that’ll be speaking from different countries and different perspectives. I think that’s what makes it so interesting – to hear about how they’re all doing disruption and reinvention differently.

Nurock: Another thing that really interests me is your focus on professional development.

Egami: One of the other initiatives that we started probably two or three years ago is the Creative Leaders’ retreat, based around the idea of professional development and the fact that a lot of creatives start out in the business being trained to be an art director or a writer – some sort of creative but then they rise up through the ranks and go from creating the work to overseeing a team that creates the work, to managing all the different parts of it, and there’s no real formal training to do this. And a lot of creatives unfortunately wind up being managers or leaders but they’re not well equipped to do that. So the Creative Leaders’ retreat was created to fill that gap. So it’s for mid-level to senior level creatives who are rising up through their agencies. We do these small group seminars on how to better manage creative teams, how to run a better agencies – it’s really the nuts and bolts of it – everything from how to hire and retain talent to how to inspire your teams and assemble the right people in the room when you’re meeting with a client and how you put together interactive teams, for instance.

Nurock: Do you run these only in the US?

Egami: So far yes, we’ve done several of them. We have one every year in February in Arizona, and we’ve done one in San Diego, one in Miami, and they each have a slightly different spin. So the one in Arizona’s overall them is ‘leading creative teams. Then in Miami, that was more design-focused, about how to run a better design agency and how to build design teams. The one in San Diego was centred on digital, specific to that crowd. But yes, at the moment we are only doing these in the US but we have participants coming in from all over the world. We do try to make it a retreat, but it’s not a retreat in the traditional sense. You don’t get away from work when you come to one of these, you get even deeper into it. That’s the beauty of it. We go to Arizona, Tucson and Scottsdale and get them away from the office but it really is a unique experience because over the course of 3 days, they all spend time together in small groups but also get to talk and network over meals and do group activities. The conversations that happen between sessions and inside of sessions are just as if not more valuable than what happens inside of sessions because then you really get that one-on-one time and we invite some top, top people to lead some of these sessions, like the Glenn Cole from 72andsunny, Iain Tait from Wieden + Kennedy, Judy John from LeoBurnett Toronto – these are all people that were at our last February retreat. So we try to assemble some of the really top people that have transitioned into leadership roles, where they also started out as a creative, and then they share their experiences of what they learned along the way.

Nurock: Hopefully you will bring it out to South Africa.

Egami: Well you know, our plans are to try to expand this internationally. It’s just a matter of logistics because it does take a lot of planning and manpower to put one of these together, but we’ve certainly got a lot of requests, and South Africa is part of our plan.

One Show Creative Week runs from 9 to 13 May 2016. Click through to our One Show awards special section and watch for live coverage of the One Show Creative Week from me, roving reporter, Ann Nurock.